Parade Rachel Cusk Quotes

Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word.

to be able to live your life without considering every action in the light of practical necessity seems to me an almost unacceptable privilege.

We acquired things and used them and disposed of them. What we liked best was disposing of them. It felt like disposing the bad and burdensome parts of ourselves. It felt momentarily, like disposing of our own bodies. Sometimes we sensed that we were living counter to nature, were at odds with it, and this manifested itself as intolerable feeling of material chaos and disorder, to which a material solution could usually be found.

It was well known that G's early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things. Her wild years were safely behind her: it was apparently only she who had thought that things could go on as they were. But instead the wildness had become historic, and was now a certified source of allusion in her work, as foreign landscapes and exotic paraphernalia were in the works of the masters (44) The days passed slowly and indistinguishably at Mann's farm, as though they were the same day examined from different angles (69) It was a day of brutal heat. The valley below lay stunned, pulsing in the throbbing air (71) The next morning, in the hotel room, we stood at the window looking out at the curious devastation of dawn, its relentless casting of new light on old failures (197)

a situation developed that had no clear beginning or end. It emerged and flowered and receded again over a day or a handful of days. He was old enough now to know that these situations, these flowering, which in youth seem almost identical to the forward-driving story of life, in fact turn out to be life itself. It was in these moments of hope and expectation and disillusion, of prelude, before the will decides to conscript the self into conformity, that they really lived.

The impulse to have a child is very often a response to the woman’s own childhood, as though her childhood has left her incomplete, or has taken a part of her that she is driven to find again. The struggle, which is sometimes a direct combat, between the search for completeness and the desire to create art therefore becomes a core part of the artist’s development.

He knew that [his work] embodied change, and he wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage toward the future.

Sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of inanimate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substance, of the body. Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane.

It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character.

Without her, he might still be an artist but he would not really be a man. He would lack a home and children, would lack the conditions for the obliviousness of creating, or rather would quickly be destroyed by that obliviousness.

When G tried to see her, he simply saw his effect on her, saw in other words himself. Another man looking at her would see something different – this, he realised, was what he was unable to tolerate. It was unbearable that she could take his power of sight away from him and still be seen by everyone else.

Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence – to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.

A sickness had taken possession of me since the attack, of body but also of mind. The boundary of possibility had been moved, and the world was now a different place.

She continues to be a woman, yet that fact has lately met with some kind of constraint or opposition: instead of flowering and putting out its display, her femaleness is growing back into itself. Her body no longer represents any kind of danger.

The reality or otherwise of monuments was a form of distraction in the cathedral painting, a facade behind which lay a relationship to power so oblique as to be almost ungraspable. It could perhaps be summed up as the idea that to stop experiencing the feeling of injustice would be to make the injustice no longer exist.

The justice he brought to the cathedral was of a rare kind, was something akin to love, or pity. He would not, perhaps, have pitied a mountain in the same way.

The ageing bourgeois couple trapped unto death in their godless and voluntary bondage is the pedestrian offspring of history.

Some days, in the city, all the children seem to be crying. They are wheeled along the streets in their chairs, wailing like sirens. Their tear-streaked faces can be seen through the windows of passing cars as they sob disconsolately in their car seats. In the park, in the supermarket, on the buses and trains, their sounds of lamentation fill the air, like those of seers who have glimpsed some unspeakable horror about to befall us.

When it came to love, we found ourselves confronting a foreign language. We did not know how to estimate or value things that were free. The things that were free – sex, conversation, the smell of grass in summer – unsettled us. We sought to commodify them and create outcomes from them. But they seemed to belong to everybody: we couldn’t keep them for ourselves.

Suddenly we could not tolerate capitalism. We found its presence in our lives, of which it had insidiously made a prison, repellent. Was our mother a function of capitalism?

We acquired things and used them and disposed of them. What we liked best was disposing of them. It felt like disposing of the bad and burdensome parts of ourselves.

The next morning, in the hotel room, we stood at the window looking out at the curious devastation of dawn, its relentless casting of new light on old failures.

The encounter with reality, deferred for so long, avoided by so many ruses and fictions, proved in the end hard to recognise. She mistook death for a compliment, and when finally she realised that this dark stranger was not a prince but an assassin, she struggled vainly to get away.

She disliked freedom, and bequeathed this dislike to us. She disliked all threats to her subjectivity. Most of all she scorned the truth, taunted and baited it and laughed in its face, and not until the very end, when death came and waited by her bed, did the truth act to defend itself.

Later she saw it as simply another example of the way her painting functioned autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there. It had never failed to sustain itself.

Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness. It entailed judgement, not of her person but of her actions.

People have asked me whether I won’t be sad to leave the world of museums and public art, especially in the light of this exhibition, which was really a victory for us and is the most significant thing we’ve done, but I’m not particularly sad. I was walking around it today, she said, as if I were an ordinary person, just looking, and it struck me how strange it is, how actually bizarre, that some people take it into their heads to create objects for the rest of us to look at. Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.

