All the Horrible Girliness

Ondaatje is good, so good. He is not so much an idol of mine (you hope one day to be your idols, and I don't have a shred of hope for that), but a god. Every word is sacred, meaningful, heavy. His poetry is perfect, but his prose is hard. You can't skim. I'm never more aware of my skimming habits than when I read Ondaatje prose.

I read his poems over and over. I once threw things at a puppy because he ate an Ondaatje book. I dogear and paper clip his pages.

What my new apartment needed was a little romance. It had the energy of the last tenants. It felt like it was mourning them in some quiet way, rejecting me. Then we put some beautiful new dark wood tables in the living room, and I took down an Ondaatje book. The space changed.

He reminds me of details, how every object has its own life, like your keys. They come into your keeping, they make music and open your doors, they take your abuse. You read Ondaatje, you see the edges of things, how they come into contact with you but never belong wholly to you, how you could be grateful and in love and in hate with all things.

So, walking through my apartment, I saw the geometry of light coming through the new blinds, and I listened to the sounds of the dryer in a new way. Everything sounded like music you could make love to.

The night is still hard for me. All my worries come out then. So I try to go to sleep early. Mornings are easier. It's difficult when there's nothing to clean, and I don't like having TV now. Everything is still busy.

--

This morning, I was almost arrested at the federal building on Wilshire while picking up my passport. I'm afraid to tell the story, so I won't. I was let go on the guard's intuition.

--

Here's an exerpt from the book that's warming my house.

You know hunters
are the gentlest
anywhere in the world

they halt caterpillars
from path dangers
lift a drowning moth from a bowl
remarkable in peace

in the same way assassins
come to chaos neutral.

posted by Samus @ 2:54 PM