A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

From Here to Felinity

Peter
     Strong and slippery, 
built for the midnight grass-party 
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away -- 
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding 
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds 
or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units 
in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth 
to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills. 
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity, 
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun, 
compelled when extended, to lie stationary. 
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must 
do as well as one can for oneself, 
sleep -- epitome of what is to him the end of life. 
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick 
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake. 
One need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head 
and alligator-eyes are not party to the joke. 
Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel 
or set up on the forearm like a mouse; 
his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin's width, 
are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. 
May be? I should have said might have been; 
when he has been got the better of in a dream -- 
as in a fight with nature or with cats, we all know it. 
Profound sleep is not with him a fixed illusion. 
Springing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries 
when taken in hand, he is himself again; 
to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair 
would be unprofitable -- human. What is the good of hypocrisy? 
It is permissible to choose one's employment, 
to abandon the nail, or roly-poly, 
when it shows signs of being no longer a pleasure, 
to score the nearby magazine with a double line of strokes. 
He can talk but insolently says nothing. What of it? 
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment. 
It is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness, 
that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender. 
As for the disposition invariably to affront, 
an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them. 
The eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. 
To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue. 
To tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way 
in your perturbation -- this is life; 
to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.