--{ because }------
Because I enjoy cold emptiness, I have been reading
Kureishi's Intimacy while listening to Death Cab for Cutie's new
EP, Stability. Both the novella and the EP are stark stark stark, and
make me feel as if my layers are being slowly frozen and crushed into some
kind of organic powdered snow.
You wouldn't believe how pure
Intimacy feels, how weird and transparent and filled with conflicts
that are too icy to be angstful. It makes me feel so empty I can't even
cry.
The weird thing is that the book is nothing, plotwise, like the
movie.1 The movie centered around a
protagonist's weekly trysts with a
woman he didn't know at all. The book is about the night before a
protagonist leaves his girlfriend and their two children, and his
thoughts. The words have the same jumpy resonance of Wittgenstein's
Mistress, and the same echoing truths of, well, Kureishi's other
stuff.
Wait, correction. That's not the weird thing. The weird
thing is how the book's tone is exactly like the movie's even though the
book's plot is nothing like the movie's. They have the same all-too-true
emptiness. The protagonist's recognition of responsibility, at least in
part. But the coexistence of hope for the future, despite it all. And
the transience, always the consistency of transience.
The
relationship between the book and the movie was similar, too, for Ghost
World. The remarkable similarity in tone and atmosphere, given the
plot differences. As if under an impressionist's scheme, the book and the
movie would be the same work. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat how this
was done.
But so much for my wonder at this. I've overwhelmed
myself with cold now, and it's time to warm up. The danger of this type
of immersion is that I will stay too long, and dwell in it, just to soak
up as much of this feeling as I can. Because after awhile, it's hard to
get out.
post-note: As usual, I find that
someone else has pointed out what I could not point out, and has done it
much better than if I had even tried to do so. From Ben Marcus, in a book
review (of another book) in the News and Observer: "Yates makes you think
for a while that no other outcome is even likely, but the upside is that
we do things, we live, we have relationships, for their intrinsic
pleasure, and not as a guarantee. His bleakness is in fact an argument
for joy right now."
Yes. That's it.
Read the last paragraph of Intimacy. It does exactly that.
031902
1. Okay, upon reading the short stories that come with the novella, I now see plot bits from which the movie is pieced together.