View all notes
I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn't give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn't seem to give you any rights at all.
:(
Henry and I had plans to meet that afternoon in a park where we sat side by side under a tree to watch people as they passed by, and I was glad not to have to look at him because I feared I would faint, though I had never been that sort of woman, a fainting woman. In past relationships I’d been accused of being cold, of being distant, of never loving anyone as well as they had loved me. I’d never known what to make of those accusations, had never been able to discern my own coldness or distance, but as I sat there talking with Henry, his mere presence pressing me so firmly and warmly into the present, it became clear to me that this was it, this was love, and all those past partners had been right—I had never loved them. I must have believed love was something that arrived in your life and told you what to do with it.
I learned how to block out the sound of a cheering crowd and his occasional howls as I read. Henry was such a remote, dispassionate person that I enjoyed seeing him experience an extreme emotion, even if the feats of strangers were the only thing that seemed to rouse such feelings from him. The fact that I wrote all day and came home to read, he said, proved that being a journalist wasn’t taxing in the same way that being an artist was. I never disagreed with him. I did not understand what Henry did in his studio or why. At home, we spent our time together engrossed in opposite things, and this had seemed like one of the things a person had to do in marriage—accept differences, block out certain noises, be alone. There may be nothing inherently wrong with living a life like that, and perhaps I could have safely remained married and had his children and gone along with the original plan. It’s not as if I would have died from it. Not immediately.
good point for BH
When I arrived at the address she’d given I found nothing but an empty lot. I checked the note again—I was in the right place. I waited a few minutes; then, as I turned to leave, I noticed a rope ladder swaying from the abandoned elevated track that ran above Tenth Avenue. One bare arm waved at the top, then slid out of sight, and even now, all these years later, I do not understand how I had the nerve to climb that ladder. It was the first time since childhood that I discovered I was capable of more than I’d previously believed, an expanding sense of possibility that defined my years with her—a stark contrast to the smallness I felt in Henry’s home. Once I reached the top of the tracks she helped me over the edge—her hands on my arms and back. I stood and looked out over an impossible sight—a long, narrow meadow running through the city, overgrown with vines and tall grass.
When I got out of the taxi minutes later, I realized I’d mistakenly given my old address, on East Second and Bowery, an efficiency studio with wonderful light and terrible everything else. I looked up at the windows where I’d lived in such happy squalor, and cried. How completely idiotic I was being. It makes no sense to grieve years. Be reasonable. Go home.
As I walked north toward our building, I lingered at each of my private graves on Second Avenue—the bench where I’d had the relationship-ending fight with a girlfriend several years ago, the bar where I’d read The House of Mirth for the first time, the café where I’d once met my estranged father for a painful coffee, and the Italian restaurant where Henry and I had soberly discussed the decision of marriage. I’d always been someone over whom the past had a powerful hold, easily importuned by nostalgia, but that evening each of these locations seemed to have lost their power. I walked right into the café where I’d had that coffee with my father, though for years I’d crossed the street to avoid passing it. I ordered a glass of wine as if I belonged there, had belonged there all along.
:(
I repeated that I was leaving, but he scoffed, almost laughed. Not just like that you’re not, he said, and we walked in silence for several blocks and I wondered whether there was any ideal criteria for this, whether there was a correct way to end a marriage on nothing more than an amorphous sense of another life just out of reach, a life that might kill me, it seemed, if I didn’t live it. Once inside our apartment again, he asked me to at least keep living with him for another month, to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding, to give him a chance to make the case for our life together, and I agreed to it, hoping that it would make sense, that the simpler course—staying together, staying the same—would come to seem to be the correct course.
X was not exactly a person to me yet, but a possibility, a different way of life. I deified her then and for a long time after, believed her to be an oracle, almost inhuman. Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.
Storr: How consciously did you structure this according to psychological or psychoanalytical models, or how much of this was organically coming out of your own experience?
X: It came out of my own development.
STORR: Your own development?
X: Yeah.
Storr: What do you mean by development?
X: Are you familiar with photography, the process of photography?
Storr hesitates and half laughs as he squints at her.
X: You put the photo paper in the developer and what happens?
Storr: What I was asking—
X: What happens, Jerry?
Storr: The photograph develops.
X: Good boy, Frank, good boy. The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.
X lights a cigarette. A long silence.
STORR: I—well, I had one more—
X: Come on, Billy, just go with it, Billy Boy, ask me another smart question of yours. Have a look at your notes, find some genius in there!
this is so funny
Knowing all this, I listened to Mr. Vine go on about how the ST was a better place for women than anyone realized, how his wife (my wife) had simply mistaken the simplicity of her life as a form of oppression. This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.
X then went on to name names, to make an example of thirty-nine of her peers and their most celebrated works, which she deemed “full of unredeemable pettiness, violent anti-intellectualism, and fatuous notions of insight.” Her primary thesis was that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves,” and her primary complaint was that the relative comfort and political apathy of the Northern Territory had produced at least three generations of “money-driven fluff machines … that insult the very notion of art as a matter of existential survival.”
i mean not a bad point but not to be treated as totalizing either