Parade

The pane of glass between herself and us, between the dark of outside and the day of inside, had been broken. We recognised the ugliness of change; we embraced it, the litter-filled world where truth now lay. This grey reality, this meeting of darkness and light across shards of broken glass, was our beginning.

‘She felt as if she was living in simultaneous realities, like the clocks in airports that showed the time in different cities across the world. The men looked her directly in the eye, as though to tell her how overjoyed they were to be integrated with their own bodies. They noticed her dislocation. They were clothed in self-interest. They looked at her with the same puzzlement she remembered from her youth.’

‘I have no reason to care, David said. I’ve never found a reason—I don’t hurt anyone, David said. I don’t stop a woman writing poetry. I don’t support a woman either, or prevent one from leaving her child. I never had to involve myself in things like that. I never wanted to.

That’s true, Betsy said—You’re white and you’re male and things just fall into your lap, and I’m not saying that’s your fault. You didn’t do anything to make it happen and you didn’t stop it either. You just let yourself be carried along like a cork in the water, always floating on the top.’

‘At certain times of day—when the museum isn’t full, the atmosphere is like that of a church. You can tell people are attributing sanctity to these works of art, and some godlike capacity to the artists who created them. At other times the museum is crowded and the atmosphere completely changes. People push and shove each other trying to see, like people trying to see the aftermath of a car crash or some equally gruesome spectacle. 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.’

‘Once, she said that what she had in fact liked best was being pregnant. In pregnancy she had received attention for what was as yet a swelling mystery—This attractive prospect, like an interest-free loan, may have been what tempted her to repeat the exercise so often—Pregnancy was a reverse kind of authorship, where the work started after publication and the suspension of disbelief came before the story had begun—Pregnancy concluded with the drama of birth. Love ended with the spectacle of marriage.’

‘Enter the era of prosumption, one in which everybody makes. The creative, as personality and social role, reminds me of the influencer, a monetised identity born of the tech zeitgeist a decade after social media saturation. I’ve heard the words creatives and artists used synonymously, but they are not the same to me.

I’m writing about people that don’t make art to fill time, or when they have free time, or to feel free or alive (tap into that universal creativity), or because they’re trying to change laws or end inequalities (art will not directly save the world, nor should it be taxed with this responsibility), or because it’s therapeutic, although they feel miserable when they aren’t making it. I’m writing about people who embody art, breathe it like air and drink it like water, like a reflex. I’m writing about people who are animated and destroyed by art.

I’m attracted to sociological deviance: behaviours and ideas that are nonnormative, irrational, or dangerous to the social order. I’m attracted to outsiders and outcasts. The betrayers of the status quo, the stigmatised, the picked-on. I’m attracted to people who don’t think about 401(k)s, have spent summers doing acid and working in restaurants, and would rather spend an afternoon alone in their studio—than go to a birthday party on a beach and play volleyball.

I avoid the adjectives struggling and starving to describe artists. The former implies an innate floundering, a deficiency, and the latter conjures the twentieth-century starving artist weekend sale at a local hotel chain, where Bob Ross versions of Parisian street scenes sold for as low as $49.95. By resisting clichés, it’s easier to reject the idea that artists are different in character, or somehow flawed, because they aren’t prospering under late capitalism.’

‘People think that suffering and oppression are somehow nourishing to artists, he said, but I can tell you it isn’t true.’

‘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. Mauro gave a bark of laughter. But isn’t that precisely the way they help us? he said. Isn’t that why we go and look at their shit, as you call it? Because we have been made ashamed of our own?’

‘—she was as bad as any man, and she was as good as any man. Better, in my opinion, because she lived two lives. First—the life of a woman, all crushed and conventional, making art on the side in between serving dinner—Then, when he had the good manners to die and leave her financially comfortable, she lived the life of a man. What I don’t know, Betsy said, is what would have happened if he’d stuck around, and to that extent a woman artist is always a victim of chance. She might be lucky and find that people give her some freedom, or she might stay crushed by the decisions that were forced on her along the way. At least G had the sense not to marry another artist, she said, though in fact that was a product of her conventionality too. She married a respectable, well-connected man, as she had been brought up to do. Where women have gone wrong, she said, is in mistaking an unconventional man as their chance for freedom. The worst stories of female sabotage in the arts are always those ones. A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist – she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her.’

