I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday to the sound of my dog pacing back and forth in the hallway because she’d gotten so scared of the incoming tornado she’d shit herself in the kitchen. The only thing “more pathetic than caution / when headlong might save a life” is the sight of a dog cowering after having done something forbidden. I cleaned it up, got back in bed. A few hours of no-sleep later, I got it in my head that I wanted to listen to Interpol.
All my knowledge of Interpol is embryonic and feral. I remember standing in the living room of my grandmother’s house and watching the video to “Obstacle 1” on MTV — I must’ve been 11 — and feeling like I was peeking into a world I wasn’t even aware existed. I couldn’t believe these people were presumably breathing the same air as me, walking the same Earth, made of the same stuff.
Did I like Interpol? Do I like Interpol? It’s impossible to say. I’ve been listening to them fairly consistently all week, and I’ve heard most of these songs before, and they still sound to me exactly like they sounded the last time I really listened to them almost two decades ago: like they have their roots in something ineffable, something I would like to know but might never.
I can say this with certainty: I am attracted to Interpol. I’m attracted to them in the same way I’ve been attracted to my favorite novelist, Nell Zink, who writes from a place of such absolute confidence and absolute bareness that it makes me want to find the synthetic kernel in the middle of it all. Sometimes the truth in her novels is undigested; there’s a lot of room left for the reader to fill in, to draw their own conclusions, to interpret in whatever way. I read Zink, and I think: what does she know? And how does she know it? I keep reading because that sense of mystery draws me in. There is something just beyond my grasp, and I want it — so badly. Do I like her writing? I guess I do; I guess I must, otherwise I’d stop reading. But ultimately whether or not I like Zink’s writing is less important than the attraction, the feeling of searching for something I sense is there but of whose existence I might never receive confirmation.
I’ve been reading a lot of Rachel Cusk lately, starting with her divorce memoir Aftermath a month or two ago, then moving on to the Outline trilogy, pausing briefly in the middle of Transit to read her newest (Second Place) in one day before I lost it to another library patron who placed a hold on it, and then finally biting the bullet and purchasing the entire Outline trilogy so I could put little tabs in all my favorite parts. I’m on to the last of the three, Kudos, now.
The reading experience has been entirely absorbing. Cusk is as smart as I one day hope to be and writes as well as I can imagine anyone writing, point after sharpest point in the space of a single page, sometimes a single sentence. I like it so much I keep taking pictures of the pages and sending it to a few friends with no context, though they can usually guess where the excerpt is from because it’s all I can talk about sometimes. I like Cusk because she puts words to things I already think — “a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted,” for example — much more succinctly and deftly than I can, and because she’s thought about things so thoroughly that it would be hard to argue with the final synthesis of her analyses on whatever, whether it be marriage or divorce or parenthood or friendship or being a woman raised by men or a woman raised by women.
The parallels between Aftermath and the Outline trilogy are remarkable, Cusk using the oxygenating freedom granted to her by fiction to explore alternate scenarios, to expand on feelings between facts, to make more room in a narrative that ultimately tells the same story. Reading her work has made me feel a sense of deep kinship in my ruthless but not unfeeling unsentimentality at a particularly complex time in my life. I like her writing.
I’m also attracted to it. I see the sharpness I’d like to think I could one day find in myself and know it’s, at this moment, still out of my reach. That turns me on, in the sense that it makes me want to do the things I am always doing — thinking, paying attention, writing — but more and better.
I don’t feel so sharply awake, so recognized, when I listen to Interpol. Letting the sound pound into my ears — that distorted voice, the piles of guitars high in the mix, those obscene bass lines — the experience is much less challenging, and much more immediately rewarding, than reading ideas whose essence feels pulled from the spot where my throat meets my chest and whose clarity I might one day intimate. It won’t stick with me forever; I won’t carry it inside me; I won’t come back to reread lines I’ve marked with colored tabs; I won’t send photos of its metaphorical pages to my friends. But I’ll pump my fists when Paul Banks sings “our heaven is just waiting / so put your hand into mine,” writhing pleasurably in the almost certain knowledge that wherever he’s come from I’ll never go.