Possession - A.S. Byatt (4) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

There are faster ways to read, but I'm glad I have all of these quotes and notes to reflect on later.

"You have read my thoughts - or made clear to me what were my predispositions - not in an intrusive way - but with true insight" (186). That's what we crave when we seek out relationships.

"You understood my very phrase - the Life of Language. You understand - in my life Three - and Three alone have glimpsed - that the need to set down words - what I see, so - but words too, words mostly - words have been all my life, all my life - this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out - the silk is her life, her home, her safety - her food and drink too - and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew - you will say she is patient - so she is - she may also be Savage - it is her Nature - she Must - or die of Surfeit" (188).

"I may call myself your friend, may I not? For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth" (188).

"I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become - all at once, all wound in one - and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. Do not misunderstand me - I do not mean missishly 'poetical' - but the source of the driving force of the lines - And when I write lines I mean the lines of verse indeed, but also some lines of life which run indifferently through us - from Origin to Finish" (190).

"How shall I answer you? I have been abrupt and ungracious - from fear of Infirmity of Purpose, and because I am a voice - a voice that would be still and small - crying plaintively out of a Whirlwind - which I may not in Honesty describe to you" (194).

I hate her coyness here. Already, it's clear that she's going to give in: "I have chosen a Way - dear Friend - I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott - with a Narrower Wisdom - who chooses not the Gulp of outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards - but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too - You will say, you are no threat to That. You will argue - rationally. There are things we have not said to each other beyond the - One - you so starkly - Defined. I know in my Intrinsic Self - the Threat is there" (196).

"A lover might indeed in all honour accept such a conge - but a peaceable, a valued friend? It is not as though I ever breathed - or scribbled or scratched - the faintest hint of any improper attention - no 'if things were otherwise, ah well then...' no 'Your eyes, which I know to be bright, may peruse...' - no - all was straightforward from my honest thoughts which are closer to my essential self than any such nonsensical gallantry - and this you cannot support? And why am I so tenacious? I hardly know myself. For the sake of future Swammerdams [his most recent poem], it may be - for I see that I had insensibly come to perceive you - mock not - as some sort of Muse. Could the Lady of Shalott have written Melusina in her barred and moated Tower" (197)?

The problem of all text correspondences meeting in the flesh: "And did you find - as I did - how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other so much better? I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries - you are more mysterious in your presence (as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we all are so. I cannot tell)" (200).

P.201 – the admission we all knew was coming: “I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth – my Love – there, it is said – for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in the world – a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, and to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command. (Except complete silence, you will rightly say, which was out of my power.)"

“But, my Dear, I cannot do this. It goes against nature – not my own particularly, but Dame Nature herself – who this morning smiles at me in and through you, so that everything is alight – from the anemones on my desk to the motes of dust in the beam of sunlight through the window, to the words on the page in front of me (John Donne) with you, with you, with you. I am happy – as I have never been happy – who should be writing to you in who I can say what agony of mind full of guilt and horrified withdrawal” (202).

“a single famished kiss” (202).

“Oh Sir – things flicker and shift, they are indeed all spangle and sparks and flashes. I have sat by my fireside all this long evening – on my safe stool - turning my burning cheeks toward the Aspirations of the flame and the caving-in, the ruddy mutter, the crumbling of the consumed coals to – where am I leading myself – to lifeless dust - Sir. And then - out there - when the Rainbow stood out on the dark air over a drowning world – no Lightning struck those Trees, nor trickled along their Wooden Limbs to earth – yet flame licked, flame enfolded, flame looped veins – burned up and utterly consumed” (203).

“Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness. This has extended from the burning in the clearing – until this minute – and now speaks. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed. Not that I have not dreamed of walking in the furnace – as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego – But we latter-day Reasonable Beings have not the miracle-working Passion of the old believers – I have known – Incandescence – and must decline to sample it further” (204). Boo.

“What am I to make of your missive – I had almost writ missile” (205). I just like that.

“It is Love’s nature to know itself eternal” (205).

“We must come to grief and regret anyway – and I for one would rather regret the reality rather than its phantasm, knowledge and hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities” (205).

“The true exercise of freedom is – cannily and wisely and with grace – to move inside what space confines – and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. But we are human – and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means” (209).

“I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest – ‘I love you for yourself alone’ – ‘I love you essentially’ – and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by ‘you essentially’ – lips hands and eyes. But you must know – we do know – that is not so – dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry – the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought – quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra’s hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony – more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic) – your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished” (210).

