Last night, Sylvia, our dog of 13 years, died. She was probably 15–maybe even older. The animal shelter we got her from definitely lied about her age, but for noble reasons. They had her on the euthanasia list and, the day she was scheduled to be put down, I found her on Facebook. Immediately, I messaged and said, “I’ll take her!”
“A second dog?” My husband looked at me, unamused.
I had not consulted him.
(Ironically, Sylvia would become his best friend, a constant companion. I was the spare parent in this case.)
Sylvia was insatiably curious and willful, in the best ways possible. When she wanted something, her ears would be in a very specific, alert position. Her brown eyes were always bright and attentive, in case food might be on the offing. (My father in law loved to feed her cheez-its which she loved to eat. I’m pretty sure she could identify the box.) She was quite forceful: if she wanted on the couch, she used her paws to hit your leg. When Sylvia played, her paws would smack the ground and propel her forward. It was so cute.
One of my favorite memories of her is at my grandmother’s in Northern Michigan. Most of the time we were there, she was snarling and snapping at hummingbirds. But on an afternoon walk around the property, Sylvia stilled. Her ears were akimbo. Then she was off! She quite literally bounced through the forest, narrowly missing her quarry, a partridge. Remy sat by confused at what Sylvia was doing. She came back, visibly annoyed that there was no partridge in her jaws…
look at those ears: her dad is making her food.
December of 2023, our other dog of 12 years, Remy, passed away after a blood cancer became incredibly aggressive. He was quieter and less pushy than his sister; to be fair, he had not ever had to live on the streets. If Sylvia was attached to mountain man (my husband), Remy was more dog. He would protect me if mountain man tried to hug me. He would curl up in my lap, a holdover from his puppyhood. And he was always so excited to see me, even if I wasn’t in a good mood. His death was so sudden and happened while I was living 3,000 miles. So I didn’t have the sense of closure that I have with Sylvia. I sometimes come home and expect him to come up to me. His absence sometimes blindsides me when I remember summer days in South Carolina walking around our old city together.
Remy going in for the kiss! Seattle, WA.
So here I am, 32, with no dogs. I feel like something is missing because it is.
Remy with Sylvia resting on him. Durham, NC.
I’ve been trawling reddit recently to cope with the news and given the economy, I have seen far too many people disparaging people who have pets, saying they cost too much. They’ll even say that poor people especially shouldn’t have pets because it’s a bad “financial decision.” This is middle-class bullshit (they also say that you shouldn’t have kids unless you can afford them). It denies the warmth, love, and comfort animals give us, especially in a culture where people are increasingly aggressive, unloving, and distant. And, relatively speaking, animals are less expensive than many things people think are essential–such as a car.
My family, no matter their financial situation, has always had animals and often multiple at a time. I think I come from people who are more comfortable with animals than with people. The communication is more straightforward and an animal doesn’t really make any moral or social judgments about you. (Unless you’re taking too long to feed them, of course.) So having two dogs was sort of…normal. Even though we got the dogs when we were broke college students. We’re still broke. Just not college students.
My partner bought me a book many years ago that Mark Doty wrote about his dogs and I remember being so moved that he had written an entire memoir about his nonhuman companion. Now, as I sit here with Sylvia as we wait for a crematorium to open, I have a hunger for more of these stories to talk about what animals mean in our lives. They are central rather than extraneous.
(In the hall, a neighbor walks their dog. I can hear the clicking of puppy nails on vinyl.)
I struggle with sound sensitivity so there are aspects of having pets that are difficult for me. But for many years, I acted as if my dogs were in the way of my writing, my thinking, etc. without really understanding that they made my daily mental health possible. They gave me a reason to get up in the morning. They made sure I went walking. They demonstrated a way of living that I couldn’t quite grasp because I was so snowed by achievement/burn-out society. My dogs were really central to my life and how I organized it. While many people thought it was strange to “tie myself down,” I realize I really was tying myself down to the earth. They grounded me. Reminded me who I was: an animal in need of love and play and sunshine and cuddles on the couch.
Both the dogs went from the East coast of the US to the west, then back to the East coast, then up to Montana. They made friends quite literally all over the country. Now I just think of how lucky I have been to know them, to have them in my life, to benefit from their love and affection.
I miss them terribly.
my snow bunnies. Seattle, WA. best friends; ours and theirs.
image from a copy of Feminist Revolution, eds. Redstockings
At work. I’m supposed to be writing an essay, later to be a powerpoint (that most horrifying of forms), on female freedom, except I can’t write the essay or the presentation because people keep interrupting me. So with my fragmented attention, I scroll through the infinity pool of videos posted by content creators all over the world, looking for videos of women living alone as a kind of research project since I’d recently been tasked with living by and for myself, a sudden change of situation which meant I was naturally curious about what other women were doing. There was something both promising and threatening about this premise. It was as if the sun shone on new possibilities for me in my living while, at the same time, illuminating a void where I had ceased to live at all. In any case, I couldn’t focus on much else besides these videos which required little conscious thought and induced a pleasurable, mind-numbing passivity
In my search, I found mini-films—untouched even by the likes of Godard or Akerman—in which women recorded their daily lives but their faces were always beyond the camera and their voices absent except in scripted subtitles. These formal choices produced a curiously anonymizing effect, exemplified in the automatic translations that captioned the videos, the automatic part leading to slightly awkward English, jarring the viewer out of total union with the image, such as one line that still makes me laugh to think about, a Japanese woman told us that she was “reliably on the sand,” which makes no sense with or without context (could one be unreliably on the sand?). Yet their voices were unique and theirs. I came to know their preferences and habits, felt a certain sense of style in the compositions. Anyway, it was hypnotizing to watch, even the back-and-forth motion between the images on the screen and the captions describing them, revealing the narrator’s feeling and motivation.
I am moved by a logic of democracy as I watch more and more vlogs, because, unlike the paralysis with which I confront a novel or an essay, in these videos there is no hesitation, no doubt that the recording of one’s own life, no matter how ordinary, was worthy in and of itself, there was no conceit that it was the events demanding representation or recording. The form was motivated by the simple fact of being alive. Here I found a craving for witness that had not compelled these women into partnerships and families but drove them, instead, to broadcast their lives and invite in viewers who may be living alone or, even if surrounded with people, living lonely lives. I, like the anonymous millions watching, could now see, through these vlogs, that daily labor, instead of a discipline imposed by others, could be an aesthetic principle, such an aesthetic visible in the precision of the faceless women’s movements, no aspect of life could be too small to garner attention.
