The Harmonious Self

What about harmony and what it actually means to live harmoniously with ourselves and other people? We often associate harmony with agreement, with people sharing similar beliefs or reaching conclusions that allow them to live comfortably alongside one another. But harmony involves something more substantial than agreement. I believe it’s an extension of love, and that our ability to experience it with other people has a great deal to do with the relationship we’ve established with ourselves.

When I speak about love, I’m not referring exclusively to affection, intimacy, or the relationships we develop with people who are personally important to us. I mean something that extends beyond those attachments: a genuine concern for another person’s existence, freedom, and well being, whether or not we know them, understand their circumstances, or agree with what they believe.

That kind of love cannot be separated from the way we understand ourselves. We have to be willing to sit with our own thoughts, consider our conduct, and recognize what we’re capable of tolerating. Loving ourselves isn’t simply feeling pleased with who we are. It requires an understanding of our limitations, our disappointments, and the things we may need to change. And as we develop that understanding, the love and respect we extend to others can deepen our understanding of ourselves.

Self-love and love for humanity are not competing virtues. One doesn’t become more important because it concerns ourselves, or less important because it concerns somebody else. They are expressions of the same capacity, each capable of strengthening the other. The spiritual principle of loving our neighbor as ourselves has always interested me for that reason. It suggests a relationship between the consideration we extend inward and the consideration we’re capable of extending outward. That principle doesn’t need to depend upon religious authority to possess philosophical meaning.

Perhaps this is why I find our need for agreement so troubling.

People sometimes appear confident in their convictions while remaining remarkably dependent upon the approval of others. They seek out people who think as they do, and disagreement becomes something they interpret as rejection or even hostility. I wonder how much of that dependence comes from never having developed sufficient confidence in their own understanding.

There is nothing wrong with seeking another person’s perspective or discovering that our reasoning may be flawed. We learn through intellectual exchange, and sometimes disagreement is precisely what allows us to recognize something we hadn’t previously considered. An opposing perspective can expose weaknesses in our reasoning, introduce knowledge we don’t possess, or encourage us to reconsider a conclusion we’ve accepted for years. There is a difference between examining our convictions through conversation and depending upon another person’s approval to sustain them.

Our environments contribute to this. We may grow up in families where acceptance depends upon obedience or agreement, or enter adult relationships and communities where belonging requires us to adopt opinions we haven’t independently examined. Over time, conformity can become so familiar that we begin to confuse it with harmony.

Yet genuine harmony doesn’t require us to think alike.

Two people can disagree profoundly and still possess affection, respect, and an understanding of one another. We see this in relationships where individuals have opposing beliefs but remain deeply in love. They learn what can be accepted, where compromise is possible, and which differences need not threaten the relationship itself. Their affection doesn’t depend upon resolving every disagreement, but upon recognizing that each person possesses an understanding shaped by experiences the other may never have shared.

Sometimes, however, differences become too substantial to reconcile. Harmony doesn’t require us to remain involved in relationships that continually produce conflict. There are circumstances in which the most respectful decision is to separate, allowing another person to continue living according to their own understanding without attempting to punish them for being different.

Being able to leave without deliberately causing harm may itself be an expression of love.

Tolerance also has moral boundaries. We cannot reasonably describe a society as harmonious when people are being deprived of their freedom, healthcare, food, or clean drinking water. Cruelty and oppression are not simply differences of opinion that others must learn to accept. They have consequences for human life, and our responsibility toward one another sometimes requires us to resist them.

The distinction matters because harmony should never become an excuse for indifference. Caring about humanity means recognizing that other people’s suffering concerns us, even when we have no personal relationship with them.

There is something worth considering about the ways human beings depend upon one another. Countries possess different resources, just as individuals possess different knowledge, abilities, and experiences. One may have something another needs. Cooperation becomes possible when we recognize that our differences need not prevent us from contributing to one another’s wellbeing. In fact, those differences are often what make the exchange valuable.

What troubles me is how frequently disagreement becomes hostility before people have even considered what they might learn from one another. The consequences can be devastating. We lose human lives, childhoods, freedom, and the opportunity for people to discover what they might otherwise have contributed to the world.

And I wonder how much of that could be changed by the things we teach our children.

We all develop at different rates, and no generation can guarantee that the next will become wiser or more compassionate. But there is something profoundly important about the example we establish. Children who grow up experiencing love, respect, and the freedom to think independently may carry those qualities into their own relationships. They can learn that disappointment doesn’t have to become resentment, and that disagreement doesn’t necessarily require somebody to be defeated. They may also discover, through the consideration extended to them, how to develop that same consideration within themselves.

What begins as an individual’s willingness to examine themselves can eventually influence a family, a community, and perhaps generations of people who will never know where that influence began.

I don’t imagine humanity reaching a condition in which everyone agrees or conflict disappears. Human beings are too different, and our experiences too varied, for such an expectation to be reasonable. Nor does love prevent us from exercising poor judgment or behaving in ways we may later regret.

But harmony asks something more substantial of us than agreement. It requires us to distinguish between disagreement and harm, between protecting our convictions and imposing them, and between loving somebody and needing them to become more like ourselves. We can respect another person’s existence without requiring their understanding to resemble our own.

And if we can learn to extend that consideration beyond the people we know and love personally, harmony becomes something greater than a condition we hope to experience in our own lives. It becomes something we are capable of contributing to the lives of others.

1102|2026

Marni Fraser

XI:XLI AM

1016|2026

The Human Contradiction

I’ve been thinking a great deal about disappointment, particularly the disappointment we experience in ourselves. There are circumstances in life that leave us questioning other people’s conduct, but I think there’s something more difficult about recognizing our own participation in experiences we might have understood differently, had we been willing to examine ourselves a little sooner.

I’m not suggesting that we are responsible for what other people do to us. We aren’t. But we are responsible for considering our own decisions, our reasons for making them, and what we choose to do with the knowledge we’ve acquired. I’ve reached an age where disappointment in other people seems less useful to me than it once did. Human beings are complicated, and we’re all living through circumstances that another person may never fully understand. I cannot reasonably expect somebody to possess the same knowledge, interests, or capacity for reflection that I have, any more than I can claim to possess theirs.

What I can do is examine myself.

There is something uncomfortable about recognizing that we have occasionally acted against our own understanding, or continued pursuing things long after we suspected they weren’t particularly good for us. It’s easy enough to identify another person’s shortcomings. Looking carefully at our own requires a willingness to sit with things we may not especially like.

I have been disappointed in myself for taking so long to recognize certain things. Not because I believe I should have known everything, but because there were times when I knew enough to question what I was doing and chose to continue anyway.

And yet, I’m not convinced that every decision we eventually regret was necessarily a mistake.

When we’re young, we sometimes seek experiences precisely because we don’t understand them. We want to know what something feels like, what another person might teach us, or what we may discover about ourselves by entering circumstances we haven’t encountered before. Sometimes we take those risks knowing perfectly well that the outcome may be unpleasant.

