carrie

i ♥ sock puppets
Music did not open doors.
Nature flowered, caressed, spilled, relaxed, slept.
In the gilded frames, the ancestors were mummified forever, and descendants took the same poses. The women were candied in perfume, conserved in cosmetics, the men perserved in their elegance. All the violence of naked truths had evaporated, volatilized within gold frames.
And then, as Djuna's eyes followed the path carpeted with detatched leaves, her eyes encountered for the first time three full-length mirrors placed among the bushes and flowers as casually as a boudoir. Three mirrors.
The eyes of the people inside could not bear the nudity of the garden, its exposure. The eyes of the people had needed mirrors, delighted in the fragility of reflections. All the truth of the garden, the moisture, and the worms, the insects and the roots, the running sap and the rotting bark, had all to be reflected in the mirrors.
Lillian was playing among the mirrors. Lillian's violence was attenuated by her reflection in the mirrors.
The garden in the mirror was polished with the mist of perfection. Art and artifice had breathed upon the garden and the garden had breathed upon the mirror, and all the danger of truth and revelation had been exorcised.
Under the house and under the garden there were subterranean passages and if no one heard the premonitory rumblings before the explosion, it would all erupt in the form of war and revolution.
The humiliated, the defeated, the oppressed, the enslaved. Woman's misused and twisted strength....
-Anais Nin, Ladder to Fire
Murphy’s purpose in going to sit at Neary’s feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at the time a Pythagorean, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, ausculated, percussed, radiographed, and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box. One moment in such labour that it seemed on the point of seizing, the next in such ebullition that it seemed on the point of bursting. It was the mediation between these extremes that Neary called the Apmonia. When he got tired of calling it the Apmonia, he called it the Isonomy. When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called the the Attunement. But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy’s heart it would not enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy’s heart.
–Samuel Beckett, Murphy, Chapter 1
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
Emily Dickinson