Cleaning ovens Cooking dinner Taking a walk Going to a bookstore Making art Getting ready for bed Doing laundry Moisturizing one’s hands
The calmness with which life is lived within these frames soothed me. A kind of flat affect prevailed, as the feeling subject in this genre is absent from the camera’s view for the most part and the motions are controlled and precise. The choreography betrayed nothing about the feeling subject except her care with the action right in front of her. A thinking subject is only sometimes referenced in language where she appears, as if by divine revelation, in an expression of pleasure, enjoyment, or exasperation but, as quickly as she bursts forth, obscurity takes hold again and we are, instead, left with poetry of action in which the camera records the mundanity, if not the boredom, of daily life and yet, somehow, aestheticizes (I almost said anesthetized) it, leaving me to wonder how she, any of these faceless and voiceless women, feels. Does she truly enjoy the logistical nature of daily living, of reproducing oneself for the next day, replenishing the body after its depletion for work or does she take her camera to the material in order to satirize, to show the emptiness of life as we now receive it, survival stalking our every moment? That either of these could be true, or even true at the same time, is as unsettling as it is dissatisfying.
Many of these directors, auteurs of the daily, are also workers, but their art does not touch upon their work, instead focusing on their days off in which they have all the time to themselves and which are, supposedly, free of labor, except they are confronted with tasks uncompleted because working requires so much energy and reproduction and, one wonders, whether they consider the filming they do proper labor or if it escapes because it sometimes gives pleasure. The focus on the “day off,” as the title cards for the video often read, suggest the double bind yet again, that these women’s choice of subject-matter is a willful choice, a site of sovereignty, calm, and self-assertion, reminding us, as The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective wrote decades ago, that even if 90% of my life is not mine, surely the 10% that is gives it all back to me. (The sentence was a declaration and not a question.) but it still seems that work continues in another realm. As much as we may enjoy cooking—well.
me on one of my favorite days off ever. in Tokyo. life seems to happen on days off.
These videos, when I discovered them, finding myself suddenly living alone, had filled a void rapidly growing in the absence of more substantial material (is life not substantial?). I had stopped reading books several months prior. I was unable to read a sentence to its conclusion because I could predict how they would begin and end. I knew the words that would be used, the fictional or rhetorical developments that would be made, the thinly veiled preconceptions of the human and political near deadly in their standardization. The only pleasure books could give me was the pleasure of an impeccably timed eyeroll at the predictability of it all. Overall, I think, I was angry, angry at the cliché and repetition of language, the reification of sensation and experience, and when I tried to leave fiction behind for the more objective genres in the land we call nonfiction, that was no help either: I wasn’t predicting character transformations but argumentative moves and moralistic gestures.
Was I going mad? Everyone, everyone trafficked in the same language, phrases, and politics, each book an iteration of the last, nothing new, nothing worthy, because apparently everyone agreed on everything (even when they disagreed fundamentally), I mean, didn’t they all have their punctuation arranged the same and didn’t they use the same narrative layering devices and didn’t they produce the same version of self-hood they had acquired to survive? My cynicism was all-encompassing: where once language had excited and compelled me, it now left me dead, motionless, compulsively consuming that which made me ill, simply because there was no outside and I couldn’t make the outside myself because then I wasn’t operating in language but in nonsense. I once submitted this very essay without punctuation because, I felt, it captured how my mind worked and I thought that was interesting but the editors disagreed so now you have all these little black scars everywhere because apparently it’s impolite to not have them.
Everyone else, after all, uses periods.
It seemed strange that I took solace in these videos made by women, an art form which seemed to reiterate the problems of the books that made me ill: after all, weren’t they just exposing daily life as the site of deadening repetition from which you could never escape (yes). But weren’t there moments beyond the daily labor, even within it, that overwhelmed me in their beauty, like the caring and incisive motion of slicing a cabbage, hands holding it sturdy on the chopping board, the command over a space of one’s own implied in rearranging furniture, the sound of food frying in a pan which, though their food looked nothing like mine, had the potential to invoke those memoire involontaires that made modernism what it was? So many of these videos were records of food made and spaces cleaned, an attention to the absent and disappearing in daily life, a strange aesthetic principle that existed alongside a depressing reminder of how much life has been reduced to its basics, to mere survival. There was an art of living to the arrangement of one’s food on a platter, just for oneself (and one’s million viewers), a kind of ascetic joy to be found in just the basics, a comfort in the routine of keeping oneself alive because what else is there to do?
A question hovered that reflected more about me than it did about these women who occasionally became an object of identification: do these women not read, philosophize, create, have thoughts about their lives, is it all just about these repetitions that feminist writers, from Beauvoir and Ernaux, so easily dismissed as alienating? Watching these vlogs, and asking myself these questions in exasperation over and over again, repetition bore its own fruit: I realized the thinking life cannot be captured by the image because it is a negative, it is precisely what is not there even as it may be animating the images of life these women so carefully curate, yes, that’s right, the intellectual part of our lives is precisely what is not accessible to others, and what cannot be captured. A picture of a book one is reading is not the same as the experience of reading that book, of having the words linger in one’s head for a long time after, similarly, a picture of one at a desk writing does nothing to convey the total life that supports such writing or what happened to enable that dedication to oneself and one’s art form, nor could you adequately capture the effects or remnants the thousands of books read and words written and discarded. (Much like the image of cutting a cabbage is not the same as having cut it.) The image, like the word, cannot show what has been jettisoned, the negative space one has to create to think and dwell and be amid a society that clutters one’s head and home, reducing life to consumable experience and to the products that always leave us wanting more of something that isn’t worth wanting, it is then that I truly see in these videos what is not there, the moments that cannot be symbolized: the intellectual and interior lives that will not rise to the level of the image and, in their rebellion, remain outside the grasp of the social.
me, philosophizing, reading. Ernaux’s Getting Lost. Forthcoming: a series of photos with me reading books in foreign countries.
Watching this reproductive labor, my cynicism swells again until my hand hovers over the red X at the upper left of my screen. But then! The narrator appears elsewhere, no longer confined within the private as the camera hops to a sunset on the water, sand under our director’s feet, the wind blowing on the speakers, the narrator tells us about a feeling of limitlessness in the world, and I think, yes, how on earth could literature ever stand up to this as a means of recording life, of giving us the will to live, I am enraptured and I believe, in my temporary insanity, that words on the page can give us no sensation of sunset, could not make us hear the wind, it could only approximate these things, truly. Even experiments in language and form, designed to excite that part of your brain that searches for similarity and difference, between language and experience, were repetitions of language, not what was real. The longer I spent submerged in the ocean of image, the farther I drifted from my homeland of surfaces, of black ink on white pages. My face became one with the screen, making me faceless like these women, melding my life into theirs, and it was in this way that I passed an entire day of work and missed my bus.
The day after my disastrous essay attempts and the missed bus, I tried videoing all my actions, with the idea to turn it into a vlog, which, I thought, would be a better version of the novel I was not working on alongside the essay I could not write, since language could only break down motion and thought so far. I wanted to achieve something of the documentarian approach to life these videos suggested, but it was wildly difficult, aiming the camera at every action threw me back into time, every movement Taylorized, broken in its smallest parts to repeated faster and faster, over and over until the gesture reached a stunning perfection at the intersection of speed, efficiency, and ease. None of the takes in these videos that I watched, I realized with a dawning horror as if I were in a film, happen in one go, none of them come out easily and so one must practice even the everyday actions that had seemed so normal and natural but now had turned out to be quite technical and learned. My normal way of cooking was messy and inefficient and would make for a hideous vlog, even leaving aside the fact that the bulb in my kitchen didn’t adequately light the place and part of the kitchen counter was falling off.
