Take My Wife, Please

Shakespeare as Henny Youngman. Parnassian vaudeville. Othello, having just murdered his wife, hears Emilia outside his bedchamber.

"What's best to do? If she come in, she'll sure speak to my wife.

My wife.

My wife?

What wife?"

(Othello, Act V, scene ii)

Out of the Granite Darkness

6/26/2012


Out of the granite darkness a blue smile materialized–a smile which could split rock. The blue friendliness became a rocky perch in the open air on a mountain crag overlooking a bottomless pool of clear glacier water. Somehow I understood that it was the custom of those emerging--against all fate--from the labyrinth intestines of the mountain’s hopeless schist to hurl a fragment of rock from a nearby vein of lapis lazuli into the glacier pool: as its blue farewell of stone disappeared into the bottomless depths, it was supposed to signify the return of hope to the darkness which is its dwelling place, from which it could be summoned again by memory at the opportune moment. The connection between darkness and hope had some obscure connection with the sound of the words “suffer” and “sapphire” I think, or “semaphore” and sapphire, but I can’t remember.

Once I heard the slow merciless steps of confirmed executioners–black-uniformed stage Nazis with jackboots and lugars–approach me inexorably across the cold stone pavement of a dark cathedral transept. At an opportune moment I took control of the situation by remembering to wake up (remember to remember): the cruel slow steps–monotonous metronome of murder–became the slow, steady, flinty jackhammer “chip...chip...chip” of an absurd bird in the morning scrub pines outside my tent somewhere on the northern shore of Lake Superior.

Must there not exist a map somewhere, legible as the sky and with a legend printed in peacock inks, detailing the sites where the springwaters of surprise trickle out of the bleak rock of despair?

Our world is porous and shot through (chatoyant like a silken cat’s eye) with strange lookouts, returns, points of intersection and escape. Hope sees us naked without our knowledge.

A Japanese Princess with Algae-green Eyes

6/18/2012

One day it is said a Japanese princess with algae-green eyes folded a paper crane so perfect it escaped from her hands and flew away to the west, where it caught fire in the setting sun. As it fell and turned to ash, it unfolded into a map of Central Asia. This became Central Asia. To this event Japanese lore attributes the origin of the firebird (spurious folklore). It is said that a still-falling tear from the eye of the now long-dead princess demolishes wood, stone, glass, flesh, even metal or diamond (a ring on a consoling finger?) impediments from our world that encounter it by hazard in the space of fairy tales, obscurely mingled with our own. Theories of fairy-tale space have been proposed with a view to harnessing this energy for weapons research.