(no subject)

[proximoception]

From October 1921:

It had been impossible for him to enter the house, for he had heard a voice saying to him: 'Wait till I lead you in!' And so he continued to lie in the dust in front of the house, although by now, probably, everything was hopeless...


One page and two days after "This ending of the Pentateuch bears a resemblance to the final scene of L'Education sentimentale." Is the necessary context here - this rewrites "Before the Law" in light of that resemblance.

Maybe it isn't only Borges who hides la femme - that beard and pointed nose always seemed fake, no? But here the mask perhaps falls. Maybe perhaps falls. God is God but the gods are a woman.

The invisible house-obsessed are often emphatically single, aren't they? Thoreau, Robinson, Crowley at the time. Or like Frost (and maybe Shelley - and in a sense Stevens) contemplating a failed household - can't remember what Bishop's status would have been when she wrote "End of March" or finished "The Moose." Neglected to mention that most crucial aspect of the house, didn't I, that you not be alone in it. Alone, even a mansion is just an apartment. Though "End of March" is funny about that - the dream house seems to involve aloneness, where on the beach one of the few things she does have is her companions. "Five Flights Up" is living alone.

And then the next passage, from the same day, fades us into the other house, the tower, the Command Center:

All is imaginary - family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

The last paper I wrote as an undergrad was for a course on Philosophy of Architecture on houses in poetry.

"To build some kind of house out of the" something something, "the days spent." Merrill, Urban Convalescence, I think.

And:

"Upstairs, the windows will be lighted, not the rooms."

I like the allusion to Crowley's epigraph.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of that Merrill poem too. The dull need... love spent.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Time to open Merrill.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I'm a sieve! (unquote)

It is "Urban Convalescene" though, right?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Also China Mieville's The City and the City. A city (or two or three or four) imbricated, like Crowley's house, according to impossible (?) topologies. Rose in Aegypt would be the human equivalent, no?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Mieville good? All I know of him is that long interview John Pistelli, late of here, did with him. And that he apparently tries to mix Marxism with Dungeons and Dragons, which sounded pretty offputting. My father was reading him the months before he died.