Natalie
Hey Reframeables, it’s Nat.

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe some of life’s big and small problems.

Natalie
We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability — together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us. Let’s reframe something.

Rebecca
Today we’re reframing ‘I love you’ with philosophical thinker and writer Marianne Apostolides as we discuss her newest book, I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind. This episode of Reframeables is really her book launch that she never got (thanks a lot, COVID).

Natalie
The story is about Ariadne, a writer who’s navigating a divorce, an affair with the arrogant Adam, and two angry teenage kids. As a way to make some extra money, Ariadne enters into an academic study that involves bringing an AI machine named Dirk into her home.

Rebecca
The book asks how we enter big questions and confront ourselves in the answering. We talk about philosophy, desire, a love of language, and what ‘I love you’ really means. Dear Reframeables, it’s a big one.

Natalie
We are so excited to be speaking today with author Marianne Apostolides about her novel I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind. Ok, Marianne, I’m just going to dive right in. As a philosopher in my head (my doctoral work was philosophy of education), a lot of the names that pop up in your book are names that I have spent some serious time with. So your text really resonated with me from that angle. But that’s not actually really what your book is about. And so I just wanted to know what you meant when the protagonist Ariadne turns to philosophy to help her as a writer. There was a line that I was drawn to where she says, earlier on in the story, “Language doesn’t describe the world, language alters it.” Can you just tell us more about that?

Rebecca
You know, just talk about that.

Natalie
That’s really big. Now go.

Marianne
Ok. Well, I mean, it is a huge debate in 20th century philosophy, and it goes back to the whole notion of truth. Like, can we define a truth or is truth more of this dynamic flow that isn’t one solid entity that we can point to and know and that give certain rights to those cultures or people who claim to possess that truth or knowledge. And so it was this huge debate, and it was termed the performative speech act. And there’s all this philosophy around it, and thousands of words written, and great, you know, slashing fights between British philosophers and French philosophers. And really, to me, what I take from that is much more psychological. Like, I read philosophy with how it helps me understand myself and my body and my relationships with others, my relationships and obligations to those who extend beyond my intimate sphere. Philosophy is not… it doesn’t belong to philosophers. It belongs to all of us. It’s like a human inheritance — to think, to desire.

Natalie
Oh, I love that.

Marianne
Yeah. I mean, every animal has appetites. Every animal has desire and fear. Humans also have a desire for goodness, right? And philosophy helps us understand, or helps us to find the terms and the method to try to arrive at a sense of how we live a good life and how we arrive at ourselves, at our best selves. And so for me, I use philosophy as a creative writer. I use it to just stimulate my own thought. Because it’s hard and it gets so deep at the root of human behaviour and just the dynamics… you know, not just the dynamics of language, but the dynamics of being. So it gets so deep into that that in reading it, it stimulates questions in me. And I’m writing those down in my journals, and I’m arguing with these guys and these women who have written these texts, sometimes hundreds of years ago. And that helps me… just it gives me fire to write. But the question of language doesn’t describe the world. Language alters it. In philosophy, that’s called the performative speech act — that language performs, it enacts something on the world.

And as a writer, I’m just so fascinated by the power of this tool that I have, which is language. And it’s terrifying, actually, how powerful language is. We can think about it politically, how language and speech and rhetoric can sort of galvanize people toward actions that might be abhorrent in other circumstances with different linguistic contexts. But also personally and psychologically, the power of language — particularly in this book, the power of ‘I love you,’ right? So ‘I love you,’ if we think of ‘I love you’ as a performative speech act, ‘I love you’ doesn’t describe my state of being. Maybe my declaration of love to you can alter what the relationship is, how you are in relation to me. Does the phrase ‘I love you’ bring love into being? Can it squeeze off a relationship — when you say ‘I love you’ too soon can that alter the arc of the relationship, the course of the possibility of love, just by uttering those words? So those are very sort of concrete, specific examples. You could get even more, I don’t know, metaphysical about it — you know, like altering the words ‘I love you.’

