Read Love + Hate for Free Online

I no longer recognised, as if I didn’t want inevitable change, or to become the new person that saying real words can make you into. And if I couldn’t speak, I felt blocked and distant and angry. In silence you rot.
    I needed, as the young do, to escape, and I went to work in the theatre. Silent and anguished or not, I would be a writer. Fuck everything else: it was art or nothing. Artists did whatever they wanted. I thought then, and probably still believe, that to be an artist was the finest thing anyone could be. I had pretty much failed at school. I blamed myself for the fact the teachers there couldn’t entertain me. They hated the pupils, and the pointless system ran on threat, fear and punishment. We were being trained in obedience, and to be clerks. After, I worked in offices, and didn’t fit in there either. What sort of future would I have? If I couldn’t imagine having a conventional job, I would make things much more difficult for myself: myfuture, everything, would depend on one throw of the dice. Looking back in puzzlement, it seems like blindness, stupidity, arrogance and very good sense. It takes a sort of mad courage to want something truly absurd.
    Not that there hadn’t been examples. At home I’d study photographs in magazines: Jagger and Richards swaggering and smoking outside some court or other; McCartney and Lennon in Hamburg and just after; Dylan around the Blonde on Blonde period. Defiant, original young men convinced of their own potency, desirability and immortality. Not only do these boys look as if they have just joyfully killed the old and now have the world to themselves, but to be a young man in the 1960s was to glimpse the view from a briefly opened window, to grasp an opportunity between two dependencies and enjoy a burst of libidinous freedom, of self-wonder and self-display.
    These kids look free. But of what? Of the fetish of renunciation; of the dull norms and values of the day – whatever they were. Hadn’t there been two relatively recent world wars through which our parents and grandparents had suffered, and for which generations of young men had had their natural aggression taken advantage of, and for which they had been sacrificed? You cannot forget, too, the sheer amount of daily fear, if not trauma, the child – any child – has to endure. You could also say that the teenager’s life so far has been a cyclone of outrageousdemands: to eat, shit, shut up and go to school; to behave well, to be obedient and polite while achieving this, that or the other; to go to sleep, wake up, take an exam, learn an instrument, listen to one parent, ignore the other, get along with one’s siblings and aunts, and so on. And these compulsions and demands: one succeeds in obeying them, succeeds in failing them, or evades them altogether. But each of them will generate anxiety since they are all combined with punishment, fear and guilt. Stress will be the common condition of adulthood if the demand has been the constant of childhood.
    Of course, the demand is the currency of all intercourse, and not all demands are impossible, pointless or demeaning. One wouldn’t be a person unless one received or made them. These demands never end, either. At least in the West since the 1960s there might be fewer moral prohibitions than before. But there are more impossible demands. What isn’t forbidden is almost obligatory: the prescription that one should be wealthy, or always active, or successful, or have frequent high-quality sex for all of one’s life with someone beautiful is as likely to cause anxiety as any prohibition.
    *
    Anyone will notice that adults can lose their modesty when describing the achievements of their kids. Since the child is them but also not-them, the parent is free tobrag. What sort of strange love is this, the parent’s for the child, or what sort of possession is the child for the parent? Who or what does the parent want the child to be? What sort of ideal image do