I think taking risks is essential to understanding the world beyond what we’re already familiar with. Traveling to unfamiliar places, experiencing other cultures firsthand, and stepping outside the circumstances in which we feel most comfortable can teach us things that observation alone cannot; there is a difference between knowing that other ways of living exist and having experienced them for ourselves.

I think the most substantial learning often comes from participating directly in life. We can study something for years and still discover that the experience itself contains difficulties and distinctions we hadn’t anticipated. When direct experience isn’t possible, we have the accumulated knowledge of other people. Books allow us to enter circumstances beyond our own lives, to consider what somebody else has observed, endured, investigated, or understood.

I’ve always found something remarkable about that. A person can spend a lifetime acquiring knowledge, and another human being, perhaps living centuries later, can encounter some portion of it through the written word.

But experience alone doesn’t guarantee understanding. We have to be willing to consider what it means, and that requires something more than simply accumulating memories. We can move through an extraordinary number of experiences without examining how they’ve affected our understanding of ourselves or the world around us.

We live in a world that offers an extraordinary number of ways to avoid being alone with our thoughts. Technology, entertainment, the internet, and the endless availability of other people’s lives can occupy nearly every moment of our attention. These things aren’t inherently bad; they can educate us, connect us, and make life considerably more interesting. But they can also become habits that leave very little room for reflection.

I sometimes wonder how much of what we call living is simply an effort to remain occupied. We have access to more information than any generation before us, yet the availability of knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean we’re becoming more thoughtful. Information can be acquired almost instantly, but understanding requires us to consider what we’ve encountered, question its meaning, and recognize how it relates to what we already believe.

There are people who may be frightened of what they would discover if they slowed down. Others are exhausted, distracted, or have never learned to examine themselves with much patience. I don’t think there’s one explanation for why people behave as they do, and I don’t believe I have the authority to judge another person’s entire existence because I disagree with their conduct. That doesn’t mean overlooking cruelty or excusing behavior that harms other people. We can recognize wrongdoing and hold people accountable without pretending to understand everything about the person responsible for it.

I learned something about cruelty very early.

I was bullied terribly as a little girl, beginning in preschool and continuing through much of my childhood. Changing schools didn’t necessarily change the behavior I encountered, and I remember being astonished that people could treat one another in such ways. As I grew older, I began recognizing similar conduct in adults, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be done about something so deeply embedded in human behavior.

I don’t believe cruelty is the whole of human nature. There is too much evidence of tenderness, generosity, intelligence, and cooperation for me to accept that. But I do believe we possess capacities that can develop in very different directions, depending upon what we experience and what we’re willing to examine within ourselves.

We cannot reasonably expect humanity to become more thoughtful while remaining unwilling to consider our own behavior. Nor can we assume that everyone will arrive at the same understanding at the same time.

Some people seem to acquire certain kinds of knowledge remarkably early. Others spend decades reaching conclusions that might appear obvious to somebody else. One person may possess an ability another hasn’t developed, and that ability may be shared, learned, or accumulated independently through curiosity and experience. We all come to our fruit in our own time.

Perhaps I’m something of a late bloomer. There are things I understand now that I wish I’d understood twenty years ago, although I also recognize that the person I was twenty years ago had experiences she hadn’t yet lived through and questions she hadn’t learned to ask. Growing older gives us opportunities to accumulate experience, but whether we make anything of that experience is another matter.

It requires curiosity, and I think it also requires courage.

Questioning beliefs we’ve carried for years can be difficult, particularly when those beliefs have helped us feel accepted or secure. Recognizing that we may have been wrong about something important can threaten our understanding of ourselves, and developing our individuality sometimes means accepting that other people won’t approve of what we’re becoming.

I’ve never understood individualism as a rejection of humanity. To me, it’s the recognition that we possess different abilities, interests, and ways of contributing to a world we share. I don’t think everyone is meant to pursue the same purpose, or that one person’s contribution must resemble another’s to be meaningful.

Some people protest injustice. Others devote their lives to scientific research, medicine, teaching, or caring for those who cannot care for themselves. There are writers, painters, philosophers, photographers, and orators whose work may cause somebody to reconsider an idea they had previously accepted without question. There are people whose contributions will never receive public recognition, although their influence may be considerable.

Our differences also make it possible to learn from one another. Knowledge accumulated by one person may become the foundation of another person’s understanding, and an ability we haven’t developed ourselves may be something we encounter through somebody else’s work. Individuality doesn’t separate us from humanity’s accumulated knowledge; it allows us to contribute to it in ways that might otherwise never exist.

I find it difficult to imagine humanity progressing without that exchange. The knowledge available to us is the result of countless individual efforts, but what we do with it depends upon the choices we make, both independently and collectively. Our capacity to discover something doesn’t necessarily establish that we understand its consequences, or that we’re prepared to use it responsibly.

And I think progress should involve more than the accumulation of technological achievements. I’m fascinated by the possibility of traveling beyond this planet, and I understand the curiosity that makes us want to explore space. But I also wonder why we don’t devote an equal measure of our imagination and determination to improving the world we’re already living on.

We have extraordinary capacities for discovery, yet there are so many things about our treatment of the planet and one another that remain troublingly primitive. The distinction troubles me because it suggests that intellectual and technological development can advance considerably without an equivalent development in our willingness to examine the consequences of our behavior. Some people are suited to public action; others accomplish more through quiet, sustained work. I think we have a responsibility to consider what our particular abilities might contribute to a humanity whose future depends, at least in part, upon what we choose to do with them.

For me, that contribution has always been connected to making things.

I remember that the happiest moments of my childhood were spent drawing, writing, reading, and learning. I felt safe during those hours, and there was a joy in the experience that I still find difficult to explain. I wasn’t concerned with recognition or approval. I was simply involved in something that brought me an extraordinary sense of peace.

I didn’t have the language to consider that experience philosophically at the time, but I recognize now that being physically alone and experiencing inner stillness are not necessarily the same thing.

As an artist, that difference matters.

I can spend hours alone and still be occupied by thoughts that prevent me from concentrating. I can sit in front of a drawing or a page and find that my mind is somewhere else entirely.

And I haven’t always been at peace with myself.

I don’t think it’s necessary to explain every circumstance that has contributed to that. What interests me is the relationship between disappointment, self-examination, and the ability to become sufficiently settled within ourselves to do the work that matters to us.

There have been times when I’ve spent too much energy trying to understand other people’s behavior, or trying to resolve circumstances that weren’t entirely mine to resolve. I’ve sometimes confused my curiosity about people with a need to remain involved in their lives, even when those exchanges offered very little in return.

Certain desires have left me. I no longer feel particularly interested in maintaining friendships or participating in frequent conversations. Much of what passes between people seems to consist of talking about themselves, often without much curiosity about the person listening. I don’t find those exchanges especially rewarding, and I don’t feel a loss when they end.

That doesn’t mean I believe companionship is unimportant. It means I’ve come to recognize that it isn’t something I need in the same way other people might. My time has become more precious to me, and I would rather spend much of it working.

