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A review by meyrathedreamer
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
5.0
“When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?”
*
“I could see a particularly bright star that I then saw as a satellite but ultimately I knew it was a plane.”
*
“To embrace the tragic interchangeability of nouns and smile inscrutably or to find a way of touching down, albeit momentarily, and be made visible by swirling condensation and debris and to know that one pole of experience is always caught up in the other but to know this finally in your body, cone of heat unfurling. To take everything personally until your personality dissolves and you can move without transition from apartment to protest or distribute yourself among a shifting configuration of bodies, saying yes to everything, affirming nothing, your own body “giving up / Its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.”
*
“The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self–abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.”
this protagonist is simultaneously the most insufferable ass and the most relatable man; does that make me the most insufferable ass too?
*
“I could see a particularly bright star that I then saw as a satellite but ultimately I knew it was a plane.”
*
“To embrace the tragic interchangeability of nouns and smile inscrutably or to find a way of touching down, albeit momentarily, and be made visible by swirling condensation and debris and to know that one pole of experience is always caught up in the other but to know this finally in your body, cone of heat unfurling. To take everything personally until your personality dissolves and you can move without transition from apartment to protest or distribute yourself among a shifting configuration of bodies, saying yes to everything, affirming nothing, your own body “giving up / Its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.”
*
“The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self–abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.”
this protagonist is simultaneously the most insufferable ass and the most relatable man; does that make me the most insufferable ass too?