beyond the floating bridge

Michael T. Stowers

"It's these modalities which hook me. That's how it feels, like hooks with those little barbs on them that prevent the fish from unhooking itself, those 'hads' and 'shoulds' and 'woulds'. Life is, as you know, woven out of a million threads, 999,999 of which end in one of those hooks.

...

Time. Such issues with time. To me, you see, your assertion that the past is unredeemable is the opposite to my reality. For me, the future is the only unredeemable thing. The present is the persistence of evanescence. The past, though, is the only part we can change. And we do, all of us, all of the time. Memory is around seventy to eighty percent fabrication; we know this now. Add the rose-tinted glasses and the exponential fall off of memory and you get a situation where the past becomes more story-like than any myth."


Michael T. Stowers




We would often fight about the all-time-is-unredeemable-motto of the Bridge, whose constant and passionate supporter he had been ever since he first came here, in march 2011. It deeply irritated him and time and again he would try to convince me of the contrary. His sudden death, on the 29th of August, has left this debate open (or closed it forever, it depends on how one wants to look at it). Perhaps it is exactly through this shocking disappearance that he has been proved right: the future may be the only unreedemable thing, and my memory has already begun to fashion the story of him, of our close friendship into a myth, an ever-shifting tale which has become part of my ever-shifting self.


I would like to say more, but words fail me.

those childhood summers

The fair in the month of August brought me many other sadnesses and exaltations. The full spectacle swelled like a symphony, from the prelude of isolated attractions that arrived much before the others and that indicated the general tone of the fair, like the prolonged stray notes that announce the entire theme of the composition at the beginning of the concert, to the grandiose conclusion, bursting forth with shouts, shots and fanfare on the culminating day, followed by the immense silence of the field, deserted once again. 

The few attractions that came early encompassed, in essence, the whole fair and represented it exactly. It was enough that only the first of them were set up, for all the colors, all the brilliance and all the carbide smell of the whole fair to descend into town.

In the obscurity of the boulevard a tiara of colored glass would light up toward evening, like the earth’s first constellation. Soon others would follow and the boulevard became a luminous corridor, along which I would wander, speechless, as I had once seen, in an illustrated edition of Jules Verne, a boy my age, leaning against the porthole of a submarine, looking out into the suboceanic darkness, at the wonderful and mysterious marine phosphorescences.

from:

MAX BLECHER,
Adventures in Immediate Unreality 

translated by Jeanie Han 

the journey

the Belogradchik rocks

where sleeping beauty softly whispers in her sleep

the colour of spring

Forget our fate
The pedlar sings
Set up to sell my soul
I've lived a life for wealth to bring


And yet I'll gaze
The colour of spring
Immerse in that one moment
Left in love with everything

Soar the bridges
That I burnt before
One song among us all

we only live in the shadows

"but please do put everything away when you are done playing", i told her, as she busied herself with transforming the entire living room floor into a ship, using wooden bricks, vases, books, glass beads and every other imaginable object she would find around. 

"but i want to keep my ship here as it is, even as i am away at my grandparents'".

"no, this won't do - we will stumble upon these things, besides guests might come and then what".

"no problem, we will invite them onto the ship, no?"

"well..." - i wanted to say something but then i realized i didn't exactly find any tenable argument as to why we couldn't do that. she looked at me, then to her ship again, sprawling over the floor as we were speaking: 

"it is so boring to live as you do. your grown-up world is so boring. you only have rooms, and no ships hidden in them any longer". 

i couldn't make out the expression on her face when she said this, something between sadness and bewilderment. 

(perhaps it is true that, as we grow old, we only live in the shadows of what once was a luminous world filled with being)

because the earth is full of ancient rumour

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres' dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles...

and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell...

and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the running goathoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way. All of the gods have lost the way.

from Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe