#eng213

[mcmontague]

[franticwretcharchived022723]

a man is (never) lost at sea

But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal, that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to then swoon. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they weren’t concentric ripples, but rather eccentric, spreading each time farther, until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspected. But her center . . . no, she had no center, just emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me in and smothered me.

This story reads like a man falling out of love, to me. It's the story of two people inevitably at odds; both unable to accept either themselves or their partner for who they are, and then, after finding themselves, realizing their incompatibility. From the beginning, the woman-as-a-wave is a force of nature, yes, and poison. She is full and enveloping and yet unreachable, untouchable. And yet, despite all this, in the beginning, he loves her. The very sun comes in to cover them in light; to them "Love was a game, a perpetual creation."

And yet, he becomes jealous of the parts of her he can't find, the ones he can't touch, the ones separate from him. "She began to miss solitude," he says, and as she turns to herself and her fish he becomes bitter and jealous, raging at the fishes he can't be. He begins to resent her for not being human the same way she surrounds herself with the things that remind her of who she is and where she comes from. Then, as he pulls away, visiting friends and girlfriends long abandoned, she begins to cling to him, 'cursing and laughing,' as though that could call him back like one of her monsters, like one of her fish. 

The ice chips with the waiter seems to be the final confrontation, of sorts, a symbolic killing of the relationship she has frozen herself out of and he is severing. 

[self--renewal-blog]

the medium is the MASSAGE

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."- J. Robert Oppenheimer 

I would like to expand more on this idea that children are able to perceive what we as "grown-ups" can not. When you are a child you have no walls set up and you do not have to sift through your thoughts thinking what would be the best thing to say. You are a child that does not need to worry about the consequences of what you say. I mean what is going to happen, you will be put in time out, the end. So there is no need to be censored as a child. You are free to think about whatever your mind will allow and scream to the top of your lungs "I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD!" So back to the quote I feel like as children you are able to perceive things that we as adults do not even consider. We might think them to be too silly or even unimaginable. But as children they see everything as tangible, they have an imagination the size of the universe and beyond. So as we grow up and become more concrete in our thinking this ability to think out side the box starts to disappear slowly and we think in a more logical manor. I hope to never come to this point in my life though. I WILL STAY YOUNG FOREVER. Always in the mindset of what if and can not will not be in my dictionary. My imagination, dreams, and thoughts will continue to grow from here.