A universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level

We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.

I don't know what it is about Rachel Cusk's Transit that made me want to write about love. I jotted down a reference to page 110 in my initial notes, as if something important had struck me, but it's hard for me now to find any connection between what I see on that page and the inspired outpouring I drafted. Maybe something about symbiosis, an inexplicable connection. But it must also be something about universality, a word I'd highlighted. 

In fact, when I check through the passages of Transit that I'd marked, there's very little about love at all. She retells anecdotes various characters share with her in confidence and in passing. I can't tell if there is a theme that threads them together. Perhaps they are all checkpoints on someone's road to awareness.

Without having much of a plot, Transit gives me a feeling, it puts me in a state of sharing the narrator's "post-divorce mind." It's the in-between of then — the kind of life I once led and was always vaguely dissatisfied with — and now — the life I am still growing into. 

I didn't see why, I said, I shouldn't take my share of blame for what had happened; I had never regarded the things that had occurred, however terrible, as anything other than what I myself — whether consciously or not — had provoked. It wasn't a question of seeing my femaleness as interchangeable with fate: what mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the the things that happened, to study their truth. It was hard to do that while still believing in identity, let alone in personal concepts like justice and honour and revenge, just as it was hard to listen while you were talking. 

I'd been hurt, but I coped, and healed. (Had I been loved and betrayed? That sounds so dramatic.) Finally in my late forties I was coming to some minimal awareness, foundational for the exploration to come, of what I was actually feeling and actually thinking — where my thoughts come from, and where my emotions live in my body. I was finding some bodily emotional truth.

Love, I had come to understand, or my experience of one version of it (first post-divorce love), the kind that ends in sudden inexplicable heartbreak after a few weeks of walking on air, carried along by butterflies, does not happen between two people. It happens inside one's own head.

This was borne out by my ability to cope. Recreating the feeling of someone, of being in love with someone, simply by immersing myself in the same stimuli — the music we listened to together, the food and drinks we ate and drank together, the paths we walked, repeating the same rhythms of the day. When it was over, everything was the same, except for his absence, and it felt pretty much the same, I was still happy and in love, albeit with no one in particular, and I realized it didn't matter.

If you're lucky, however you may define luck, you meet someone who is experiencing a sense of love inside their own head/body that is compatible with yours, at the same time, and together you wallow in the universality of a very individual experience.

This may sound sad and lonely to some, that love is solitary. But I find it comforting — that love is not imposed from outside, that this chemical explosion is generated within me, that I can generate it myself — and transcendent. 

They were hunting dogs, the student continued, who ran in packs behind a falcon or hawk, the bird guiding them towards their prey. In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch the hawk as they ran. The complexity and speed of this process, he said, could not be overestimated: the pack flowed silently over the landscape, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on it target. To follow the subtlety of the hawk's signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. This idea, of the two dogs sharing the work of reading the hawk, was one he found very appealing. It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, of consciousness not as an imprisonment in one's own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level — well, like the German trainer before him, he was both seduced by the idea and willing to do the hard work involved in executing it.

It's just over a year ago that I read the first book of this trilogy, Outline. My opinion of this second book is similar: it is quiet and somehow beautiful, giving me not a story but a way into myself. 

Transit reveals its narrator only through the people she encounters, not how they see her so much as how she processes life through them. She is lukewarm and unmoored. There's not much love in Transit; it's post-love and pre-potential-love. It's transition.

I had seemed to see in it a portent whose meaning penetrated me like a skewer in my chest. I could see it, in fact, still, the turbulent whiteness massing and gathering, the wave whose inability to stop itself rising and breaking formed its inescapable destiny. It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

Elsewhere
The Cut: Choose Your Own Rachel Cusk

Excerpt.