Paraclete

I'm reading Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey, and I came across this word in the title, paraclete, and it means (in Christian theology) the Holy Spirit as advocate or counselor (John 14:16, 26). Wow, a new word. 

Most of the time I read difficult stuff, but I can really flow over the words here without knowing I'm not skimming. I haven't enjoyed reading a book so much in quite a while. 

I have a struggle with the second part where she's in the relationship with a dominating and controlling man, but actually it's not very long and she's back in her intimate loss mode, writing about loss in the age of Covid. 

My one question is, if you break up with someone, does that entitle you to paint them negatively for a whole novel? Why not leave him sooner? Actually he left her, she didn't even leave him, so horrible, she spends a whole novel painting him as a subtle monster. Maybe she's just talking about the dynamic of growing up with an angry father, who mostly got better, and a cultivated angry man who meditated. It's OK to make the bad choices you make, and there's no hiding in the novel/memoir. She's telling on herself, and you can decide how much you blame her, and how much pity you give her, or do you just observe without judgement? Appreciate the articulation of her experience. 

She has an eating disorder, but doesn't get hospitalized for anorexia, rides the line. 

I do enjoy the literary readings to help her shed light on her dynamics. Seneca, Proust, others. 

She arrives at ambulance situations alarmingly often, though always quite ambiguous. One time she's flummoxed by a pool of seeming blood, but another person calls 911. Another time the operator doesn't want to dispatch an ambulance because the person was unconscious and hadn't asked for help. 

Links:

Guardian review: The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention.

She mentions the temple of Zeus. One in Athens, one in Olympia. She is in Athens, so it's that one.

Hildegard von Bingen from one of my blogs.

I've listened to Bach's KANTATEN (choral music) in 2025 album by Vox Luminis on Spotify. I feel like the beauty of the music compliments the beauty of her journey. 

A blog post.

Quotes from Mobius Book:

Here is a quote that got me into reading this book:

"Marie opens her cupboard where a cluster of teacups huddle on a shelf too small to contain them. She picks the light blue one, the one she’s partial to, crude and mass produced, saved from a stoop in a rich person’s neighborhood, one of those piles of abandoned objects that couldn’t live up to the lives of their owners. Almost everything in Marie’s apartment has been defined by such rejection.

Marie’s setting a kettle to boil when Edie reaches for a cup and knocks it to the floor and into pieces. Doesn’t matter, Marie says from the kitchen, not even checking to see what broke. But Edie is already rummaging in the junk drawer for the superglue she left when she helped Marie move into this place on an awful, late-summer day.

Broken things matter, Edie says, and Marie can’t help but blurt back, You don’t have to get philosophical about everything that happens to you. Not everything’s a sign—"

I like that, of course everything is a sign but when you're grieving the loss of a big relationship, you can't always be digging and grinding out meaning.

Here is a quote, which I think is a kind of universal issue for spiritual people, no matter what denomination you follow:

"She stayed up late at night trying to pray, trying to address, in the divine gaze of God, her fear that human-on-human love was really the root of all suffering, all malaise, all bad music, all good music, all addiction, all psychological problems, all joy, all art, all laughter, all sorrow, all ecstasy, most pregnancies and therefore most human beings from the best to the worst, and therefore all global warming, all disaster, all war, all science, all art, all waste, all of us and all of it, and wasn’t it true that the only way out, the only way to soberly and respectably pass your life, wasn’t the only honest option to devote yourself entirely to God and nothing else, to never align yourself with something so base as another person, to avoid the distraction of heartbreak and longing and mixed feelings, to avoid romantic entanglements altogether? Or was refusing God’s (perfect, but twisted, but perfect) creation a kind of sacrilege on its own?"

Here is a quote about why she wants to write more autobiography than fiction:

"...nearly every time I’ve written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, has been expressed in the fiction, without my awareness. What I think I’m doing when I write a novel and what I later realize I’ve done is so out of sync that I’ve felt repeatedly shocked and sometimes embarrassed at how I’ve tricked myself once again."

Also:

"I spent hours peeling every handwritten label off every jar I could find in the house, as it suddenly seemed very important that I leave no trace of having ever been there, and therefore no evidence of my absence. (Later, my friend Brenda laughed at this mad ritual, like the wartime practice of removing street signs to confuse the enemy.)"

I like her questioning, very Job like:

All the pastors said you had to have faith, that it was always a matter of faith—faith that Jesus was in my heart, faith that I deserved grace, faith that I was on the right path—but how could I be sure I was truly perceiving my faith and not my hubris that I had faith? Did you have to have faith in your faith? And where would such faith-buttressed-faith come from, and did you have to pray for that, too, and anyway how could you even be sure you had prayed to the Real God and not some False God that grew like mold in your human mind? How could you be so certain your prayers had reached God and not been intercepted by the Devil? How did you know the Devil wasn’t the one answering your prayers, parroting the voice of the Lord?

And,

Manhattan is and has always been the best place I’ve known to cry in plain sight, so I did a good deal of that, too. Much has been written on the subject of crying in Manhattan, as writers tend to cry in public, and writers tend to congregate in New York City, and anyway, you could make the argument that half if not all published writing is a form of crying in public.