Rebecca
Are you in the camp of people that think you can say it too much? I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast, I had a friend whose mom wouldn’t say it too much because I think she felt like it would lessen its power.

Natalie
She didn’t want to wear it out.

Marianne
Yeah. It devalues the currency, yeah. Totally. It can. I don’t know, I can’t tell somebody whether it’s too much, I can’t. But I totally hear what you’re saying. Like, you devalue the currency, right? Like, the power, that value that word has, or that phrase. If you’re just tossing it around, how can I even trust — how do I even know what that means? Like, you know, “I love you — oh, pick up a quart of milk on your way home.” You know, you’re not saying anything there. You know, and we can also say the phrase ‘I love you’ to a friend versus to a lover. And it can mean very different things depending on whom... Same words, right?

Rebecca
Actually, I’ve been interested in that phrase because I had a very deep friendship and we used to say that all the time, and then our friendship dissolved and it’s always struck me. I mean, I think people who go through divorce, that probably resonates really loudly, is: how can we love and then not love? I find that such an interesting quandary.

Marianne
There are definitely times I recall being so in, like, that heat of the first flush of desire. So this is, like, not deep, committed love, but just that rush of desire. And a few weeks in feeling the phrase, just like, in my mouth, and holding, not saying it, knowing that it was too soon, but imagining myself saying and feeling so… like, “Why do I get that rush, that sensation in my belly when I imagine saying those words to you?” Like, I don’t even… it has nothing to do with physical attraction, but yet I feel that same crazy rush in imagining declaring this to this other person. You know, it’s clear that that phrase has power.

But when I thought, “Ok, I have to do something with this in a creative context,” it was in a very different circumstance. It was probably, I guess now, 15 years ago or so. A friend of mine who wasn’t a super close friend… I used to do all my writing at cafés, so I’d see him at cafés. And so I’d, you know… for years, we’d spend five minutes, ten minutes, two minutes in these little casual conversations. And over time, it developed into this real solid friendship. And he called me up one day, which was very unusual, and he said, “I’ve had a seizure and they found a tumour and I’m going to have brain surgery next week.” And so we spoke for about five minutes, and, oh my God, I’m tearing up just thinking about it. And at the end of the phone call, I said, “I love you.” And it was just so clear. Those were the words you need to say, right? There was nothing else to be said.

And so again, you know, I just thought this declaration, this gift… because ‘I love you,’ can be a means for exchange. I love, you love me back, right? But it can also be this tremendous just… offering, almost. I love you, I want you to be ok. Actually, he is ok. And he’s got now twins who are like, you know, twelve years old or whatever. You know, like, he got married, he had kids, he’s terrific. And it was after the surgery and after I knew he was ok that I thought, “Ok, I’m going to do something with this someday.”

Natalie
Ariadne, as a character, spends a lot of time not just with philosophers, but also with story. So I was really struck by the character. Ariadne spends time with Derrida, and I have talked about Derrida on this podcast a number of times, but then you also have the character talk about The Odyssey. So Homer’s Odyssey wasn’t something I read until, you know, early on in my literature degree in undergrad, but my mom had taught that poem many years before that. So I had been exposed to the stories of Homer in that big, long, epic poem, right. So to see these two things that I have sort of had long histories with show up in the book, not too far apart — like, actually a few pages apart, was quite powerful for me. And one of the things that in the book it says is that there’s a contrast between the rigour of theory and then using language that feels true — or at least that’s my interpretation of something that was written in there. So does that contrast speak to you? Like, do you think that Ariadne and me, your reader, Natalie, do we need both to grapple with really big feelings, like love?

Marianne
You know, I need both. I can’t tell somebody to read Derrida because I’m really… you know, like, he’s kind of torturous at times. Kierkegaard is a hoot. He’s great, but Derrida… oh, I don’t know.

Natalie
He’s a lot, yeah.