This all came to a head when, on my most precious bagel shop journey (on my day off), I realized that picking up the bagel was not just picking up the bagel, it was interactions with the cashier, gestures to pick the bag up from the counter, a careful checking of the ingredients, an aesthetic shot of said bagel shop, and every action had to be treated this way, so that an hour later I had spent time at the bagel shop simultaneously eating and trying to recreate the experience of eating which produced two realities splitting at the seams. Anyway, an hour later I was exhausted and had wanted a shot of me reentering my apartment, but turning the key in the lock was too difficult as I tried to aim the camera at my hand with the key that my hand kept missing the lock because my attention was split. It was so alienating I became frightened and immediately shut the camera off—it didn’t take me long to realize that creating this blow-by-blow account of a life was unsatisfying for me in its spiritual elements, even if its aesthetic features were somewhat interesting for a viewer.
the bagel in question. (book later abandoned because of tedium.)
It wasn’t so simple, I realized. Life in its barest elements was probably not worth representing and I could no longer take refuge in the idea that the image was superior to the word. I knew these two thoughts were irreducibly connected. But how? Anyway the image flattens and deadens as much as language, doesn’t it, it’s not so easy to say that either is better except that one conveys a sense of voice and excess while the other reduces us to what can be perceived visually, the firm lines of the body and the clutter of objects members of the same species in this flattened world. These images present themselves as natural and normal but are neither of those things, and it is this that makes the videos suddenly surreal to me.
No longer could I hide: my fear of language had to be confronted, what it would show me about life, my life? About freedom? I had failed to fully cultivate and sustain my disdain for literature through a traitorous appeal to other art forms and so here I was, exposed, thrown back to my unnatural home in words where the self, split by the social, haunted me (it seemed) with a kinder eye than the grim replication of image and gesture that deviated not at all from reality and yet also existed alongside it. There had to be, I thought, a way of using language so that life could, for a little while, be ignored, and imagination meant that my life did not have to be reduced to its reality, its materiality, to meal cooking and dish washing and apartment cleaning and waiting for days off. I didn’t have to seek a mindless state through the visual capture of day-to-day motions that left me in shards. My mind could be made real and worthy, a subject in its own right, even if only on the page, and even if only briefly, before the dust accumulated and the dishes crusted over. Oblivious to the time passing, I could slip into the ocean of language, surely shark infested, but safe enough for me to submerge and swim, as cunningly as I could to elongate the time before I reached the other shore, floating in waters where, temporarily, the waters suturing my fragmentation.
“There’s not a day when I don’t think/how nice it would be/if I wanted different things/there’s not a day when I don’t think/how good it is/that I don’t.” –Dijana
I started thinking about this in my essay on Perfect Days, which is about the alternative hedonism presented by the movie, a vision of life in which commodities are not the center. This picture of some graffiti from my time in Italy reminded me of a central, difficult question about wanting things and what happens when you want things that are unavailable or not easily acquired by money.
We can want things, commodities, as they present us with visions of ourselves as cool or complete or as somehow staving off the reality of finitude. I’m talking here about the things we don’t necessarily need or those objects that fill us with rapturous visions of who we could be rather than satisfying, say, our nutritional needs or our spiritual desires. We can also want things that are not things but are really forms of life: like better relationships; clean air; more kindness; health and happiness for our neighbors. But these things cannot be solved by buying things.
It’s easier to want the thing rather than to want forms of life.
This is why, as Todd McGowan argues, we in some ways like and want capitalism, because it arises from and satisfies things we as humans struggle with and desire. But like Dijana is saying in my photo, things start to get a little difficult when you stop wanting things and start wanting life. (I’ll refer you back to my blog title; less labor, more life!)
I’ve been thinking about this even more now, reading the memoirs and diaries of Dorothy Day, having become interested in her as a result of Zena Hitz’s fabulous Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of Intellectual Life. I have always been drawn to the stories of those who follow the difficult path of living what they believe in. And in our moment, it is more necessary than ever, even though Day may roll her eyes at me saying that. She recognized that all moments in history are crisis; not just ours.
My battered, Free Little Library copy of Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes.
The world looks very different if our words and lives come closer into alignment and Dorothy Day’s life demonstrates this powerfully. Her biography is easily accessible, but the two salient details for me are this: that a free, seeking youth lead her to communism and then to Catholicism. Becoming Catholic intensified her commitment to issues of social justice, especially poverty, labor struggles, and anti-war actions. Her life was a practice of living her values fully, in voluntary poverty, caring for the poor, tax refusals, and anti-war protests.
For instance, Day writes an explanation for refusing to pay income tax in Loaves and Fishes, that clarifies .85 on the dollar pays for the military-industrial complex in the US. That was in 1963 when the book was published; I am afraid to confirm my intuition that this number is much higher. After all, in the US when services are cut, that money is almost always directed toward the death machine. By earning less money and consuming less, as the Catholic Workers set out to do, there can be a reduction in complicity with war.
The point is not that we all go out and become Dorothy Day; some of us may become like her but Day would encourage us to work with our desires and our skills toward that vision we have and in community with those who sustain us. Catholicism and anti-capitalist, anti-war politics were central to her vision; her skills were writing, speaking, and caring. For example, I loved parts of being a union organizer; mostly I found it wrecked me every day and I did not have the constitution for it. Instead, I write about how wonderful unions can be and will always participate in one should I have the chance.
This is a principle shared by many of the feminists I read and teach but particularly the Milan Women: following our desire can remake the world. Day emphasized freedom just as much as the Milan Women; it is one of the most compelling aspects of her philosophy. But in a world where our desires are broken and deformed by the market on the one side and the state on the other, what are we supposed to do? How do we find our way forward? I say “we” here because I feel I have been lost in consumer hell myself. I feel like I am becoming aware of how my desires for feminism, love, happiness, community, a better world have been funneled into the only thing available: buying shit!
Across all her work, Day desired, more than worldly goods, a world in which every person has freedom, dignity, care, food, and housing. I find this single-mindedness, something Zena Hitz wrote about recently, so moving. The Catholic concept of vocation is a powerful one. I am not Catholic, but I still, in my 30s, wonder what my vocation is. What is the thing I am single minded about? Feminism? Labor issues? Writing and teaching as many people as possible to tell their stories? Writing novels and essays? The answer, after all, cannot be answered by a force of will.
I think many of us wonder how we can use their special gifts in the world–some of us are even still looking for those gifts, doubting them, chasing them away, hiding if they come knocking. We’ve been taught to love other things besides ourselves and each other, something like Dorothy Day’s life (as she tells us) has revealed to me, loud and clear.
Day’s life, and her life-writing, were so unique, so powerful, I can feel her coming through the pages of her books. To be that alive, to seek life out in the presence of suffering others, amazes me and reflects my life back to me in unsettling ways. The daily courage her life required, well, encourages me. Dorothy Day did not claim the mantle of feminism for herself, but her picture now belongs in my pantheon of spiritual advisers.
