From my journal for Saturday, September 17
Reading Krista Tippett writing about taking a break this last summer, giving herself time to think, feel, and write — she says that writing with hand and pen puts you more in touch with deeper parts of yourself. Also in At the Root of this Longing, Carol Lee Flinders explores the question of enclosure and how, when it’s freely chosen, it can help a woman go through a growth cycle. And also The Daily Good led to a description of a book called Bittersweet, which suggested another set of complex emotional experiences. I read about them and feel frustrated, they are talking about something I’ve never experienced, something I can’t understand. This may be part of my low thyroid diminution of my intellectual function, or it may be how I lived my life, suppressing my intuition, trusting only my intellect. But no, I remember as a teenager, galloping up the third hill over, the music of Brazil in my mind and some sense of emotional complexity I couldn’t name.
Too much. On the Marginalian about Bittersweet was a YouTube version of Nina Simone singing Suzanne which sent me on to find Suzanne by Judy Collins — the first version I learned — and could barely listen to today because it was so painful. Then there was someone talking about the complexity of the song both musically and poetically. First she describes the music — all three verses different, then her interpretation, then what she learned from Leonard Cohen’s own words and from Suzanne herself. Fascinating, many layered, nuanced, I can feel in my body the sense of bitter and sweet, longing and grief…
The woman who talks about Suzanne is Tamsin Jones.
I see this is what I’ve been longing for. This complexity — emotional, spiritual, physical. What does she say? “the liminal space between the spiritual, the physiological, and the psychological.”
This is Maria Popova in the Marginalian, where she talks about Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet: “It is an act of quiet courage for Cain to reckon with these questions in a culture that so readily cosigns the verdict on matters of complexity with a bellicose X illiterate of nuance. For these are indeed complex, nuanced matters beyond easy binaries, murky even as a spectrum — where do the fertile blues of melancholy end and the deadening black of depression begin? The bittersweet — this enchanted loom of longing on which we weave the tapestry of meaning — exits in the liminal space between the spiritual, the physiological, and the psychological. It is an orientation of the soul laced with neurochemistry and chance.”