by Ema Dumitriu
In a Glass Darkly emerges Emma, the Girl With Green Eyes and A Severed Head. ‘Don’t Move’, says The Double, ‘wait and see How the Dead Live.’ I patiently pen down- ‘Faces in the Water: The Drowned and the Saved’
In a Glass Darkly emerges Emma, the Girl With Green Eyes and A Severed Head. ‘Don’t Move’, says The Double, ‘wait and see How the Dead Live.’ I patiently pen down- ‘Faces in the Water: The Drowned and the Saved’
The story begins in a Broken April, in the year Nineteen Seventy Seven, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Coming Up for Air in the House of Doctor Dee, I was Like Life, crying Good Morning, Midnight. In the Group Portrait With Lady I identified Oscar (The Lover) and Lucinda (House Mother Normal), Dr. Dee (The Collector of Dead Babies) and Martin Eden ( The Godfather). They cut my Path to the Nest of Spiders and told me there was no way Back. Then, they gave me A Room with a View and a mirror in the House on the Borderland.
“Yes, look, it’s you! It’s baby! Do you see baby? ,” said the mirror.
The Child in Time becomes One, None and a Hundred Thousand, The Thinking Reed, The Tent of Miracles. The Devil-in-the-Flesh. Running Amok in the Sound and the Fury At the Mountains of Madness. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Cloudsplitter. God of Small Things. The Unconsoled. The Untouchable. The Unnamable. The Magus. The Golden Ass.
The Adolescent then loses herself in The Labyrinth of Solitude; The Last Days of Humanity are Surfacing from her Notes from the Underground. “Bonjour Tristesse”, says The Virgin in the Garden Where the Brass Band Played. As If I Am Not There, I contemplate On the Beauty Written on the Body of Dead Souls. Emma’s Green Hat caresses her Crome Yellow locks. Her cheeks are glowing Embers, her mouth, Pale Fire In Watermelon Sugar. She bows her Lovely Bones to hide her small breasts, golden Fruits of the Earth. She’s one of the Little Women whose Story of the Eye reminds one of the Downriver of The Female Quixote.
In My Remembrance of Things Past, I reckon that The Age of Innocence became A Ghost at Noon a bit too fast…I’d Call it Sleep, a peaceful sleep, before I realized that The Heart of the Matter was my Pursuit of Love, far from Home. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” seemed to whisper the mirror. The Voyage Out would place me around Independent People. The Comfort of Strangers would bring Small Remedies to my feeling of Extinction. I would become one of the Wilde Swans Possessing the Secret of Joy. A Sentimental Journey would bring Love in Excess. My Metamorphoses would be the Celestial Harmonies of an Enchanted Wanderer.
But, naturally, The Glimpses of the Moon cannot become one’s Reasons to Live. There was no use Sexing the Cherry during infinite Cocaine Nights or having a Public Burning in the Bonfire of the Vanities, because later on I found out that Les Enfants Terribles are only sparkly particles of Les Misérables. How Late It Was, How Late for both Atonement and Regeneration. “The Trick Is to Keep Breathing,” stated the Bitter Glass. “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” I inquired.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler had talked to me about Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and heavenly Persuasion, I might have learned to live with my Nausea, as a Folding Star with Lost Illusions.
Yet, my Enigma of Arrival on earth was now to justify my Disappearance, too, since Midnight’s Children always die in The Afternoon of a Writer.