such revisitations
B and I had a long phone conversation the other day, meandering our way, as we do, from the academic (e.g., Foucault, in which B, in thesis mode, is currently immersed) to the speculative (e.g., “maybe we are all made of stardust”), to the anecdotal (“I had a friend who moved to Korea to live with his mother, but then returned a year later, the relationship too fraught to maintain”) to the mundane, (“hold on, I have to get the cornbread out of the oven”).
I am replaying bits of it this morning, and thinking about how in The Argonauts (which I have been revisiting in preparation to teach it later this semester), Nelson returns often to Winnicott's idea of "ordinary devotion." I am thinking of a particular passage that I want to find, and I scan the spines of the books I have piled around me. A few on my desk (for my other class), a few short stacks on the floor beneath the window, under my desk, in front of the bookshelves. I just had it. Where is it? I go back to the piles, pick each one up, am I just missing it, not seeing it? I remember that I have a second copy, upstairs on the bookshelves that line the hallway. OK fine, I think, I'll go up and fucking get it.
Beyond the cozy confines of my office, the house is so cold. I ascend the stairs quickly, frustrated, as this feels like wasted time. I find it easily — these bookshelves (which are mine) still organized alphabetically unlike the benign chaos of the ones downstairs ("ours"). I go back, through what seems like a tunnel of cold air, to my desk and open the book, only to realize I have forgotten what I had wanted to find in the first place.
I practice my breathing. The deep, calming kind. And every time, every time, I register mild irritation that it works, it calms me, re-centers me. I flip through the pages of The Argonauts, and while I cannot recall the scene, the passage that I was looking for, I find instead, the pencilled notes I had made in this copy (the one I read first, before acquiring a second, paperback copy at the school booksale, which I had designated my "working copy") and I am struck by this:
But whatever I am, or have since become, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. (She is talking about the way we evade or disengage with certain aspects of our identities, about wanting to feel wily and slick and nimble) I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own way of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
I am continually undone, derailed by my own weak refusals to engage, to abide, to persist. A heightened fight or flight that rises up, demanding slipperiness, turning away.
This was not the passage I was looking for, but am glad to have rediscovered it. To have it affect me with the same sharpness, the same shock of recognition that compelled me, the first time, to pencil one line down the length of the paragraph and another beneath the phrase "relearn the same."
