forty-second (2022-08-10)
“all human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret" - gabriel garcía márquez, as quoted in the biography by gerald martin
photos herein by steph byce - this week’s theme is forces unknown, apparitions, divergence
shorts (click here for my full list of shorts on the docket for 2022)
Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown" (1835)
there’s something refreshing about characters in old short stories being named so literally (the pure wife “faith” and the protagonist “young goodman”). i’m even more of a sucker for the is-it-a-dream-or-really-happening trope, especially when it starts off ambiguously and seeps into full delirium. the obvious themes here are loss of faith, perfection, and purity (quite literally, puritans) but what sticks with me most is the uncovering of the dark, perturbed shadow selves of even our most righteous leaders.
book
the story of the lost child by elena ferrante, 2015
it took me awhile to realize the character lila is something beyond - a demiurge, a force, a dissolution. lila, in contrast to the largely straight-laced narrator elena, magically attracts abundance, splendor, wealth, and romance, contrasted by protracted periods of intense suffering and death. this book, the last in the series, was darker than the previous three, full of battles of conception and autonomy - where do we end and others begin? how do we carry our entanglements with us - literally in our embodiment but also in our work, accomplishments, relationships? elena always despised her mother’s limping gait and then after her first pregnancy, sciatica lent her a matching one, something that felt not without choice. i loved this review - and i’m sad that this four-parter is over on such a splitting, fragile note.
poem
i was looking for a famous Eliot poem - i remember none of the lines but swear i’d recognize it - and came across this. i keep picturing the waiter as a sort of zombie, his body ineffectively carrying out the motions of his previous work. it also reminded me of the story of the lost child, in the narrator feeling subsumed by dissolving boundaries between him and the woman laughing.
art
forothermore by nick cave at the museum of contemporary art chicago
it’s hard to articulate the sense of colliding pasts and futures present in cave’s work. looking at the disorienting non-referential sculptures i kept thinking about the passage of time, the way it warps and recedes and carries us forward. his work is imbued with the sense of an impossible future that carries with it the past: intricately beaded, buttoned, and woven with remnants of grief.
thanks for reading - more to come -
bria