Marianne
Yeah. I mean, I certainly do, but I’m someone who’s so language-oriented. There are many other ways that we can enter big questions, whether it’s through sport or meditation or visual art or a long hike up a mountain. So I’m not going to say that somebody has to read philosophy. I do. Or poetry. It gets so to the root of language, which really is the root of thought, right? That’s our instrument that we as humans have to express our complexity, is through this crazy system called language. But yeah, I mean, I think what you’ll find often in the book is, though I have a really combative relationship with philosophy (as does Ariadne), in the sense that I’m drawn to it, I need it, but it also really frustrates me because there’s a certain smugness to philosophy.

There’s a certain comfortableness to these philosophers who work in the academy and universities, and sometimes, not always, but I think sometimes they sort of lose the point — which is that it’s about physical bodies and beings in the world who are struggling to figure it out. You know, it’s not about some argument in the academy. It’s not about some claim to truth. It’s not about the paper you publish or the keynote address you’re given. It’s about all of us moving through, you know? And I think for me, although my book does discuss philosophy, I want people to feel it physically. Like, I want people to have an immediate reaction to the language. There’s some pretty racy bits to the book, and I want someone to, through the rhythm that I use, the rhythm of the language through the allusions, the vocabulary palette, I want someone to feel that in their skin and their body, right? Not just having language operate cognitively, but having it be what it is at its base. I mean, language began as grunts and moans and songs and chants, right, before it became this logical cognitive system. And I want my language in my books to encompass both of those poles of what language can be.

Rebecca
Hey Reframeables: a little housekeeping. Don’t forget to rate, review, or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts if you like what we’re doing here on Reframeables. Your feedback really supports this reframing project of ours. Also, please sign up for our weekly newsletter, which comes with a free delicious recipe from Nat. Check us out over on Patreon too, where we do mini-episodes which we call Life Hacks and Enhancers — our five best things in a week. On Patreon, you can become a monthly donor for as little as $2 a month, or you could even tip us on our new Ko-fi account. Lastly, tell us what you like and what you want to hear more of. We love feedback and getting to know you, our listeners. All the links are in our show notes. Love, Reframeables.

Natalie
Marianne, can you introduce the notion of the AI?

Marianne
So basically, Dirk is this AI device. So Ariadne is a writer, and as many writers in Canada know, it’s not so easy to make a living as a writer. So Ariadne, because she’s struggling financially, decides to join this study where she’s paid to interact with this AI device. And Dirk gets more and more… he learns, basically. He learns from being with her. He learns who she is, he learns how to interact with her. He learns to anticipate what she wants. You know, it sort of parallels all the things that are happening in our society right now, like natural language processing. Just like you have your Alexa, you know, or Siri, or whatever. And then gathering biometric data, as happens when you wear a wearable such as a Fitbit or a smartwatch, or when you have one of these sleep monitors, right? What is that gathering? Well, that’s gathering information about our heart rate and our pulse, and that can tell us things about our level of arousal, our level of anxiety, right? And all of that information, when you sort of triangulate the heart rate and pulse with the language that’s being used, with the websites that were visited or the searches done or the social media, we can gather a very detailed psychological portrait of who you are. You know, that can be used in many different ways, but in this case, it’s just used to teach this device how to learn — how to learn to be with another person.

So that’s who Dirk is. That’s really all Ariadne knows is going on. And as the study goes on, Dirk’s capabilities increase — which is another way of saying he gets more and more invasive, right? So that’s when she does things like, you know, she does the EEG and then she has to do a couple of fMRIs — you know, this idea of how integrated can an AI become in our bodies and our thoughts?

Rebecca
I mean, that’s part of what you’re doing with the AI piece — is just playing with desire and power. Would you sum it up that way? Or how would you sum it up?

Marianne
You know, I think for me, so much of what concerns me about the way society is going is that I feel like we’re just losing connection with the body. And so, so much of what I’m looking at in the book is, as regards to AI, is just bringing it all back to the body, right? Like, don’t forget the body. We’re so sophisticated and we’ve got all of these algorithms, but really at the basis we are mortal, embodied, desiring, appetitive, fearful, vulnerable animal creatures graced with this incredible conscious mind. So how is it that we move through the world with each other, and with AI, and with an environment that’s crumbling? Let’s just bring it back to the physical.

