Rachel Cusk’s Translated Will
Having a baby would definitely make it harder to do what I want.
Yesterday I went hiking in Grand Teton National Park. I’ve come here with some friends for a long weekend, to celebrate my bachelorette—the first in a series of celebrations that is ramping up, bringing my impending wedding closer and closer. My hiking companion was a seasoned outdoorsman, the only friend I have who knows how to backpack, how to navigate an off-road backcountry, how to properly use a can of bear spray.
Since I am a bookish indoorswoman, raised in the boring bosom of the horizonless Midwest, our friendship has always struck me as slightly improbable: for all the mountains he’s climbed I have libraries visited; for the miles trekked, I have books read. But on this hike I was reminded, as I often am when we are together, of all the ways we are alike—of the orientation we have to life, a shared perspective on the world and the people in it. It would be unkind but perhaps not incorrect to call this perspective pessimism, although that is undeniably part of it: we are both cautious, quiet observers, sensitive to the things that can go wrong, wary of other people’s oblivious optimism. We are preparers and rule followers, projectors of outcomes. We do not, in other words, go with the flow. We’d rather direct the rivers around us—or, at the very least, paddle our own canoes.
“It’s as if,” my friend turned to me and said, “they’ve not thought at all about what might happen.” Something, I thought, that also characterizes many people’s approach to parenthood.
When two individualists of such an ilk find each other, it is, I think, a small miracle: being with Luke is much like being by myself. And on journeys like this bachelorette excursion, I can turn over the planning reins to him without anxiety. Here, thankfully but improbably, is someone who will do it all in exactly the same way that I would: who will read the maps and watch the weather patterns and pack the extra snacks. Baristas and bartenders in Jackson are confused at our relationship to each other, but from the inside it’s very clear—we’re too alike to be anything but the best of friends, too similar to push each other’s growth. Together we stand on the sidelines, marveling at the choices other people make.
And, if you’ve never been hiking on a popular trail in a national park, I’ll tell you: these are excellent places to observe the spectacle of human society. One encounters every kind of person on a trailhead; they are places tailor-made for metaphor. Because we are the people we are, we started early and were already on our way back out by the time the masses descended, most of them vastly underprepared for the snow-covered trek ahead. “It’s as if,” my friend turned to me and said, “they’ve not thought at all about what might happen.” Something, I thought, that also characterizes many people’s approach to parenthood.
Of all the people we saw entering the trail insufficiently supplied, the parents with children seemed the most unwitting. It was as if they’d already relinquished their futures to fate; the idea of exercising the kind of control over their lives that my childless friend and I still covet is lost to them. As we watched them wander down the path, without water bottles or windbreakers or walking sticks, I found myself wondering: is that what it takes to leap into parenthood’s unknowns? A sort of blithe sense of trust in the magnanimity of the universe?
*
In Rachel Cusk’s recently published Second Place, the narrator—a woman referred to only as “M”—considers the problem of exerting one’s will upon the world. The character is a woman attracted to the artistic lifestyle, but incapable of exercising it herself. As a way of filling her own void, she becomes enthralled with an aging famous artist, a man whom she invites to take up residency in her and her husband’s “second place,” the small artist’s cottage they maintain on their property.
Why she herself is not an artist is never made entirely clear, but the novel intimates that two of the obstacles standing in her way are her gender and her motherhood. There is something, it seems, inherent in such conditions that disrupts the translation from will to world. Having children, perhaps, necessarily subrogates one to life’s vicissitudes, while the childless artist is better able to stand outside the world.
Toward the beginning of the book M notes:
“Because this is partly a story of will, and of the consequences of exerting it, you will notice . . . that everything I determined to happen happened, but not as I wanted it! This is the difference, I suppose, between an artist and an ordinary person: the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it.”
I thought of these words when I watched a couple—a tired-looking but well-equipped man and woman about my age—trodding slowly behind a toddler at the trailhead. The child was unpredictable, and as I watched he plopped himself down in the center of the path and began to wail, complaining of the cold and of the tiredness in his feet. This is parenthood, I thought to myself: being suddenly stymied by the whims of the smallest one. They had probably, I thought, come prepared, and prepared their child as well. But their adult wills were no match for their son’s mercurial moods. By tying their lives to his they had relinquished a significant degree of their control. Those parents, I found myself thinking darkly, will never see Cascade Canyon, the location at the end of the trail.
My friend and I, by contrast, might have been the artists of Cusk’s M: we had set our intentions, we had made all our plans, and we had mostly imposed our wills. We sat on a rocky outcropping overlooking Lake Jenny and felt, I think, that our control had helped to bring us here. By being cautious and prepared, we had arrived at our destination.
But to have a child is to surrender one’s will rather than exerting it. It is a kind of creation, but without replication. The child does not exist as the perfect external realization of an internal intention. His own will interferes in the determination of his outcome.
There are, I suppose, those who like to say that works of art have “minds of their own,” but I’m not convinced. After all, a book may stall or stop; inspiration may escape for a while. But my words cannot sit down in the path to the mountain, preventing me from going forward. If I had a child though, I guess I could pick him up and carry him. That, however, is another burden entirely.