Reminders to Believe in Always Moving Forward

[Image: a panel from Linda Ciccarello‘s interactive digital story called “Everything Makes a Noise When It Reveals Itself.” As you move your mouse over the screen at that site — or your fingertip, if using a mouse-less, touch-sensitive device — something like the light of a flashlight appears to reveal each succeeding bit of the story (if “story” even comes close to describing the thing revealed).]

Over the past week, the anonymous curator of thought- and soul-provoking quotations who blogs as whiskey river seems to have been preoccupied (as one can be, at the end of October) with matters of mortality. For example:

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

Where the text says song, see ghost.
Where the text says ghost, see further.

(Brenda Steczkowski [no authoritative source that I could locate, although it’s quoted in a handful of places online])

…and:

You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead. You salt the sills from the inside. You are going to dream. You check the window. You burn a piece of paper. You burn a piece of hair. You check the door. You put a root beneath your pillow. You put the candle out. You bite the root before you put it beneath your pillow. You dream of the dead. You keep a candle burning. You bite the root. The dead put their fingers in your mouth. You are dreaming. You draw the dead & burn the paper. The dead have no doors. They have no salt. Each one takes a grain of salt. There are more dead than salt. You bolt the door. You are dreaming. When the salt is gone the dead touch your mouth. When the salt is gone you buy more salt. When the salt is gone the root does nothing. The salt does nothing.

(Lisa Ciccarello [source, apparently])

While researching the source of the Ciccarello quote, I found this description of it, per Google Books:

Told in an age we can’t quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello’s debut collection twist up from tales of witchcraft and the punishing morals of the Newgate Calendar. Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind salt-lined windows, we are led to explore a world of simple objects through a complex fog of cruelty and longing, strength and feebleness, folklore and familial traditions. Violence, love, death, jealousy, sex, and shadows fill the pages of At Night. If you seek comfort, you will find none here.

[source]

And then, as sometimes happens, I fell into an even deeper rabbit hole… I won’t even try to recreate for you the chain of links — graphically, it’d probably resemble a map of our ongoing road trip (haha) — but here’s one of the treats I encountered along the way:

After Stephen Dunn

If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself
in the stump outside your home, wake and walk
softly through your halls. Walk softly through
this house that is like your heart, built in the solace
of these woods from things you claimed as your own.
Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and
think of the heartbeats of the trees giving
their lives, each swaying wood grain a
skipped beat of gasping titans beneath
your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle
push, the settling of these quiet things.
But your hands are not in this house. Your
heart is not in this house. Your love is not in
this house. This house was not built from tall,
certain things, but from the surest things
you could find: roots, nests, not clocks
but the parts hidden behind their faces,
reminders of belief in always moving forward.
One morning you will wake in this home that
is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain
and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump
outside, you will touch everything roughly, this
house will sound no longer like your heart but
your heart will sound like this house, built tall
from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes,
stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping
roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You
will burn it to the ground.

(Lewis Mundt [source])

A real haunted house of the heart, eh?