Broken Rose

Tags: serial novel; metablog; poetry; post-contemporary; music; technology; drama; literature; memoir; suicide; spirituality; rock and roll; autobiography; fiction; monad; Christianity; Buddhism; New Age; post-modern; narcissism

1.2: Those that belong to the Emperor

—Samuel Beckett

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought–our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography–breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other.

–Michel Foucault: THE ORDER OF THINGS

Powered by ScribeFire.

Technorati Tags: serial novel, metablog, poetry, post-contemporary, music, technology, drama, literature, memoir, suicide, spirituality, rock and roll, autobiography, fiction, monad, Christianity, Buddhism, New Age, post-modern, narcissism

3.2 those that are trained…

–Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’s Taxonomy

3.3 I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

–Jorge Luis Borges

3.4 Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour. In his long black coat no matter what the weather and old world Latin Quarter hat. At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream. How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and and flowed united on. Then turn and his slow steps retrace.(Pause.) In his dreams—(Knock.)Then turn and his slow steps retrace.(Pause. Knock.)

–Samuel Beckett “Ohio Monologues”

3.5 :

I.

Sanford, North Carolina: February, 1938

A hard frost–frozen cattails bristle a troubled itch above the child. She digs with a bent spoon in one mittoned hand, the other props her for leverage. Searching for the silver thimble she buried last fall, she scrapes and stabs at the thawing earth, uncovering pieces of gypsum and mica, root-bound chunks of quartz. The high sun melts the late snow, until the current swells through distant shoals and, farther off, heaves over the falls. Tufts of fog and mist rise over the river’s surface. Above the valley, a plane makes its way across a sky farther than the sun, and as blue now as hand-blown glass.

She stands, forgets the thimble, listens: From each pine needle, a single bead of melting snow quivers, other itches dangling for a scratch. Each falls, one by one, onto ice crusted along the floor of the grove behind her. Mindless pocks, a random patter. She breathes in, the bright air flaring her nostrils. The tang of two seasons bending to touch. Her bangs shift as it sidles past, as if a feather brushed her forehead.

She closes her eyes; she doesn’t move–that would break the spell, a found thing feeding a hurt mind new magic, this flush of good luck passing through this cove where the swollen current dozes, tucked in the pulsing crook of the river’s elbow.

II.

Sanford, NC: January, 1944

She touches herself with the same hands she prays with, lost in late afternoon dolor, kneeling in the dark room draped by mid-winter. She’s afraid the sparrows will come back, searching for seeds hidden under snow. She knows they roost at night, having heard the flutter and rustle as they nest their small frenzies in her closet, their wings and bodies a single quivering mass that smothers her blouses, skirts, and shoes. These clumsy thoughts crowd the same panic that rouses her. Dinner’s cooking–the scent of biscuits, the simmer of greens, the sizzle of pan-fried meat stalks the house, a seeking beast gumming at the very air she struggles to breathe. So she sneaks through rooms, makes her sly way down to the cellar, where she sulks and then dozes, curled on a basket of old, moody clothes. Heels cross the floor overhead. She wakes slowly. Stretches. Hands perform perfunctory chores. Murmur of voices agitate, querying, wondering about her–her –caught dreaming again of the fingers she’s kissed, so thirsty for those tear drops under the long nails. She stretches again. Yawns. Makes her way to the door, works the knob and hinges, decoding the giveaway creaks and groans with the art of escape she’s mastered.

Outside the cellar door, she stops–her body flexes, relaxes. Her eyes narrow in the moonlight, slowly focus on the sparrows that peck and hop about the snow-covered yard. Each step prowls the thin ice glazing the walk. She’s no longer afraid of those birds–so nervous, so frail–bound so delicately to their nervous shadows by nothing but strands of fine, black thread.

Powered by ScribeFire.