Day at her typewriter. Credit: Bob Fitch. Source: U.S. Catholic.
I spent last week in Tokyo, soaking in the cherry and plum blossoms, as well as the public baths. I rested in gardens and hurried to catch the packed subway trains. I wandered along rivers and sat in cafes watching people go by.
It was my last stretch of time without having to report to a job, though the job loomed at the end, quite like it might when you take a “normal” vacation. There’s always a sense of finite time. My experience of Tokyo this time was less full of possibility and more bittersweet than it was a year ago, precisely for that reason.
But I loved my time there, just as I did the first time. I loved the unfamiliar sounds, both the songs and language. I now live in a small town (it calls itself a city, but I beg to differ) and so I do not hear the clatter of train cars or the announcers’ voices or the mix of many languages at any given time. So many different people come to Tokyo from all over the world, even from within Japan itself, so there’s also a real diversity of people moving through the city.
I visited my third crown jewel garden, Kairakuen in Mito, about a two hour train ride from Tokyo. The garden’s name references a particular kind of pleasure and ease. This philosophical aspect of the garden felt like a natural conclusion to my time off, as both were something I thought in sustainable and nourishing forms. Much of the pleasure we have access to on a daily basis is not…healthy? It’s at least not sustainable, as we try to consume our way out of loneliness and mortality and lovelessness and anger. Instead, Kairakuen was a place for everyone to retreat to rest in the beauty of the plum trees and the exceptionally beautiful Koubountei, a three floor residence with rooms painted in different designs. Kairakuen, of the three crown jewels, was always treated as a public space rather than the domain of the wealthy.
momiji (maple) room in Kobountei
The plum trees were still in bloom, so I wandered the plum grove multiple times, breathing in the scent of the trees. Photos can never capture smell and they fade from memory, only to be evoked in surprising ways later. (Proust taught us this, I suppose.) I was acutely aware of the impermanent nature of smell as I sat beneath the blossoms, enjoying my onigiri for the day. I enjoyed watching people show each other the blossoms, snatches of Japanese conversation floating toward me and away.
white and fire-pink blossoms in Kairakuen
I think the Japanese acknowledgement of the shaping relationship between people and nature is sound, much more sound than the culture I come from which views nature as valuable only for resource extraction or feelings of sublimity (these two things may be related). The Japanese garden is sometimes derided as being artificial to which the Japanese respond, rather sensibly, with “well…yeah.” Men cannot make mountains, though, in my country, they work very hard to destroy them. But in a Japanese garden, men can create mountains. Mountains can be made with carefully placed stones that evoke legend and symbolism. Ponds can stand for lakes, and the barest of fields suddenly becomes the plains. The Japanese gardens are worlds created to satisfy a need for beauty and one that engages all of our senses and faculties.
Imagination is where beauty begins.
I haven’t been working on any writing in the last two weeks, even this blog was a casualty of my travels and my job starting. But this problem of imagination and beauty, of how we restore our souls, especially when we don’t have money or means, interests me very much. That problem of restoration and beauty is the center of a story I’ve been working on for a couple of years about tiredness, inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. (That book actually saved my life.) Maybe I’ll get back to it since I’ve returned from trip, full of sustaining images and memories to get me through the workday.
Graffiti in Florence. “Videocourse for how to construct healthy relationships. 150 dollars.”
Today my essay on Feminism in Revolt, an edited collection of Carla Lonzi’s work, will come out on Full Stop. I have long been fascinated by Italian feminism, in particular because of the way its writing is often experimental and outside the academic realm. Italian feminism, too, has an entire different universe of concepts unrelated to American feminism which has a hard time thinking past “gender” as a concept, even if it collects a lot of modifiers along the way. It ends up being very monotone and not at all interested in what it means to live and how one might want to do so.
In my essay on Full Stop,I explore the significance and experimental nature of Lonzi’s writing. She is rarely treated as a writer–only as a critic and feminist. But I think she is an artist, using her life to create new and surprising works. In this post, I’m going to follow a thread that got cut from the essay because it is far more relevant to my blog’s usual themes of living and (not) working. Lonzi’s enactment of feminism, to me, has close ties to an anti-work ethic that many miss if they take her self-narration at face value. Lonzi, at least in the excerpts that we have in English, doesn’t necessary use the language of the anti-work left, which has a strong presence in Italian leftist thought.
In teaching Lonzi for the first time, I was reminded of how distant Italian feminism is and how useful it is to give some context. Lonzi lived from 1931-1982 and was the cofounder of a group of Italian feminists called Rivolta Feminile. The group experimented with different kinds of consciousness-raising as a way to extract themselves from what they saw as a male-dominated culture. This culture had little respect for different ways of being or living, and its subjectivity was often geared toward profit and the harm of others. One of the key aspects of Rivolta Feminile, like that of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s philosophy, was that developing autonomous relationships between women was a valid political practice that could create different kinds of freedom. Freedom is often what we see Lonzi searching for in her writing, though she called it “authenticity.”
Her first book, Autoritratto, or Autoportrait, is a collage of interviews she did with mostly male artists and one woman artist who was also involved with Rivolta Feminile, Carla Accardi. The book is not very enjoyable, in my opinion, but it does mark the end of her career as an art critic. What concerned Lonzi about art-making was the way it destroyed relationships. The language of her critique came from a feminist perspective, of course, critiquing the figure of a male artist’s autonomous subjectivity forsaking the real background that enables and produces him. This would include any women that reproduce his labor. Lonzi also tires of being the critic in that it puts her in service of the art and art world rather than her own subjectivity. In other words, she had to submit her subjectivity to a commodity, even if a special kind of commodity, and that she found intolerable. Refusing the exploitation, she left art criticism altogether.
She affected a similar kind of leaving with the publication of Vai Pure, a dialogue with her long-term partner, the artist Pietro Consagro. The book is transcription of video recordings that Lonzi took of their final argument. It is, quite frankly, an amazing document. Using her personal experience, Lonzi shines a light on conflicts in relationships that seem universal: the lack of understanding, a lack of gratitude, and a lack of care. But in the context of feminism, this argument takes on a heightened significance as Lonzi is struggling to live out feminism in her day-to-day life with a man she feels does not appropriately appreciate her. Vai Pure is often very funny as Pietro demands examples from Carla as she lists her grievances and as Carla struggles to explain to him the stress of trying to be a feminist while also being partner to a man who doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about feminism.
Within the written work Pietro publishes he does not (to her mind) acknowledge her role in his art sufficiently. Instead, his work operates on a liberal assumption: “Everyone creates an image of himself, a resumé, grants himself himself his preferred identity” while everyone in his liberal circle, clinging to the “abstract originality of the individual,” consents to the idea that ‘I don’t talk about you, you don’t talk about me” (246). This is an insane basis for art, let alone society. In reproducing the abstract individual who sells his labor willingly and freely (note the language of resume here), Lonzi accuses Pietro of colluding in capitalist subjectivity.
