The Tent by Margaret Atwood.
Title: The Tent.
Author: Margaret Atwood.
Genre: Non-fiction, graphic novels, WWI.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2006.
Summary: An experimental work of "mini-fictions", or 33 stories and 2 poems. Life Stories speaks of the hunger we have to memorialize special moments, and the writer's attempt to recall and write her own. In Clothing Dreams, the narrator describes her decades' long dream of rifling through a clothing store. Bottle is a dialog between a woman and who appears to be the Devil bargaining for her services. Impenetrable Forest is about trying to save someone who is lost with no desire to be found or fixed. In Encouraging the Young, the narrator, hopelessly and condescendingly, argues that the young should be encouraged. In Voice, a singer at the end of her prime contemplates her co-dependent, hostage-like relationship with her voice. No More Photos is an urge to share and take less photos. Orphan Stories is a piece about the disadvantages and advantages of being an orphan. Gateway is about wandering in a vague, unexpected afterlife. In Bottle II, a voice from inside a bottle of sand whispers mysteriously. Winter's Tales has an older person addressing the young. It's Not Easy Being Half-Divine is a re-telling of the myth of Helen of Troy in modern times, when a young woman married to a police chief takes off with another man. In Salome Was a Dancer, Salomé seduces her Religious Studies teacher because he gives her a bad mark. In Plots for Exotics, a man of color heads down to the plot factory to ask to be a main character, a rare honour in the world of fiction. In Resources of the Ikarians, a self-deprecating islander discusses the community's attempts to raise foreign income. Our Cat Enters Heaven is a bout a cat who arrives in heaven only discover that his heaven is humans' hell. In Chicken Little Goes Too Far, Chicken Little begins a campaign that the sky is falling that messes too much with the established order of things. IThylacine Ragout follows the efforts of people trying to clone and save the Thylacine tiger, and what happens when they do. The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins is a poem about the animals rejecting their names, as well as all of the symbols and roles we have assigned to them over the years. Three Novels I Won't Write Soon, the narrator lists three silly but compelling ideas for novels she is not planning to expand upon. Take Charge takes form of five dialogues of commanders and their underlings, wherein the commanders ask their subordinates to complete impossible feats, or "the best they can." Post-Colonial speaks of the post-colonial life that the privileged lead, stolen from and merged with other cultures. Heritage House is a tale about the Heritage House where people stored their "heritage" until it all became forgotten and obsolete. Bring Back Mom: An Invocation is a poem about missing your longing for one's mother as an adult, and missing what was taken for granted in one's youth. In Horatio's Version, Horatio from Hamlet offers his view on the story, as well as some observations about human nature and the world. In King Log in Exile, a deposed king muses on his ineffective reign, gradually illustrating that his inertia hid not harmlessness but a corrupt selfishness. Faster is about the human urge to move faster. Eating the Birds is a critique on meat-eating. Something Has Happened points out the change we have undergone in our hearts and beings as humans. In Nightingale, the dead visit one in dreams, and a wife who is visited by her husband's widow realizes everything is not as it seems with her own life. Warlords is about warlords and warlords' warriors, and how the tendency for war-mongering runs through the genes. In The Tent, a writer huddled inside a tent of paper engages in doodling as self-defense, scribbling on the walls in a frantic attempt to keep out encroaching horrors. Time Folds is story about time. Tree Baby is about the process of reincarnation. But It Could Still lists some things that could have been better outcomes of dark situations.
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. It's mostly a question of editing. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.
♥ I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you've slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I can't recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?
I'm getting somewhere now, I'm feeling lighter. I'm coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.
I was born.
I was.
I.
~~Life Stories.
♥ - I only want to be like everyone else, I said
- You're not, though, was what he told me. You're not like them.
- Why not? I said. I was inclined to listen to him. He had a persuasive manner.
- Because I love you.
- Is that all?
- I'm not just anyone, he said.
- Nobody is, I said.
- You see, he said, that's what I mean, you're not like everyone else.
♥ - Is this a seduction? I said.
- No. The seduction took place a while ago; you didn't even notice it. We're past that. We're at the hiring stage. We've come to the bargaining.
