Maggie Nelson
And how AI will never understand what it is like to live in body...
(I will be in conversation with Maggie Nelson at Skylight Books in LA Monday March 2nd at 7pm.)
I have known Maggie Nelson for over 25 years. And I have been reading her just as long. I have a memory of reading Bluets the summer it came out and realizing my friend had reached a new place in her work. Some of the sentences stay with me.
“Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
She unpacks her loneliness, her heart break in a way that shows us the pain of it but also its generative qualities.
In her new book Pathemata, about her jaw pain and the anxious dreams that it engenders, Maggie writes from a body in pain and a mind trying to make sense of that pain.
It reminds me that while pain’s meaning is never clear. The body remains meaningful, poignant.
Her book reminds us that our incarnation, our brokenness is something AI will never understand.
And how important and even revolutionary it is to write from the body; worlds have been changed when we begin to understand what it’s like inside another’s skin.
I have been inspired and lifted up by Maggie’s work.
Thank you for the reminder that "pain’s meaning is never clear. The body remains meaningful, poignant." I'll stay with that today. I appreciate your post.