grit - Lockwood

Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood. 

"The soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean." 

"To be right is to do what our bodies know how to do anyway, and not ask why."

Lockwood's last book was about an infant's death and I will never hear/see the term "birth defect" the same way ever, she broke my brain of it, and somehow the book was also funny. 

This new book picks up where that one left off, and is about long covid and losing your mind completely to a fever that never ends. And I keep laughing out loud.

To teach humor in a context of life-changing Disease and imminent Death, you gotta find the voices that can do it. 

I felt AFTERNOONY for a brief min. The day shot that right in the face. Glad I got a little reading done first 💔 

survival skill: humor

"To err is human, but to persist in error is diabolical." 

Lockwood's most recent work is challenging. A woman trying to piece her sanity back together REALLY as she performs it AS IF. Why would she do that? Because if you've misplaced your mind (not "lost", it's right there), you know nothing kindly stops for you.

Nothing kindly stops for you, period.

Except maybe Pam.

The premise of the last book, and of the work we did with it for students with the scholar-parent who lost a child the same way, was simple:  Life is worthwhile if you are "just" an object of unconditional love. (Why is life not worthwhile if all you are is an object of unconditional human love? I must protest.) 

I have other material in this category, like Expecting Adam, in which an academic chooses to carry a pregnancy to term with a down syndrome child. So much hate such decisions bring, strangers furious at the imperfection of a human infant. And the academics are the worst. The "smart" people. The folks who are doctors who teach folks who are gonna be doctors and nurses cannot fathom a human life worth anything at all if it will not eventuate primarily in skilled productivity.

The baby will probably never learn math, says the doctor. Lockwood, thinking of Oppenheimer and balling her fist, "say it again, so help me"

Curating this material, it is not difficult to get students to step back from "defective" as a good reason not to exist. They're not nazis, despite everyone calling everyone else that now. And they take another step back when they're reminded that they wouldn't have met me if they had not failed somehow 😀 Step back and back and back, then walk forward again and tell me who does and does not deserve unconditional love (?). 

To Err is Human. We premiered it in the Kav with overflow rooms for the whole SON. The hardest thing: apologizing. Being wrong ever for some people is agony.