Life is fury. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb.
- Salman Rushdie, Fury
Showing posts with label rushdie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rushdie. Show all posts
And I called that discourse me
Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
Which notion turns my thoughts back to Vina, to whom all my mental pathways still lead. Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany of identities. To be sane, we chose between the diverse warring descriptions of ourselves; I chose hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called that discourse me.
Salman Rusdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000)
Which notion turns my thoughts back to Vina, to whom all my mental pathways still lead. Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany of identities. To be sane, we chose between the diverse warring descriptions of ourselves; I chose hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called that discourse me.
Salman Rusdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000)
All the earth I need
There's a candle in my window, Vina sang, but I don't have to tell you, you're feeling it already, the memory of it, pulling at your emotions. Swim to me. I can't listen to it myself. Not any more.
He clings to her, without touching her. They meet and whisper and shout and make each other up. Each is Pygmalion, both are Galatea. They are a single entity in two bodies: male and female constructed they themselves. You are my only family, he tells her. You are my only earth. These are heavy burdens, but she bears them willingly, asks for more, burdens him identically in return. They have both been damaged, are both repairers of damage. Later, entering that world of ruined selves, music's world, they will already have learned that such damage is the normal condition of life, as is the closeness of the crumbling edge, as is the fissured ground. In that inferno, they will feel at home.
He is clear about his purpose: by his labours to make himself worthy of her again. And when he's ready he'll find her, he'll make her real by touching her kissing her caressing her, and she'll do the same for him. Vina I'll be the ground beneath your feet and you, in this happy ending, will be all the earth I need.
- Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
He clings to her, without touching her. They meet and whisper and shout and make each other up. Each is Pygmalion, both are Galatea. They are a single entity in two bodies: male and female constructed they themselves. You are my only family, he tells her. You are my only earth. These are heavy burdens, but she bears them willingly, asks for more, burdens him identically in return. They have both been damaged, are both repairers of damage. Later, entering that world of ruined selves, music's world, they will already have learned that such damage is the normal condition of life, as is the closeness of the crumbling edge, as is the fissured ground. In that inferno, they will feel at home.
He is clear about his purpose: by his labours to make himself worthy of her again. And when he's ready he'll find her, he'll make her real by touching her kissing her caressing her, and she'll do the same for him. Vina I'll be the ground beneath your feet and you, in this happy ending, will be all the earth I need.
- Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Tumblings-apart
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Larger-than-usual capacity for love
He filled himself up with God knows what, but he could not deny, in the small hours of his insomiac nights, that he was full of something that had never been used, that he did not know how to begin to use, that is, love. In his dreams he was tormented by women of unbearable sweetness and beauty, so he preferred to stay awake and force himself to rehearse some part of his general knowledge in order to blot out the tragic feeling of being endowed with a larger-than-usual capacity for love, without a single person on earth to offer it to.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Life went on fighting
And as for himself: what did he really want? I'll know when I see her, he thought. The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Hijack, fall, arrest
What is unforgivable?
What if not the shivering nakedness of being wholly known to a person one does not trust? - And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in circumstances - hijack, fall, arrest - in which the secrets of the self were utterly exposed?
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
What if not the shivering nakedness of being wholly known to a person one does not trust? - And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in circumstances - hijack, fall, arrest - in which the secrets of the self were utterly exposed?
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Am uncompromising; absolute; pure
His offer had contained an old question: What kind of idea are you? And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. I was tempted, but am renewed; am uncompromising; absolute; pure.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
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