[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])
