Gerhard’s Reviews > Second Place > Status Update

You see, I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force – the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that all our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out – no matter how long it takes – for the best.

There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

It was set in an alternate world, Jeffers, with dragons and monsters and armies of imaginary creatures interminably fighting one another, and great lists of names like in parts of the Old Testament, and pages of oracular-sounding dialogue which Kurt spoke out very slowly and solemnly.

‘I’ve often thought it’s fathers who make painters,’ he said, ‘while writers come from their mothers.’
I asked him why he thought that.
‘Mothers are such liars,’ he said. ‘Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.’

In the period of difficulty before I met Tony, I told him, I was sent to see a psychoanalyst who drew a map of my character on a piece of paper. He thought he could sum it up, on a crumpled piece of A4!

This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it.

I think of the marsh as the vast woolly breast of some sleeping god or animal, whose motion is the deep, slow motion of somnambulant breathing.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?