Possession - A.S. Byatt (5) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

"The tide was out; the sea was far away. The moment had come for a personal conversation. Both felt this; both were mostly willing, but inhibited" (282).

"'I had a bad time, with Fergus. We tormented each other. I hate that, I hate the noise, the distraction....He's one of those men who argues by increments of noise - so that as you open your mouth he says another, cleverer, louder thing'" (283).

"'It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting'" (284).

Beautiful, about Maud's perpetually turbaned hair: "'You shouldn't. You should let it out.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Because if anyone can't see it they think and think about it, they wonder what it's like, so you attract attention to it. Also because, because...'

'I see.'

He waited. Maud untied the head-square. The segments of the plaits were like streaked and polished oval stones, celandine yellow, straw yellow, silvery yellow, glossy with constricted life. Roland was moved - not exactly with desire, but with an obscure emotion that was partly pity, for the rigorous constriction all that mass had undergone, to be so structured into repeating patterns. If he closed his eyes and squinted, the head against the sea was crowned with knobby horns.

'Life is so short, said Roland. 'It has a right to breathe.'

And indeed his feeling was for the hair, a kind of captive creature. Maud pulled out a pin or two and the mass slipped, and then hung, still plaited, unbalanced on her neck" (284-285).

And then: "She began to undo, with unweaving fingers, the long, thick braids. Roland watched, intently. There was a final moment when six thick strands, twice three, lay still and formed over her shoulders. And then she put down her head and shook it from side to side, and the heavy hair flew up, and the air got into it. Her long neck bowed, she shook her head faster and faster, and Roland saw the light rush towards it and glitter on it, the whirling mass, and Maud inside it saw a moving sea of gold lines, waving, and closed her eyes and saw scarlet blood" (285).

"For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in a tower, and his imagination's work had been all to make her present, all of her, to his mind and senses, the quickness of her and the mystery, the whiteness of her, which was part of her extreme magnetism, and the green look of those piercing or occluded eyes. Her presence had been unimaginable, or more strictly, only to be imagined. Yet here she was, and he was engaged in observing the ways in which she resembled, or differed from, the woman he dreamed, or reached for in his sleep, or would fight for" (289).

All fantastic: "As a young man he had been much struck by the story of Wordsworth and his solitary Highland girl; the poet had heard the enchanted singing, taken in exactly as much as he needed for his own immortal verse, and had refused to hear more. He himself, he had discovered, was different. He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him. nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide. So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her. He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present. The face not kind. There was no kindliness in the face. It was cut clean but not fine - strong-boned rather, so that temples and slanting cheeks were pronounced and solid-shadowed, the shadows bluish, which in imagination he always touched with green too, but it was not so.

If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp.

He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression - an assumed modesty, or expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst - oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him - at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world's expectations" (290).

"'The German sea. Like steel, with life in it'" (291).

"She watched him with her sharp look when she thought herself unobserved, but not with solicitude, nor yet with affection, nor yet with the greedy curiosity he could not suppress in himself. She watched as a bird watches, the sort that it chained to the stand, some bright plumed creature of the tropical forests, some gold-eyed hawk from northern crags, wearing its jesses with what dignity it could muster, enduring man's presence with a still-savage hauteur, ruffling its feathers from time to time, to show both that it tended itself with respect, and that it was not quite comfortable" (292). I resent her for her half-care and for her disinterest in Ash.

"He walked calmly, in his private electric storm" (293).

"'We are all part of some divine organism I do believe, that breathes its own breath and lives a little here, and dies a little there, but is eternal. And you are a manifestation of its secret perfection. You are the life of things.'

'Oh no. I am a chilly mortal, as Mrs. Cammish said yesterday morning, when I put on my shawl. It is you who are the life of things. You stand there and draw them into you. You turn your gaze on the dull and the insipid to make them shine. And ask them to stay, and they will not, so you find their vanishing of equal interest. I love that in you. Also I fear it. I need quiet and nothingness. I tell myself I should fade and glimmer if long in your hot light'" (297-298).

"Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past, and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference" (299).

"Inhuman Powers cross our little lives. / The whale's warm milk runs beneath icy seas. / Electric currents run from eye to eye / And pole to pole, magnetic messages / From out our Beings, through them, and beyond" (302).

This little line just enchants me: ""Writ by wise men, as guides to wandering wits" (303).

"The siren sings and sings, and virtuous men / Bind ears and eyes and sail resolved away / From all her pain that what she loves must die, / That her desire, though lovely in her song / Is mortal in her kiss to mortal men" (304).

