Saturday 27 September 2008

the lost grace of my hands




She wants to throw herself into the river. From a stone bridge. Or maybe iron, I can't remember. He doesn't let that happen and takes her with him. He teaches her another kind of throwing: knives. At her. In the circus. When they are alone, in a forlorn barn, where she unfolds in pleasure and becomes a veil of light. They never touch. Their eyes meet. Their eyes close, they don't need to see each other to know the only love and the only truth: that they inhabit together a land of pure trust. Inhuman trust, concentration of being reaching that centre of the centre, where the world ceases to spin. Self-abandon, the kind that only grass knows when kneeling to become the sickle.

And I remember your words: 'You've already plunged so many knives into me by making me see all my flaws, my faults, my pitiful frailties'. In the silence that followed, I contemplated my hands. My hands had failed me. The glowing knives of love and song that I used to throw at you had missed. Your transparent mind, the shape of your heart, that my knives knew how to draw again and again, your dark body which I had taught a pale shade of white, a burning shade of gold, they were suddenly out of my reach.

But your devotion for me had also failed. Your longing for the soft bow of my hands in the air, your hunger for my sacred knives of mystery had faded away. Oh how I wished you to resist, to fight the growing loss of grace in my fingers, to lure me back into the spiral of throwing, that perfect act of abolition - death and rebirth of time - the only one possible between us. It would have been so easy. But you just stood there, blinking gently, as if through a haze, smiling in defeat, and I knew then that you hadn't even grasped what had happened. As the meaning dawned upon us, we had already forgotten the face of each other.



11 comments:

  1. very sexy? hmmm. you are the second one to tell me this about this picture, which seemed perfectly innocent to me, in the beginning. now I have to wonder :-)

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  2. innocently sexy then, perhaps ;-)

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  3. oh, i rather envisioned someone touching her breast, sighing " my poor heart....!" - i find the photo very sensuous (not sexy )

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  4. lol. it made me think of lady macbeth.

    or one of those fifties movies where the main character has a hand transplant. and the transplant has a murderous mind of its own!!!!

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  5. why did she want to throw herself in the river?

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  6. dSexoh my goodness swiss! how is it possible that you always plunge in such deeply emotional discussion and never lose that iced breeze from scotland? :D

    Anyway, I am just reading 'the cold and the cruel' (Deleuze, as usual) and there is a long digression on swifts like this one roxana proposes: to fall in love with the hand who kills you, or at least hurts you, almost by profession. I am always amazing of finding here images that are still forming in my mind, metaphorically speking and not :) it is so comforting and stimulating. can I ask if the text is yours, Rox, and what is the movie? Thanks for the post anyway.

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  7. that photograph is gorgeous. the hand, the hair-- so visceral and earthy. quite moving.

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  8. I am sorry for the delay in answering, really sorry. and for not keeping in touch with your blogs, lately.


    ffflaneur: sensuous is much more difficult to achieve than sexy, I believe. (and it is japanese, the fifth one).

    swiss: lady macbeth is my preferred shakespeare, you know. and I particularly enjoyed marta's depiction of your 'iced breeze from scotland'!!!

    yes, marta, I (try to) write myself the blog texts from time to time, whenever I don't indicate the source it means that I wrote it. the movie is The Girl on the Bridge. very intense and full of tenderness. I loved that, about the images still forming in your mind...

    anonymous: the film opens with a very beautiful scene, she is telling the story of her life, a very sad one. you should watch this film, I think you'd like it.

    katrina: visceral, earthy! I haven't thought about it, that it could be felt in this way, this picture... thank you!

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  9. yes, the hand is sensual--in its openess; which we don't intend; maybe the hand expresses soul, its own feeling towards air and being; life is erotic in the smallest gestures. Even the grass, the grain of wheat in sunlight, the small curve of the hair turning on its spiral axis around a neck--we are beauty.

    love the text, whose is it? What kind of photos are these, if you want to tell, is it digital, or silver... perhaps the mystery of it more than this ...

    thanks

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  10. mansuetude, forgive me but I had somehow lost your comment, I've just found it again - and such a wonderful comment at that, yes, I believe this also, that the hand expresses the soul and that life is erotic in its smallest gestures.

    the text is mine, otherwise I would have mentioned the author, when I am not too lazy I write myself :-) I am afraid there is not much mystery about the photographs, I take them with a Nikon on film, then scan the negatives and work on them in photoshop (I try however to keep the postprocessing to a minimum, basically cropping, colour and contrast adjustment).

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