If that point seems a little, well, abstract, there’s another critique that Lonzi makes which seems even more heartbreaking in its universality and simplicity. Keep in mind that Consagra is an artist, an original freelancer who has some control over his labor. In a translated excerpt of VaiPure not included in Feminism in Revolt, Lonzi delivers a huge blow:
I don’t know how to name it. We eat lunch with the feeling that you have to go to the studio, you come back in the evening with the feeling that you must recharge your batteries and in the morning you are off to the studio again … Even when we are at Elba Island [on holiday], you don’t want to go climbing on the rocks, because you want to work on a drawing, on a project, on something, and you accuse me of stealing time from your work. You give me the remainder of your time in the afternoon. We don’t walk around the island, we don’t take walks, we meet people only and exclusively for work, we have restricted the world for ourselves to the people that are interested in your work, whoever they are, clever people or idiots, but it is the work that counts. You must understand that our whole life is structured by work, all of it, that we are never together for ourselves. It’s just a pause, a rest from work. The vital, conscious, and active moment, the promised land is work … You don’t have a schedule, you don’t have a job, you don’t have obligations, but you create a more constraining situation than if you had a job and a boss. (Excerpt translated by Claire Fontaine, in e-flux.)
Even the artist lives his whole life around work, making time for his partner rather than living his life and making his art an accessory to it. Lonzi has no patience for this; it hurts her deeply to come second to Consagra’s art process.
Lonzi estranges us from the typical vision of art as an expression of human greatness or creativity. From the perspective of relationships, art is an inhuman process, merely an extension of capitalist production, if a highly specialized one. It is no different than other forms of labor for pay, it just arrogates prestige to itself.
Lonzi’s entire oeuvre is dedicated to the question: what kind of art can we make if we are unwilling to destroy our lives and relationships? While it’s true that art might outlast us, do we really want to live our lives as if we are already dead?
Maurizio Rapiti art in Florence, Italy. (Me, writing this blog.)
At some level, the writing game has only one rule: keep going.
I forget this rule all the time and end up wondering if I should quit and be happy.
The thought process goes a little something like this: I’ll start a project and it’ll feel great and around 20-30,000 words I start to wonder whether writing this thing is really a good idea and whether I shouldn’t try a different craft and hadn’t I better quit before it turns out to suck because otherwise I’ll just be disappointed in myself and, anyway, I don’t think I have it in me to finish a book length project.
Play this on loop 1,000 times a week. (I am genuinely curious if other writers have similar thought processes!)
Most of my life is littered with half finished projects that got sabotaged by some form of self-doubt or displaced by other responsibilities. I finished a book length project in high school thanks to NaNoWriMo (do not recommend) but until my dissertation, no book length project was finished.
Getting my PhD was, at some level, about learning how to finish a project, how to find an idea worth writing about and sustaining that writing for a significant amount of time. It was also about studying literature as a way of finding out what my own voice sounded like, what my concerns were relative to the canon. So my intents were slightly mercenary: I was there to ransack the library, so to speak.
My dissertation was the first long-form project I had finished that might actually go somewhere. I mostly finished because I wanted the credential and because I had a committee that knew I was writing something. I couldn’t look like a failure: I had to finish the dissertation.
Similarly, when I had a publisher for my first book, University for a Good Woman, I couldn’t quit. There was someone waiting for the manuscript. This was a great situation for me to be in as a first-time published author. Without that contract, I never would have written that book. I used the proposal and contract as a way to lay out the book and it gave me concrete deadlines to work with, not vague self-imposed ones.
Anyway, as I wrote University for a Good Woman, I put aside doubt and just added to my word count every day because I had to get it to the publisher on time. Or else. (What the or else was, my brain wouldn’t tell me, but the threat was useful.) That is all you need to get a first draft. For me, generating words is the hardest, most grueling part, the part where I can easily talk myself out of a project because it is so labor intensive. Editing, though, is the most pleasurable part of the project. There is something much more enjoyable about working on prose when you’ve written it already. Doubt is replaced by a much meaner critic, but I’m working on that part.
Now I’m working on (among other things) a novel that no one is waiting for, a novel whose sole audience, at the moment, is me. The book is tentatively titled Dinner at Silvio’s and it’s about some restaurant workers who are trying to get a union together. Chaos ensues, as does hilarity. I wanted to experiment with voice and style as well as challenge myself with a new form. I’ve been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett who has taught me about the value of humor and redescribing our strange world in funny ways.
I started the project with the idea that I wanted to have fun so the reader could have fun. My friend recently told me he enjoyed writing his dissertation and it made me wonder whether I could come up with a project that was about enjoyment. And writing this book really has been enjoyable. The humor and happiness has kept me coming back to add at least 500 words five to six days a week. I can run long on word count, if I want to, but 500 is the minimum. And doing so, I have already accumulated 38,000 words. Previously I would have either already given up because I’m no good or I would still be thinking about writing in the abstract instead of actually doing it.
And while I see the mountain of half-finished projects and wish my younger self hadn’t dealt with so much doubt, I am very proud that I did what I could to keep writing–even if that meant sometimes that “writing” was reading 150 books a year trying to find a voice and subject matter that I cared about.
Writing is a long game, like any other craft or sport. I used to be enamored with those who published their books young or who wrote quickly. Usually, these types are middle class or have some sort of support; not to diminish their achievements, but often their success is held up as indicative of their individual strength rather than the success of their social support. Knowing what I do now about the class politics of writing as well as its basic difficulties, I no longer find such phenomena interesting: there is no inherent value in doing things quickly or at a young age. I’m more interested in people who sustain their practices for years as they have competing responsibilities, or who publish in their forties, sixties, or eighties.
It’s a mood, a structure of feeling, that all of us look at waged work and think, “yuck.” But it’s difficult to act on that mood. Who can really leave work behind? I think of Rental Person Who Does Nothing and the anonymous author of “Tang Ping,” Luo Huazhong, who works two months a year and has monthly costs of 200 yuan. Both of them left work behind, but in different ways.
I, too, was fed up with work. It was somehow both soul-crushingly boring and kept me just busy enough that I stressed constantly. I needed an off-ramp, quickly. My partner had just taken a year to get a degree and leave customer service work entirely. He finished his degree and got a job in Montana, one that would cover rent entirely. Our roles swapped: I would quit my own job. I turned in my notice, moved out of the North Carolina apartment, and flew to Montana after a couple of months.
There was very little information about taking a career break when I started, with the exception of Julie de Vivre’s archive (which I highly recommend). I read about travel writers who were digital nomads but had financed themselves through sold houses and in demand careers. This, obviously, was not an option for me. I read about people who lived in communities that helped them reduce their spending considerably and so their career breaks were “permanent.” These people invariably had gardens that required a lot of work. I read about someone who cashed out $190,000 in savings. I read about Luo Huazhong and his 200 yuan a day and knew I could never do that, either.
