“The prose has camera-eye immediacy. In a more recent book, “The Conversations” (2002), Ondaatje explored with Walter Murch the mysteries and wonders of film editing. In “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” he was already obsessively feeding off this craft from another medium. He doesn’t so much tell the story as splice it together, weaving together moments and sequences, cutting between emotions, or from image to image, shaking the kaleidoscope for maximum effect. The book doesn’t read like a film, but it stays in the imagination like one, dream-like, so that its characters start to haunt us.”

–Richard Rayner, http://franciscovazbrasil.blogspot.com/2009/10/tricks-with-knife-by-richard-rayner.html

“According to Stephen Greenblatt, the choices artists and writers make about how to fashion their self-representations reveal what he calls “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.” By authority, he means the shared, referential meaning associated with an object or an item of clothing. By alien he means the figure in the painting, which becomes an alien twin to the artist, frozen in a constructed world. Greenblatt would say that self-fashioning in self-portraiture forces the artist to select a costume. But unlike an actress the painted figure cannot take the costume off when the drama is over. The alien image in the self-portrait separates from the real self, living a different life than its maker whenever it is viewed, often surviving the artist’s corporeal existence, forever captured in relation to certain unchanging objects.”

–from “Self-Fashioning in Sarah Goodridge’s Self-Portraits,” by Chris Packard, on “Common-Place” website: http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/lessons/

 In 1887
the white peacocks came and watched the dance of death in the garden
and tea was served

–oh this was far away
In Dutchess County, New York
In the humid summer
green fields, green trees, wet black bark, black dirt
mansions of polished stone

And she danced, spinning
the hem of her white dress flying out

and the peacocks cocked their heads this way
and that
to view her

A perspiring gentleman sitting near the boxwood hedge crunched gently
on a shortbread
as the music soared

Beyond the hedge the top of the Irish maid’s cap was seen
moving to and fro
until suddenly it stopped
and her head blossomed, neckless
above the hedge
grey eyes astonished
as she too watched

While the slender albino girl spun in the sun
her slippers barely touching the flagstone patio
her blonde hair slipping from its jeweled chignon
her bare arms gleaming

The chamber group on the long porch
breaking free from their cadenced harmony
into something unknown
and jungly

But the white peacocks were unsurprised.
Instead, like applause
their long delicate tail feathers began to spread
and spread
and spread

immaculate
incandescent

pluming into the world

And what did the girl see, whirling?

White white white white
Everywhere light
sliding through veiled light and
light sluicing
the white agate of  horizon
and white
crackling with terrible purity
eclipsing sight

incantatory
dazzling

Fall
on your knees

in her white silk dress
with her dress hem streaming out

Fall
on your knees

She is flying

and we cannot catch her
and we cannot catch her

and then
the peacocks begin to scream.

[This poem was written by E, my daughter, age 5. She dictated it to me, and then I pared it down and shaped it, and here it is. The words are all her own.]

Now here everything is tuttle. Tuttle means everything
is in its place. Eyes for seeing, mouth for eating
ears for hearing, legs
for walking a long way from the farm all the way to sinker-bok.

Sinker-bok is mud.

                                                     *

cats

their whiskers help feel anything in this house

and their body helps them get inside of their bones
and their bones help them eat

and the last part is their smile
the smileness of their smileness helps them smile
the cat has a sense of eyes and their eyelashes

and their bodies love everything even their words inside

dog

the dog has some smell to help them smell every way of their smellness.

The dog has lost its temperature. Temperature means
that sad went all the way down into its stomach and
it had no people.
But the sadness is not good. It helps them die.

Whatever it is don’t go near
dogs because it helps them die. 
If you get near dogs if they’re bad or good you can’t keep them.

