The Doubling of Self: An Interview with Richard Siken by Peter Mishler
[text ID: My father died while I was writing this book, but the book isn’t about him. There’s a condescending tone I hear when people say “Writing is so therapeutic! How wonderful that you could take your pain and make something out of it!” But writing isn’t therapy. Painting isn’t therapy. Music isn’t therapy. Living well is therapy. We’ve taken the arts out of living, and now we only leak them back when people tell us we’re sick. It’s almost impossible to convince anyone that you can make something when you’re healthy, or just because you want to./end ID]
My Own Private Idaho (1991) // I Had a Dream About You by Richard Siken
[text ID: You were lying in the middle of the empty highway. The sky was red and the sand was red and you were wearing a brown coat. There were flecks of foam in the corners of your mouth. / The birds were watching you. Your eyes were closed and you were listening to the road and I could hear your breathing, I could hear your heart beating. I carried you to the car and drove you home but you weren’t making any sense. /end ID]
[text ID: 2. I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something, that he didn’t love me / 4. I want to tell you this story without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something, but he chased after me and threw me into the gravel. /end ID]
[text ID: You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to God. You can, but it does no good. Every spy knows this. Some say God is where we put our sorrow. God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first? /end ID]
[text ID: You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours. /end ID]
[text ID: I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me. /end ID]
[text ID: you realize the one person in the world who loves you isn’t the one you thought it would be, and you don’t trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy /end ID]
[text ID: Oh, the body, its hungers, needs, and limitations. You look at somebody and you realize that they’re in there, inside there, somewhere, and how will you ever reach them, understand them? /end ID]
[text ID: So, you kiss him, and he doesn’t move, he doesn’t pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn’t moved, he’s frozen, and you’ve kissed him, and he’ll never forgive you, and maybe now he’ll leave you alone. /end ID]
[text ID:
People love to hate themselves, avoiding the necessary recalibrations. Shame comes from vanity. Shame means you’re guilty, like the rest of us, but you think you’re better than we are. /end ID]
[text ID: Love, love, go ahead and have another plate of it, it doesn’t run out. Of course, I wonder if they love me back, which is, really, besides the point. /end ID]
[text ID: There’s a part in the movie where you can see right through the acting, where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears, right before I burst into tears /end ID]
[text ID: Sure,
we go to the bar to drink, and we drink to get drunk, but peel back that layer
and there’s yet another: we get drunk to leak a little truth. We get drunk so
we can say things, often things we’ll want to be able to deny later. end ID]
