I am wonderfully excited to be posting the league’s definitions for the 3rd word in Kundera’s 63 word personal dictionary. And, please note an addition of a league member, from here out. Here is a brief recap of our project:
Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.
The 3rd word is: Betrayal.
Here are the league’s definitions, beginning with Kundera’s definition:
Milan Kundera: “But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
Aaron Shulman: While writers are known to visit betrayal after betrayal on their characters, in my experience more often than not I’m the one who gets betrayed—by my own limitations. When a new idea comes to me, be it for a novel, a short story, an essay, or anything else, during the time before I start it (if I ever do) it occupies a golden, haloed space in my mind. This space, and the potential future project which inhabits it, feels perfect, as if I’m already done, marveling at how divinely I carried out the specifications of the original starburst of inspiration. Of course, it feels this way precisely because I haven’t started it. When or if I do, I’ll inevitably watch the intuitive, pristine story-picture in my mind destroy itself in the arduous process of trying to bring it into being. The very sine qua non of writing—the words, sentences, and paragraphs—will constitute the grotesque undoing of a beautiful hunch. Betrayal, in other words, is disappointment. Lately, however, the gritty everyday work has lost some its sting for me, either because I’m getting better at bringing inspiration and implementation closer together, I’m learning how to deal with disappointment, or I no longer have to idealize so much in order to get myself to sit down and work. The deeper pleasures, it turns out, are in the unglamorous daily struggle, where the golden moments aren’t a dreamy notion but the delight at how you surprise yourself.
CAConrad: Noting a ceaseless contribution, here is a toe. Scale the sides of any heart. Give and receive the dimensions, everything breaks under the pressure to feel loved as well as . . . I don’t do similes, so finish it yourself. Noting a ceaseless collaboration, a toe is here. Pull. Down. Hills. Then pull down the mountains. Pull against all who pull forth. Forgiveness is overrated. You thought it was a stage. It was the gallows. Forgiveness is overstated. Thin envelopments constrict the strongest necks.
Hilary Plum: Know betrayal as a word that betrays itself, and thus you. Not only: to be disloyal, treacherously to reveal, secretly to consort with the enemy, but: her face betrayed her satisfaction. He lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old, betraying his anxiety. It is enough to make anyone turn to fiction—that a word that means the worst surreptitiousness, the unrevealed action, also means to reveal the presence of; be evidence of. The betrayal is what we cannot see and unwittingly are destroyed by; and what we see and are known by. I pick up a novel, knowing it to be falsehood. I pick up a pen. I hide and reveal the self; I betray myself.
Trey Seger: So far I feel rather indirect. My ego is easily distracted and overly impressed. As a writer probably I am just an ego switching strategies, hoping that people will like me for B, if not A, and C, if not B. Why I want people to like me is a truly psychological question. I remember Jack Spicer saying you write because you want people to sleep with you, but if you were truly in touch, you would write what makes people scream and run away. In general I want to abandon what I’ve written. Recently I’ve abandoned poetry to write stories. Consequently I feel a sense of betrayal. Why do we always hate the betrayer? In middle school and high school we all practiced our mutual hatred of each other when X dumped Y. How could X do that? That heartless X, always looking for something better. “There were others; their bodies were a preparation.” Now that I’m writing stories I feel more comfortable, less nervous. Nervous like Ali. But also I feel a sense of shame, like I’ve betrayed an identity, however manufactured it was. I spend most of my time trying to fix things that exist, e.g. a sentence, or a person. Some people live by “First thought, best thought.” For me it’s “First thought, worst thought.” The sentences don’t get better, they get different. Same with people. And everything else. Betrayal is just a way for us to countenance our anger when the things we want to prevent from changing go on becoming what they are.
Kristen Gleason: At first, the ice supports the game. Two can toss silver. Silver pools on the frozen lake, which is silver itself. Or white, you say, or blue. Here’s to an equal number of tosses! The twinned heap! Should there be a secret toss, a toss receding, a toss over your shoulder – a toss to be last or best – the game has turned into: My bus popped, and you were not on it. You would not say “bobledress,” and the babies went cold in their thin, southern jackets.
Ronnie Scott: I recently wrote an essay for a website that included the following sentence: “In 2007, post-Cronulla race riots, the organisers [of a music festival] discouraged the practice of punters caping themselves in the Australian flag”. And this is how it was published: “During the 2007 post-Cronulla race riots the organizers discouraged the practice of punters capping themselves in the Australian flag”. And then, somebody tweeted the article, saying: “well written; great irony: THere is hope for GenY writers”. And way earlier in history than this, somebody leaked the demo version of “Ironic” to the internet, revealing that the line “It’s a black fly in your chardonnay” was originally “It’s like ice cream on a freezing day.” Alanis sings the old line rather well.
Caren Beilin: Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, describes the process of falling in love as that of someone having entering their poetry into your soul—and it is forever there. Betrayal is to enter this poetry into a lover’s soul, and then, in the light of day and along the chain of time, switch to prose and then, reportage.
