A matter of degree
How simple it might have been to remain unmarried, but he’d wanted a family and was smitten, so here he was. There’s a built-in contradiction to it, as marriage leaves no hiding places for any differences impervious to alteration. A household is the stage on which domestic drama has its long run, the children as audience. Later, an internal chorus takes it up. By then he might accept how his efforts were traduced, though without malice.
Out in the world, randomness flitted through, but most people are handed their behaviors and follow blindly, their minds elsewhere. Knowing is a knowledge of others’ particularity, but she remains a mystery, her life an expression of her nature and a byproduct of her work.
This knowing of others is his only art. It reminded him of Tacita Dean’s film of Merce Cunningham rehearsing, barely directing the dancers, never raising his voice, light from the harbor pouring in and moving around, like the upper-floor hotel rooms he favored, the performers taking each other’s measure, finding a repertoire of nuances on which something memorable depends. If his knowing others always ends badly, is it due to the lack of an audience? But then memory brings it back, just as a film does.
Her work takes her away and sometimes she lingers. Mementos are brought back, along with marks. This burdens things a bit, and then she lifts the ban, affection’s closer expressions resuming. He leaves her alone until it passes. Absenting himself for an afternoon takes the edge off of this.
His pursuits are mixed with fatalism and resignation, those two lucky rabbits’ feet. The I Ching suggests to hunt where there’s game, but some hunters deny they’re hunting. His world is one of constant exposure. He could chalk it up to statistics, but there’s a whiff of poesis. Modern life’s remarkably small owing to specialization and its corollary, no anonymity. It’s easier for her, whereas he has to fit it in between work and everyday life. Abbreviated, yes, yet one knows and extrapolates.
His idea of marriage is steeped in domesticity: perpetuating themselves and then organizing a future to pay for it. Knowing is incidental, pursued for its own sake until exhausted. Marriage’s barriers are Zen barriers, each with its koan. He could write his own Blue Cliff Record or Kafka aphorisms.
His idea of marriage reflects how mating sets aside any pragmatic qualms about the differences one notes immediately. Or we intuit their importance to the genetic melding that follows, discovering traits that are the outcomes of eons of earlier unions, if that word applies to boundaries so porous. It’s a hunger for this that attracts us. Everything else is a nostalgic allegiance to a semblance of order or a neurological oddness she lacks, so one more thing they engineered out of the kids.
In conversation with two friends, one speculated that the three were on the spectrum, but emotive. Was it true? Everything had to align, “straighten up” given a literal meaning. A dialed-up version would compel it. His could pass it off as composition. His daughter has it, he realized, hidden as curation. The house is a cabinet of wonders but the back of it is out front like that Michael Frayn play, only no need to turn anything around.
There are places where order is scrupulously kept. Business takes him there on occasion, but with knowing it’s the view he remembers, along with the myopia of intimacy, or is it that the other senses come forward? In those worlds, for work or for pleasure, each retain aspects of the other.
Knowing’s beauty is theatrically lit. This relates to love slowing time, and when time loses that quality, the lighting changes. She’s enduringly beautiful, but time never slows with her as it does with them. This is part of marriage’s generality, while knowing proceeds deductively.
