The Narrator Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took my clothes off and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled gray and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.
I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French were the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled.
For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I would be able to use because there has [sic] never been any important women artists. That was before we were married and I still listened to what he said, so I went into Design and did fabric patterns.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate […] if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.
I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death.
If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe that you are the God, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die?
Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill.
A part of the body, a dead animal. I wondered what part of them the heron was, that they needed so much to kill it.
Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that was no different; it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer.
From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.
I willed it, I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.
No gods to help me now, they’re questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus. They’ve receded, back to the past, inside the skull, it is the same place.
The Narrator Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took my clothes off and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled gray and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.
I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French were the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled.
For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I would be able to use because there has [sic] never been any important women artists. That was before we were married and I still listened to what he said, so I went into Design and did fabric patterns.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate […] if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.
I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death.
If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe that you are the God, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die?
Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill.
A part of the body, a dead animal. I wondered what part of them the heron was, that they needed so much to kill it.
Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that was no different; it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer.
From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.
I willed it, I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.
No gods to help me now, they’re questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus. They’ve receded, back to the past, inside the skull, it is the same place.
