Hunting for Clues in (of) the Interior

[Image: “She Got a Lot Out of Those Physics and Shop Classes,” by Alan Levine; located this clue to someone’s interior at Flickr, naturally, and share it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Posted there about 10 years ago, the image seems to have been one of a daily series — all telling (one enigmatic story? several enigmatic stories?) of a woman named Lori. The story itself seems to be in rough-draft form — typos, ever so slightly “off” phrasing, and so on — and I’m guessing it went straight from Levine’s keyboard, to the Flicker post, without an intervening spell-check and so on. But it was an interesting story nonetheless, and, most importantly, I do like this still life… especially as metaphor.]

From whiskey river (highlighted stanzas):

Wildly Constant
(excerpt)

The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.
Three adjectives that recur

in the literature on ravens are
omnivorous.
Pernicious.

Monogamous.
I’m interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta’s house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily
duogamous.

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

…

I should learn more about signs.
I came to Stykkishólmur
to live in a library.

The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

…I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

(Anne Carson [source — do consider reading the entire long poem!])

…and:

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Lost in the Milky Way

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain
as if prepared for the path of? the spirit’s journey
to the world of all souls.

It is not an easy path.
A dog stands at the opening constellation
past the great helping hand.

The dog wants to know,
did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature,
did you take a life you didn’t eat?

This is the first on your map. There is another
my people made of? the great beyond
that lies farther away than this galaxy.

It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means.
After this first one,
the next could be a map of ?forever.

It could be a cartography
shining only at some times of? the year
like a great web of finery

some spider pulled from herself
to help you recall your true following
your first white breath in the cold.

The next door opens and Old Woman
counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been
hurt and not in anything akin to sin.

From between stars are the words we now refuse;
loneliness, longing, whatever suffering
might follow your life into the sky.

Once those are gone, the life you had
against your own will, the hope, even the prayers
take you one more bend around the river of sky.

(Linda Hogan [source])

…and:

In a Landscape: III
(excerpt)

You go to the room, and the place you like to sit
is missing. This is an opportunity to trust, I suppose, or perhaps
for blind panic, if one were to consider this a metaphor
for something. But say it’s not, say there are no such things
as metaphors for a moment, and where does that get you?
Presently, it gets me to a row of green and yellow plastic chairs,
those 1950s-looking ones I imagine Kenton would like
to collect. They’re joined together by shiny metal clasps, chrome,
and the whole thing is full of sunlight through the plate glass
window. It’s the kind of scene I think of as lickable, how everything
looks like cheerful candy, and I wonder if there might be a way
to be there or here without a beginning, or without an ending,
or if perhaps there might be a concept for no middle.

(John Gallaher [source])

…and:

#75: I used to think I could find the gods, any gods, in books. I thought many times that, yes, I’d stumbled upon them in media res as it were, carousing, debauching, or arguing, with one another or with the reader, or sometimes just following Roberts Rules of Order in a respectful one-at-a-time way, complete with “the honorable gentleman” and “the good lady” honorifics to refer to someone other than the speaker. Over time, it became obvious that just by squinting, mentally, I could find one or more gods in pretty much everything I read.

Only much later did I consider the obvious: that no gods at all exist in any book, unless and until some reader brings them along and puts them there. Which says exactly as much about readers as it does about books and gods.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

___________________________________________

Note: I will be traveling for about a week, starting next Wednesday. If I post here at all on Friday, it will probably be brief (for which regular visitors here may give thanks). However, I should also point out that Tuesday will be RAMH‘s 13th anniversary; I expect therefore that my annual “Running After My Hat @[age]” feature will show up here on that day… The gods giveth, and they taketh away!