@dreamofmourning - Tumblr Blog

#knowing this perfect thing #Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her?

the passenger did something that's always of interest to me - staging one person as some grand, disjointed mystery who could never be comprehended, or who is so altered, so strange, that no history of him could ever be pieced together, so marked that he could never live unobtrusively among other human beings (the neither fish nor fowl), and then the truth of him is actually quite simple (just too sad!!!). and sheddan delivers it with relish like twenty pages in, because it does have this mythical explanatory power to it ('he's in love with his sister and she's dead') that then fails to resolve anything. a shattered, incoherent subject, told from everyone else's point of view, inside whom is the desperately preserved memory of the one person for whom he cohered, and whose knowing of this person may be the only true recounting of his life and is essentially unrecoverable. #i wish i grew up the second i first held you in my arms. however, what i'm finding difficult to survive and so singular about these books is that stella maris as a sequel then goes on to reinstate all this as an essential mystery, without discounting the magnificence of their subjectivities and the ordinariness of their history. it IS simple, AND it explains nothing

#not of knowledge but of nearness 😭#'things ultimately contain no information concerning themselves'

#🫠#good at it

#its own remote flowered void #seeing god knows what in the darkness

"And when he says he is building a Cone for his sister in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, in its exact geometrical center, impossible to calculate according to the experts, but I was finally able to prove it, he must seem even crazier,"

i reread the passenger and stella maris last week on vacation and they are really among the greatest and saddest books i've ever read in a crushing and deeply altering way. just absolutely no possibility of repair in any direction, and completely mystical. there's an underlying question in the passenger of "could incest save someone's life?" (or - "have saved") that mccarthy is treating with complete solemnity, and then in the first few pages of stella maris alone it's answered with a resounding yes that continues to be played out much more explicitly. and bobby pretty much does know the answer for all of the passenger and knows he is too late. under what conditions would she have been allowed to pursue that as a viable strategy for her continued existence? it is too foreign to bobby and to the doctor but she sees quite clearly that this was a mode of life (specifically, having a child with her brother) that might have sustained her and nothing else would. "i knew that i had only one chance and one love" i guess i have no other way of explaining it than mccarthy is taking that statement and desire seriously and taking that mode of life as coherent, capable of being advantageous, and specifically asking what type of subject would alicia have to have been, or more accurately, what kind of subjectivity would have to have been granted to her that was instead denied, for her to be allowed to choose it, for her choosing it to be "rational", for that point of view and that decision to cohere from an outside perspective. it's the one thing that the doctor can't meet her on, makes no progress towards her on. it's too far for him. as impossible to conceive of as one passenger making it out from a closed plane at the bottom of a lake 🙃 and mccarthy specifically achieves all this in stella maris by sketching out the singularity of one individual interiority to such an extent that the thought of any method that might succeed in preserving it not being attempted is unimaginable, devastating, and it works because you’ve already seen in the passenger exactly how leveled one person's life was by its destruction

#keen alert cold observant detached manipulative ruthless

dreamofmourning

“the body becomes more and more describable when it learns to be affected by many more elements.”

#so that I might hear the unsaid more clearly

+

asfortheworld

what's eerie is the singularity of the individual is matched by the singularity of the task, like we watch one incredibly specific person apply their ability to one incredibly specific thing, or one incredibly specific thing shape the ability of one incredibly specific person

#you don't know my attributes #but we always did try

not to “lol 👍” again but two things recently:

1. Random tiktok commenter understanding he who occasions the catalogue

(the infinite omitted adjective list)

2. The last time I saw you, you were on stage ! your hair was wild, your eyes were bright, and you were in a rage! :

#LOL!!!#keen alert cold observant detached manipulative ruthless

lol 👍

#if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it

how has no one ever told me that cormac mccarthy wrote a book about a former formula 2 driver turned deep sea salvage diver (standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight) who is in love with his sister

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