I don’t think affection for humanity requires us to be constantly involved in social life. I can care about another person’s comfort, safety, and ability to sustain a decent existence without needing to participate personally in everything that concerns them. In fact, I sometimes feel more connected to humanity when I’m drawing or writing than I do when I’m surrounded by people.

There’s something about making things that allows me to move beyond the immediate circumstances of my own life. I can consider an idea, give form to an observation, or communicate something I haven’t been able to explain in conversation. I can work quietly for hours and feel that I’m participating in something larger than myself.

That experience is also connected to what I understand as spirituality.

I don’t believe in God, or in a separate being who presides over our lives and determines what we are meant to become. My understanding of spirituality has more to do with the experience of belonging to an existence that extends beyond my individual consciousness. I believe there is an energy inherent in that existence, something we participate in rather than something that governs us from outside it.

When I’m deeply involved in my work, I sometimes experience that connection with unusual clarity. I feel as though something greater than myself is working alongside me, although I don’t understand it as an external intelligence directing what I do. The experience is real to me, but I recognize the distinction between being certain of what I’ve felt and claiming to know precisely what accounts for it.

I don’t know whether that sense of connection arises entirely from consciousness itself or whether it reflects something about existence that we haven’t yet learned to understand. I’m not particularly troubled by the absence of an explanation. There are things we can experience without possessing the knowledge necessary to define them.

I believe human beings are capable of developing a greater consciousness through love, curiosity, and the willingness to reflect upon themselves. I don’t think enlightenment has to be understood as something bestowed upon us by an authority outside our own existence. Perhaps it’s something we gradually develop through our capacity to examine what we know, acknowledge what we don’t, and reconsider the ways we participate in the world.

I also think stillness means different things to different people. Someone may find it through meditation, contemplation, or an activity that requires complete attention. For me, it’s the ability to sit alone and write or draw, without needing approval and without being continually interrupted by unresolved questions about myself or other people. It doesn’t mean forgetting what has happened or pretending that certain experiences haven’t affected me; it means being able to consider those experiences, including my own decisions, without allowing them to occupy the whole of my attention.

I don’t believe I’ve reached some permanent state of peace. I don’t even know that such a state is possible. There are always new circumstances to consider, new things to learn, and aspects of ourselves that may become apparent only after we’ve lived long enough to recognize them.

Disappointment has played a considerable part in my understanding of that uncertainty. I don’t regard it as something noble or particularly desirable. There are experiences I would rather not have had, and decisions I wish I’d made differently. I cannot turn them into something pleasant simply because I’ve managed to think about them more carefully.

What I can acknowledge is the distance between what we believe and how we actually live.

We may believe ourselves to be thoughtful while repeatedly acting without much consideration. We may value independence while allowing other people’s opinions to determine our choices. We may speak about kindness and responsibility while neglecting the consequences of our own conduct.

I don’t exclude myself from any of those possibilities. Possessing the capacity to understand something intellectually doesn’t guarantee that we’ve learned to practice it, and I think recognizing that distinction is among the more difficult aspects of examining ourselves.

For me, the work of creating is inseparable from that examination. Writing requires me to consider what I mean, and drawing requires a kind of sustained attention that leaves very little room for distraction. Both ask something of me that I cannot always give when my mind is occupied elsewhere.

There is something remarkable about the human ability to take an observation, a feeling, or an understanding that exists privately within the mind and give it a form another person can encounter.

A poem may communicate something that would require pages of explanation in an essay. A drawing can hold an experience that doesn’t lend itself easily to language. A photograph may preserve something that another person would otherwise never have noticed. What we make can become part of somebody else’s understanding, sometimes long after we’ve finished considering it ourselves.

I think there’s an important distinction between making something that another person can encounter and making something that requires another person’s agreement. An artist doesn’t necessarily transmit a conclusion. Sometimes the work presents a question, an experience, or a possibility that another person must interpret independently. Its value isn’t confined to whether that interpretation resembles the artist’s intention, or whether anyone recognizes the work at all.

There’s something peaceful about the possibility of sharing an understanding without demanding agreement. We begin to discover what differences we can tolerate, where compromise is possible, and how people with different beliefs might coexist without needing to defeat one another. Harmony doesn’t require identical minds. It requires some willingness to recognize that another person’s existence and understanding need not threaten our own.

I think the inability to make that distinction can become dangerous. Disagreement itself isn’t violence, but when people begin treating every difference as something that must be overcome or eliminated, the possibility of coexistence becomes increasingly fragile. That is one reason accountability matters so much to me. When disappointment causes us to examine our own conduct rather than simply assign blame, we may recognize the point at which our frustration, certainty, or resentment begins to place somebody else in harm’s way.

Of course, compromise has its limits. I don’t believe peaceful coexistence requires us to tolerate cruelty or surrender our responsibility to protect people from harm. There is a difference between allowing another person to think differently and accepting conduct that threatens somebody else’s safety. Learning to distinguish between those circumstances is part of the intellectual and ethical work of living among other human beings.

What interests me is that we possess the ability to examine our own consciousness, yet that ability doesn’t necessarily determine how we behave. We can recognize something as reasonable, ethical, or beneficial and still act against that understanding. My disappointment has made me question not only what I’ve done, but how a person comes to believe something, act upon it, and sometimes behave in contradiction to it.

I think part of that contradiction lies in our relationship with effort and expectation. We may understand intellectually that something is worth pursuing, but when the consequences of changing our behavior aren’t immediately visible, it’s easy to become discouraged. We want some indication that our effort will amount to something, and when that indication doesn’t arrive, we may abandon the very things we know would be beneficial.

I don’t think this is simply a failure of intelligence. Understanding something and being willing to endure the uncertainty involved in practicing it are different capacities. There are times when we may know what would be better for us, or for somebody else, but cannot imagine what the result of making that change will feel like. The absence of an immediate reward can make an old, familiar disappointment seem more tolerable than the uncertainty of doing something differently.

And I think this is where stillness becomes more than the absence of noise or interruption.

There is a kind of peace in being able to live with what we know about ourselves without continually struggling against it. Not the satisfaction of having made every correct decision, or the certainty that we won’t disappoint ourselves again, but the ability to acknowledge what has happened and consider what remains possible without being consumed by the distance between the two.

I don’t believe that peace can be demanded from ourselves, or that it necessarily arrives as a reward for having behaved correctly. It may take considerable time to recognize that we can accept responsibility without spending the rest of our lives punishing ourselves for what we’ve failed to understand.

Perhaps the difficulty is that we so often expect the value of our efforts to become visible somewhere outside us. We look for a result, a change in circumstance, or some confirmation that our understanding has made a difference. Yet there may be a quieter consequence of learning to live more consistently with what we believe: a mind no longer occupied by the need to defend what it knows to be contradictory.

That possibility interests me because it doesn’t require disappointment to become something pleasant or meaningful simply because we’ve survived it. Nor does it suggest that understanding will prevent us from making further mistakes.

