I have been obsessing over my own hatefulness.
Maybe that wasn’t clear when I wrote last week’s piece on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work as an alternative to the “hate read,” but I am not one of those writers who can set aside her own experiences to write something that transcends the personal or mundane, however dumb or superficial or insular the personal or mundane may be. I have to write from, I have to write through. I write to live, which sounds cliché coming from me, but have you ever listened to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore say these words? Have you ever read Sycamore writing about how we all need to be writing together, how we need to be writing to remember, or else to challenge memory, how we write because “language searches for more language?” That’s just what it does?
Sycamore: I’m writing to figure out the rhythm, can you hear that? Can you hear that beat? It’s language. Maybe I’m writing about dry skin, intestinal pain, desire that doesn’t quite feel like desire, a craving, seasonal affective disorder, the disaster of everyday alienation. Maybe I’m writing about loss. Maybe I’m writing so I don’t feel so much loss. Maybe I’m writing so I don’t feel so lost.
I have nothing but a loss of language for the levels of hatefulness I felt in April, so I’ve been searching for more words, searching for others’ words, the way Lily and Madeleine call April “the devil we know,” in their eponymous song. Here it comes again, they say in their opening lyrics—“April, I can hear your anger marching” —but in the next line they promise the flowers “will forgive your rage,” and that’s where, last month, it lost me. I haven’t wanted to forgive. I haven’t wanted anything to be revived except an intensity of rage, so pure it almost feels like boredom, the way you feel when you get a dumb text message from your mother who can’t bear to apologize to you but wants to make amends by forcing your dying grandma’s weird china on you before it goes to the dump. “Let your hate drive you forward,” one tarot reader told me years ago when I drew the Chariot as an answer for “what to do” about my endless sense of professional disappointment, and ever since, I’ve waffled between wondering if I should follow her advice and despising her for putting it into my brain in the first place.
Hatefulness is an affect defined by what it misses, though—it’s one of those feelings that squanders life, rendering everything in dumb and dump. You forget why you wanted to be a writer; you become fixated on how most everyone on Substack harps on the same shit over and over again, however artfully. You become so entangled in the critique of all parenting methods you forget to hold your child in love; you stumble over the storybooks you used to enjoy reading him at night. You become tied to visions of apocalypse and genocide as inevitable, life as pain, you weep over the grocery prices in Food Lion, but only because some essentialist somatic coach you learned from for a little while once mentioned that women’s anger gets expressed most often as tears, and the commodified pithiness of “experts” has been known to jerry-rig your emotional circuitry. You’re wiping at your snotting nose with your cracked phone screen because, in your hate, you can’t really think of anything better to do with this cold piece of intrusion you carry around with you like its a cup, something that could fill you up.
The astrologers you follow talk about the eclipses of April as exercises in selfish hungers and the Mars-Saturn conjunction as a roiling boil. They use too many gerunds on Mercury retrograde. You wish they’d learn to say something more precise, leave out the bad poetics in their pursuit of clairvoyance. The writers chase after Annie Dillard in their concepts of totality: “I should have known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away.” In a different month, you’d join in the eclipse decadence, too. In a different month, you wouldn’t be rolling your eyes at the chase, you wouldn’t be secretly grateful for Taylor Swift discourse to roll back around, because then, at least, the sense of everything beautiful being wasted on something dumb … is actually that rather than a delusion that your own bad mood has set up for you.
I could saddle you with the whys of the bad mood, but I bet you know them well enough yourself: not enough money or fulfilling work, too little kindness from others, near and far, health shocks, hypochondria, the unrelenting violence of the world. But “he knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, wasted time, who he was and where he was,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes of her protagonist’s emergence from a protracted period of hatefulness in A Wizard of Earthsea, and this, at long last, is a line I can claim as my own this week, as what I’ve missed comes into focus, comes back to me again with the first blooms of the irises, the robins born in the dead cedar wreath we never took down after Christmas, the relief of reading my friends’ good writing that reach into me and rip out something bad.
In Earthsea, the shift happens for Ged, the protagonist, after a friend bestows upon him a rare generosity in a moment where he deserves, quite literally, nothing but the ramifications of his own self-destruction. For me, the shift has not been quite so singular as it has been a resignation to the duty of addressing my particular delusions, which, for me, so often stem from the hard-bitten belief that I am the only person in all the world who must suffer so! Sedgwick’s ethics of repair has helped, as has reading Le Guin, a writer I’m ashamed to say I stayed away from for too long, suspicious and hateful as I was of how oft she was championed in Instagram graphics online.
It’s a hard thing, owning up to one’s mistakes and bad behaviors, especially when those missteps of emotion and action arise from true hardship. But I’ve never found a better cure for hate and delusion than to name them for what they are—the gifts of truth and language, gifts that, in the words of Le Guin, once received, encourage us to stand “still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it.”
May offers a sense of home, whatever that means to you. The tarot cards of the month are the reversed Page of Swords and the Knight of Pentacles, reaffirming this essay’s move away from windswept, overaffective disgust and into a steadier mode of being. In the last six months of reading cards for people, I’ve kind of stopped thinking of pentacles as the suit of money. No one has any of that stuff anyway, and whenever the coins cards of the tarot show up, it’s usually more about the need to find resources through common ground, basic decency, and a little bit of whimsical ritual thrown in for the thrill of faith, too. The Knight of Pentacles is one slow dude; I’ve always kind of hated him, being committed to whirlwinds myself, but I see the necessity for his good and quiet measure in May.
Wishing you peace, truth, and belonging, this month, and the words to describe such things to yourself and others, too.
Below are bibliomantic tarotscopes for May, using Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, a book I’ve wept over recently for its immeasurable portrayal of shadows and friendship, and friendship in spite of shadows. The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Earthsea quote. Read for your rising sign, though some of you have mentioned getting a lot out of reading all of the scopes as insight into each house of your natal chart that is ruled by that zodiacal sign.
Taurus Rising: “Often as he worked he sang softly. Ged, still weary, listened, and as he grew sleepy, he thought himself a child in the witch’s hut in Ten Alders village, on a snowy night in the firelit dark, the air heavy with herb-scent and smoke, and his mind all adrift on dreams as he listened to the long soft singing of spells and deeds of heroes who fought against dark powers and won, or lost, on distant islands long ago” (153). There’s a sense of community in the face of militarized enemies for you this month, and there’s an important role for you to play as a leader in this fight. Weariness abounds, but so do the good food and shelter of people who really love and admire you. May 7 offers new beginnings in terms of self-perception and shapeshifting identities.