[Image: “The Cadejos,” hand-painted etching on paper, by Todd Freeman; found on Flickr.
(Click to enlarge.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
(Neil Gaiman [source])
…and:
My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position you’re trying to hold.
(Joseph Campbell [source])
…and:
To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.
(Anne Carson [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Please Marry Me
Please marry me. Your mother likes me.
–Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dreamWe are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my motherHas been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.
(Charles Baxter [source])
…and:
Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal… As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
(C.S. Lewis [source])
…and:
War Poetry
The class has dropped its books. The janitor’s
disturbed some wasps, broomed the nest
straight off the roof. It lies outside, exotic
as a fallen planet, a burst city of the poor;
its newsprint halls, its ashen, tiny rooms
all open to the air. The insect’s buzz
is low-key as a smart engine. They group,
regroup, in stacks and coils, advance
and cross like pulsing points on radar screens.And though the boys have shaven heads
and football strips, and would, they swear,
enlist at once given half a chance,
march down Owen’s darkening lanes
to join the lads and stuff the Boche —
they don’t rush out to pike the nest,
or lap the yard with grapeshot faces.
They watch the wasps through glass,
silently, abashed, the way we all watch war.
(Kate Clanchy [source])
…and:
As a baby, [my son] Eric was a real stair-climber. My wife or I would usually catch him after he’d negotiated no more than a step or two. But on one occasion, as I remember now, while his mother and I were eating our dinner, he’d gotten fussy and neurotic there in his high chair, as babies will; we wiped the stray food from his face and fingers and put him down on the floor. He was just under a year old, I think. As my wife and I nattered on, absorbed in our adulthood, Eric crept on hands and knees out of the kitchen, into the hall and up the stairs. It must have taken him ten or fifteen minutes, but he assaulted the stairs, craggy and orthogonal, with as much tenacity as he later pursued his engineering degrees.
At some point I suddenly said to my wife, “Where’s Eric?” and she replied, “I don’t know, wasn’t he just in here?” We leapt from our chairs.
Eric got to the top of the stairs about then, but did not go on to explore the mysteries of the second floor; only the stairs were of interest. He’d ascended them, all right, but at that age still lacked I suppose the motor and visual skills to get himself back down. And yes, he did start to scream then. Our conversation obviously over, I went to fetch him while my wife cleared the table. He was lying on his stomach on the second floor at the top of the stairs, facing down towards me, his little hands and arms waving feebly, the way they do, like huge pink fleshy antennae. Screaming.
(JES, “Dissonance”)
About the image: The cadejo is a dog-like character appearing in Central American folk tales. Per Wikipedia:
There is a good white cadejo and an evil black cadejo. Both are spirits that appear at night to travelers: the white to protect them from harm during their journey, the black… to kill them. The colors of the cadejo are sometimes exchanged according to local tradition. In some places the black cadejo is seen as the good one and the white cadejo the evil one.
I like that you don’t know which cadejo is which unless you know where you are, and what the natives believe there… or, of course, until you trust one.
Leave a Reply