metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2014-03-19 03:15 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2014-03-19 03:15 pm
your heart, dispossessed
THE TWENTY-YEAR-OLD AT THE SKETCHY CORNER PHONE REPAIR PLACE FIXED MY PHONE.
Yay!
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I've been thinking about Allison's iconic line from The Breakfast Club:
One of the biggest parts of growing up, for me, has been slowly trying to grind it into my head that the world doesn't give a single solitary shit about my heart. The world cares about my hands. And what I do with them. That's the only thing that makes a difference to the world. My heart can contain oceans of feeling and it makes not a single difference to anyone outside my head unless I do the hard grinding work of doing something about it.
And I don't know about you, but my heart is kind of stupid? I find that if I care too much, it actually makes it harder to get up and do things. Also, I'm lazy. My heart wants to daydream. My heart wants things to just work out. My heart wants the Junebug to love it when I hug and kiss him as much as I love it; my heart doesn't want to do the hard work of figuring out how he likes to get attention and affection and express it that way instead. My heart doesn't want to do annoying repetitive research and organization at work, that over weeks and months and years accumulates into experience and understanding. The other day the Junebug was crying that he didn't WANT to do something and I told him I understood, I was going to do things I didn't want to do every single minute of the whole day. I tell my heart to shut up a lot. I tell it that I don't have to like the things I do, I just have to do them.
Do that for a few decades and yeah. Maybe your heart dies.
Because I think, all respect to Ms. Bujold, but I think Miles was wrong. I think that I am in fact buying my heart's desire with my heart. I spend all day ignoring my desires and doing things I don't want to do so that I can have the life I want - not, like, at some mythical point in the future, but right now - and that doesn't make any sense at all BUT IT'S TRUE. Moment to moment, my life is really annoying. On the occasion I get to take a step back and a deep breath, I love it. How - why - what?
--------------------
As part of the stupid week of stupidity I had fifteen minutes to kill in a bookstore and I accidentally bought a book we already own, because it was that kind of week. Having bought it, though, I went ahead and reread it. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin, classic of the genre obviously. Really good book. But, two things I noticed, which I did not notice the previous time I had read it:
1) Though it's not explicitly about gender in the same way as The Left Hand of Darkness, or anything, there's a lot of gender in it. But just like Left Hand and its male pronouns, you can see the bits where LeGuin was explicitly thinking about gender, and you can also see where the patriarchy sneaks in around the corners. If you tell me that in your utopian society sex is totally egalitarian and free of weird fucked up power or ownership themes, but you show me that your sweet sympathetic hero tries to rape a woman the first time he gets drunk and never gives the slightest thought afterwards to how she might be feeling or tries to apologize or wonders about his actions or anything, you have depicted a different society that I think you meant to depict; one much more like our own.
2) Deliberately depicted, though, was the way that gender ties into the book's huge theme that survival depends on cooperation. LeGuin hammers it home that Shevek could not do his work without colleagues, people to bounce ideas off of, people to support him, people even to try to tear him down. He couldn't find them on Anarres so he had to go to Urras. And she also makes it very clear that a female physicist could not have found what Shevek found on Urras. A female physicist could not have developed the ansible because she might have been as bright and as motivated but she would have been stopped by the hard limits of what one person can do all alone.
Yay!
------------
I've been thinking about Allison's iconic line from The Breakfast Club:
When you grow up, your heart dies.I mean. There's some truth to it, isn't there?
One of the biggest parts of growing up, for me, has been slowly trying to grind it into my head that the world doesn't give a single solitary shit about my heart. The world cares about my hands. And what I do with them. That's the only thing that makes a difference to the world. My heart can contain oceans of feeling and it makes not a single difference to anyone outside my head unless I do the hard grinding work of doing something about it.
And I don't know about you, but my heart is kind of stupid? I find that if I care too much, it actually makes it harder to get up and do things. Also, I'm lazy. My heart wants to daydream. My heart wants things to just work out. My heart wants the Junebug to love it when I hug and kiss him as much as I love it; my heart doesn't want to do the hard work of figuring out how he likes to get attention and affection and express it that way instead. My heart doesn't want to do annoying repetitive research and organization at work, that over weeks and months and years accumulates into experience and understanding. The other day the Junebug was crying that he didn't WANT to do something and I told him I understood, I was going to do things I didn't want to do every single minute of the whole day. I tell my heart to shut up a lot. I tell it that I don't have to like the things I do, I just have to do them.
Do that for a few decades and yeah. Maybe your heart dies.
Because I think, all respect to Ms. Bujold, but I think Miles was wrong. I think that I am in fact buying my heart's desire with my heart. I spend all day ignoring my desires and doing things I don't want to do so that I can have the life I want - not, like, at some mythical point in the future, but right now - and that doesn't make any sense at all BUT IT'S TRUE. Moment to moment, my life is really annoying. On the occasion I get to take a step back and a deep breath, I love it. How - why - what?
--------------------
As part of the stupid week of stupidity I had fifteen minutes to kill in a bookstore and I accidentally bought a book we already own, because it was that kind of week. Having bought it, though, I went ahead and reread it. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin, classic of the genre obviously. Really good book. But, two things I noticed, which I did not notice the previous time I had read it:
1) Though it's not explicitly about gender in the same way as The Left Hand of Darkness, or anything, there's a lot of gender in it. But just like Left Hand and its male pronouns, you can see the bits where LeGuin was explicitly thinking about gender, and you can also see where the patriarchy sneaks in around the corners. If you tell me that in your utopian society sex is totally egalitarian and free of weird fucked up power or ownership themes, but you show me that your sweet sympathetic hero tries to rape a woman the first time he gets drunk and never gives the slightest thought afterwards to how she might be feeling or tries to apologize or wonders about his actions or anything, you have depicted a different society that I think you meant to depict; one much more like our own.
2) Deliberately depicted, though, was the way that gender ties into the book's huge theme that survival depends on cooperation. LeGuin hammers it home that Shevek could not do his work without colleagues, people to bounce ideas off of, people to support him, people even to try to tear him down. He couldn't find them on Anarres so he had to go to Urras. And she also makes it very clear that a female physicist could not have found what Shevek found on Urras. A female physicist could not have developed the ansible because she might have been as bright and as motivated but she would have been stopped by the hard limits of what one person can do all alone.
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