Pamela Nassar Altabcharani’s Reviews > The Lonely Letters > Status Update

"What intrigues me about all these folks is their desire for a vertical relationship with god over and against all other kinds of relationships, how there is a sorta necessity to renounce sociality, how there is a retreat, how there is a movement away from noise. Such an individual [monks], a self, a subject would would be rational, would be higher, than the base emotions, than the flesh. There was an assumption, a moving out from the flesh, a renunciation of the body, to produce this vertical relation." p. 23

"No fats, no fems" seems to be a rhetorical admission to and underscoring of the ways gender performance as well as the physical musculature of the body are ripe with social and sacred meaning. Similar to blackqueerness in a Black Christian imagination, fat and fem bodies intimate one that is out of control and given to excesses: it is a different rendering of a sinful body, yet equally engaged in discourse of pleasures, ecstasy, and behaviors of the nonnormative. [...] All this to say, I wonder about mortification of the flesh as a means of attempting an ideal of the religious, the spiritual, the set apart, mortification in order to have an experience of god. [...] What of those of us, in other words, that do not have to become or be initiated into such an experience of bodily pain but experience it as a grounding of being?" p.25-6

"So I'm totally uncomfortable with a kind of apocalypticism that seeks the destruction of the world because that --destroying the world, the earth-- has been the project and crowning achievement of western epistemological force, of western imperial-colonial farce."

“What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure…” p. 29