- What do I have to do? I said.
- Sleep with me, that goes without saying. I'll make it worth your while.
- What else?
- I value loyalty. Remember, you're not a lawyer: don't fuck the clients.
- I wouldn't anyway. They always have bad karma. What else?
- Just what you're already doing, he said. Some routine chores. Inhale some smoke, chew selected plant materials, tell a couple of riddles, write things on leaves. Do the odd incantation; lead a few sightseeing tours of hell. Jeep up the tone of the establishment.
..- Just a minute - what do I get in return?
- Women are so mercenary.
- No, but seriously.
- You'll get wise. Wiser than you are, I mean.
- It's not enough.
- All right: you can have some immortality. Here it is. It's inside this bottle. See it?
- That little heap of dust?
- Look harder.
- Oh. Yes. Does it always sparkle like that?
- Only at first.
- Are you sure this is immortality?
- Trust me. With some of this, you'll always have a voice.
- Have a voice, or be a voice?
- One or the other.
- Well, okay, thanks a lot then.
- Don't drop the bottle. Be careful with it. You have to watch those things, they have a habit of getting bigger. They can get as big as the sky. You can be sucked into them before you know it. It's the vacuum effect.
♥ - It's just - are you really who you say you are?
- I am what I am. I'm also who you say I am. That's the way it is with gods, and I'm a god, after all.
- So there's nothing to you. You're only in my head. You're just - you're nothing.
- More or less.
- That's what I thought. Wait, come back!
- I'm not stupid, I recognize no when I hear it.
- I didn't mean to be abrupt. Let's talk.
- You can't talk with nothing.
- But-
~~Bottle.
♥ The young are not my rivals. Fish are not the rivals of stones.
♥ No. It's the newly conscious young I mean, the ones with ambition and fresh diffidence, those who've learned the hard way that reach exceeds grasp nine times out of ten. How disappointed they are! And if and when they succeed for the first time, how anxious it makes them! They develop insomnia, or claustrophobia, or bulimia, or fear of heights. Now they will have to live up to themselves. Bummer.
♥ What a big, stupid, clumsy mess like the one you just made-let me rephrase that-what an understandable human error, but a learning experience? Try again! Follow your dream! You can do it!
♥ On second thought, my motives are less pure than they appear. They are murkier. They are lurkier. I catch sight of myself, in that inward eye that is not always the bliss of solitude, and I see that I am dubious. I scuttle from bush to bush, at the edge of the dark woods, peering out.
♥ I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork image or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.
~~Encouraging the Young.
♥
♥ Invitations to perform cascaded over us. All the best places wanted us, and all at once, for, as people said - though not to me - my voice would thrive only for a certain term. Then, as voices do, it would begin to shrivel. Finally it would drop off, and I would be left alone, denuded - a dead shrub, a footnote.
It's begun to happen, the shrivelling. Only I have noticed it so far. There's the barest pucker in my voice, the barest wrinkle. Fear has entered me, a needleful of ether, constricting what in someone else would be my heart.
♥ We sit in this hotel room, my voice and I; or rather in this hotel suite, because it's still nothing but the best for us. We're gathering our strength together. How much of my life do I have left? Left over, that is: my voice has used up most of it. I've given it all my love, but it's only a voice, it can never love me in return.
Although it's begun to decay, my voice is still as greedy as ever. Greedier: it wants more, more and more, more of everything it's had so far. It won't let go of me easily.
Soon it will be time for us to go out. We'll attend a luminous occasion the two of us, chained together as always. I'll put on its favourite dress, its favourite necklace. I'll wind a fur around it, to protect it from the drafts. Then we'll descend to the foyer, glittering like ice, my voice attached like an invisible vampire to my throat.
~~Voice.
♥ Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much.
~~No More Photos.
♥ They make up their names as they go along. Call me Ishmael, they say. Or else: Call me Ishmael, but call me often. Or else: Don't call me Ishmael, call me Anonymous. Call me No-name. Call me In Vain.
♥ On the other hand how sad, to make your way like a snail, a very fast snail but a snail nonetheless, with no home but the one on your back, and that home an empty shell. A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
♥ Folks line up for them, cross-eyed with pity, money in their pockets, damp handkerchiefs in their fists, rescue in their minds, blankets in their knapsacks, warm arms open, waiting to gather them in. Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the darkness. Out of the fear.
♥ Don't invite the orphans over your threshold! They'll cut your throat for a penny, they'll run off with your daughter, they'll seduce your son, they'll wreck your home, because home is where the heart is and the orphans are heartless.
♥ The orphans are not the stealers but the stolen; they are not the killers but the killed. You can tell where the orphans have wandered by the trails they leave: breadcrumbs in the forest, drops of blood, tears that have turned into small white mushrooms, small piles of fragile bones among the roots and moss.
♥ It's a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything-every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared, She had mo mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we're grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there's a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn't anything of interest happen to us, coddled as we are? Why do the orphans get all the good lines?
♥ ..I can see how you would feel that way. But to note is not to disparage. All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.
(And consider: It is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers. It is you, not we, that have always been the children of the gods.)
~~Orphan Stories.
♥ Ask me what you need to know, this voice-my voice-promised. Ask and I'll tell you. You car keys? They're under the bed. Your stock holdings? I see gold, but is it yours? Your death, when and where? This voice offered you knowledge, but also fear. Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location. I can put my fingertips on this road, on these roads, on this trembling branchwork, my fingertips that are not so fine and spidery.
♥ I understand you: I too was curious once, like you. We are both the kind of person who takes the corks out of bottles. Not bottles of wine: bottles of sand.
~~Bottle II.
♥ The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you: they've become very tall. How young are the young, these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they weren't.
♥ If you were a married woman, it was all over at thirty, you say. You were doomed to put on a print dress and a rubber girdle and sit in a rocking chair on the porch-there were porches, back then-fanning yourself, because there was no air conditioning, and talking about your flat feet, your sciatica, your varicose veins, and the snoring habits of your husband, whose shirts you had to iron, every Tuesday-mountains of shirts. All of these were metaphors for unsatisfactory sex.
At this there are a few giggles. But you don't want the past to be taken lightly: it cost too much. It deserves respect.
~~Winter's Tales.
♥ Hubby's pissed as hell; he's talking about a posse, go into the city, smoke them out, beat the guy up, get her back, smack her around a bit. A lot of men wouldn't bother, with a tramp like that; but it seems he doesn't believe in divorce, says somebody has to stand for the right values.
~~It's Not Easy Being Half-Divine.
♥ In our desperation we've fallen back on the idea of artists. Sure we have enough misery in store to produce a crop of these. Out of the pain we've taken care to inflict on them during their childhoods and at random intervals thereafter, out of the poverty we can guarantee, the artists will make art. They will write or paint or sing and then they will die early, and after that we can cash in. Postcards will be ours, black-and-white ones in which the artist frowns or scowls; pilgrimages too, and places of interest (the artist's birthplace, with a blue enamel plaque on it; his local bar, ditto; his favourite sleeping ditch); tasteless figurines of the artist made out of wire coat-hangers; perhaps-is it too much to ask?-a coffee-table book. In the far distance, a film, in which the artist suffers and scowls and drinks and dies young all over again. But this plan hasn't worked out yet.
We did have a poet who almost won a prize. He kicked the bucket last year, helped along by drink and drugs, and also by some of us. We may have been in too much of a hurry-perhaps we should have let him ripen a bit longer-but a living impoverished poet is a drain on the economy, whereas a dead one has potential.
We have hopes, however. Our greatest resource is surely our optimism: a tribute to the human spirit, you might call. Already the T-shirt makers have swung into action. All is not lost.
~~Resources of the Ikarians.
&hearts I'm glad you aren't a dog, said our cat. Do you think I could have my testicles back?
Of course, said God They're over behind that bush.
Our cat had always known his testicles must be somewhere. One day he'd woken up from a fairly bad dream and found them gone. He'd looked everywhere for them-under sofas, under beds, inside closets-and all the time they were here, in heaven! He went over to the bush, and, sure enough, there they were. They reattached themselves immediately.
