against narrative | Internet Princess 

Our sense of beauty is what allows us to cope with events that would otherwise be debilitating. And beauty, writes Becca Rothfeld, is a lot like a story. “That’s what a story is: a false promise of fulfillment that we know to be false and yet swallow wholesale time and time again, not because it’s plausible but because it’s irresistible. But when a story ends and presumes to gratify us in precisely the manner we claimed to want, it disappoints us in being over, which awakens a whole new appetite… in this respect, stories are like beauties, which promise without making good on what they pledge, which also interest us for precisely as long as they evade and oppress us.” This is the paradox of narrative: it is both existentially necessary and necessarily insufficient. We can’t escape the story (to think that we can is, in the end, another kind of story), but the story is also never enough.

It can be tantalizingly easy in hindsight to let a complex relationship slip into a series of algorithmic calculations: I did this because of my father, he reacted like this because of his mother, he couldn’t get hard because he couldn’t see you as a sex object once he saw you as a person, that’s also because of his mother, and you can’t take responsibility for yourself because your parents never cleaned when you were little and now you need someone else to manage all your messes. Okay, that’s a good story. It’s compelling. It’s so clean and neat and tidy that it might make you forget how dirty and messy and maddening it all actually was. But what about how it feels? Did it hurt? What about how it hurt?

• What a fucking closing:

  From Maggie Nelson: “Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened.* This may have served some purpose for you**, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood.** I wrote it because I had something to say to you.**”*

  What Nelson offers here is the idea that interpretation can be a kind of forced objectification: to engage in the romance of assigning meaning can deny humanity, autonomy, a deeper and more complicated truth. I think of Nelson’s letter when I feel the impulse to close my past experiences up and hold them like an object, finite and bounded next to my chest, representing something, teaching me something, a story to tell rather than an ongoing force that meant something and means something far beyond the words we have to describe it. I never wanted our relationship to be a talisman, or a lesson, or a souvenir from the past imbued with historical meaning. I didn’t love him so that I could hold anything in my hand at the end of it. I loved him because I had something to say.

  I’ve written much here about what it felt like to love David. I could write much more. The cruelty of this project, of course, is that I’m setting out to do exactly what I aim to condemn: I am trying to describe the indescribable, to turn something sacred into something consumable and finite. So I will try to stop telling the story, for that reason and also because I find it hard to convince myself that any of it would matter — if it would really mean anything to you to hear about the morning sun in his irises, the cold showers in the heatwave, the mud, the vomit, the sex, the dinners, the dirty dishes made clean and then dirty again. It was better than all of this, and worse than this too, and the problem with telling a story about love is that the harder you try to tell it accurately the further away you get from anything that feels true.

  I don’t know, in fact, if anything I wrote here — about my life, about David, about how I felt about any of it — is accurate in the strict or technical sense. But this is how I tell it to myself. I have to, I think.