trek drabble: the art of losing isn't hard to master

[darstellen]

Title: the art of losing isn't hard to master
Genre: 100-word drabble
Era: tos or reboot, your pick
Rating: g
Character: christine chapel
Notes: written for the feb. 15 drabblefest at where_no_woman for prompt number fourteen: "the art of losing isn't hard to master" -- itself a quote from one of my favourite Elizabeth Bishop poems, "One Art".

Comments

[darstellen]

*hugs you*

Thank you for being so lovely, dear, despite my failure with MT -- it means more than I can say. ♥

[darstellen]

Oh, my dear friend, you've left me quite speechless. ♥ Thank you.

[darstellen]

♥ Thank you. That (almost) was the most difficult part to think of; everything sat wrong without it, but it was also the last part written.

You have the most beautiful, expressive icons; my world lights up when seeing them. :)

[darstellen]

Torture is a good word for it. ;) But it is, indeed, also exquisite.

Without our faces and voices and gestures to help us be understood, icons are all we have available to express our intentions non-verbally. There's an art to picking the right combination of text and image, though, just as there's an art to combining words in a text -- and it's one you've mastered. ♥

[anon_j_anon]

tos or reboot, your pick

It definitely works both ways.

This is great. I find it hard to do formal analysis on 100 words-- the line between prose and poetry blurs and one feels one can say something and nothing... 100 words is 100 words, enough to capture feelings and images, give context. Not enough to make motifs and themes and further development.

Really, 100 words say it all. Is it obscene that analysis can't help but exceed that limit, and manage to say so much less?

[darstellen]

Your words mean more than I can say, at least in this mode.

Is it obscene that analysis can't help but exceed that limit, and manage to say so much less?

Good question. I know the dilemma all too well; it makes me despair at times, as you know. :) Perhaps the only good answer to a piece is to write another in response? A poem for a poem? etc.?

One of the most intriguing solution to the limits on 100 words I've seen has been none other than your Panopticon. Each section retains the laconism and pointedness of a drabble, but also gains through the multiplication by ten the traits specific to longer, prose texts. Someday, I might try a 10 x 100, or 5 x 100 -- as a response -- if you don't mind that is!

[anon_j_anon]

Don't mind it at all. Go for it. Spread the experimentation.

[danahid]

I am constantly fascinated by what we lose and what we keep, the things we carry and the things we forget, the things we miss and the things we don't. In a hundred words, with that perfect (almost), you've captured this. Beautifully.

Henry David Thoreau said: "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." I am intrigued and fascinated by Christine's serenity, her acceptance of what is lost and forgotten.

Then I come back to that (almost), and I wonder.

Wonderful use of form and language, dear friend. Lovely work.

[darstellen]

Your words have not ceased to delight, and I thank you for them. You see so much -- bringing so much more to the text in the process.

I am intrigued and fascinated by Christine's serenity, her acceptance of what is lost and forgotten. Then I come back to that (almost), and I wonder.

Then the text has succeeded; it was meant to produce a break, while leaving open the consequences. I must admit, though, the true insight behind this text is not my own, but Elizabeth Bishop's. I could not, cannot do justice to her poem, especially not to these lines:

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

That write it!, softened here to a parenthetical almost -- stuns me every time, is simply unparalleled.

Thank you again for your insights. You bring wonder back into reading, my friend. I'd feared it gone; you've helped bring it back. ♥

[danahid]

Thank you again for your insights. You bring wonder back into reading, my friend. I'd feared it gone; you've helped bring it back. ♥

This is exactly how I feel about you, my friend!

Thank *you*.