Paired Reading
or, if you prefer, a whole flight
Read this… with this
“these figures are ghosts dancing together, and I am a ghost too, and there is a conviviality, to the thousands of years they have been dancing here ..”
“they were the footprints of people, bare and shod. There were boots and shoes and clogs … hundreds pressed in the clay where only a dozen could stand.”
and then read this … with this
“arms out, head up, he uncrossed his feet and let them hang. He was wearing the steeple. It fitted like a hat. He was wearing the steeple all the way to the earth, a sone dunce’s cap.”
“for a moment, he felt the solid stone under him move — the dunce’s cap a hundred and fifty feet tall began to rip down and tear and burst, sliding with dust and smoke and thunder, breaking and shearing with spark and flame…”
p. 377:
“it seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician’s trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral — a blue cathedral of ice … and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we step backwards involuntarily at the force of the event, even though it is occurring a mile away from us , and we call out to each other in the silence before the roar reaches us.”
Now read this … with this.
“what holds it up? I? The nail? Does she, or do you? Or it is poor Pangall, crouched beneath the crossways, with a sliver of mistletoe between his ribs?”
“he was there, white like a mask, spattered with lime .. the body seemed planted in the stone. His stomach and legs and trunk were rooted deep.”
and this … with this … while reading this…
“old Ajkuna came on the seventh day, the day when it is believed that the dead make their first and most desperate attempt to break free of the shackles of the next world.”
“thin places are those sites where the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile… the hands of the dead press through from the other side, meeting those of the living pals to palm, finger to finger … time proceeds according to its usual rhythms beyond the threshold, but not here in this thin place.”
“The passage of time is internal to the world, is born in the world itself in the relationship between events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time. There is no longer space that ‘contains’ the world, and there is no longer time ‘in which’ events occur.”
Re-read this, with this.
“in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now.’ Compare ‘now’ with ‘here.’ No one would dream of saying that things ‘here’ exist, whereas things which are not ‘here’ do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are ‘now’ exist and that everything else doesn’t?”
“I’m in the market for some present tense. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, than surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow.”
p. 138 “those who had seen the drowned man and tried to tell other people were met with stare of incredulity. But that happened last year, people said.”
Have you read all three?
“the bull was all colours, but some of the stone had shed itself in the damp air. Mary had come through the hill to see Father’s mark on a daubed bull. And near the bull and the mark there was a hand … fingers and thumb.”
“certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows … if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dipped on broadleaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft … and this book is the trail of blood.”
“he raises a hand in the air, fingers spread wide. I reach my hand towards his and meet it palm to palm, finger to finger, his skin strange as stone against mine.”
“i sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes. They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles.”
“i have a strange sensation of being watched.”
“i know now why my gaze was so directed. But at the time I knew nothing … there was the uprush, the ornamentation of sidethoughts for others, then the rush of the heart, rising, narrowing, piercing — and at the top, still carved in stone, the thing I had felt as a flame of fire.”
Should you want to get drunk as hell, an aperitif:
“he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’
“somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later.”
“‘i am buried too deeply, there,’ he blurted out at last, pointing his rod to an invisible point beneath the miniature pyramid.”
