Continuing to delve ever further into William H Gass’s The Tunnel I find the usual superfluity of quotable chunks but there is a couple that I scribbled down in my notebook and now wish to share: ‘It was I who was supposed to be having an adventure, but it was she who had it.’ (Page 556) and ‘The greatest gift you can give another human being is to let them warm you till, in passing beyond pleasure, your defences fall, your ego surrenders, its structure melts, its towers topple, lies, fancies, vanities, blow away in the wind, and you return, not to the clay you came from – the unfired vessel – but to the original moment of inspiration, when you were the unabbreviated breath of God.’ (Page 560)
It was worth saying that life is about pursuing adventures, but I guess at any one time the role of adventurer is passed around the circle of participants. In the first quotation there is an ‘I’ and a ‘she’; man and woman. This places my view on these last forty years of adjustment to our changed conception of woman and her place in the social matrix. How do we negotiate the question of who is to have the adventure? No longer can we assume that adventuring is something that is for men only. Does that leave men mourning the loss of their monopoly on adventure?
In the second quotation we have that melting centre of intimate life from which we are able to touch something larger than ourselves. Something that Gass identifies (through his narrator) as a breathing something, a something that calls for the idea of original, something from which we came from, something which cannot (should not) be reduced.
I’m looking at the word original. I’m looking at the O that is the open mouth of the sound. The beginning of everything. The beginning of this new day, this new year. A sound which strains to move into this newness. The open mouth of our original inspiration to be the the engagement, the grappling, skin tingling, laughing . . . what do we call it? Being in love? The beingness in loveness, our original commitment.