The father took a long time to die and for that uncurtailable interval G was free from her husband’s control. The power of death impressed and relieved her. She went to the country house with her daughter and her daughter’s nanny, and spent her days in the virgin light and liberty of death.

One afternoon G’s daughter looked up from her book and asked G why there needed to be men. Why can’t there just be mothers and children? she said. This bold and horrifying question immediately struck G as a trick. It was as though the walls were waiting for her answer. The answer seemed to be that there needed to be men because G thought men were superior. The idea of a world filled with mothers and children repelled her. It would be a world that lacked the crystalline force of judgement. If men were dispensable, then so was her desire for superiority. She identified mothers and children with mediocrity. How could that be, when she herself was a mother? Men are great, she answered. She justified this answer as encouraging a balanced attitude. But the question pierced her repeatedly in the days that followed.

She identified the baby with everything that was true about herself and with the secret they shared. Her power of sight was doubled, now that the baby’s perspective was added to it: she started to see good and evil in what had up until now been the pressing disorder of reality. She started to see

There are people here who remember snow on the mountain, she said. They remember a time when there were ghosts here, who were as real to them as they were to each other. Nothing is left of that time, she said, but it doesn’t seem to make them sad. They may live long lives, she said, but their rapport with death has always seemed to me more intimate.

When she had discovered his age – he was ten years younger than her – she had felt a quiet dismay. She had grown used to her own precocity, which had always guaranteed that she was younger than everyone else around her.

He’s spent so much time with corrupt officials, Johann said with some disgust, that he’s turned the same colour as them, and even if you think his cause is just, the issues of power and domination start to look the same from both sides.

This farm has a bad case of woodworm, he said significantly. It’s been hollowed out just as men always hollow things out.

A chasm of horror seemed to open up beneath her. She realised that she was monstrous, a monster of moral indifference. Would her husband consider redeeming her by giving her his child?

They take photos with their phones, like voyeurs, and in fact sometimes I think they don’t even see what it is they’re photographing. They’re just making a copy to take away with them, and somewhere in that process they turn what is meant to be eternal into something disposable. It’s hard not to feel, she said, that the works are damaged or diminished in some way by all these millions of copies that are taken from them.

It is sad in the way dreams are, because they reveal something fundamentally confused in our grasp of truth.

She gave me her dreams, David said. Without knowing enough about me. I don’t know enough about myself to own her dreams. I’m haunted by them, he said. There’s nowhere for me to put them.

I think it’s because animals have no language, he said to her. Or at least not a language we recognise as connected to consciousness. We experience them as bodies whose actions and motivations we don’t understand. We experience them, in other words, as madness, but also as death, because an animal is something that can die without explanation. It’s perhaps true that we would be less mad ourselves, he said, if we had better relationships with animals, and that we would fear our own bodies less if we ceased to fear theirs.

And what are you going to do? asked Julia. I don’t know, Thomas said. I don’t know what I will do or what I will be. For the first time in my life I am free. I saved up a little money, because of course that’s the first thing anyone thinks of, but I find that even money has lost its power to coerce me. My father died not long ago, he said, and I made this decision almost the next day, quite naturally. With him gone, I immediately found that I no longer needed to play the part of myself. Perhaps I no longer need to exist at all.

He died without having really lived, Thomas said, and while that kind of thing is easy to say, to witness the reality of it is quite shattering. You might say that he wasn’t allowed to live by history and the politics of this country, but I always somehow believed that there was something human – a soul, if I can use that word – that would survive the worst attempts to crush it. But in fact nothing of him survived. When things changed, he didn’t change – he walked around like a piece of the old reality that had somehow got left behind in the new one.

If she’s like most poets, Mauro said, she suspects that what she does is entirely useless, not because it’s a luxury but in the sense that a spider’s web hanging in the corner of a room is useless. Everyone ignores the spider’s web, which nonetheless required enormous persistence and patience to make and yet can be brushed away in an instant without anyone noticing. No one notices poetry, he said, but when they find it and look closely at it they see something marvellous, like the spider’s web. The spider’s web has nothing to do with history or politics or oppression, he said, it exists in a different reality from those things and is obviously much weaker and more fragile than they are. It is more linked to survival than to power or violence – it survives in spite of them. It can be brushed away and all that work wasted, but then the work starts again, in another corner of the room.

When I look at her work I feel how bizarre it is, how actually horrifying, to be located in a body, not because the body ages and dies, but because it is unknown to us. The people who try to know their bodies, through sport for instance, or pleasure, seem to me as limited and confined as people who practise religion.

You don’t mention the physical pain involved in such an act, Thomas said when she had finished, nor what the body’s mind makes of its pain. I wonder sometimes whether we have ceased in our age to take pain all that seriously. We have come to value psychological trauma more highly.