Leslie Jamison - Make It Scream, Make It Burn

 

“The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universe, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it - through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving" aren't the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms - the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.”

“Every paradise is made possible by blindness.”

“For years I'd been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining.”

“Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness.”

“Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.”

“It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.”

“In the Whole Wide World Museum, Grover visits "The Things You See in the Sky Room", and the room full of "Long Thin Things You Can Write With", where a carrot has mistakingly wound up, so he returns it to an elegant marble pedestal in the middle of the otherwise empty "Carrot Room". As Grover reaches the end of the exhibit, he wonders: "Where did they put everything else?" That's when he reaches the wooden door marked: "Everything Else". When he opens it, of course, it's just the exit.”

“One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines. We trade in the scripts we've written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.”

“You feel the lift of wine in you, you feel the lift of wine in everyone, and you’re all in agreement—not to believe in love, but to want to. This, you can do.”

“Once you become obsessed with documenting, it can seem impossible to stop. No ending feels honest or defensible. What does it mean to make art from other people’s lives? What distinguishes exploitation from witnessing, and when is that witnessing complete? Is it ever? It’s the problem of Borges’s imagined map: In order to show every detail of the world, a map would have to be as large as the world itself. It would have no edges. It would never be done.”