proximoception: (Default)
proximoception ([personal profile] proximoception) wrote2015-07-05 12:18 am

(no subject)

Go nowhere and wait, Wakefield. The festival in the country will appear in the dark. You won't remember it. In the morning the drained hues and new but somehow ancient garbage that's the after of any party will give no hints, for you will be in that stage of childhood where anything can lead anywhere for all you know, thus all things subside further into themselves than anything could merit. We all wake in a field. And that one waking makes a field more of a beginning than the bang itself. The weeds of only this spring from no bottom. And yet the candy corns, the rubber band stuck between pink and gray. Black ridges off fried whats, and saddest of all the papers. Folding, stretching, fraying, cornering, gumming, curling, snailing, wetting, drying: no papers die alike, but in death all fall up a dimension. The field wakes to find itself field, plane plain. Wakefield was seen that day. Seen everyday. We all knew. And no one's ever failed to understand.

Sit elsewhere and start, Hawthorne. You weren't married then, but the lies in your confession confess more than fact could. The wife is the life, but only since life is all wife. We live largely by avoiding living, a feeling avoidance. A show put on for eyes one never meets, like all the shows. Which doesn't mean you could have lived. They're right that not trying is about not failing, but mostly they don't think it through: try and you'll succeed, they assure, assuming secretly we'll fail and then move on. We don't move on. Motion on occurs, but not of us. "Live your life!" We are, though. This is how.

The piety and pity. Hence her face, her hands. That is exactly what it's like. To have had, to be promised to have, to be having and yet: for all three there's the haze but not quite enough haze to save, to deflect, to resweeten the dream or return us to dreaming, not dreams. There's haze but the undeniable breaks in. And, breaking, makes the haze what could be broken. Marble folds. A haze you'd break your head on. A world made of wall in the way. With her behind.

Of course you die. False beard off, K's Law's guardian is Michael Angel's Mary, a Mary who has never had a child. But Hawthorne's right. The nonexistent, preexistent, here but distant woman is a family. And you could have them any time, but only by being the you who could never have them.

A day comes when that changes but anyone who's ever spoken that truth was lying. All any Hawthorne signifies is the impossibility of every Hawthorne's past. What can never touch does. It and you become one, and you find you were always an it, it always a you. Which you knew you were. You were never a fool. The ending you feared, so declined, had all the same words as the one you sought.

If you'd only known. If the you who knows now only knew what replaced knowledge then. All the hamburgers you could have had! But the steak you didn't ruin is in someone else's home. It can't become yours and still be someone else's. But you can go homeless.

It's only not paradox for being always true of something. Or rather: almost always. But there are two almost-trues. There's what's true for almost everyone, and what's almost wholly true for you. We're always on the wrong side of an almost.

Almost always.

[identity profile] karinmollberg.livejournal.com 2015-07-08 11:17 am (UTC)(link)
Wakefield was born in Oblomovka essentially but who dreamt whose dream before it unhappened elsewhere?
Never thought of this before because Maud but now that you made me maybe this http://pomposa.livejournal.com/33739.html will make you...or could it be; that in fact he was nothing but an abandoned lover? A character named "Oblomov" in art patron Peggy Guggenheim's memoir Out of This Century was identified by poet Stephen Spender as Samuel Beckett, her one-time lover. Now, you made me intrigued, never looked that way out of the window befoe...(typo to let stand as is;)
Edited 2015-07-08 11:44 (UTC)

[identity profile] karinmollberg.livejournal.com 2015-07-08 12:00 pm (UTC)(link)
However vigorously explained to the feeble-minded here...:

http://classic-literature.yoexpert.com/classic-literature-general/what-is-the-meaning-behind-nathaniel-hawthorne-s-w-37597.html

Well, now we know more.
Edited 2015-07-08 12:02 (UTC)

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2015-07-11 04:04 am (UTC)(link)
It's the interaction with Hawthorne's biography that fascinates me. Wakefield is Hawthorne without Garfield, as it were.

[identity profile] proximoception.livejournal.com 2015-07-11 04:00 am (UTC)(link)
Wow, never even hesrd of that. Intriguing...