REALNESS
- “'To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis'” (17) (Jacques Lacan)
- "D.W. Winnicott’s notion of ‘feeling real’ is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, ‘the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing,’ which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live” (17)
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
- “I was a cloud stuck inside a person I didn’t choose to be” (60).
- “My body wasn’t real so the cold didn’t matter much. The skinny, breast-budding, miniskirted pale thing was just a container” (57).
- “I was hollow, a porcelain casting of a person, filled with liquid light. The cast shattered. There was no container” (58).
- “After that I became addicted to the splitting feeling. It hurt a little, and I knew that when it hurt my body cracked and I wasn’t me anymore” (58).
- “It occurred to me that if never been real. I recalled being a child and the memories felt as if they’d been implanted, pictures downloaded into a manufactured brain” (61).
- A Year Without A Name, Cyrus Grace Dunham
- “It’s tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family was a sham. That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum. Yet we really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms” (17).
- “A suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father's stock in trade” (65).
- Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
“'How can I tell you this?… That this stub of … pencil that moves across the page of paper is not real, either, and that the truth lies on the other side of even these words'” (Native Country of the Heart 214) (—Four Souls, LOUISE ERDRICH)
“When what is real is never fully public, it ceases in effect to be real. I thought it was a problem with narrative, with story, with word choice, but suddenly I saw it as a breakdown in ontology. In being and its meaning. The language used to describe reality defines and determines that reality, more than I ever knew. Beneath my feet the meaning of our relationship shifted, and my ability to know my own identity” (My Autobiography of Carson McCullers 87) -carson
“Slid away with it. If this wasn’t love, what was it? Who was I? And why couldn’t I speak up for it, call it by name?” (88) -carson
“Because if we couldn’t name it to ourselves, what would we have said?” (88) -carson
“It makes me think that there will never be a time when women or lesbians are real—when we call them by name, use the right words to recognize them/ourselves. It’s analogous to the concept of coming out, for the oft-cited reason that you never stop coming out as a queer person; every time you meet someone you must find a way to broach the topic or risk closeting yourself” (144). -carson
“My own chronic illness connects to fear, the feeling of not being real that accompanies queer womanhood. I don’t always remember or believe my illness is real, because there is no reflection of it outside myself, my own feelings. As a ‘fashionable illness,’ it is a subject of ridicule (like Carson’s ‘obsessions’ with women) or something that others fail or refuse to acknowledge (like lesbian invisibility)” (199). -carson
@keynote image, kai meyer
