Audition

What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

It is no small thing to realize that you are the one who is waited for, and it is also the perpetual condition of motherhood, the waiting never stops.

I had again the terrible sense of familiarity, the knowledge that I could not place or source and therefore could not trust, so that it was not knowledge but understanding, which is not dependent on proof, and which therefore cannot be refuted—the anger, like the words, the challenge, the feeling of his insufficiency, none of it was new, all of it had taken place before.

A performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed, and was made, in that space of interpretation.

It was death, that was what we had responded to when we watched him wading through those scenes on-screen, even if we hadn’t understood it. The film was a portrait of a man in the process of surrender.

We don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

Suspicion began to grow in me again, blooming with rude health.