And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ’you would find out.
There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.
He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself.
All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks.
And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.
I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise.
I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.
The families are on display – it’s part of how they function. Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement. I suppose they are exposing what they have created, as an artist feels compelled to do.
Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of indivduality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation, and conformity.
Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them – a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the ‘true’ self. The true self seeks release, not constraint.
The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for ‘there’.
Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.
There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.
It struck me how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.
What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.
I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.
There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.
If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.
One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me.
But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.