(no subject)
Rereading Harmonium for Bishop purposes.
"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is an archipelago of shotgun blasts to the me, at 39.8.
Wondering if this fed those scenes I liked best in "It Follows," along with all that other stuff:
And you? Remember how the crickets came
Out of their mother grass, like little kin,
In the pale nights, when your first imagery
Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.
Not sure I ever fully appreciated the title till now, either. You're showing the friend a vision-helper inherited from your now-deceased uncle, presumably one you associate with him hence retained, so characteristic of how he appeared in middle age when you first knew him well. And realize idly that monocle and my uncle sound the same. And realize, picking it up, that it fits your present degree of poor eyesight. Realize, looking in the mirror, that it fits how you look at this age. That you look like him. And that you must now be looking at things now the way he did. To have picked up a monocle is to no longer feel one is the star of the show, one of the romantic leads. One is now a spectator, to some degree, and one now sees it all differently - both because one's eyes have decayed and because with those decaying eyes one has seen how all the eyes decay. One is but halfway there oneself - just one eye needs it. "Forty," we're later told. And though one couldn't have seen that one would see this way before, it was right there in front. My uncle, who was ridiculous, if nice enough. Who saw the world as I would never see it, because that I would never be him. And I wasn't necessarily wrong, as I'm not now necessarily that I. My eye is a new one: the eye of an uncle. How we see things is what we are, how we are how we see things. Or close enough - give or take one eye, one n. Corrected vision removes the blind spot, brings the visual fields together, takes that space in the middle away a la Mad Magazine in the day. Or maybe it's just that a crack has gone right through the center.
(I wish I had time to know more about monocles - if he's like Bishop with optics this will have been thought out down to a ridiculous level of detail. They must be for far-sightedness, since used occasionally, on just one eye, and by the c. 40+? Far-sightedness, my lad. Whatever, uncle.)
"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is an archipelago of shotgun blasts to the me, at 39.8.
Wondering if this fed those scenes I liked best in "It Follows," along with all that other stuff:
And you? Remember how the crickets came
Out of their mother grass, like little kin,
In the pale nights, when your first imagery
Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.
Not sure I ever fully appreciated the title till now, either. You're showing the friend a vision-helper inherited from your now-deceased uncle, presumably one you associate with him hence retained, so characteristic of how he appeared in middle age when you first knew him well. And realize idly that monocle and my uncle sound the same. And realize, picking it up, that it fits your present degree of poor eyesight. Realize, looking in the mirror, that it fits how you look at this age. That you look like him. And that you must now be looking at things now the way he did. To have picked up a monocle is to no longer feel one is the star of the show, one of the romantic leads. One is now a spectator, to some degree, and one now sees it all differently - both because one's eyes have decayed and because with those decaying eyes one has seen how all the eyes decay. One is but halfway there oneself - just one eye needs it. "Forty," we're later told. And though one couldn't have seen that one would see this way before, it was right there in front. My uncle, who was ridiculous, if nice enough. Who saw the world as I would never see it, because that I would never be him. And I wasn't necessarily wrong, as I'm not now necessarily that I. My eye is a new one: the eye of an uncle. How we see things is what we are, how we are how we see things. Or close enough - give or take one eye, one n. Corrected vision removes the blind spot, brings the visual fields together, takes that space in the middle away a la Mad Magazine in the day. Or maybe it's just that a crack has gone right through the center.
(I wish I had time to know more about monocles - if he's like Bishop with optics this will have been thought out down to a ridiculous level of detail. They must be for far-sightedness, since used occasionally, on just one eye, and by the c. 40+? Far-sightedness, my lad. Whatever, uncle.)