[Image: “The Matryoshka Dolls,” by Mathieu Croisetière; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). While the photo was posted by Croisetière, the piece is actually the work of multimedia artist Laetitia Soulier. (The full name is “The Matryoshka Dolls 2”; it’s the second panel in a triptych.) You can read more about Soulier’s “Fractal Architecture” series — of which this image is but one part — here and here (and elsewhere around the Web). Her process is quite involved — fascinating, I think — and as the saying goes, you can’t argue with results.]
From whiskey river:
Costumes Exchanging Glances
The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars.
I’m sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.
A science of motion toward some flat surface,
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn’t last.
Isn’t that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.
(Mary Jo Bang [source])
…and:
Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn’t want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren’t dead in real life, just as actors, the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: I dreamed this: in life we are actors in an absurd play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this theater: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?
(Clarice Lispector [source])
…and (italicized stanza):
Passing Through
—on my seventy-ninth birthday
Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
(Stanley Kunitz [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The Kindergarten Concert
The kindergarten concert was an interesting show.
Peter walked onto the stage and yelled, “I have to go!”
Katie was embarrassed, but she had nowhere to hide.
She raised her dress to hide her face. Her mother almost died.
Keith removed his tie and said, “It’s ugly, Dad. I hate it!”
David picked his nose on stage. What’s worse is that he ate it.
They sang their song, and Wyatt burped. Then he did a dance.
Michael fell while spinning ’round. Peter wet his pants.
The music teacher at the end said, “There, I’m glad that’s done.”
The kindergarten bowed and said, “Let’s sing another one!”
(Robert Pottle [source])
…and:
The Chime
When death stands in your doorway, you must show no weakness. If he points at his watch, answer “in five minutes.” If he insists, murmur “just a minute.” When he bridles, whisper “half a minute,” “a second,” “half a sec,” “one moment.”
You mustn’t look him in the eye. But don’t avert your gaze. Glance decisively at the bridge of the nose or the moist place right below the lips.
If he unfolds a map, please don’t express a preference for the seashore or the mountains. Betray no longing or anxiety. You might tap the margin nonchalantly, if there is a margin.
There’s an old superstition that death is a healer, he brings peace, escape from corruption. On the contrary: he is not a person, an animal, an insect, not even a pebble. Not even a name. Not an event. Not a whiff of night air.
So why, ask yourself, does he fidget there, with that peevish “can’t we meet each other halfway” expression, in those absurd Goodwill clothes, baggy corduroy suit, pants and jacket the same color but different wales, so often folded the seams are white as chalk lines, fat two-tone white-and-beige golf shoes with cleats, nylon argyle socks, like someone’s idea of an encyclopedia salesman from the nineteen thirties?
And why is the street behind him so fascinating, empty as a stage set, a few vans double-parked, a cat hiding under one, sometimes the flicker of the tip of a tail, sometimes the glint of the eye itself, voracious, ecstatic?
(D. Nurkse [source])
…and:
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
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Note about the Rebecca Solnit quotation: As it happens, I’ve used this passage before. While doing a general search for prose which more or less fit with today’s theme, I came across that posted on Goodreads. And then, because I always try to track down the original source for the fragments I post on Friday, I did a more specific search… and that’s where I found my own earlier post (which flowed from, yes, a whiskey river entry — dizzy yet?).
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