Natalie
My thought when I hit this one line, which was, “I’ll use only the intrigue of language itself, which includes, of course, the body.” I’m hearing that line as you’re describing what you’re describing now, and I’m still not fully… like, maybe I am just so disconnected from my body, though I think that over the years, I’ve gotten much more in tune. I mean, I’ve had a baby, all these various things where my body had to do a lot of work. I’ve suffered with chronic pain in one part of my body. And so I feel very aware of it. But I was trying to understand the word ‘intrigue’ there. And maybe you’re touching on that, but do you want to go further?

Marianne
Yeah, I mean, I think… I should say the book is: we have third person sections where we see Ariadne interacting with Dirk and her kids and her lover. And then we have first person sections, which are supposedly excerpts from Ariadne’s manuscript. Ariadne is a writer, but because she’s struggling financially, she does this study. So we go from the third person where she moves to the world to the first person, which is her manuscript. So that excerpt you read is from, supposedly, her manuscript. And Ariadne, like Ariadne’s author (namely me)… I don’t tend to write books that have a lot of plot. So the intrigue is not, you know, what happens next, and next. It’s not the tension of, “Oh, how is this all going to work out?” It’s the tension within language itself. It’s the psychological tension. And so that’s where that came from, or that’s where that line arises in the book.

But I do like that questioning that you had — of, “What do you mean, ‘Language includes, of course, the body,’ what does that mean?” And I think, you know, I sense that particularly acutely when I write. Which is to say, I don’t know what I’m going to say before it arises in language on the page, right? And I can think I know what I’m going to say. I can think about it. I can believe I know what I think. But that’s never actually how it arises in the act of writing. And so, often when I come to knowledge, when I come to the words, it’s like this crazy alchemical process, right? It’s this calling upward from a physical sensation — recalling a sensation of desire, recalling a sensation of injury, recalling the colour of the light in the operating room when my daughter was born, recalling the brightness of that light, the shadows, or… you know. It’s like you have to enter a physical space so deeply — or I do, when I write. And the physicality is what gives rise to language. It’s not from the brain. That’s in part what I meant by that phrase.

Natalie
I like that.

Rebecca
This writing teacher that I’ve been listening to, her name is Natalie Goldberg, she would really echo that. It’s from the body. It’s a physical experience more than a cerebral one, actually. Ok, I wanted to ask you about these lines from Cicero. This is another big question. So Cicero writes, “There is no friend, because how one loves a friend is a model of how one loves oneself.” So what were you doing with that line, and what do you make of that line? Does this explain love going wrong, because when we don’t love a friend, it’s really about ourselves? I mean, it seems so narcissistic in a way, but what do you make of that? And I don’t know why I was so interested in it. Nat was like, “If you want to ask the question about the friend…” I’m like, “I do. I really want to understand this.”

Marianne
Well, ok. I’m so glad you used the word ‘narcissistic,’ because again, I have to go back to the context in the book where I use that phrase. So that phrase is used in a letter written to Ariadne. It’s written to her by the man with whom she’d had an affair. And it’s written to her in the aftermath of her husband finding out that this affair has happened and her marriage has collapsed — basically, she’s standing in the ruins of her life. And he writes her a long letter where he finally declares his love for her. And he says, “I know you needed me to say it, and I couldn’t say it because it just…” I forget the phrase that is used, but that the circumstances of the affair were too removed from reality for me to be able to declare my love for you properly. And in this letter, her lover quotes Cicero, and his conclusion is: I failed to love you because I didn’t love myself well enough. Which in the circumstances of Ariadne’s ruin of her life and separation from her kids feels exceedingly narcissistic. That in this moment, what he is reflecting on is his inability to love himself — not his care for her, right. Not, “Are you ok?” Not, “This is happening to both of us. How do we get through this?” It’s, “Oh, man, I really don’t love myself enough.”

