Christina Sestina - Dan Albergotti
Christina has written a sestina, and it's astonishing that she would ever hazard becoming forever Christina Sestina, nominal identification with that most artificial form. She should have known that writing a sestina is madness, should have stuck to free verse and saved herself, saved her name, kept herself hidden. In a sestina, nothing can ever be hidden. Everything is as plain and obvious as Christina the Astonishing waking at her funeral Mass and floating, saved, to the rafters of the church's ceiling. That's what writing a sestina will get you—levitation and a gawking crowd. Madness may be given order, but not by that ridiculous form. Christina must have torn at her brain, her hair, trying to form ideas to fit refrain words and math, trying to keep hidden the artifice, the arbitrary positioning in the mind, the madness of such a pattern. 123456, 615243. It's astonishing how each progressive stanza of the sestina can record the implosion of the mind, whether saved in a computer file or recorded on paper. Christina may have saved refrain words for weeks only to drop them into a form that collapses of its own weight and design. The sestina falls into itself, 615243, as some people do, to keep themselves hidden, as was the case with Christina the Astonishing, who would hide in ovens or cupboards, the patron saint of madness. She would also roll in fire and stand in icy water, her own madness on display, her faith that, despite every pain, she would be saved by a god she could not see. And that's the astonishing thing, that some of us will suffer hell on earth and be content to form prayers and supplications for a god who is always hidden, who may be gone, who may have always been as artificial as a sestina. What desperate measures we sometimes turn to—writing a sestina or offering words just as coldly chosen to a god—in order to fight the madness of the truth. Everything collapses. Nothing is hidden. Playing with words and math and the idea of gods, no one is saved. Up above this stinking world, the firmament is without form. Christina Sestina cannot become Christina the Astonishing. That's the mad and sad truth, Christina—astonishing in its depth of madness—that a random sestina will do as much as a prayer to get us saved, that every time we try to give this life a form, all form stays hidden.