But I did think I could manage a year on what I had saved without being wealthy, gardening or eating tofu and rice for every meal. It turns out I was right, thanks to my partner covering rent when I was in Montana. (I could have contributed toward rent, but he refused.) I covered all my other expenses which included travel to Japan and Italy, as well as travels to see my family. (Recapped here.)
As of right now, I have about $10,000 of the $24,000 that I started with. My one-year mark will be on March 31, 2025. I’m being transparent about this because, before I started, I felt doomed to work forever, parceling out my time in 1-2 week stints of vacation time that feels so oppressive. I used to think you had to be wealthy to take this much time off of work. But it’s more about assessing how much you need to live on and how much you’re willing to give up for the freedom.
I haven’t been entirely work free. I finished writing my book (though I haven’t received any money from it) and taught a couple of classes at Hugo House for Writers in the past year. I have done free book reviewing for a few sites I admire. I published a couple of paid essays. I have also been working on multiple book projects that I enjoy and hope to publish in the next year or so. These are all things I have enjoyed doing and took on willingly. Taking a break from work let me focus on things I really enjoy instead of having to cram those things into the tired hours around a commute and office stay. I used to have a 1.5 hour commute (1 hour if the traffic wasn’t bad) each way to work, meaning I went to the gym at 5 AM to ensure I fit it in, and then had to work 8 to 5. I would get home after 6 and have no energy for loving on my mammals, my partner and our two dogs, or for doing things I wanted to. I was completely drained.
Consider my day now. I start each day with coffee and work on one or more of my writing projects. My partner gets up and one of us makes a second cup of coffee for all. (Even the dog. Kidding!) Then I go to the gym, come home, take care of the dog, and make my lunch. After lunch, I do some household stuff, then I take a nap, especially if my gym session is particularly heavy. Then I’ll study one of my two languages, Italian or Japanese. I make dinner some nights, my partner makes dinner the other nights. TV before bed. And then I start all over again. On a week to week basis, my partner and I go to the hot springs in nearby Boulder. That’s our big adventure. If this sounds at all boring to you, rest assured, this is the perfect life for me. It is a nourishing routine, doing things I love, and not having to suffer 8 hours a day for someone else’s profit.
My initial concern about taking a career break was money. How would I survive!? But now my concern is: how can I go back to work after this unparalleled stint of freedom? How will I survive having to crush myself down small again to fit into a work environment?
In reading about career breaks and their endings, the key is to learn how to “sell” your time off to employers as a bonus. This means thinking of your career break as a time in which you gained skills that you can sell in the marketplace. Apparently, my Japan trip wasn’t an enjoyable encounter with a culture that has long fascinated me but an upskilling in intercultural exchange and soft peoples kills. This annoys me. Not everything we do, as humans, needs to be folded into work or seen as job training.
My time off, frankly, isn’t an employer’s business. It is deeply disturbing to me that, as a culture, we give so much power to prospective employers who can demand information at will and whose power deforms us into performing creatures who will do anything for money. This is an unfreedom: it means people live their entire lives around an imaginary figure’s expectations rather than their own desires. For example, career guides recommend, in the strongest terms, that you make sure your blog is employer friendly. Don’t write anything to upset them or make them think you won’t be a good worker. You don’t, then, even have free speech in your own time; not really. Elizabeth Anderson argues in Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives that employers govern our lives in way that are far more insidious and damaging than some forms of state control.
So that finds me here, on a snowy February morning, thinking about what my career break has meant to me. And I think it has, ultimately, meant reclaiming a kind of freedom. It has given me time to recover myself beyond the status of “worker.” It has also helped me recover pleasure in activities that began to feel like obligations. Writing, for example. Whether this career break becomes permanent, when I leave the career ladder for a different relationship to work, or is just a pause, I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll see you back in the life of waged labor soon enough.
In March of 2024, I left my job in the university.
I had major burnout. I had been cycling from burn out to burn out, (read: emotional implosion to emotional implosion) for five years by the time I finally left. I did not have a job lined up but I had roughly $24,000 in savings from jobs, my personal retirement, and a random cash account that I kept to catch travel money. The discourse in the US is to build your entire life around funding retirement and keeping health insurance. But I couldn’t do it.
I needed a break.
I’m not quite at the one-year mark of my sabbatical yet, but I wanted to reflect on that period, from March 31st until now, a period of my life not defined by work or my earning potential. I have been working since I was fifteen or sixteen and basically worried about money since then. This is terrible! I won’t say I haven’t been worried about money as I worked. It is hilarious how many times my partner told me to put away the resume because I would be just fine. Anyway, here’s to the year in review.
japan: april-may 2024
In October of the previous year, I booked a 40 day trip to Japan, fully intent on taking my vacation time and then some in order to go on this trip. I had not been planning to leave my job at that point. But in November of 2023, I decided to leave my job so I could take this trip without limits.
I made my way from Tokyo to Nagoya to Kanazawa to Osaka to Kyoto to Hiroshima to Beppu to Imabari to Takamatsu to Okayama back to Tokyo to fly home. Phew! I ran out of breath just typing all of that. I want to do a more extensive write-up of my trip later. (I do have an essay about my experience coming out in the first issue of SOLO Travel Mag, so check it out!) But I will mention 2 things that were life-changing for me.
First, sento. I had been determined to find tattoo-friendly onsen during my time in Japan only to find out about their more welcoming, far more plentiful cousin, the sento. It’s a public bath house with a variety of features: hot baths, cold baths, medicinal baths, saunas, etc. It was the place where I got to interact with Japanese people on a daily basis and they were, without fail, friendly to me. We even managed some hilarious conversations with what little of the other’s language we had. One woman in Osaka was thrilled that I had discovered sento. I went to a sento multiple times a week because they were so affordable (anywhere from 400-500 yen) and they restored my body after walking 10+ miles most days.
me looking like a happy nerd after my sento time in Hiroshima.
The second thing: gardens. Japanese gardens were my initial reason for traveling to Japan, as there were a couple when I lived in Seattle and then one when I lived in Durham. I travelled to the crown jewel gardens of Kanazawa (Kenrokuen) and Okayama (Korakuen, which has 3 Michelin stars, incidentally). They deserved every ounce of praise they received. Korakuen was my favorite of the two as its history and use was interesting.
This is Korakuen in Okayama. It’s my favorite picture of my entire trip.
The most significant garden I went to, though, was in Hiroshima. It was called Shukkein garden and it bore the history of the atomic bomb. A beautiful garden had regrown. The signs told of a mass grave, as residents headed to the garden after the bomb because they didn’t know where else to go. Images showed devastation and the haunting outline of a bridge that survived.
My trip is on my mind every day and I can’t wait to go back to Japan.
family visits: june 2024
Coming back to the US was a bit of a shock, I had book revisions to manage and family to visit. I went from speaking only a few phrases each day (if any at all) to suddenly communicating at full blast all the time. It was a little overwhelming! I visited all my grandparents in the great state of Michigan before heading home to visit with my in-laws. They had come to visit us in the lovely season in Montana, before the summer heat.
