Perhaps of Interest Volume 4
Being seen, Ursula K. Le Guin, and more...
A couple of days ago, I posted on Instagram that I felt seen because a bunch of people sent me a meme that reads, “A haunted house but it’s filled with guys asking where their hug is at.” I am not a hugger — though I have come around to some degree on hugging people I actually know — and I thought it was funny and affirming that multiple people thought of me when they came across that meme.
But there’s another part of being seen that makes me squirm. I have never been great at maintaining an awareness of my physical body. I tend to live so entirely in my head that I forget to breathe. I’ll sit in weird and uncomfortable positions for long periods of time because I’ve been so deep in thought that I didn’t realize my hips were screaming at me. There are times that I’ll look in the rearview mirror and realize that’s the first mirror I’d looked in all day.
Because of this, it is not uncommon for me to go out into the world without thinking about my physical self until I have a zap of realization, to my horror, that I can be perceived1. Sometimes I wish that I could be a floating brain — that my words and ideas could make their way to other people without me — rather than having to reckon with my self. It’s part of the reason I have been content to write without recognition, in other peoples’ names, for most of my career.
So I loved what Austin Kleon pulled from this excellent Erykah Badu interview in The Cut.
“My biggest fear is the same as my biggest hope,” she confides. “That I am seen.”
She nailed the thing I find most appealing and most terrifying about being a person and a writer in fewer than 15 words. I highly recommend reading the entire interview, and I also recommend subscribing to Austin Kleon’s Substack. I always find something that seems hand picked for me in his blogs and newsletters, and I bet you’ll find stuff for you as well.
Also perhaps of interest:
I watched The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin the other night. It was fascinating, and it also featured a ton of beautiful animation illustrating Le Guin’s stories. There is also footage of her actually saying the quote I’ve seen floating around Instagram of late, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
I love Le Guin’s writing, and I admire so much the way that she was able to learn and pivot throughout her life. Arwen Curry, the director and producer of the documentary, recently released a series of six shorts about Le Guin called The Journey That Matters that I am looking forward to watching as well.
There are a bunch of great articles on LitHub if you would like to dive down an Ursula K. Le Guin rabbit hole.
I spent my Yom Kippur fasting and reading Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentence and Repair from cover to cover. I had an idea of what to expect because I was sort of familiar with Jewish teachings on repentence, and I’ve read shorter versions of Rabbi Ruttenberg’s writing on the topic, but I was especially interested in her thorough explanation of why she believes Americans and our institutions are so bad at apologies. It is a book I think every single person should read, but since I don’t think that’s likely to happen, I’m glad that some of the broader strokes are available in this Twitter thread.
I have returned to an interactive piece in the New York Times called To Fall In Love With the World at least three times since it first came out. It combines the poetry of Brian Turner with the photography of Mary Manning. I love the way it makes my heart feel…the way it weaves together a profound love for the world with deeply held grief.
This piece in Defector helped me name this phenomenon. I remember sending it to many, many of my friends at the time.