It asks something more difficult of our intellect: whether we can recognize a contradiction within ourselves, accept the responsibility that recognition creates, and continue acting upon our understanding even when we cannot see what the outcome will be.

I think the peace we’re looking for may have less to do with reaching a final understanding than with no longer having to turn away from the understanding we already possess.

1102|2026

Marni Fraser

XI:VII AM

The Dying

Death

Death, why do you come and go,

teasing the blood of an imploring soul?

Why do you linger beneath my window

like a black cloak in the autumn rain,

your pale eyes full of centuries and sins,

your mouth sweet with the last roses of September?

You came in October. I was young,

when the clocks still donned their golden faces,

and the earth was round with possibility—

every flower believed itself eternal.

You didn’t take my innocence at once.

You gathered it slowly,

petal by petal,

as the wind undressed a dying day,

and a raven carried the bright fragments

of an orphaned dawn

into the mouth of the woods.

Even then, I still dreamed—

until you entered the garden

of my sleep

and buried its small, luminous animals

beneath the roots of your winter.

Even then, you left me hope.

Like a white sun tethered to a field of thorns,

like a candle burning in an abandoned shrine,

like the last red apple

clinging to a blackened tree.

And I grew—

a moon swollen with the tides of other lives,

a garden with room enough

for every wounded and wild creature.

But before the clock divided my life in two,

you came again.

You arrived a native to my anatomy—

and hope fell soundlessly,

like a magpie’s feather

upon the first frost.

Now you wander through my imagination,

your fingers stained with the pollen of dead flowers.

You trouble my compassion.

My empathy.

You whisper that goodness is a mask

worn by the hungry,

that tenderness is a fruit

concealing the worm inside its heart.

And I have grown so still

the ivy thinks I am a statue.

I am merely waiting for you now.

There is nothing I can be bothered with.

There is nothing I can hold.

There is nothing.

And yet—

here I stand,

with my ridiculous heart,

and my impossible devotion to the living.

I am the Magician,

my sorrow a thousand small suns.

I am the Hermit,

with one lantern

through a forest of extinguished stars.

And you, Death—

you are my Death.

The bruised gold of October.

A black goat standing motionless

among the graves of summer.

The raven’s throat,

black with the songs it will never sing.

And the gardens—

always heavy with desire

before the first frost.

Flowers open their mouths wider,

the earth grows fragrant with surrender.

The last bee staggers drunk

through the swollen hearts of dahlias.

Everything becomes unbearably beautiful

when it can no longer remain.

I know this.

I have walked beside you

through every season of my becoming.

And when the final roses bow,

when the magpies abandon the orchard,

when the clocks forget their hunger,

I will not mistake you for a king:

I lead you.

Marni Fraser

1027.2026

III:XXXV

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A Poem…

Everything Beneath the Sun

At dawn, the dragon stirs

beneath the earth's thin crust,

but breathes a fading fire.

The sun has mastered

entering quietly,

as though apologizing

for its bright days.

There are mornings

the light must be talked into the day.

And each morning,

a little less of him returns.

I wonder if he still longs

for the green inviting of spring,

or summer's endless asking,

or if he loves autumn most,

when the shadows grow long enough

to cover him,

and he need not see

his own sorrow.

I think I understand the sun.

And all the things beneath it.

Marni Fraser

10.2026

1990’s

When Giving Up

Wild

It is true.

There is a quiet where my language spoke.

Perhaps it began with those who turned an ear

away from the wind’s carrying of my calling—

each syllable dispersed like seeds

over ground that had no germination.

Now even the cicadas have abandoned

their complicated machinery of sadness.

I have been the tree

beneath which men sharpened their cruelty,

confusing the intricacy of my roots

as an invitation to excavate.

I have been the bitch

whose teeth they counted

while discussing the virtue of obedience.

And what of the incessant manufacturing of meaning—

the mind pleasuring itself

against the indifferent make of the world?

There is only so much a living thing can give up

before its own heart becomes an extraction site.

Even the rhizome,

that clandestine world beneath the earth,

cannot distribute what has been exhausted.

It is true.

I’ve begun the silent work of withdrawing

from the judgment and other people’s hunger.

No surrender.

No forgiveness.

Much more primitive.

I am taking my silence with me,

—a way, certain creatures carry their venom

without ever announcing its existence.

And when anyone comes to inventory what remains,

there will be no evidence of departure—

only earth,

—disturbed where something living

escaped being domesticated.

Wild.

Marni Fraser

10|21|2026

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Art & The Artist: In Dangerous Times

It is impossible to separate the art from the artist as though they exist independently of one another. They are one and the same in the act of creation.

The artist is the visionary. The one who conceives, imagines, interprets, and gives form to what did not previously exist. Often multidisciplinary, the artist brings together intellect, imagination, experience, and an understanding of the world that cannot simply be detached from the work itself. Without the artist, the art would never arrive.

It is only after the work has been brought into existence that the artist may choose to separate themselves from it, releasing it into the world much like a child, allowing it to develop a life, meaning, and relationship with others beyond its creator.

That is entirely different from suggesting that the artist is somehow less important than the art.

There are, of course, circumstances in which an artist deliberately distances themselves from the work, particularly when it is commissioned, joyless, or produced without personal investment. But even then, the work does not exist without the person who made it.

Art does not conceive itself. It does not imagine itself into existence. It does not create itself.

To recognize the importance of art while diminishing the importance of the artist is to celebrate the consequence while disregarding its cause.

And in dangerous times, this distinction becomes especially important. When societies begin to tolerate censorship, authoritarianism, the suppression of dissent, and the erosion of individual freedoms, artists are often among those who question what others have been conditioned to accept. They preserve memory, challenge dominant narratives, expose uncomfortable truths, and imagine possibilities beyond the circumstances in which they live.

Art may endure long after its creator is gone, but it is the living artist who must possess the courage to create it in the first place, sometimes at considerable personal risk.

We cannot claim to defend the importance of art while dismissing the importance of the human beings whose imagination, independence, and courage make it possible. Especially now.

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The Quiet of an Inner Life

On solitude, artistic temperament, and the search for belonging

Lately, I have been giving considerable thought to the things I have spent much of my life trying to change about myself. I wonder how many of those efforts were necessary, and how many were undertaken because I had accepted other people’s ideas about what constitutes a happy, well-adjusted person.

Friendship is one of the things I have been thinking about, along with solitude and the unusual demands of living as an artist.

For many years, I believed I needed to become more sociable. I imagined there was some part of myself I had failed to develop, something that would eventually allow me to move comfortably through groups of people, maintain friendships with greater ease, and enjoy the ordinary exchanges that seem to satisfy so many others.

I was a very quiet child. I remember being intensely interested in things that could occupy me for hours, often without wanting company. Unfortunately, quiet children are not always treated with much understanding. Their reserve is interpreted in all sorts of ways, and sometimes they become convenient targets for the impatience or cruelty of others. A child’s private world is rarely given the same consideration as the more visible qualities adults are accustomed to praising.