I enjoyed visiting with everyone and then had to figure out what to do with myself now that I wasn’t planning a trip…
book revisions: june-july 2024
My time was carved out in a major overhaul of my book draft for my publisher. The feedback I got on the first draft from my editors was kind but I knew the book was no good. So I stripped it for parts and worked through it at a prose level. I broke down my sentences and explained things as simply as I could. This probably sounds like a no-brainer: it was not how I was taught to write! I had one meeting with an advisor during my dissertation where she helped me break sentences down simply but I forgot that lesson for almost two years until it came time for me to write a book for undergraduates.
I actually enjoy editing more than writing. It works my puzzle-loving brain a bit more than the generating phase. I also can tell when I’ve edited well. I sent the book back and received an enthusiastic YES from my editor.
turning 31: august 2024
Turning 30 was a bit of a crisis for me. I had struggled with intense awareness of mortality as a result of the pandemic and so I worried that turning 31 would be marked by the same feeling that time was running out.
I had no such feelings and, in fact, I felt lighter. I was able to stretch into my days because, as time passed, I was less and less beholden to the sensation of working constantly. I had a book coming out from a publisher–my life-long dream–and I had all the time in the world to write and lift weights. I had literally nothing to complain about!
book published: october 14, 2024
The book came out! A little earlier than expected and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. It didn’t help that I would be in Italy by the time my author copies arrived…
italy: october-november 2024
I planned a second trip, based on my budget, to Italy. I wanted to meet the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a feminist group based in Milan. They, to this day, run a feminist bookshop run by volunteers. Their book, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice, changed my life and thinking when I read it. I don’t talk about it much in the book, University for a Good Woman, but I did write an essay about them for Oh Reader, issue 17 that also came out in October. I packed my bag and headed to Milan.
The inside of the Libreria delle donne di Milano. I left with an extra copy of Sexual Difference, their journal, and Carla Lonzi’s Taci, Anzi Parla. I should have gotten more!
In their book, the Milan Women underscore the practice of gratitude between women, acknowledging what you’ve received from others. In my acknowledgements page, I tried to mention everyone I had to be grateful for (inevitably leaving off names, much to my horror). But the Milan Women, for some reason, didn’t make it. So I decided to meet them, give them a copy of my essay and book. My Italian is minimal, but what I found interesting was how passionately they argued and how they managed disagreement. I had never seen such lively political discussion in my life. This sticks with me.
After my time in Milan, I went to Venice, then Florence, then Rome. It was overwhelming to see so many ruins and so much art. I was amazed by how small Venice and Florence were, the way they evoked older ways of organizing cities. I ate fabulously, though was sick for a lot of my trip. I also felt a lot of pressure to see things: because Italy has such a long history of tourism, there are big feelings about what must seen and how, and I did not enjoy that aspect. I was supposed to spend over a week in Palermo, but cut my trip short because of my illness.
family visit: november 2024
I returned to visit my parents and sisters in South Carolina for about a week. It was refreshing to see them, as I had last seen them in January when they hosted me before I moved to Montana. We had a lot of fun and good food while I was there. I miss them all immensely. I unfortunately headed home before Thanksgiving because I was homesick, but I celebrated Thanksgiving with Mountain Man (my partner).
hot springs: december 2024
Going to Japan made me appreciate living in Montana a little bit more. I complain about it a lot as a joke, my partner fretting about my unhappiness. But Montana has tons of hot springs! It is basically the closest to the aspect of Japan I will get in all of the US. We are a 30 minute drive from my favorite hot spring, Boulder Hot Springs, which has a clothing-optional women’s only side with both a hot bath and a cold bath. (It is divine.)
Mountain Man, the dog, and I all trekked up to Hot Springs, MT, a 3-ish hour drive that takes us near Flathead. Hot Springs has a hotel with hot springs pools as well as several smaller “plunges” (the local term) that operate on the honor system. You drop 5 dollars in a box and soak. So cheap! We stayed at Alameda’s Hot Springs Retreat which had its own private soaking tub. It was my first time in a claw-foot bath. The water was sulfurous which was also new for me.
Me in Rose’s Plunge in Hot Springs, MT. Those are the Camas Bath House Ruins on the left.
I’m not normally a fan of outdoor baths, but Rose’s Plunge was perfect for two of my soaks while we were in Hot Springs. I hope to go back soon.
now, 2025
Admittedly, I had my crises throughout the year where I doubted the wisdom of taking time off; I got rejected for a job I sort of wanted; I also felt like I should leave writing behind entirely. But somehow, I kept going. I’m working on a novel that I’m really excited about: it’s about restaurant workers and inspired by the humor of Terry Pratchett. (Humor is difficult! But I crack myself up sometimes.) I have published a few things this past year which is a 1000% improvement over past years. But I still feel reticent about trying to make a writer of myself. As if I’m blocked somehow.
But still, I show up to the page every day and meet my goals. I have an essay/review about Carla Lonzi (remember her?) coming out in March and am working on an essay/review about Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone. These are both part of my second nonfiction book project, tentatively titled Women with Issues that collects and refines my criticism about contemporary feminist authors and why their work matters.
Finally: thing I did not mention was weightlifting. It has been absolutely central to my mental health. I’m in a block (period of programming, about 10 weeks) where I am hitting previously unheard of numbers for my squat, bench, and deadlift. I am so proud of myself and I feel so good when I leave the gym.
Tired, need a haircut, but I always love squat day!
Here’s to heavier weights and weightier dreams in 2025. xo
“People can die because of the stress of adapting to society. Or they can lose every ounce of their energy. I’ve seen it happen.” –Shoji Morimoto, Rental Person Who Does Nothing
I’ve been writing a book about the stress of graduate school. During that time, I suffered severe burnout. It’s been a couple of years now, though I feel as if I am constantly on the edge of burnout. How do you recover from burnout? I quit my job and moved to Montana where my partner took a new job. I’ve been floating in unemployment while I work on my book, travelling a little. Is idleness the solution to burnout?
I think and read a lot about idleness as a concept which seems radically other to our moment. We must be doing or consuming at every moment. I find it hard to do nothing, to take a day where nothing must be planned or done. Days filled with TV, online scrolling, work, reproductive labor, it all feels very overwhelming. I’ve always wanted to write a book but that’s still work! And I have a graduate school hangover: every moment could be for writing, so why isn’t it? This is really unhealthy and unhelpful. But difficult to shake.
I just finished reading Shoji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a surprisingly moving account of resisting work and labor. It has made me reflect on my ingrained worked tendencies. It also makes me think about what makes work, well, work and how we might recover from burnout. There is no prescription here: no bubble baths or long walks. (Though you should definitely do those things.) But rather, Morimoto helps us see a way out of burnout through being with others.
Morimoto became famous a few years ago for receiving requests on twitter, mostly for companionship, and he obliges. He does not get paid, though he often gets his travel reimbursed and gifts from those he fulfills requests for. He lives on savings to support his partner and their kid, spending his day fulfilling requests to do nothing. Often, he watches someone while they work on an essay, goes with them to an event, or eats at a restaurant with him. He does not do labor for others. It is almost a performance art piece, this doing of nothing. And it really is “nothing,” in Morimoto’s words, as he tries to think nothing and say as little as possible in these encounters.
