I’ve been thinking about aerial things this week—birds that live between earth and sky and find circumference in the steady pull of gravity. Clouds that are present but always changing, disappearing, reforming, much like their counterparts in this:
A young, star-forming region of the Carina Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.
Enjoying this book by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The story of a middle-aged woman breaking family ties, settling into one’s own life, and finding herself somewhat inadvertently making a pact with the devil and becoming a witch to escape the weariness of social demands.
I love this conversation between the heroine and the devil, who wanders around the countryside like a thoughtful woodsman:
“Is it true that you can poke the fire with a stick of dynamite in perfect safety?…even if it isn’t true of dynamite, it’s true of women. But they know they are dynamite, and long for the concussion that may justify them. Some may get religion, then they’re all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it’s there—ready!…That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure….One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either…It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others…”
...The wheat grows querulous with unseen cats;
A fox strides out in anger through the corn,
Bidding each acre wake and rise to mourn
Beneath its sharps and through its throaty flats.
And so it is, and will be year on year,
Time in and out of date, and still on time
A billion grapes plunge bleeding into wine
And bursting, fall like music on the ear.
The snail that marks the girth of night with slime,
The lonely adder hissing in the fern,
The lizard with its ochre eyes aburn—
Each is before, and each behind its time.
--from "Pastoral" by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)
Oh My! I ordered this book last winter and was so taken with the story I intended to gift it to a friend but instead have kept it as a talisman of sorts. Now I will reread it again especially with the world as it is now. What a gift your writing continues to be.
Oh My! I ordered this book last winter and was so taken with the story I intended to gift it to a friend but instead have kept it as a talisman of sorts. Now I will reread it again especially with the world as it is now. What a gift your writing continues to be.