My interests developed early. I loved music, writing, and drawing. I was fascinated by the construction of things, particularly the human body, and I learned to use architectural instruments to draw when I was very young. Anatomy interested me because I wanted to understand the relationship between structure and appearance. I could study a subject for hours, examining its proportions and details, trying to understand how something so complicated could be represented through a series of lines. These interests have remained with me throughout my life.

By the time I reached adolescence, I had begun making a conscious effort to overcome my reserve. I learned to speak in groups, attend parties, and become more comfortable around people. Eventually, I could be quite outgoing when I wanted to be. I enjoyed conversation, developed friendships, and acquired many of the social habits I once found difficult.

I could enjoy someone’s company and appreciate their kindness, yet leave an afternoon together feeling that very little of what interested me had been touched upon. I wanted to discuss science, film, literature, painting, philosophy, music, anatomy, and the strange connections that exist between subjects we ordinarily consider unrelated. I enjoyed people who were curious enough to follow an idea wherever it might lead, even when there was no particular reason to pursue it beyond the pleasure of understanding something. Those conversations were uncommon.

Over time, I began to recognize how much my artistic interests influenced what I wanted from other people. I was looking for a kind of intellectual companionship that I could not reasonably expect from every friendship. There are wonderful people whose interests and inclinations are entirely different from mine. I can appreciate them without necessarily finding the closeness I have been searching for.

I have also come to recognize the considerable difference between enjoying creative activities and devoting one’s life to developing an artistic discipline. There is nothing wrong with pursuing art for pleasure. I have enjoyed many hobbies myself. But the work of becoming accomplished at something requires an extraordinary amount of time, much of it spent repeating exercises, correcting mistakes, studying, and gradually acquiring abilities that cannot be hurried.

Anyone who has seriously pursued drawing, painting, music, or writing knows how much work remains invisible to the people who eventually encounter the finished piece.

I have spent years practicing, often returning to the same problems until I could finally resolve them. There is always something more to learn. I don’t imagine I will ever reach a point where I feel I have learned enough, and I would be disappointed if I did. The pleasure is partly in the work itself, in discovering that something which once seemed beyond my ability has gradually become possible.

I have begun to think about the amount of time I spent pursuing friendships with the same persistence I might have devoted to my work. I wanted to belong, to be included, and to experience the kind of companionship I saw other people enjoying. There were occasions when I found it, although even the better relationships sometimes left me wanting something I could not quite explain.

Perhaps I was expecting friendship to provide a degree of understanding that very few people can offer one another.

I have known genuine affection, and I am fortunate to have people in my life whose love and kindness I value enormously. But even the most loving person has a private existence that another cannot entirely enter. We bring our histories, interests, and peculiarities into relationships, and there will always be parts of ourselves that remain beyond another person’s experience.

I find this particularly interesting when considering the lives of artists.

There has been a great deal written about creativity and personality, although I am reluctant to make sweeping claims about artistic people. Artists are not all introverted, and creativity certainly does not confer some special superiority of character or intelligence. Nevertheless, I think there is something worth examining in the relationship between serious artistic work and the ability to spend long periods alone.

Much of the work requires it.

A person may spend an entire afternoon studying the movement of a hand, the proportions of a face, or the arrangement of a composition. A writer might spend hours considering a paragraph, searching for a word that expresses precisely what is intended. These are activities that require concentration, patience, and a willingness to remain occupied with one’s own thoughts.

I have always found this kind of concentration satisfying. Sometimes an observation made during an ordinary day will remain with me for hours. I might remember the expression on a stranger’s face, a fragment of conversation, or the way the light fell across a particular object. Later, something about it may find its way into a drawing or a piece of writing.

I suspect that people who spend much of their lives creating develop a habit of observing the world in this way. It becomes so familiar that they may scarcely notice how much of their attention is occupied by it.

Of course, there are difficulties associated with spending too much time alone. Human affection matters, and isolation can become painful when it is imposed rather than chosen. I know that loneliness can exist even in the presence of people we love. There is no reason to pretend that an active imagination eliminates our need for companionship.

Still, I wonder whether I have spent too much of my life worrying about the size of my social world when I might have been better served by accepting its natural proportions.

I have never required a great number of people to make me happy. What I have wanted is a particular quality of companionship, and I have sometimes gone to considerable lengths trying to find it. Looking back, I can see how much effort went into maintaining relationships that offered little of what I actually needed.

There is something pleasant about the possibility of meeting people without feeling obliged to develop a relationship with them. I can have a lovely conversation with a stranger, enjoy someone’s company for an afternoon, or exchange a few affectionate words with an acquaintance and allow the experience to be complete in itself.

What interests me most about all of this is the possibility that my natural inclination toward quietness has remained essentially unchanged since childhood. I learned to be sociable because I believed it was necessary. I became reasonably good at it, and in doing so may have persuaded myself that I ought to want more of it than I actually did.

I have been through enough in life to know that our personalities are influenced by experience, sometimes in ways that are difficult to untangle. Childhood can leave us with fears and expectations that follow us into adulthood. We learn to protect ourselves, to accommodate other people, and occasionally to behave in ways that bear little resemblance to what comes naturally.

It can take years to recognize these habits, particularly when they have become so familiar that we no longer question them.

I have worked hard to understand myself, and I continue to do so. Some of that work has involved examining experiences I would rather not have had. Other parts have been surprisingly rewarding, particularly the discovery that certain qualities I once considered obstacles have contributed to the things I value most about my life.

My quietness, for example, has allowed me to develop interests that have given me an extraordinary amount of pleasure. My tendency to become absorbed in a subject has made it possible to study and practice for long periods without becoming restless. Even my inclination to observe rather than participate has contributed something to the way I see and represent the world.

I find myself increasingly reluctant to interfere with these qualities simply to satisfy an expectation of how much social interaction a person ought to enjoy.

There are people I love deeply, and I hope there will always be room in my life for new friendships. I would be delighted to encounter more people whose interests resemble my own, particularly those who understand the peculiar devotion involved in making art. But I am no longer certain that finding them needs to occupy so much of my attention.

There are other things I want to do with my life.

I want to continue studying the human form, improving my drawing, developing my painting, and writing essays that express the ideas I have spent years considering. I want to read books that challenge what I think I know. I want to remain curious, even about subjects that have nothing immediately to do with my work.

Most of all, I want enough uninterrupted time to do these things well. At this stage of my life, that seems a perfectly reasonable ambition.

I have sometimes wondered whether the need to be accepted by others diminishes with age, or whether we simply become more selective about whose acceptance matters. Perhaps it is a little of both. I know that I have become less interested in participating for the sake of participation, and more interested in the quality of the life I am actually living.

There is still a part of me that would enjoy having a few more close friends. I don’t imagine that feeling will disappear entirely, nor do I particularly want it to. It is a lovely thing to encounter someone who understands an aspect of ourselves that has rarely been understood before.

But I can allow myself to want that without making its absence the measure of my happiness.

When I think about the child I once was, sitting quietly with her drawings and her many interests, I wonder what she would make of all the years I spent trying to become more like everybody else. I suspect she would be puzzled. She had already discovered something that would continue to interest her for the rest of her life, although she could not possibly have known how important it would become.

