Reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie's ode to love, beauty, loss... to our better angels and affinity with the demons, I found myself turning pages over and over, frustrated, amazed, humbled and in wonderment over the prose, the insights into the realities and potentials of love, the expert writing of a master. As an insatiable audiophile, Rushdie's exploration of music left me feeling like a child in an adult's world; as a photographer, he humbles me with a lover's intimacy of the creation of art; as a writer, he breaks my heart with a mastery of words unutterably beyond my ken. But it's a recognition of and respect for a true master to pause and be humbled, to bathe in the glow of genius.
Something I love about Rushdie is his ceaseless use of intertextuality that situates his work within a canon of literature, music, popular culture, ancient religion and mythology; it takes its place in this palimpsest as a peer in the only conversation that matters: what it means to human. His work continually alludes to the world of art, but shyly so, making it easy to read on and miss all of the references; however, when they are recognized, it's a moment of charming connection between the author and reader, a wink and a nudge, a sly nod of mutual understanding and respect. And it's something that I look forward to as I will one day re-read his canon and understand his work in a new way, creating a text that is influenced by my own life.
I can't recommend highly enough this book.
Below, a few of my favourite lines from the book.
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When a woman who obsesses you hands down harsh judgements, they go deep. And when the chance to make those judgements come true offers itself, maybe you take them, maybe you live down to her low opinion of you and spend the rest of your life with the no-longer-deniable accusation stabbing you in the heart.
We repeat in ourselves the faults of the ones we have loved.
Love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
It's tough to speak of the beautify of the world when one has lost one's sight, an anguish to sing music's praises when your ear trumpet has failed. So also it is hard to write about love, even harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. Which is no excuse; happens to everyone.
Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost.
Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? ... Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
All they had in life was attitude, but it was a steed which would get you a long way if you knew how to stay on its back.
She embraced instability, her own and the world's, and made up her own rules as she went along. Nothing was certain in her vicinity any more, the ground was always trembling, and of course the fault lines spread through her from top to toe, and faults in human beings always open up in the end, like cracks in the groaning earth.
What was it like, the First Photograph? Its subject: nothing more elevated than the view from the workroom window... All is dull, still, dim. No hint here that this is the first quiet note of what will become a thundering symphony, or it may be more honest to say a deafening cacophony. But (I switch metaphors in my excitement) a floodgate has been opened, an unstoppable torrent of pictures is to follow, haunting and forgettable, hideous and beautiful, pornographic and revelatory, pictures that will create the very idea of the Modern, that will overpower language itself, and cover and distort and define the earth, like water.
Here the polyphonic reality of the road disappeared and was replaced by silences, mutenessses as vast as the land. Here was a wordless truth, one that came before language, a being, not a becoming. No cartographer had fully mapped these endless spaces. To journey down some of these tracks was to travel back in time for over a thousands years.
While the gods are occupying centre stage, we mortals must hang about in the wings. But after the stars have finished all their tragic dying, the extras come on stage - it's the end of the big banquet scene - and we get to eat up all the fucking food.
He hunted it as a madman hunts his doom.
It fizzled; she drifted away, as I knew she would. Nothing really went wrong between us, but then there really was nothing between us to go wrong. We were both filling in dead time, and one day she woke up and looked at me and had forgotten who I was. I went to take a shower and didn't hear her go.
Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to be... that is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape... it's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterward retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball... it's done.
Male love is a kind of self-assessment. We allow ourselves to love only those women to whom we feel we have a right to pay court, to whom we dare aspire.
2 comments:
I heard of this work a few days ago and was amazed by some of the things I read in his wikipedia article. I am glad the fatwa against him has failed so far. What an interesting mind he has, touching upon and bringing together masterfully so many spheres of cultural influence.
cools shot! nice contents here..
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