‘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 had relied from the beginning on the manufacture of desire to camouflage the problems of truth and limitation. Was there anything we remembered from the time before this reliance? Only fragments. Our mouths and bodies craved sensation. There was a terrible tension in the distance between our needs and their satisfaction. We made the discovery that we could create needs that we ourselves could satisfy. Later we found that our will could enlarge the possibilities of this cycle, whose end result was never the transformation of our circumstances but the rendering of them more tolerable. Slowly we understood that need had a crippling effect: it made us inflexible and secretive.’

‘My ambition all my life—has been to avoid the things people say you have to do. I made the discovery quite early that you could avoid them, and now there’s no way I can make myself do them if I don’t want to. There are some positive aspects to living that way, but when the dictators take over I suppose I’ll be the first one to be shot.’

‘She despised love. It was one of the reasons she was so easy to be around. Only if you were male, Betsy said. The woman who refuses to love can’t tolerate other women. She knows they’ll look down on her or pity her. And besides, she thinks they’re idiots. It’s a terrible notion, Julia said, that a woman can be an artist only if she refuses to love. If you ask me, David said, any woman is better off without love.’

‘I’m happy, and I only ever wanted to be happy, and for a woman like G happiness is not only not a goal, it’s an actual danger. I don’t deny that she achieved happiness in her work—but I imagine it was happiness of so exalted a kind that most people would be incapable of understanding it. The ordinary forms of happiness were beneath her.’

‘—a strange sensation, to see her child full of another woman’s stories, as she might have been full of another woman’s milk. She wondered whether her husband knew that this heady milk was flowing in their daughter’s veins. In the morning she went into the kitchen and made pancakes. She made them carefully and neatly, as though from memory, despite the fact that she had no real memories of that kind.’

‘Rain and freezing sleet hurled themselves from the sky, a reprise of winter. I thought of the cherry tree in the park that had put out its blossom so early. In the streets people were sleeping huddled in doorways or under bridges and walkways, or sometimes in tents they had pitched on the pavements. Everyone walked past them, these reproaches to subjectivity, with apparent indifference. We ourselves, outsiders, in a limbo of our own making, perhaps felt the reproach differently. At home people also slept in doorways: here it took us longer to forget them.’

‘We are deformed emotionally and spiritually by oppression—our family life was almost completely silent. Now that things here have changed, he said, a different kind of silence is emerging. Everyone wants to forget what happened, or perhaps they are just unable to remember. So this silence is a sort of oblivion, like the skin re-forming over a wound, where what happened doesn’t matter any more.’

‘If she’s like most poets—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.’

‘Our bodies felt unacceptable and cumbersome to us, as though they were a burden we would have to carry forever. Sometimes it felt as though only with the removal of this burden would we be free. There appeared to be some primary necessity we lacked and were therefore always in pursuit of. If this was so, its substance remained a mystery. We were tormented by something no one else could see. Yet, far from causing us to flee, this torment seemed to cement us more and more where we stood.

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. So when the personal offer of love came, a specific love for us alone, it was irresistible. To the question, Is this what you want?, there was only one answer: yes. To be given something for free was unparalleled in our experience. How could we refuse it? In the system of love, we soon came to understand, all the things that were free retained their appearance of freedom while in fact being conscripted into ownership. Was love itself a system of ownership? Often we received the confusing impression that love disliked freedom and at the same time sought to impersonate it. But in this foreign language we could never be sure.

Using the system of love, we built a structure of possession. Our feelings lived in this structure and sought to replicate themselves there. They sought familiarity and the feeling of things being real. They sought repetition. Some of these feelings were presentable enough to show in public; others were left to roam the attics and cellars. We had the sense of our lives as a story: this had been the case for some time. According to this story the past was a place of unenlightenment from which we were continually in the process of delivering ourselves into the future. Our habits of need and satisfaction had given us an interest in the future. The future enlarged the prospects of satisfaction and embroidered the sense of desire. We had visions of it that we described in words. We were continually creating it, making our way to it, yet we never arrived there. Often the present moment – the bridge to the future – weakened and collapsed while we were inside it. Then we had to start building again. This interest in the future strongly resembles belief. The people who lived around us and perhaps loved us were struck by the strength of our belief. They listened to our visions of the future and sometimes participated in them. But they tired more quickly than we did of the effort it took to get there. They were more interested than us in the past and felt nostalgia for it. The present moment did not collapse under them: it was strengthened by this element – love – that we did not entirely understand. We tried to be loving but when the sound of footfall from the attics and cellars was loud in our ears we grew impatient with love. We wanted to move forward, into the future.

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. 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 an intolerable feeling of material chaos and disorder, to which a material solution could usually be found. We felt both exposed by and imprisoned in what we had built and the story we had created.’