I find that thought rather comforting.

Perhaps there is something to be learned from returning to the interests that occupied us before we became so concerned with how we appeared to other people. They may tell us more about our natural dispositions than the personalities we developed in order to get along in the world.

I cannot say whether artists are more inclined toward solitude than other people, or whether the work itself gradually makes solitude more appealing. I suspect the answer varies considerably from one person to another.

What I do know is that I have reached a point where I would like to spend less time questioning my inclination to be alone and more time enjoying what I am able to accomplish when I am.

There will always be people to meet, conversations to have, and friendships that may develop unexpectedly. I welcome those possibilities. But I have paintings to finish, things to study, and a great deal of writing still to do.

And I have come to appreciate the quiet in which I do them.

10|19|2026

Images | 2026

The Hours, Days, Years

The Hour Between

At half past four in the afternoon,
I begin to drink.
By five twenty-eight,
I am no longer here.

There is only your face—
then only the suffering
I imagine behind your eyes,
and the terrible tenderness
of being unable to touch it.

I remember how much I love you.
How love did not end
when there was nowhere left
for it to go.

It became something
I carry.

Sometimes, I reach across the silence
to ask if you are okay,
knowing that even kindness
may feel like another wound.
Knowing you may hate me
for remembering you at all.

And here,
in this life I’ve made,
I cannot find
a single person
who believes me worth
the trouble of loving.

There are afternoons
when I’m already dead,
as though this heart
has forgotten its purpose
and continues beating
out of habit.

And still, I remember.

I remember remembering
the one time we held each other,
the way our mouths met
in a world that had already decided
we could never belong to each other.

How strange,
to have been so close
to something impossible.

But before all that,
there was Sweden—

The bed I lay in,
not knowing
which country held you.

Then you came to me
as though from a dream:

There was a dune.
A long, pale stretch of sand.
The silence of a world
I had never entered—

And you stood there,
watching.

You didn’t speak.
You didn’t come closer.

You stood against the distance,
as though you had always known
that one day I would remember.

And now the afternoon is gone.
The glass is empty.
The light has left the room.

Somewhere in the world,
you are alive.

And I am here,

alone with the memory
of having once been yours.

Marni Fraser
October 9, 2026

Real Bodies | 2026

The Forgiving Night

Unshriven

At last my hands are free of all but this;

I court the listless hours

and call it love.

The oath I took outlives the mouth that swore;

I keep its vesper flame

against the wind.

The hills lie mute before the morning breaks;

some lambent bruise of red

unseals the dark.

At noon I sin against the blank again;

I raise unshriven hands

and wake the flesh.

No mortal love has asked of me so much;

it breaks me into form.

O art, my sin.

Marni Fraser

10.09.2026

IV:00 A.M.

Img | 2026

Food…

The Banana Who Did

Now look what I found

at the end of the summer,

in back of the fruit bowl,

grown steadily glummer.

Too bad it lacked feet,

for with feet it could run

and not be a thing

I would eat just for fun.

Perhaps, had I bitten,

it would never have died

of such terrible fright—

but it chose, then, to hide

from the spoon and the bowl,

from the cereal too,

from a breakfast at noon.

When it heard me come through,

it imagined me chew,

and it thought with a grin,

She will never find me—

which was technically true.

For weeks it lay still

and it made not a peep,

so afraid that my fingers

would peel it asleep.

It refused to be breakfast.

It refused to be pie.

It refused so completely

it forgot not to die.

By August it had

a most terrible plan:

"I'll be so un-banana

she won't know what I am."

So it sucked in its belly

and went leathery, thin,

and folded its yellow

and kept the sweet in.

And there it remained,

the brave little fool,

still hiding from hunger

behind the fruit bowl—

until . . .

I found what was left

of its devious scheme:

a banana so frightened

it had softened to cream.

Marni Fraser

09.2026

The Banana Who Did | 2026

Endings

The Promise

Soon, the black and green tide—

lilacs laid across white marble,

first breath’s bloom,

and the last exhale's fading hues.

Soon, the tired and naked copses—

children of November asleep

in wood-lined cradles,

beneath plaques inscribed

with celebration’s cold grammar.

Their skin sings into dust.

Once mated to linen,

once the beloved

on a morgue’s quiet table,

now only the echo—

like a bell’s final toll

at dusk.

This is the promise:

hesitant,

half-whispered,

never rescinded.

Marni Fraser

0101.2010

Unknown photographer, The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous, c. 1890. Multiple-exposure photograph.

To Run

The Hedges

To sit among the hedges

she wonders toward

the other side of it—

Are there happy plates and cups?

Are the utensils

properly placed?

To run among the hedges,

she wonders along the length of it—

What causes the sudden change

from green

to the tarnish of spoons?

The eye turns downward.

First it turned away,

then turned itself inward.

Now it closes.

The happy days were there—

a pale cup-ring

drying into the table.

Gladly admitting

they hardly existed

is the weight finally falling.

I long to go.

To marry myself to death,

not its dead,

and to finally be ended

of this boring cycle.

No ode or its idea

is without it.

Marni Fraser

0928.2026

V:XVI PM

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Gardener’s Daughter, 1867. Mary Ryan, model. Albumen print.

The Lie Of Pure Blood

Hatred hasn't disappeared. Neither has the old fantasy that human beings can be divided into clean ancestral categories.

Most of us don't invent our first ideas about people. They are given to us. Families hand down beliefs along with everything else. Communities reinforce them. Children learn very young who is considered familiar or different, who their parents trust, and who they don't. Later, we tend to build friendships inside the world that already seems familiar to us.

This is one of the ways racism survives.

The idea of racial purity survives with it, and I understand exactly why. It is useful. It offers rank to people who have earned none. A person who has built nothing, questioned nothing, and learned nothing can still wake up believing he stands above millions of strangers. All it costs him is his decency and integrity. It is the cheapest pride.

It is also preposterous.

According to the 2020 Census, 33.8 million Americans—more than one in ten—reported more than one race. Even that number barely touches the reality, because a census measures how people identify. Human ancestry is considerably messier than a box on a form.

There isn't even a scientifically meaningful number for how many people in the world are "pure blood." Admixture has shaped nearly every human population, and human beings do not fall into genetically pure, discrete biological races.

(Hellenthal et al., "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History," Science, 2014; American Association of Biological Anthropologists, Statement on Race and Racism, 2019.)

And really, look around.

One cannot look at a Black person and simply say "African." What does that mean? Ethiopian? Nigerian? Haitian? Jamaican? African American with European or Native American ancestry somewhere in the family?

You cannot look at someone who is Hispanic and know whether their family is Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Spanish—or whether their ancestry also includes Indigenous, Basque, African, or other roots.

And a white person isn't simply "white." Irish, Polish, English, Portuguese, Italian, Scandinavian, Eastern European—sometimes half of Europe is sitting quietly inside one family tree.

The same is true of people we casually call Asian. Indian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese—and the families where those lines have already crossed.

