Time Isn't After Us

When Smashmouth said the years start coming and they don't stop coming, they meant that

The Sunday Letter #31

Yesterday evening, a rainy Saturday night: I walk into a showing of the iconic 1984 Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, and I am immediately blown away. Newly restored ahead of its 40th anniversary, the film was joyous, raucous, and jubilant. It was remarkable watching a band at its prime, each musician moving in tandem with every flying bead of sweat illuminated around them. By the time they got to Once in a Lifetime I felt like I was levitating.

“Time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us.” Maybe it was the ~gummy~ I popped ahead of the screening, but the lyrics made me oddly emotional. As a child, I thought the song was a riddle, or some sort of adult inside joke. A man wakes up in a strange house, and doesn’t recognize the woman claiming to be his wife: it sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood the urgency behind Byrne’s anxious messaging; how quickly years move through you, how often you feel both stuck in time and outside of it.

This year alone we attended three weddings, two out of province, with one more to go. It’s been five years since our own wedding, and we keep saying we need to finally take our honeymoon, but we already have at least three more weddings to attend next year. This stage of life snuck up on us, even though everyone told us it was coming. But I feel so lucky, truly! I feel honoured to witness friends and family come together and I cry every time, through every speech. Each wedding is unique, each celebration of love different in its expression of it. But man, when Smashmouth said the years start coming and they don’t start coming…they meant that.

Enjoying the BC seafood 🦞

A few weeks ago we traveled to Vancouver to attend a wedding with a friend group that formed when we were young university students over nine years ago. As babies crawled around our feet and recent engagements were celebrated, we all kept shouting, “how has it almost been ten years already?” We stayed in one big house together, chatting late into the night, catching up, feeling like no time had passed and all the time had passed. Later, I turned to one friend and said, “is this how our parents felt?” As in, did our parents also blink one day and suddenly find themselves paying taxes and a mortgage and saving up for five weddings a year and baby showers and retirement and RRSP’s? Time isn’t after us…but could it be?

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I finished A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk this week. Written as a non-chronological fever dream, the memoir is Cusk’s recollection of the year following the birth of her first daughter. A frayed nerve, Cusk writes from the edge of society. She lays bare the anxieties of a new mother freshly scorned at the realization that this is how it is, how it’s apparently always been. In a chapter about the madness induced by her daughter’s bout of colic, she writes:

I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise.

Published in 2001, the memoir was apparently very controversial for its time, given Cusk’s piercing discomfort with the isolation of motherhood: “it is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting.” But it reads, too, as remarkably relevant to today’s moment, in which new moms face so many existential threats on a daily basis. She bemoans how easy her parents’ generation had it, and feels utterly unprepared for the day-to-day realities of parenting. Cusk is a brilliant writer, and she describes with a lucid sadness how it felt to disappear from language and stories, from herself.

“Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.” — A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

Someone on Twitter remarked recently that they “can think of an enormous amount of writing that sort of intellectualizes motherhood” but that they couldn’t say the same for books about fatherhood. I have no idea whether there is statistical proof about this supposed imbalance, because I fervently seek out writing about the intersection of motherhood and art, and I’m not even a mother! But reading A Life’s Work, I thought a lot about the enormous creative pressure of motherhood, and the act of mothering. I’ve seen the way new mothers disappear in groups, relegated to the edges as they occupy their child. I’ve seen women illuminated by motherhood, regardless of whether the choice of it was painful, complicated, or ambiguous.

I am likely many years away from that reality, if/when it happens for me at all, but I continue to be amazed by the cycles of life, how things change and stay the same. By the end of A Life’s Work, Cusk’s daughter is one. Or, as they say in French, “elle a un an,” as in, “she has a year.” Cusk remarks on how lively she is, how set in place she already seems. She has strong opinions, is unswayable. Gone are the sleepless nights spent breastfeeding, but here are the new fears, the way Cusk must allow her out into the world without her. How remarkable that apparently time isn’t after us after all, despite all evidence to the contrary.

This week’s recommendations

Five years ago, Rachel Cusk bravely announced that characters don’t exist anymore, likely meaning that most of her writing is based in reality, with a veneer of novelistic structure obscuring the true self at the centre of her stories. The “true self” seems to be a common topic in what I consumed this week. Let’s unpack that…

I finished Cusk’s memoir after having just read “Me, Myself, and I,” in which

miri

writes, "The project of self-spectatorship is fundamentally about a migration of the self—from the self or towards the self.” It’s a fascinating piece about what we reveal about ourselves, about the artifices of art, and troubles of genre. Miri’s piece also fits well with “We’ve Come a Long Way from the Personal Essay Era,” in which

Arbela Capas

reflects on the tension being knowing what to share and what to hold back in the era of writing online.

This article from Bustle about creators who grow to hate their brand had me feeling all kinds of ways about how much my own identity is shaped by what I choose to present of myself online. Like an ouroboros, I am constantly consumed by whether what I’m presenting online reflects who I want to be seen as in real life, or whether my real life is a distillation of my online one, and those lines continue to blur. Not to be dystopian about it but I kinda think that’s a feeling most future generations will have to contend with!

On the topic of sharing vs. holding back: out of sheer curiosity, I watched the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana last week. Swift deliberately obscures the meticulous machinations that have made her into a global megastar with a (mostly) pristine public image, so the documentary felt a bit undercooked. I could watch a whole documentary about her writing songs though, à la Paul McCartney in The Beatles: Get Back.

Someone who I would say does share a lot but is even more mysterious (to me) than TSwift is Julia Fox, and her recent interview by Jia Tolentino felt raw and illuminating, especially re: her choice to lean into the grotesque to repel men. I can’t wait to pick up her book later this month.

This article about men posting books in their dating profiles made me chuckle. The social performance of reading knows no gender!

A Twitter thread about books “every artist should read.”

Annie Hamilton on how to quit smoking when you’re really, really good at it.

Hannah Baer on loneliness and apocalypse capitalism: “As I began to research loneliness, I wondered if I was lonely, and what that meant to me.”

This Claudia Dey interview: “I have a subterranean fear of performance when there is a huge component of performance in writing—going for what is precisely true and alive without adorning it.”