Our cat was very pleased. Thank you, he said to God.
God was washing its elegant long whiskers. De rien, said God.
♥ If they aren't mice, what are they? he said. Already he'd pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks.
They're the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don't mind, it's time for my nap.
What are they doing in heaven then? said our cat.
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
~~Our Cat Enters Heaven.
♥ But the sky is falling! said Chicken Little. I'm sounding the alarm.
You sounded the exact same alarm last year, said Henny Penny, and the sky is still a place. Last time I looked, she added, with heavy irony.
"The sky is falling" is a metaphor, said Chicken Little huffily. It's true that the sky really is falling, but the falling of the sky represents all sorts of other things that are falling as well. Falling down, and falling apart. You should wake up!
♥ The sky is falling, said Chicken Little.
That's one analysis, said Turkey Lurkey. But there's data to show it isn't the sky that's falling. Its the earth that's rising. The rising of the earth is simply displacing the sky. It's due to natural geocyclical causes and is not the result of human activity, and therefore there is nothing we can do about it.
I don't see that it makes a blind bit of difference whether the earth is rising or the sky is falling, said Chicken Little, as the end result in either case will be that we are minus the sky.
That is a simple-minded view, said Turkey Lurkey, with offensive condescension.
♥ He formed a group of his own, called TSIF-an acronym for The Sky Is Falling, as he had to explain carefully to journalists, at first. He launched a Web site. Soon he had a dedicated pack of disciples. They were mostly woodchucks and muskrats, but who cared? They picketed political gatherings. They blocked highways. They disrupted summit conferences. They carried big signs: Take Back the Sky! No Sky, No Pie, No Sweet Bye and Bye! The Sky's Our Limit!
♥ This Chicken What's-his-name twerp is making a dent, Hoggy Groggy told Foxy Loxy. He's giving me a headache. He's against progress. You should put him out of his misery.
I eat guys like that for breakfast, said Foxy Loxy. It's the best method. There's no mess except maybe a couple of feathers, and they never find the body. What'll you pay me?
The Sky's the limit, said Hoggy Groggy.
And so it was.
~~Chicken Little Goes Too Far.
♥ Forget the fairy tales, in which I was
your shaggy puppet, prince in hairshirt, surrogate
for human demons.
I'm not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head,
plush bedtime toy, and that's not me
in outer space with my spangled cub.
I'm not your totem; I refuse
to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve
my soul in stone.
I renounce the metaphor: I am not
child-stealer, shape-changer,
old garbage-eater, and you can stuff
simile also: unpeeled,
I am not like a man.
I take back what you have stolen,
and in your languages I announce
I am now nameless.
My true name is a growl.
♥ Well, there were suddenly a lot more flamingos
before they in their turn became eggs,
while people's bodies reverted through their own
flesh genealogies like stepping stones,
man woman man, container into contained,
shedding language and gathering themselves in,
skein after skein of protoplasm
until there was only one of them,
alone at the first naming;
but the streetwise animals, forewarned
and having learned the diverse meanings
of the word dominion,
did not show up,
and Adam, inarticulate, deprived
of his arsenal of proper nouns,
returned to mud..
♥ I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.
~~The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins.
♥ We got into the museums, where we muse. We muse about the time before, we muse about the something that was done, we muse about the Native inhabitants, who had a bad time of it at our hands despite arrows, or, conversely, despite helpfulness. They were ravaged by disease: nobody painted that. Also hunted down, shot, clubbed over the head, robbed and so forth. We muse about these things and we feel terrible. We did that, we think, to them. We say the word them, believing we know what we mean by it; we say the word we, even though we were not born at the time, even though our parents were not born, even though the ancestors of our ancestors may have come from somewhere else entirely, some place with dubious hats and with a flag quite different from the one that was wafted ashore here, on the wind, on the ill wind that (we also muse) has blown us quite a lot of good. We eat well, the lights go on most of the time, the roof on the whole does not leak, the wheels turn round.
