There’s this thing; this owl, this very ugly owl. Like a cartoon owl – roughly the size of a smallish eight year olds closed fist. The owl holds some magical property. The glitter that forms a random crust over some parts of it changes colour – from a candyfloss pink to a bleach blue – ostensibly to indicate climatic conditions – but undoubtedly signalling something else way more esoteric and unknowable.
Here’s me clutching at its abrasive surface, and here’s me breathing hot breath over it as I cradle it in cupped palms. I’m using it as some kind of oracle. I don’t know what I’m asking it - something dumb probably.
After some time it turns this kind of sludgy purple and I lose interest.
In a way it is very funny reading your texts and Lou's texts sort of next to each other. You have a way of writing that seems so, I dunno, innocent? Naive even perhaps, in a thoroughly amoral way... like... you seem so, what is the word, dissociated? from your narrators, like... have you ever read the Neverending Story by Michael Ende? There is a bit where one of the main characters, Atreju, has lost all his memories, and is walking about talking with an oracle and looking at things in a curious but totally detached way. Your writing makes me think of that on occasion.
ReplyDeleteLou on the other hand always is his narrators/characters, so intensly, painfully, and so focused on them/himself, that nothing exists outside of each immediate, individual emotion. Every brief moment of pain blooms into a supernova of multi-world destruction, outshining everything else.
It's like you have almost entirely substracted yourself from your writing, and Lou has almost entirely substracted the world.
(This is probably overly dichotomistic and hyperbolic, but, well, maybe you get what I mean...)
I think I find myself much more on Lou's side of the river. I try to look at the world, but I can never forget that it is my looking at it, and that whatever I see I see through the lense of my experiences, and assumptions, and values...
(The oracle owl of course makes me think mostly of The Wasp Factory. Know the book? I'd be astonished if you didn't, but I think it's a total must-read!)
yr comment is like - 3 times longer than my piece :)
ReplyDeleteI do know the book, but i don't remember any owls. it's ok - but i kind of intensely dislike the rest of his work.
I think when FreeFox is talking about LOu, he means me, right?LOL
ReplyDeleteSee, M., we're like...yin and yang?
Haven't read the piece tho yet, I'm printing it and reading it out with a smoke, per usual. I'll be back.
nibble
uh huh - yr over the other side of the river wiv foxy, L - but I got the picnic basket *waves*
ReplyDeleteokay. this fox is swiming through the river to get to the goodies... ^_^
ReplyDeleteI don't know nothing bout rivers or sides but the piece is as always...beautiful in a cryptic way? Blah, i'm not too good with words...
ReplyDelete