And yet that question of friendship and philia (which is the root — you know, ‘love’ in philosophy is ‘philia’), that question of defining friendship kind of obsessed the Greeks. Perhaps it did in other cultures. I don’t know the philosophical traditions of other cultures, so I can’t speak to that. As someone who’s Greek, I go back to those roots a lot more. So certainly in the Greek tradition, you know, Plato and Aristotle, they really feel that it’s the most exalted form of love — friendship. It’s not for your partner, it’s not for your child. It’s for the friend, because it is the most selfless form of love. And so although I have Cicero quoting it, I also later come back to Derrida’s lectures that he gave — his months-long series of lectures, which he began each lecture saying, “Oh my friend, there is no friend.” What does that mean? “Oh, my friend,” — you to whom I speak, you don’t exist. “There is no friend.” Right? And Derrida goes through this and he makes huge, huge sort of philosophical, political implications from friendship and enmity, which we don’t need to go into here. But I do think on one level, though, your reading of that Cicero quote is right — that the ability to experience the love of a friend as a selfless act requires one to arrive at oneself. Sort of: in facing you, I come to my own self as an ethical being, right? In order to love you well, I need to not… well, Cicero would say, “Love myself poorly,” but I need to not be so self-involved that I can’t extend my gaze outward. So I think, to me, what was important about that moment was the lover’s almost misuse of Cicero there.

Rebecca
This always interests me when writers are a bit meta. So when you have Adam congratulating Ariadne on her book, Salt Water, which is also your book, right?

Marianne
Deep Salt Water, yeah.

Rebecca
Which I started to read — I’m going to make my way through it. So what are you doing with the fictional memoir? And do you always do that, or were you doing this in this particular book?

Marianne
I like to play in that space. I like very much to play in the space where the reader does not know whether what has occurred in the writing has actually occurred off the page in the physical world. I find it a very powerful position to write from.

Rebecca
Because I sometimes, when writers get all in a tizzy about, “Well, is it true or not true, and is that ethical?” Because I was just in a workshop where everyone was talking about, “Is it ethical to be playing with truth?” And that bugs me because I’m like, “It’s… come on!” So I like the idea that you love it and that you enjoy the power in that dynamic.

Marianne
Absolutely. Nietzsche would call it beyond good and evil. It has nothing to do with good or evil, ethical or not. It’s like that question, I think, is irrelevant for this kind of writing. To me, I enjoy entering that space where everything is so fluid. I feel I can draw from my own experience in my own physical relationships and physical knowledge, and then extend it and enhance it and augment it and carry it through to conclusions that didn’t happen in the physical world, but can on the page. That’s exciting as a writer to feel and imagine and enter that space.

But I also like, as I said, it’s like this little frisson, right? It’s like having the reader feel there’s a little bit of risk — there are stakes. I think it can ask the reader to attune a little bit more closely, to have your senses honed a little bit as you read. You can’t sit back and feel secure in knowing, categorizing what this thing is. You don’t know what it is. It’s a living piece of writing. So play. Go. Feel it. And I do those kinds of things everywhere. I’m not being coy, you know? There are all sorts of things all over the book where it feels, “Oh, this feels real. Oh, this feels impossible that she could be doing this fMRI scan.” So I do play there a lot.

Rebecca
And if someone said to you, “Well, I don’t know where to place you, I don’t know how to fit you,” what would your response be?

Marianne
I’m a writer. I write. I write stories.

Natalie
I like that. Ariadne notes of her lover that longing is only a mimicry of love.

Marianne
I know.

Natalie
And it was so interesting that when I read that line, I understood it all too well. And I, like, fucking hated Adam. He was this character who made me so mad because he brings up so many memories of a really unhealthy, non-relationship in my life where all of that narcissism, all of that… I would call it psychological gameplay that sort of happens, I was just like, “Oh my fuck.” I just wanted to punch him in the face. Like, that’s actually how I felt halfway through the book — to the point where I was angry enough that I didn’t want to finish it, bringing up so many big feelings in my body. Now I did, but that was like the real kind of, like, emotional feeling that was coming at me. And now that’s why… I don’t know if it’s because of just the place that I was reading this from, like, all this philosophy and all of these poems, and all… it was just a lot of me happening on the page. Do you think that this type of fiction gives form to really big, amorphous feelings? Like, is fiction offering that, because maybe that’s what was happening?

