Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

and a stranger. He looks almost surprised to see himself: he gives that stranger a glance that is as objective and compassionless as any glance in the street. He is wearing an ordinary kind of plaid shirt and his hair is brushed back and parted, and despite the coldness of the act of perception – which is a cosmic coldness and loneliness, Jeffers – the rendering of those details, of the buttoned-up shirt and the brushed hair and the plain features unanimated by recognition, is the most human and loving thing in the world. Looking at it, the emotion I felt was pity, pity for myself and for all of us: the kind of wordless pity a mother might feel for her mortal child, who nonetheless she brushes and dresses so tenderly. It gave, you might say, the final touch to my strange, exalted state – I felt myself falling out of the frame I had lived in for years, the frame of human implication in a particular set of circumstances. From that moment, I ceased to be immersed in the story of my own life and became distinct from it. I had read my Freud often enough, and could have learned from there how silly it all was, but it took L’s painting to make me really see it. I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

You know, Jeffers, that I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them – partly because I have trouble believing that they do exist! If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist. The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old. But my point is that there’s something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first. I don’t include things created out of words, though: at least for me they don’t have the same effect, because they have to pass through my mind to get to me. My appreciation of words has to be mental. Can you forgive me for that, Jeffers?

There wasn’t another soul in the gallery that early in the morning, and the sun came through the big windows and made bright pools on the floor in the silence, and I stepped around as joyfully as a faun in a forest on the first day of creation. It was what they call a ‘major retrospective,’ which appears to mean you’re finally important enough to be dead – even though L was barely forty-five then. There were at least four big rooms, but I ate them up, one after the other. Each time I stepped up to a frame – from the smallest sketch to the biggest of the landscape works – I got the same sensation, to the point where I thought it was impossible I’d get it again. But I did: over and over, as I faced the image, the sensation came. What was it? It was a feeling, Jeffers, but it was also a phrase. It will seem contradictory, after what I’ve just said about words, that words should accompany the sensation so definitively. But I didn’t find those words. The paintings found them, somewhere inside me. I don’t know who they belonged to, or even who spoke them – just that they were spoken.

A lot of the paintings were of women, and of one woman in particular, and my feelings about those were more recognisable, though even then somehow painless and disembodied. There was a small charcoal sketch of a woman asleep in bed, her dark head a mere smudge of oblivion in the tousled bedclothes. I admit a kind of silent bitter weeping did come from my heart at this record of passion, which seemed to define everything I hadn’t known in my life, and I wondered if I ever would. In many of the larger portraits, L paints a dark-haired, quite fleshy woman – often he is in the painting with her – and I wondered whether this smudge in the bed, almost effaced by desire, was the same person. In the portraits she usually wears some kind of mask or disguise; sometimes she seems to love him, at others merely to be tolerating him. But his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.

It was in the landscapes, though, that I heard the phrase the loudest, and it was these same images that stayed smouldering in my mind over the years, until the time came that I want to tell you about, Jeffers, when fire broke out again all around me. The religiousness of L’s landscapes! If human existence can be a religion, that is. When he paints a landscape, he is remembering looking at it. That’s the best I can do to describe the landscapes, or describe how I saw them and the way they made me feel. You would doubtless do far better. But the point is for you to understand how it was that the idea of L and his landscapes recurred all those years later and in another place, when I was living on the marsh with Tony and thinking quite differently. I realise now that I fell in love with Tony’s marsh because it had precisely that