"I have not much to leave. Once I had much, / or thought it much, but men thought otherwise. / Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things / Lively in death, injected by my Art, / Lovingly entered, opened and displayed - / The types of Nature's Bible, ranged in ranks / To show the secrets of her cunning hand" (212).

"Think you, a man's life grows a certain shape / As out of ant's egg antworm must proceed / And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come / The monstrous female or the winged drone / Or hurrying worker, each in its degree? / I am a small man, closed in a small space, / Expert in smallness, in the smallest things, / The inconsiderable and overlooked, / The curious and ephemeral" (213).

"'We thought it was bad being young and - in some cases, not in mine - attractive - but it was worse when we grew older. There is an age which, I profoundly believe, one becomes a witch" (231-232).

P. 242 - 2nd complete entry. Blanche and Mrs. Ash? Or Christabel? She's so casual, which seems impossible.

A clue: "When he returns, I must be quick and lively. It must be so" (243). Whichever girl it was, I'd be surprised if Ellen didn't know.

Maud on Ellen: "'She could write. I didn't immediately see what you meant by baffling. And then, I think I did. On the evidence of that part of the journal - I couldn't form a very clear idea of what she was like. Or if I liked her. She tells things. Interesting things. But they don't make a whole picture.'

'Which of us do?' asked Beatrice" (243-244). None of us make a whole picture. However, some of us are better at making our whole picture, or at least its basic outline. Ellen deliberately omits. I like it, I think, but not as a writerly habit. I like it because she isn't a writer.

And it was Blanche. P. 245. It's almost impossible Ellen didn't know.

"the grey voice" (246). Beatrice is like a dying elf.

"'People's minds do hook together -'

'They do'" (248). It's wonderful, because their minds are hooking, as they say, while they talk about R. Ash and Christabel.

"'Literary critics make natural detectives'" (249).

"Now these first men were quite unmanned by light. / The first wet light, of the first days, that washed / Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea / With liquid gold and silvered every crest / That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth. / What had lived by the whispering of the sap / Had feelingly discerned the shivering air / Known dark and light along the rugged bark / Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool - / Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light / Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold / And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot / With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes. / All this they more than saw and less than saw" (253).

"Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body, The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist" (264). I've just realized that I haven't asked, 'who am I?' in a couple years.

"'Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects - all the time - and I suppose one studies - I study - literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful - as though we held a clue to the true nature of things'" (266).

"'And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness.'

'Impotence,' said Maud, leaning over, interested.

'I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor'" (266).

"Maud considered. She said, 'In every age, there must be truths people can't fight - whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose - to imagine - he could possibly have been wrong about human nature'" (266-267).

"the human imagination mixes and adapts to its current preoccupations many ingredients into new wholes - it is essentially poetic" (268).

"if there is a subject that is my own, my dear Ellen, as a writer I mean, it is the persistent shape-shifting life of things long-dead but not vanished" (269).

This is just lovely twiddle for me: "The shop-fronts were old and full of romance" (270).

"'Folks'll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs" (272). Other people.

Beautiful: "'I've been reading his poems. Ask to Embla. They're good. He wasn't talking to himself. He was talking to her - Embla - Christabel or - Most love poetry is only talking to itself" (279).

And finally, they're talking with each other. Not debating and defending and tip-toeing. "'I was thinking last night - about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are so very knowing. We know all sorts of other things, too - about how there isn't a unitary ego - how we're made up of conflicting, interacting systems of things - and I suppose we believe that? We know we are driven by desire, but we can't see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we - we know it's a suspect ideological construct - especially Romantic Love - so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things - Love - themselves - that what they did mattered -'

'I know. You know what Christabel says, "Outside our small safe place flies Mystery." I feel we've done away with that too - And desire, that we look into so carefully - I think all the looking-into has some very odd effects on the desire.'

'I think that, too.'

'Sometimes I feel,' said Roland carefully, 'that the best state is to be without desire. When I really look at myself -'

'If you have a self -'

'At my life, at the way it is - what I really want is to - to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. Some of that is to do with - my personal circumstances. But some of it's general, I think.'

'I know what you mean. No, that's a feeble thing to say. It's a much more powerful coincidence than that. That's what I think about, when I'm alone. How good it would be to have nothing. How good it would be to desire nothing. And the same image. An empty bed in an empty room. White.'

'White.'

'Exactly the same.'

'How strange.'

'Maybe we're symptomatic of whole flocks of exhausted scholars and theorists. Or maybe it's just us.'

'How funny - how very funny - that we should have come out here, for this purpose, and discover - that - about each other'" (280).

"Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place" (281).

I'm going to leave off here. The homework's been neglected.