For a long way there’s dogs

 bird

the mouth helps them taste cold worms and hot worms and even short worms
and their head helps them get messy
helps them see a long time

and the body is the important thing of the world

and the really important thing is the foot
and no one can believe that anyone can believe

that birds have feet and
the feet help them
walk

  pig

the pig ears are the most wonderful things in the world
the head helps them—smartness comes out

and they can smell air or dreams a long way down in the mud

and their body helps them eat inside
and their legs–the important one–to walk

to South America.

                                                         *

…and that’s what the conference is. Thank you.

…even their mouth is up and down even the conference is smart,

thank you.

This piece started accidently on Twitter as a tweet in response to a line Colson Whitehead had tweeted, about notes for a short story he was taking, although, he said, he didn’t write short stories. He thought he’d call it “The Full Iceberg.” My tweet grew into a riff, and then into its own story about Colson, shipwrecked on an iceberg, with a small penguin named Edwina. Not all the lines were tweeted, and some were subsequently re-shaped, but they all retain the “tweet format.“

***

 @colsonwhitehead sits cross-legged on the iceberg and stares back at the penguins staring at him. “Shipwrecked with non-talking birds,” he mutters.

A section of the ship still rests on the iceberg. Penguins waddle around and through it as if they are at a museum.

@colsonwhitehead pieces a quilt from comic books left in the ship’s bunkroom and stitches it with red thread. “Art,” he tells the penguins.

The penguins are impressed. Or at least they shift from one foot to the other and gurgle quietly as they eye @colsonwhitehead’s art-quilt.

I’ll call this art-quilt “The Full Iceberg,” @colsonwhitehead says. “Is it edible?” asks the smallest penguin. She has blue feet.

@colsonwhitehead looks closer at the smallest penguin. She has blue shoes on, not blue feet.  http://bit.ly/50AsV

“Like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves, as though we were drowning inside our hearts, as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul,” he says.

“Pablo Neruda,” the tiny penguin says. She blinks at @colsonwhitehead. “My name’s Edwina. And this story’s about me, not you and your wrecked ship.” “Fine by me,” he says.

Penguins dive off the iceberg. Plop-plop-plop. @colsonwhitehead hums as he watches a sapphire light deepen on the horizon. Edwina sidles near.

The ghost-ships on this iceberg crowd them. A cold wood flank touches warm one. Edwina clambers into @colsonwhitehead’s lap. Shivering.

“We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel,” Edwina whispers. “Elizabeth Bishop,” @colsonwhitehead says. “And I’d rather have the ship.”

“You need a flag,” she says. “First flag, then ship.” “Oh no,” @colsonwhitehead says. “I’m not using the art-quilt. I’ve already named it.”

“Well, un-name it.” “No,” @colsonwhitehead says. “I don’t un-name things, only name them.” “Oh pooh,” she says. “Think sideways for once.”

 With one wing Edwina sketches a shape in the frigid air. A white flag appears. Wavering. “Ghost-flag,” she says.

@colsonwhitehead looks at it. He sighs. “Nope. No more ghosts.” He hoists the red-thread-comic-book-art-quilt in the air. “Art-flag,” he says.

Edwina clicks her black beak in pleasure. Small fissures open on the iceberg. They zig-zag like ghost-snakes. The sound of branches snapping, breaking, unseen.

A sigh of night. Fissures widen. An all-black ship rises from lapping water and hangs, glistening, mid-air. @colsonwhitehead feels his chest squeeze. The sheer beauty.

“It worked,” Edwina says. “You can fold and put away the art-quilt-cum-flag now. Only one small problem.” “What?” says @colsonwhitehead.

“Um. The ship has only two directions. Up. Or down.” @colsonwhitehead glares at the small penguin. “THINK SIDEWAYS,” he says.

Edwina does. She thinks so hard that her blue shoes pop off and reveal blue feet. The black ship suddenly shifts in the air and balances on its prow.

There is sea-water raining on them. The cracks in the iceberg become maws. “You know,” says Edwina, “I don’t think we WANT to know the full iceberg. It might not be good for us.”

“Good point,” says @colsonwhitehead. “You’re coming with, right?” Without waiting for an answer he wraps her in the art-quilt and ties the ends around his chest.

