dans les bruyeres,
dans les roseaux,
parmi les pierres,
et sur les eaux,
de place en place,
percant la nuit,
s'allume et passe
un feu qui luit!
alerte! alerte!
de loin, de pres,
dans l'herbe verte,
sous les cypres.
mouvantes flammes,
rayons glaces,
ce sont les ames
des trespasses!

-charles gounod, faust, act v

Gute Walpurgisnacht!

Current Mood: thankful
Current Music: parappa the rapper

Greek alphabet cookies for Archaic Texts. See also: Mimosas, Pancakes and.

Current Mood: accomplished

This strange panoply of creatures, though I tend to think of it as one, lives on 112th street & Amsterdam, beside the great cathedral of St. John the Divine. Its given name is the Peace Fountain (Greg Wyatt, 1985), but I have referred to it since I was very young as the Silly Statue. It is one of the two sculptures (both fountains, in fact) in Manhattan of which I am enamoured and at the same time quite terrified.

I must first have seen the Statue in the third or fourth year of my life, for my mother used to take me to the cathedral gardens after nursery school. Peacocks (and peahens, perhaps, but I don't recall) roamed the grounds. It is still one of the most beautiful places that I know.

The Statue resides in a smaller garden of its own, casting shadows on the ivy and the children that surround it. Truly, you must stand before the beast to appreciate how massive it is, all wings, claws, and moonlike faces. The archangel Michael rides triumphant, a giraffe jumps over the moon (or is it the sun?)

...

Current Mood: sleepless
Current Music: mystified - heaves

This has been bothering me for months: why do the toilet paper dispensers here bear the insignia of the hand of eris?



(click detail for full photograph.)

Current Mood: bewildered
Current Music: :wumpscut: - fear in your eyes

This afternoon on the corner of Amsterdam a woman stood in the doorway of a salon to admonish a child. The sun had not yet set, but its light was veiled by thin clouds the colour of white alpaca wool. The street was neither crowded nor devoid of traffic.

*                *                *

When I left the building, it was not yet quarter to four. I glanced down and saw dry leaves on the pavement-- birds sing in the ornamental pear trees, but the oaks are dying-- and was reminded of my walk to the doctor's office four days previous. It had been a Monday, two days after I had been dismissed from school for lack of glucose in my blood. I had felt betrayed, not so much by my body as by the nurses who snidely (I thought) supposed that my illness was psychiatric. On this Monday, however, I walked the familiar streets in brown corduroy and my mother's shoes. I felt distinctly more normal than I had for quite some time. I could be anyone's neighbor.

Minutes later, sitting in a leather chair across from the psychiatrist, my sense of anonymity would have all but vanished.

Thus remembering I walked, but now my heart was changed, as had everything changed. Further bloodwork had revealed Lyme the cause of my fatigue; antibiotics, not antipsychotics, would be my prescription. My joints ached in relief. No more did visions haunt my sleep. I would be back in Poughkeepsie by Saturday; there was an internist there who would treat me. I could pass the week off, in my mind, as a dream. All that we see... within a dream...

I crossed the street as the light turned green. As I ran, I caught a glimpse of a child of six or seven moving in the opposite direction.

*                *                *

Requiescat in pace.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: Autumn Tears - Love Poems for Dying Children

μέν The Qara periodically accuses me, and rightly so, of hoarding things. I save hair clippings, broken glass, wrapping paper, metro cards, and the fortunes from Chinese cookies. I write down the sums of meaningless strings of numbers -- my student ID number adds to 53=5+3=8. My hard drive is cluttered with documents containing the meanest of correspondences and transcripts. I am virtually incapable of throwing away letters.

δέ Hoarding, nevertheless, sometimes pays off. Provided that I can find a given object or collection thereof amidst the disarrangement of things, I am seldom at loss for forgotten information or material for collage. I have been saving interesting spam (not the nigerian scams and viagra ads, but this sort) for quite a while in vague plans of assembling something along the lines of a dadaist poem or word-collage. Here, at last, is something constructive that one can do with spam.

Current Mood: willful
Current Music: joy division -- love will tear us apart

Facilis descensus Averno:
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.
-Vergil
In my dream I was walking home in the dead of the night and I couldn't for the life of me find a (1) or (9) train; the streets were ever more narrow and dark. At last, I read (7) on a station entrance and thought it was a decent prospect. I descended easily. The station was empty but for myself, a decrepit old token vendor, and a toothless woman who appeared to be collecting fare (the turnstiles had apparently been broken for a long time). The lights flickered. I showed the Collector my metro card, then, realizing its uselessness, fished lamely in my pockets for coins. The Collector shook her head and smiled with her gums, pulling me through. The whites of her eyes unnerved me. Presently, I found myself in a strange sort of amphitheatre, standing amidst thousands of dark figures. The eyes of the figures were fixed like those of zombies at the central stage, a vast, dim space bisected by a railroad track, which disappeared on either side of the stage into a black tunnel. I remember my heart pounding in my chest. Nevertheless, I sat down and asked the closest figure, when will the next train come? I knew that something was terribly wrong, of course, but I feigned nonchalance as best I could, in vain hope that such farce could save me. Faces turned immediately in answer. Clearly, I did not belong; like the woman in a certain ghost story who, having risen too early for church on Sunday morning, finds herself at the Mass of the Dead, I had seen something not meant for mortal eyes. Now my feet flew down the steps, towards the grand stage, but in vain. The Lady of the place came forth, enraged, and disposed of me. Now I shifted perspctives. Even as my own body was dragged up the stairs, my eyes did not move. The end was dizzying. The Lady reigned over the theatre-fortress, and by her Will there rose a landscape of surreality and horror. Her subjects, the stairs, the very walls themselves, gave way to distortion. By the next dawn, I was a person of shadow.

Current Mood: nostalgic