"were those her kind / More kind, those rapid wanderers of the dark / Who in dreamlight, or twilight, or no light / Are lovely Mysteries and promise gifts - / Whiteladies, teasing dryads, shape-changers - / Like smiling clouds, or sparkling threads of streams / Bright monsters of the sea and of the sky / Who answer longing and who threaten not / But vanish in the light of rational day / Doomed by their own desire for human souls, For settled hearths and fixed human homes" (304-305). Very Paglian.

"It was a face / Queenly and calm, a carved face and strong / Nor curious, nor kindly. nor aloof, / But self-contained and singing to itself. / And as her met her eyes, she ceased her song, / And made a silence, and it seemed to him . That in this silence all the murmuring ceased / Of leaves and water, and they two were there, / And all they did was look, no question / No answer, neither frown nor smile, no move / Of lip or eye or brow or eyelid pale / But all one long look which consumed his soul / Into desire beyond the reach of hope / Beyond the touch of doubt or of despair, / So that he was one thing, and all he was, The fears, the contradictions and the pains, The reveller's pleasures and the sick man's whims, / All gone, forever gone, all burned away / Under the steady and essential gaze / Of this pale Creature in this quiet space" (309).

"Much of his writing met this fate: it was set down, depersonalised, and then erased. Much of his time was spent deciding whether or not to erase things. He usually did" (312).

After their escape from nothing very solid but lots of terrifying half-entities:

"'We must be mad,' said Roland.

'Of course we are mad. And bad. I lied shamelessly to Leonora. I've done worse - I nicked Ariane Le Minier's address when she wasn't looking. I'm as bad as Cropper or Blackadder. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. This one's got a bit out of hand. But the bliss of breathing sea air and not having to share my flat with Leonora for the next few weeks -'

It was odd to hear Maud Bailey talking wildly of madness and bliss" (343).

And then: "They were not touching. They were sitting amicably close and not touching. 'Oddly, said Maud, 'if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad'" (343).

The beginning of Christabel's cousin's first diary entry:

"The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin? This is the book in which I shall make myself into a true writer; here I shall learn my craft, and here I shall record whatever of interest I may experience or discover....I began this writing task at the suggestion of my cousin, Christabel LaMotte, who said something that struck me most forcibly. 'A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experiment with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire.' She said too, when I told her of my great desire to write, and the great absence in my daily existence of things of interest, events or passions, which might form the subject matter of poetry or fiction, that it was an essential discipline to write down whatever there was in my life to be noticed, however usual or dull it might seem to me. This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came - as it must in all lives - when something momentous should cry out - she said 'cry out' - to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest" (346-347).

And later: "A lesson. Work written only for one pair of eyes, the writer's, loses some of its vitality, but en revanche gains a certain freedom, and rather to my surprise, adult quality. It loses its desire, female as well as infantile, to charm" (348).

"I cannot control my thoughts, and Christabel says that this journal must be free from 'the repetitious vapours and ecstatic sighings of commonplace girls with commonplace feelings'" (351). Christabel's such a brat. I know I'm supposed to like her, but this idea that the commonplace cannot be written of - because, somehow, it isn't really possessed by her or her cousin - is wishful, delusional, highfalutin. Bleh.

Sabine again: "I would like to see silk floss and experience the atmosphere of the boudoir - but I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write. Is this too much? Is this declaration vapouring" (352)?

A gem: "I can't so describe my father's eyes, nor his hair, nor his stoop. He is too close. If you hold a book too close to your face in poor candlelight, the characters blur. So with my father" (353).

More Sabine: "The pleasures of writing are various. The language of reflection has its own pleasure and the language of narration quite a different tone" (356).

"I do not believe in all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of Woman is less than brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin" (368). Go Sabine!

"For some time now it [this journal] has been neither writer's exercise nor record of my world, only a narrative of jealousy and bafflement and resentment. I have noticed that writing such things down does not exorcise them, only gives them solid life, as the witch's wax dolls take on vitality when she warms them into shape before pricking them" (386).

"She said, in Romance, women's two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels" (389).

"I think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting" (390).

"Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. 'Falling in love', characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Finding themselves in a plot, they might suppose it appropriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with" (437).

"they were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors of these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared" (439).

"Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his 'self' as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this" (440).

"Her driving had panache and swoop, but was not comfortable" (441).

"He was writing lists of words. He was writing lists of words that resisted arrangement into the sentences of literary criticism or theory, He had hoped - more, intimations of imminence - of writing poems, but so far had got no further than lists. These were, however, compulsive and desperately important" (445-446).

"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by" (446).

"They talked about the weather in an English way and little currents of sexual anxiety ran round the table, also in an English way" (448).