We are simply not as separate as we imagine ourselves to be.

Look deeply enough into a family tree, through records or DNA testing, and certainty starts to break down. DNA estimates aren't perfect. They shift as databases grow. But they can do something useful: they can shatter certainty.

This is the conceit of racism: that a category can tell the whole story of a human being. It cannot. People have been migrating, marrying, having children, crossing borders, changing languages, and carrying pieces of one another across continents for thousands of years. We were mixing long before anybody invented the racial boundaries that have so often been shaped by ignorance, fear, and hate.

Culture and history are important. Ethnicity and family matter. None of it establishes human rank or worth.

Skin color certainly doesn't make anybody pure.

No child is born believing it does. Someone has to teach them.

Marni Fraser

0928.2026

[IMG|2026]

The Bone Orchard

This autumn, the leaves

remember blood for me,

their bruised colors deepen

before staining the earth,

and they fall already wounded,

crumpled into clots,

drying where shadows form,

as though death watches.

Here, a thing beyond autumn

is altered inside me—

a small black wind

whirring under the bones,

as I remain strangely alive

after so many deaths,

wearing my pulse lightly—

In the season:

Blueberries, darkening moons.

Black cherries split open,

their mouths full of night.

And wood fractures in chimneys,

exhaling old ghosts

into the roofless eve.

There is still shelter—

a small animal’s warmth,

one lamp, a window,

and beyond the glass,

the world’s cold crown

moving in silence.

How long among crowds

did I practice vanishing,

while begging to hear

and fearing to be heard?

How long I longed

until longing grew teeth,

and its silence wore me.

Then I found it—

my face beneath faces,

my mask without pity,

the one that survived.

There is so much

the night returned.

So much carried

before knowing its name.

So much buried—

that still knew me.

Marni Fraser

0925.2026

VI:XXXVII PM

[2025]

Changed

Waving Goodbye

I stand where the earth swells

with hemorrhaging flowers—

fat with faces,

mouths opening and closing

in praise or protest

of the sun.

They are beautiful

in the way dying things are—

full of light

and already leaving.

The buildings around me

make me small.

They rise and vanish

into clouds,

but it's the trees

that feel more ominous—

the way they lean,

the shadows they cast,

how they don't need

to be anything

but alive

and older than me.

And in the stillness,

I realize

how alone I seem—

and for a moment,

I am.

I carry my love for you

like an injured thing,

dragging it by the leg

through the day.

Its neck won't hold

its head anymore.

It should be buried.

Let it sleep.

I can't read your epistles—

your poems,

your cleverness—

they no longer

speak your character.

They mouth meaning

but have forgotten

what it means.

On the way home

I pass children

shouting their needs

into the world—

unapologetic,

unworried

about sounding like themselves.

And the city cleaner—

he bows his head

to discarded things

as if they matter.

Maybe they do.

Maybe I could too.

But I'd have to give up

fortune-telling,

give up hope,

give up being

the future's echo.

I'd have to stop

apologizing

for my existence,

stop defending

my personality

like a woman

left on a desolate tract

with only her name

and a flint.

And worst of all—

I'd have to stop saying,

"So sorry.

It's my fault again."

Then maybe,

we'd become

two quiet activists—

no longer fighting

the clumsy conduct

of each other.

But today—

the plainer eye sees.

My body knows

what home means:

a place to hang the coat,

to place the hat on the hook,

to leave the sun

and step into the quiet,

closer

to the dark

where the end waits

naked-handed.

She waves.

And I,

still visible,

wave back.

Marni Fraser

0917.2012

Image, “The Cabinet of Curiosities Lounge”
Las Vegas | 2026

The Sunny Days

The Unwitnessed Flower (Part II)

The flower awakens before her witnesses,

and turning her tiny face up toward the sun,

his warmth arrives without needing her beauty;

she meets his bright cheek with her open mouth,

then wears the morning’s dress simply for herself.

The insects come and praise what they see,

oh how drunk on the short-lived velvet of her.

She likes their little hymns and lets them hover,

but praise is just sunshine with a tongue;

it stays awhile, then goes off somewhere else.

Her roots have other loyalties below,

to earth accepting what no wing can love,

and rain entering every pore without judgment,

and the earth holding fast as petals lose their time;

nothing under her asking for a thing.

At dusk the moon passes the sun

while laying her body across the garden.

She keeps the flower feminine and fair,

covers her softly through the cooler hours,

and asks for nothing of the flower in return.

The insects may come back. She often notices they do.

Their praise is sweet, their company brief,

and neither makes a promise of forever.

A wing and root were never built alike;

she finally knows it without bitterness.

Her life belongs to things that know of return:

the rain, the dirt, the moon, and her faithful sun.

She turns her face toward what has always fed her,

beautiful, and unwitnessed.

Marni Fraser

0905.2026

XI:LI A.M.

IMG|09.2026

Nature

Men Are Insects. Women Are Flowers. (Part I)

Men are insects. Women are flowers.

At dawn the garden starts its little trade;

black bodies dance through chalices for sugar,

and stems turn their faces to be chosen,

(ahhh desire, an evidence of worth.)

Nobody sees the labor underneath.

A root blind from wrestling with stone;

the stem performing its posture for the daylight,

each petal keeping ruin at its edges.

Beauty, so exhausting when it’s compulsory.

Women learn early what the garden needs:

stay lovely and somebody will bring water.

Stand straight enough, and hands will clear the weeds.

She blooms believing believing attraction is care,

until the first brown gathers at her hem.

The insect has the luxury of leaving.

His wings make hunger eat the freedom;

meanwhile, her ankles vanish into the earth

while carries yellow signs elsewhere,

still fed by what he flew from.

Sooner or later every flower bends.

Heat worries through the velvet of her face;

one loosened petal buckles from its bind.

The garden turns its bright eyes elsewhere,

although her roots are ever so ravenous.

We praise the flower standing alone,

call her strong when nobody brings light.

Somewhere beneath the praise, she thirsts.

No living thing was made to earn its tending,

nor beauty meant to function as a ransom.

Beneath us, roots are kissing in the dark.

The bee goes hungry when the flowers vanish.

Dear garden dying in pieces, somehow singly.

Whatever tenderness failed to give

returns eventually as barren ground.

Marni Fraser

0903.2026

XII P.M.

Marni Fraser

0903.2026

XII P.M.

IMG|09.2026

A Clean Margin

My Knife Arrives

My knife arrives holding hands with the sun—

Soon after, I awoke,

then took the knife of my life and listened to the slice.

Hear the small slice I had been refusing to hear for years?

I executed: enough.

Enough of the half-truths,

and of the missing truth.

Enough of it arriving barefoot,

then three days late to boot,

and with blood on its feet.

I executed: enough.

You dishonest home to someone.

You've made rooms inside rooms inside rooms and called it a life.

Now standing in the wreckage,

you complain about the dust.

My heart's gone rusty loving you.

My hands mourned your beauty—

they're rusty too.

Do you understand?

Rusty.