As I said, reading about idleness a lot, I have come across work with similar ideas to Morimoto’s. I can see parallels between Morimoto and the work of Emi Yagi (Diary of A Void), Jenny O’Dell (How to Do Nothing) and even Luo Huazhong’s “Lie Flat is Justice.” I think Morimoto gets to the heart of what is so radical about doing nothing in his work, much better than I have ever read.
The origin story of Morimoto’s Rental Person persona is complex and has at least three causes. First, his own alienation at work and through job hunting (of having to be defined by your abilities and skills). Second, tragedy in his own family: his brother’s breakdown and his sister’s suicide. Both were work related. Third, the birth of his child which showed to him that there are points in a human life where we live according to our desires with no repression from within and we receive the unconditional care and resources we need without any expectations for payment. (Later, your parents may blackmail you, but for a while, you’re safe.)
A central fear that connects all three of these causes is a fear of calcifying into a character, of being made to inhabit a role. Morimoto’s work, as in the book and in his “do nothing” rentals (which aren’t even rentals!), refuses roles entirely. In fact, part of what alienated him about seeking work and then being a worker was that he had to describe himself as if he were a character. Morimoto has an almost superstitious relation to language in that he felt he had to constantly renarrate himself on Twitter to avoid becoming a kind of “character” defined by his consumption, strengths, abilities, and so on.
Morimoto totally rejects the definition of life as achieving some kind of identity, of stepping into roles that we use to define us, even if they do not encapsulate us–even if they hurt us. Part of what is alienating about roles, as I finally saw reading Morimoto, despite years of thinking about alienation, is that they are always relations of exchange. The worker role sells labor for life. The spouse/child/friend/relation role is about exchanging labor for affection, social status, belonging.
Morimoto discovers that his own role as Rental Person allows other people to leave the alienating reciprocity of their relationships. He frequently wonders why he is the one receiving requests rather than family or friends. He soon thinks about it this way:
In Japan people are very conscious of reciprocity. Someone receiving a gift will try to reciprocate with a gift of greater value. This mentality promotes a gift-giving cycle, which helps to sustain relationships. I think people look for similar reciprocity in terms of behaviour between friends. If A does something for B, then B will try to do something more for A. The writer Tomoaki Kageyama describes the sense of obligation that a recipient feels as ‘a healthy feeling of debt’. For me, though, there’s nothing healthy about it at all.
I think this emphasis on the gift has particular social manifestations in Japan but I feel this acutely in my own life. I feel I must monitor constantly to avoid being a state of social debt. I don’t know why this is the case, except I feel it as an infringement on my freedom, as if every action I take has to be somehow repaid and vice versa. In simpler terms, we are working even in our personal relationships.
Morimoto argues that the somewhat impersonal nature of social media actually provides a new set of social relations that are less stressful, more human and more humane. He writes that the social media relationship “which falls short of ‘friendship’, can be quite convenient. You don’t feel you have to worry too much about the other person – there’s no sense of expecting anything from each other.” This is why many people do not contact their friends and family, but contact Morimoto instead. There is no social contract. (Except that he needs his travel reimbursement.) Like character, relationships can calcify, become “fixed” and “carry restrictions and responsibilities. Every named relationship entails particular things you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet.” Thus the unnamed relationships of social media provide us a different model of relating without expectation or obligation.
This reminds me of Byung-Chul Han’s amazing essay The Burnout Society (video linked, but you should find the book too!). The Burnout Society concludes with a description of a utopian society of the tired. Han hopes for a new kind of social relationship which he calls “friendliness-as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands,” a relation that requires “the I [ego] grows smaller” (33). But for the I to get smaller requires a certain giving up of the narcissism and “I”- centeredness of our society of work and competition. Think of Morimoto’s refusal of crafting an identity. That giving up of the “I,” for Han, appears, or originates, as tiredness.
I find this passage so beautiful:
This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation [Verwandtschaft]. Human beings and things show themselves to be connected through a friendly and.
This “deep friendship” rests on a “friendly and” something that Morimoto’s work demonstrates clearly, as he feels free to say yes or no to encounters he chooses and never feels constrained by them. Equally, this idea of community predicated on “neither belonging nor relation” is radical and strikes to the heart of almost every political conception of community, left or right. What could friendly tiredness give us, as a society, if we just decided to stop working so hard?
For Morimoto, like for Luo Huazhong, existing deserves its own recognition and is its own reward. Morimoto’s refusal of exchange in its most oppressive manifestations as well as his refusal to be someone, to try to be a character defined by work and consumption, is about showing to us the ugliness of our social reality. But it also shows us that maybe through each other we can be different.
I’ve always been a quiet weightlifter–wincing if I knock the safeties too hard, trying to put the bar down quietly when I deadlift, making sure not to vocalize while I lift. Recently, I started not doing these things. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and now that I reflect on it, I think it may just speak to increasing comfort with my skills and my knowledge at the gym.
In any case, I’ve noticed that being loud is actually central to my process of lifting these days. To get the heavy lift, being quiet is going to sabotage my strength. I had to quit playing the mental game of observing myself as others saw me while I was trying to lift. I had to learn to focus, to just be in the lift and do what I had to to make it work.
Why be quiet in the first place? A fear of attracting notice, for one. For another, gyms are traditionally male spaces. I’ve had a lot of luck in my gym life to be part of an all women’s weightlifting class which has shown me that the gym belongs to us, too. (And has immeasurably built my confidence in my body.) I am now at a point in my life where if someone tried to make me feel bad in a gym, I might actually attack them. And a last reason: that making noise is something I’m not allowed to do.
Being loud or outspoken is something that gets me into trouble from time to time, as it gets lots of women into trouble. Women are supposed to be good, above all else: to embody moral and aesthetic goodness, to not be too big, to not be too loud. So being in a gym, being in my body, being vocal are all things that carry consequences, from minor to major. Being asked to leave, being asked to be quiet, subtler forms of social pressure to conform.
I realized this kind of mindset (be small, quiet, not too much) was also sabotaging my writing practice. I had internalized some version of art that was personal, quiet, and not too upsetting. Alongside this, I felt couldn’t defend my time to make art or my art-making itself. At the risk of turning my weightlifting into a metaphor (even though I really just enjoy being a meathead), it has helped me learn to take up space in my writing, to be ridiculous and loud and to try to stretch and push rather than staying scared and small. I’ve recently started a project that is firmly within genre, a kind of action-thriller type book that makes me laugh even as I write it. It has been so long since I felt I enjoyed my writing. Which meant I had been doing it all wrong.
Speaking and writing, like lifting, are bodily acts and practices that we can become better at, exercising muscles against shame, fear, and caring too much what other people think. If all of these things help you take up a little more space, then that is all they need to be worth it. Make some noise, friends. Shout your lifts. Write ridiculous things. Shout down anyone who tries to make you smaller.
Kaelie Giffel 