Short Folk #22: On the West

Note:

I finished Murakami, and then I read Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, and then I read a bit from Borges Labyrinths (more on that another day) and now I’m reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater. I’ve read a lot of Carson in my life and its one of my favorite things to do.  Her books are all jumbles of poetry, essay and story and each of them done at the absolutely highest level. None of the individual pieces make sense standalone but somehow, put together, you can see the threads running through them.  I admire that. Its tough for me to describe how much I admire what Carson is doing. Her erudition and skill is rather daunting.  In Plainwater she has a section of short stories, or lectures, each about a paragraph long that she calls “Short Talks”. I’ll transcribe one below, so you can get a sense of them, and then I’ll borrow liberally from her to write one of my own for today’s entry.  Its really hard to take any of her stuff out of context though, you need to real the whole series. Please do.

“On Reading

            Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?”

Short Folk #22: On The West

           

There are places where it’s so dry and weathered the mountains sink up to their shoulders in dust. You’ll be driving on some highway and realize that all you are seeing are the tips of them, like islands. You realize that you’re driving on an ocean of old dust, and could maybe sink.  There are other places where it’s so wet and new that the rivers cut the mountains right down to the roots. You’ll be driving on some highway and realize that you can see up every crisp fold of them, every place the rock bends. You realize that mountains grow like your children do, their height measured by notches in the wall.   But the thing about the West is that there’s a highway at the very bottom of that ocean of dust, and it’s the same highway where you looked up at the striated face of the new mountains and thought of your children. How can that be, you ask? But the West doesn’t speak. It only grows or covers.