My eyes rained for years.

Years.

They've become rusty, too.

And still, some hope sparks like a little light

through a house you kept dark.

I covered the flame.

You struck another match.

I covered the flame.

You struck another match again.

I covered the flame.

You watched.

I will never forget you watched.

And you watched.

And watched.

There are monsters who roar.

There are monsters replying politely.

There are monsters closing the door softly.

There are monsters sleeping beautifully.

And there are monsters waking without blood beneath their claws.

You were always so clean.

Or was everyone around you in the faith of looking away?

Look away.

Looking away.

And looking away, yet again.

And you—at the center of it—hungry,

always somehow starving.

But my heart remembers her rug,

her beautiful book of poems,

and every beautiful object

that might have existed between us.

Only they didn't.

Objects are innocent.

Poems are innocent.

Even memory:

it all eventually arranges itself honestly.

My brown-eyed boy was never there.

I made him up because the truth

of life's loneliness was too ugly.

So I gave you his beautiful eyes,

and in them my tenderness,

and out of your mouth my excuses.

I gave a monster years.

Years.

Years.

And years.

And sometime last night,

in night's dark,

I took them back.

Today at dawn you died inside me.

No funeral. No flowers.

No black dress.

No identifying your body.

There was only a silence,

and that I could breathe.

At last.

At last.

At fucking last.

I could breathe.

And somewhere inside me

the sun returned.

It might have been waiting

behind a locked door.

Imagine that—

or was only you in front of the light?

You, the extraction.

This removal.

This clean margin around the death.

Finally, I understand:

losing is the body rejecting poison.

It is the house throwing open its windows.

It is the knife washed clean.

It is the truth entering without knocking.

And the truth says:

At last.

At last.

At fucking last—

I am free.

Marni Fraser

0909.2026

VI:XL AM

Photo by Roman Odentstov, edited by me.

The Months Around It

Anyone Else?

There are people who will tell another person they love them and still know surprisingly little about the ordinary life that person is living. They may know the work, the paintings, the writing, the music and the ideas. They may know what moves them and even recognize what they miss when it disappears, while knowing very little about the person responsible for any of it.

We place enormous importance on intensity when we think about intimacy. We remember what people say when they are moved, the declarations they make, and those rare moments when another person seems unforgettable. The ordinary months surrounding those moments receive much less consideration, although they may tell us considerably more. A person can be unforgettable in a moment and almost entirely unknown over time.

Perhaps one of the simplest measures of intimacy is not what someone says, but what they remember to ask. “How are you, really?” is an ordinary question, but there is a considerable difference between asking it out of convention and asking because another person’s life has remained in your thoughts. Genuine curiosity requires some memory of the life that has continued in your absence. It means remembering what mattered to someone, wondering what became of it, and caring enough to ask without first being reminded.

People can be attracted to particular parts of another person without ever developing the capacity to know the whole. Attraction can easily be mistaken for intimacy when it is intense enough, as can admiration and recognition. There is nevertheless a considerable distance between finding someone compelling and actually knowing them, and it may be greater than most of us care to admit.

Being someone’s muse, fascination, confidante, or beautiful idea is not the same thing as being their friend.

Artists encounter this in an interesting way because the work often goes ahead of the person who made it. Someone may become familiar with the paintings, the writing, the ideas, the music, and even the strange little things an artist collects and shares. Art reveals genuine things about its maker, sometimes things that would be difficult to communicate in any other form, and this can produce a powerful sense of familiarity. It is possible, however, to know someone’s expression intimately without knowing very much about the ordinary human life from which it came.

There is a human being behind the work, and that human being may be considerably less visible than the work itself. Someone may care deeply about what another person creates because of what it awakens in them, yet never become especially curious about the person doing the creating. The distinction is difficult because the affection need not be false. What was felt may have been entirely genuine while still being limited to a particular part of another human being.

The same thing happens outside art. People become attached to qualities in others that answer something in themselves. They value the person who listens, understands, makes them laugh, gives them courage, offers good advice, or remains available when life becomes difficult. It is possible to know exactly where comfort can be found in another person without developing much curiosity about the life of the person providing it. This does not necessarily require cruelty or deliberate selfishness, but it does reveal something about reciprocity.

Reciprocity has very little to do with constant contact. For a long time, I thought friendship was a constant, something maintained daily or at least frequently, but I no longer believe frequency tells us very much about the substance of a relationship. Two people can disappear into their separate lives for months, meet over drinks once a year, and spend two hours in conversation that remains with them for months afterward. Other people can speak every day and know remarkably little about one another.

What matters more to me now is whether the time between conversations has left behind genuine curiosity. Someone remembers where another person was going, what frightened them, what they were trying to finish, what they hoped would happen, or what they loved enough to pursue, and eventually wants to know what became of it. These are ordinary details, but their ordinariness is precisely what gives them value. They are evidence that another person’s life continued to exist in someone’s mind while the two were apart.

There is a particular kind of disappointment in wanting something for years and finally receiving it, only to discover that it was never what you needed. Beautiful language can contribute to that confusion, as can the experience of being intensely wanted. Being wanted momentarily can resemble being known over a longer period of time, particularly when the moment is powerful enough. Time usually makes the distinction clearer because ordinary life eventually replaces intensity, and what remains has to survive without the assistance of a remarkable moment.

This does not mean that love must be constant or that friendship requires an accounting for every absence. People have grief, families, work, illness, marriages, children, distance, obligations, disasters and private difficulties that may never be visible to anyone else. Understanding the limitations of other people is part of loving them. There is, however, a point at which continually understanding everyone else’s limitations requires ignoring one’s own.

Perhaps that is where the distinction between language and action becomes most useful. Words are not meaningless. They can be extraordinary, and they can cross years, countries and circumstances in ways that very little else can. They can alter the course of a life. They can also describe a relationship more beautifully than the relationship is actually being lived.

I used to give language the greater authority because language seemed capable of expressing what ordinary behavior could not. I am less certain of that now. There are things people may never be able to articulate particularly well that become perfectly clear in the way they behave, just as there are magnificent things people can articulate that never become visible anywhere else.

Sometimes the only sign of love from anybody on this planet is in what they do, not what they say.

There is peace in understanding this on a very profound level.

Marni Fraser
0904.2026

Image | 2026

What?

What?

Was it breaking through?

Hope, the thin argent splinter under skin.

Was it escaping?

A sigh gone feral in the cage of ribs—

Or was it an opinion that screamed behind the ladders of your mouth?

Was it reaching down?

That old amalgam: wrath and melancholy,

gulped back again because someone was an asshole?

Yes. It had begun its small insurrection,

some famished semaphore beneath the blood.

But:

Was it trying to get your attention?

Was it opening something?

Perhaps it wanted to open your legs

or unlatch the ossuary tucked behind your sternum,

or gnaw some third door that has no hinge at all.

Or was it only your throat, speaking a language it hadn’t been given yet?

Marni Fraser

0829|2026

V:XL PM

An Aperture Adjacent by Marni Fraser | 2026