She agrees but then deflects: what about if men just want to be acknowledged, or are insecure, or are following animal instinct? What are the alternative possibilities, the other ways of looking? And there it is: Gaitskill’s determination to explore, to strive to understand not just her own mind, but — without judgment — the minds of other people.
A. R. Ammons is famous for saying, “touch the universe anywhere, you touch it / everywhere,” and Bialosky’s Asylum is an embodiment of this belief. The various meanings of asylum that move through the book refuse to cancel each other out. Where one poem might touch an existential terror, another offers compassionate refuge. As we see from the poems quoted above, this happens not only across poems but also within single poems. Asylum’s searching cosmos suggests that living with these paradoxes about safety and danger and continuing to believe — in love, in language, in nature — is the only way to be fully human — feeling, accountable, caring, brave.
As David Michaelis makes clear in “Eleanor” — an excellent single-volume biography of America’s greatest first lady — modest rebellion best encapsulated her paradoxical personality anchored in Victorian morality and cutting-edge feminist bravery. With her toothy smile and genial radiance, utterly void of pretense, Eleanor epitomized grace under pressure, folksy common sense, loyalty to friends and a bedrock belief in American democratic virtues. Her lifelong bully pulpit mission was preserving individual liberty against the European totalitarian model of empowering the state at the citizen’s expense. Although rather shy and polite, she nevertheless became an outstanding orator with an irrefutable fan base. “I have faith in you,” she reassured the American people after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “I feel as though I was standing upon a rock, and that rock is my faith in my fellow citizens. Whatever is asked of us, I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.”
What’s most fascinating is the dynamic of members of a psychotherapy group determined to strip themselves bare in front of an audience, and every time we’re pulled back to Tate’s search for a partner, we miss that other setting: a strange, foreign land, even for people who have spent years in more traditional therapy. According to Dr. Rosen, group-therapy dynamics are all about individuation, but “Group” may be most compelling when Tate focuses on collaboration.
It’s an old word, fading now.
Dearly did I wish.
Dearly did I long for.
I loved him dearly.