As for them, our capital cities have names made from their names, and so do our brands of beer, and some but not all of the items we fob off on tourists. We make free with the word authentic. We are enamoured of hyphens, as well: our word, their word, joined at the hip. Sometimes they turn up in our museums, without hats, in their colourful clothing from before, singing authentic songs, pretending to be themselves. It's a paying job. But at moments, from time to time, at dusk perhaps, when the moths and the night-blooming flowers come out, our hands smell of blood. Just the odd whiff. We did that, to them.
But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night? Is that them, sneaking in here with outlandish hats, with flags we can't even imagine? Should we befriend them or shoot them with arrows? What are their plans, immediate, long-term, and will these plans of theirs serve us right? It's a constant worry, this we, this them.
And there you have it, in one word, or possibly two: post-colonial.
~~Post-Colonial.
♥ ..who smiled the weak smile of a trapped drudge
as we slid in past her,
heading for the phone,
filled with surliness and contempt
and the resolve never to be like her.
Bring back Mom.
who wanted to be a concert pianist
but never had the chance
and made us take piano lessons,
which we resented-
♥ Mom her dark lipsticked mouth
smiling in the black-and-white
soap ads, the Aspirin ads, the toilet paper ads,
Mom, with her secret life
of headaches and stained washing
and irritated membranes-
Mom, who knew the dirt,
and hid the dirt, and did the dirty work,
and never saw herself
or us as clean enough-
and who believed that there was other dirt
you shouldn't tell to children,
and didn't tell it,
which was dangerous only later.
♥ ..trying with all her might
not to sink below the line
between chin up and despair-
and who was carted away
and locked up, because one day
she began screaming and wouldn't stop,
and did something very bad
with the kitchen scissors-
But that wasn't you, not you, not
the Mom we had in mind, it was
the nutty lady down the street-
it was just some lady
who became a casualty
of unseen accidents,
and then a lurid story...)
Come back, come back, oh Mom,
from craziness or death
or our own damaged memory-
appear as you were..
♥ ..but forget that! There you'll be,
singing a song of your own youth
as though no time has passed,
and we can be careless again,
and embarrassed by you,
and ignore you as we used to,
and the holes in the world will be mended.
~~Bring Back Mom: An Invocation.
♥ But what was the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, "O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right," or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.
This often happens, as I've observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one's left standing. Countries are similar.
♥ And eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings-I've observed-are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow.
Excuse me. Not one better. One more.
♥ Somehow I no longer wanted to tell Hamlet's story. I wanted to tell something a little more-what's the term? Human, inhuman? Something bigger. But statistics pall after a time. We're not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.
~~Horatio's Version.
♥ What had he done wrong? Nothing. He himself had no murdered his citizens, as the Stork King was now doing. It was true he had done nothing right, either. He had done-in a word-nothing.
~~King Log in Exile.
♥ Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fat enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In tat case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
~~Faster.
♥ We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst our of our mouths, and so we are them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we love them. We wanted to be one with them.
♥ We're mired in gravity, we're earthbound. We're ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.
~~Eating the Birds.
♥ Listen: the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They've fallen silent. Fallen, as if into the earth. Or is it we who have fallen? Perhaps it's not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf. What membrane seals us off, from the music we used to dance to? Why can't we hear?
~~Something Has Happened.
♥ People die, and then they come back at night when you're asleep. By the time you're my age this happens more frequently. In the dream you know they're dead; funny thing is, they know it too.
♥ Then Procne flies out through the window, and so do I. It's night, a forest, a moon. We land on a branch. It's at this moment, in the dream, that I begin to sing. A long liquid song, a high requiem, the story of the story of the story.
Or is the voice hers? Hard to tell.
A man standing underneath our tree says, Grief.
~~Nightingale.
♥ The warlord sits at the centre of his own power, inert but potent.
♥ When you've reached neutral territory, when you've stashed the loot hoisted from the warlord's mansion-well, he didn't have much use for it any more, did he?-and when you finally have a spare moment to sit down at a café with a cool drink, you rethink your occupation.
But your occupation's gone. You can't get another. Once you've fought for a warlord, any warlord, even a warlord committee, you can't forget. You can't learn anything else. Nothing can replace the adrenalin, the hellish but enlivening nightmares. Nothing-let's face it-is nearly as much fun as being a warlord's warrior. Fun takes in the broadest sense of the word, you understand.
