you want the womb, and a mother, any mother, someone's mother, to sing you to sleep

Book of Dahlia:
She wanted the intactness back, and the family, and the womb, and the womb before the womb, and her mother, but not her actual mother. She would have been okay, truly. She would have! She really would have. After she was done being the opposite of okay, she would have been okay. Her life could be seen as a series of things she had failed to get over. And now it was over. where would it all go? All those memories, things she couldn't get over, and didn't, and wouldn't, now.
So this was it then. Okay. Where was her mother --or a mother, any mother, someone else's mother-- to sing her to bed?

you want the womb with all that is not there. the river, the rocks, the words, No. there are no words and none of the words are theirs. No tears, or all tears, fluid. but no grief. No train, no platform, no one being left, no one leaving. no Dog Monday, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, longer than you think. you are not thinking of the things of this world, the soldier finally come home, the old dog --old? not so old! seven years on, his Jem stepping off the train-- a flash across the platform. Chesterton's things of this world: mothers, fighting peoples. So: nations, navies, wars. but also: a cat purring, back to your face, feet against your palm, Not here. Snow, sleds, the wooded hills: "It's a wonderful world, Hobbes old buddy! Let's go exploring!" A boy and his tiger. A boy and his penguin. Goodnight Opus. Goodnight Moon. A boy and his bear in an enchanted forest, not here, playing.

dlww at 12/23/2008 11:48:00 AM

it is

Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.

all the way back to

Over the course of those two days Ramsey assembled a veritable retrospective of Irina's transgressions in the post-birthday world: arranging "appointment TV to ogle" Lawrence on the news, "declaring her love for Anorak Man" in front of her mother, "running him down" to other players in Preston--all the way back to You should have packed a bag.


p425- The Post-Birthday World: A Novel by L Shriver

Teach us to turn and not to turn.

two worlds

There is nothing wrong in this whole world.

You don't know what's in my heart.


There is nothing wrong in this whole world.

You don't know what's in my heart.


There is nothing wrong in this whole world.

You don't know what's in my heart.


There is nothing wrong you don't know.

What's in my heart this whole world.


There is There is There is my heart.

You don't know nothing is wrong:

The effect of beauty ... is good to the degree that, through its analogies ... the possibility of regaining paradise through repentance and forgiveness is recognized. Its effect is evil to the degree that beauty is taken, not as analogous to, but identical with goodness ... and the conclusion drawn that, since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history. But all is not well there.
_ W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand (New York, 1962), 71.

As less is demanded of art, as it is burdened with less idealism, and therefore less likely to disappoint and disillusion, it has freer rein to do what it can do, which is to create a model of a saved world, in which, as Auden says, crowds are communities and sins forgiven. Lucy McDiarmid

(The Virgin and The Dynamo)

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Ernest Dowson

abandon

I've lost hope. It's easier to live without it. ... First you abandon someone and then someone abandons you. {Finnish novel Dalkey Archive}

Wait without hope, Eliot says, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

All day I tried to distinguish need from desire. Now, in the dark, I feel only bitter sadness for us, the builders, the planers of wood, because I have been looking steadily at these elms and seen the process that creates the writhing, stationary tree is torment, and have understood it will make no forms but twisted forms.

Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
{cannot say or think what your spirit knows}

All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.
Up above the angels are weeping. angels, braiding, dear heart.

Then it happened as the ark of the LORD came into the city of David that Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD.

And you had been something of a cold front yourself lately.

You are my heart. a sentence and not a thing, two iambs.

stranger in a strange type face how shall I know you?

the woman I call maro does not, strictu sensu, exist. she is rather a composite...

thedayislikewidewater: Search results for abandon

pleasant angel

I can see why your friends get tired of you.

green squall jay hopler

in all my __ these two lines recur *

-

"I don't be-lieve you." said in sing-song by Veronica's father Keith Mars

-

"I've heard this story." said by Joey in A History of Violence, to his brother ('When they brought you home from the hospital, I tried to strangle you in your crib.")

-

to mom. to dad? this is how I feel?

_______________
*Wilcheck Adv Comp writing prompt ~ from Eudora Welty? ~'in all my writing these six words recur'

so this

I don't mind that you are holding my hand

you are the reason I get up every day

so this is how it ends



01.03.08 explodingdog 2008