Little Toboggans

“How is a Greek chorus like a lawyer

They’re both in the business of searching for a precedent / finding an analogy / locating a prior example / so as to be able to say / this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is not unique you know it happened before / or something much like it / we’re not at a loss how to think about this / we’re not without guidance / there is a pattern / we can find an historically parallel case / and file it away under 

Antigone buried alive Friday afternoon

compare case histories 7,17, and 49

Now I could dig up those case histories / tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the Sons of Phineas / people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind / it wouldn’t help you / it didn’t help me / it’s Friday afternoon / there goes Antigone to be buried alive”

{Anne Carson}

Perhaps any articulation of tragedy is an act of translation. 

"You are too far away — you are too absent — to invisible, inaudible, inconceivable — you have become a beautiful myth — a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort."

wrote Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson.

1. The final page of The Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley

2. Villette (Chapter XLII, Finis)

Joseph Cornell, “Toward The Blue Penninsula”, 1953 (for Emily Dickinson, inspired by her bedroom.) 

Chorus: Mine isn’t a noun     Kreon: It is if you capitalize it

{Anne Carson, Antigonick}

No. 260, illustration by Bianca Stone

"Monday.
Me.
Tuesday.
Me.
Wednesday.
Me.
Thursday.
Me."

The opening of Gombrowicz’s Diary 

(Source: invisiblestories)

A Note

Is it through the realization that we’re the only ones seeing our world that we first learn to create fictions? The monster’s stated quest is to piece together a self for himself that somehow doesn’t feel inherent, something he knows has an origin and must have qualities that are both unique and shared. Is this the quest of the reader, or of the writer? 

You ask of my Companions —

From the Cold Sky

Visibility comes to us from the direction of death, from the direction of an indifferent nature, from the cold sky. It is hypnotic, yet it seems no longer entirely of this world. It is bound up with how we imagine the end, death, departure, silence. As a challenge for the writer’s imagination, it wanders through the centuries, bringing together authors who are completely different from one another, of greater or lesser caliber on the stage of a single paragraph, related by virtue of the shared striving for pure light noted in their  texts, their striving for emptiness, for silence, by their abandoning the real, the concrete, the perceptible, the living, in favor of the motionless, the hardened, the fading, the falling silent. 

{Marek Bienczyk, Transparency}

"Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference!"

{Herman Melville, Moby-Dick}

“A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
In contrast with the things that sing
Not Birds entirely — but Minds —
Minute Effulgencies and Winds —
When what they sung for is undone
Who cares about a Blue Bird’s Tune —
Why, Resurrection had to wait 
Till they had moved a Stone —”

Facsimile of the envelope on which Emily Dickinson composed #1530 {The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-Poems}

{Giorgio Agamben, Profanations}

{A scan of the frontispiece of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.}

how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing —

{Laurie Sheck}

Here’s freedom. 

{Emily Dickinson}