Look over there. See that ropy-muscled old guy raking the lawn? The other one sweeping the sidewalk, the third hauling the trash? Warlord survivors, all of them. They're branded with invisible tattoos. Behind their eyes the embers smoulder. They're waiting. They're ready for the call.
~~Warlords.
♥ You're in a tent. It's vast and cold outside, very vast, very cold. It's a howling wilderness. There are rocks in it, and ice and sand, and deep boggy pits you could sink into without a trace. There are ruins as well, many ruins; in and around the ruins there are broken musical instruments, old bathtubs, bones of extinct land mammals, shoes minus their feet, auto papers. There are thorny shrubs, gnarled trees, high winds. But you have a small candle in your tent. You can keep warm.
Many things are howling out there, in the howling wilderness. Many people are howling. Some howl in grief because those they love have died or been killed, others howl in triumph because they have caused the loved ones of their enemies to die or be killed. Some howl to summon help, some howl for revenge, others howl for blood. The noise is deafening.
♥ The trouble is, your tent is made of paper. Paper won't keep anything out. You know you must write on the walls, on the paper walls, on the inside of your tent. You must write upside down and backwards, you must cover every available space on the paper with writing. Some of the writing has to describe the howling that's going on outside, night and day, among the sand dunes and the ice chunks and the ruins and bones and so forth; it must tell the truth abut the howling, but this is difficult to do because you can't see through the paper walls and so you can't be exact about the truth, and you don't want to go out there, out into the wilderness, to see exactly for yourself. Some of the writing has to be about our loved ones and the need you feel to protect them and this is difficult as well because not all of them can hear the howling in the same way you do, some of them think it sounds like a picnic out there in the wilderness, like a big band, like a hot beach party, they resent being cooped up in such a cramped space with you and your small candle and your fearfulness and your annoying obsession will calligraphy, an obsession that makes no sense to them, and they keep trying to scramble out under the walls of the tent.
This doesn't stop you from your writing. You write as if your life depended on it, your life and theirs.
~~The Tent.
♥ Is time/space like an accordion, but without the music? Was he making a statement about hard physics?
Or was he saying: Time folds its wings, at long last. Time folds its tents and steals silently away. Time folds you in its folds, as if you were a lamb and the lack of time a wolf. Time folds you in the blanket of itself, it folds you tenderly and warps you round, for where would you be without it? Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
~~Time Folds.
♥ There is wreckage. You didn't see that, in your dream. A jumble of smashed years, a heap of broken stories. The stories look like wood and chunks of cement and twisted metal. And sand, a lot of sand. Why is it they say the sands of time? You didn't know that yesterday but now you do. You know too much to say. What can be said? Language turns to rubble in your throat.
♥ A baby, alive, caught in a green cradle; and it's been rescued, after all. But its name has been lost, along with its tiny past.
What new name will they give it, this child? The one who escaped from your nightmare and floated lightly to a tree, and who looks around itself now with a baby's ordinary amazement? Now time starts up once more, now there is something that can be said: this child must be given a word. A password, a talisman of air, to help it through the many hard gates and shadow doorways ahead. It must be named, again.
Will they call it Catastrophe, will they call it Flotsam, will they call it Sorrow? Will they call it No-family, will they call it Bereft, will they call it Child-of-a-Tree? Or will they call it Astonishment, or Nevertheless, or Small Mercy?
Or will they call it Beginning?
~~Tree Baby.
♥ The airbags actually worked. The cheque did not bounce. The prescription drug company was not lying. The shark nudged the sailor's naked, bleeding leg, then turned away. The rapist got distracted in mid-rape, and his knife and his penis both retracted into him like the soft and delicate horns of a snail, and he went out for a coffee instead.
♥ When he said, My darling, you are the only woman I will adore forever, he really meant it. As for her, despite the scowling and the cold shoulder and the unanswered phone, it turned out she'd loved him all along.
♥ The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they'll come up, you have faith in that, and they'll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn't know what they were-some sort of little bulb- but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren't in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.
~~But It Could Still.