Marianne
Yeah. I mean, I write to harness and understand what the hell is happening in my body. You know, I started writing my first book in lieu of a binge. I was 22-year-old, bulimic, just graduated from university, and it was a Saturday morning — you know, end of my first week on the job, my first, you know, real job. And I had money in my hand for a binge, and I threw it on the floor. And I can see the coins clattering. I can hear them clattering on the floor. And I sat down, and I started writing. It was like, “Baby, you gotta do something with these feelings other than be out of control in your body. Gather them. Gather them, understand them, give them to language.” It’s like writing is this beautiful, demanding gift and obligation to understand one’s own self, to arrive at one’s own self, to sort of transform the physical into awareness.

Natalie
Lovely.

Rebecca
“Baby, you gotta do something with these feelings.”

Natalie
That’s great.

Rebecca
That’s really powerful, and it’s interesting because I was just saying to Nat, just before we started recording I was saying, “I don’t know, I’m, like, skirting some kind of depression or something that I’m feeling, and it’s a reminder to me that I gotta write, I gotta be doing something with these feelings and I have to put them somewhere.” Like, that’s the healthy place — like, spinning just in here, is not the healthy place — in my head.

Natalie
Use the language as a container.

Rebecca
Yeah, use the language. Yeah. So that’s really powerful. Thank you.

Can we ask you five quick questions that are, as Nat always says…

Natalie
They’re not very quick. Go with your gut. Otherwise, these are very ponderous questions. Like, for example, the first question is: what’s the last new skill you learned?

Marianne
How to kayak. I didn’t know how to kayak.

Natalie
That was great. Ok.

Rebecca
Next: what’s a common myth or something people misunderstand about your profession?

Marianne
Oh, that it’s cathartic and makes you feel good if you write about your feelings.

Natalie
Truth bomb. What is the most fun thing you did today?

Marianne
I went for a long bike ride, and it’s this beautiful late fall day. The leaves were changing, and it felt, smelled great.

Rebecca
How would your siblings or a close friend describe you in three words?

Natalie
In three words.

Marianne
Three words? Really, really… difficult and intense. Ok, there we go. Difficult and intense.

Rebecca
That’s what we love — difficult and intense. Oh man, that’s our thing.

Natalie
Oh, we’re into this. We’re totally there for it. What is it that you need to be creative?

Marianne
The desire to stay present with yourself.

Natalie
What’s on the dinner menu for tonight?

Marianne
Well, stuff that we got from the farmer’s market on the weekend. So we got some broccoli, and Brussels sprouts, and string beans, and last tomatoes of the season, and… all local Ontario stuff. Maybe some sweet potatoes…

Rebecca
Oh yes.

Natalie
Well, that will feed your creativity too, that’s for sure.

Marianne
For sure, yeah.

Natalie
I think that I want to end on a note that really sums up your writing for me — this experience, this very specific experience of your writing, beyond wanting to now go and dive in and read more. I do think that when you say, like, ‘intense,’ it is a very intense experience reading this work. Do you feel kind of like an intense connection to your reader when you’re putting this out there into the world? Like, do you think of me when you’re putting those words on the page?

Marianne
It’s funny, not so much when I’m writing, but there’s a moment when you give the book to the world, when it is no longer a part of yourself and your body, your thoughts. And that didn’t get to happen with this book because it came out in April 2020. So you can imagine people were not reading literature in April 2020. I never got to have a launch. There were no readings. And it’s really interesting how much I needed that. I needed to feel the book. I needed to feel it exist outside of me. I needed to see people receive it. And that happens when you do a reading. You literally, as you read the words of the book, they cease to be yours. And it’s this shared experience where the book and your thoughts are received, and you get to think about them and feel about them what you will, that’s not mind to control, but nonetheless they are received. I really so appreciate this chance to talk with you about the book, because I never really had that chance with this one, so I just loved it.