Up @colsonwhitehead goes, fingering and toeing his way up the sideways-ship as if it were a tree. A muffled screech comes from the art-quilt.

“I don’t like heights,” wails Edwina. “There’s always something,” says @colsonwhitehead. “Now hold on.”

One fatal crack, like thunder, like a redwood trunk severed. The sky goes abruptly dark, a curtain pulled on the stage of the past.

Then the muttering of a TV. The smell of coffee. Edwina looks around, dazed, at the interior of a Brooklyn apartment flooded with sun.

@colsonwhitehead is sprawled on the floor on top of his art-quilt. Edwina studies him. “You look rather penguin-like around the eyes, you know,” she says.

@colsonwhitehead sits up. “And you,” he says, “look obnoxious around your beak.”

“Your art-quilt fell apart,” Edwina says. “It looks like a bunch of crappy comic books.” “No deconstruction before breakfast,” @colsonwhitehead says. “Now let’s eat.”

And so they do. One tall, one small, both smelling of brine and fish, scooping Cheerios into their mouths.  Waiting.

They hear a voice. “Some are asleep, on the bottom of the world, sucking the world in, and blowing it out, in wave-lengths.  Radiant ghosts.”

“Michael Dickman,” Edwina says.

“As [Anne] Carson said in her interview with Kevin McNielly:

Using words so that you create a surface that leaves an impression in the mind no matter what the words mean. It’s not about the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it’s about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning, you know as impressionist colors interact, daubs of paint, and you stand back and see a story emerge from the way that the things are placed next to each other. You can also do that with language. (“Gifts and Questions” 20)”

excerpted from: “This Breaking Where Red Things Wade”: Textual Hybridity in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Madeline Oatman

Not here. Never was.
Vapor.
Drifting

(Through the open window:
Cars sigh down a damp street
an outcast dove coos to itself in the stone courtyard
black leaves rustle against the gray skin of sky )

But from me
no sound

Not here.
Never was.

Instead:
Sinking
down through slow green currents
where sleep-fish nibble dreams
and words unfurl like languid seaweed

past columns of light
where ghost-fish, ghost-selves
weave through kelp forests and
bone-white ruins
to the mystery of chambers beyond

Gliding
along the marine floor
in and out of light and shade
in and out of now and then
in and out of maybe and never-was

Down here
everything is possible
everything is probable
everything ever imagined at any time in the history of the world
now exists
all at once
and without end.

I’m not here. I never was.
Just vapor.
Drifting.

(Through the open window:
A sound like tearing cloth rends the sky
the dove’s complicated contralto is sliced
mid-note
light torches the world yet again)

“So that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold
which though perishable
is tested by fire”

This is an excerpt from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” from Glass, Irony and God, which gives a moving and unusual look at Emily Bronte:

WHACHER

Whacher,
Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,
has caused confusion…

 But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

 She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”
records Charlotte in 1828.
Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,
suggests a third. Meanwhile
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,
out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.
She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary
or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)
and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon
in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,
walking the moor
or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.

“Like two dim forests edging together the Now and the Then stood, almost silent. What strange animals crept to the verge of each and stared at one another from their own territories?  What rough or velvet coats, and fearful eyes, bright claws and teeth, did each side see? Their shadows wove together and their sunlight and moonlight were the same, but they never approached each other, never mated.”

–an excerpt from “Seven-Days Monologue” by Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Bramble Bushes” in the book Modern Poetry After Modernism, by James Logenbach.

This excerpt is from Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else…These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Of course, there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled…the sea is unwearying. Death is bad…Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? “Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,” says Baudrillard.

So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. “Passion for substances” seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches.

Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved.  Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless….or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him…”

For further information:   “Seeing Red”, the New York Times 1998 review of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red:   http://bit.ly/7MXqd

Geryon, the protagonist of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, as illustrated by Gustave Dore for The Divine Comedy.