« Phenomenal Cosmic Landscapes | Main | Not every bricklayer is a hero »
March 29, 2004
Exploiting my correspondence for material
At random I opened Anna Akhmatova's poems today. Sleeping under a slip of paper which bore your old (760) and three-pronged name were these lines:
For one moment of peace here
I would give up the grave's peace.
I have always used books as my oracles in this way. If a yarrow stick or a coin can be an oracle, why not the Word? To prove my point I have opened Rushdie's Satanic Verses to this line: "The past, it seems, returns." Proof positive: here I am, prodigal, holding your only name.
The question now becomes: which is the prophecy? Two lines of poetry on a securely-glued page? Or the loose-leafed name and number which have stuck to me so improbably for two, or is it three years? I will ask Ondaatje's Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Page 46: "All this I would have seen if I was on the roof looking." My interpretation of this answer, I guess, is to stop assigning blame to these inanimate ideas, turn off the laptop, get up on the roof and water my baby tomato plant.
And someday you will find some bit of me wrapped in a fortune cookie, and then you too can send vague, pompous emails out into the ether.
Posted by didofoot at March 29, 2004 08:23 AM
Comments
Thank you, Mr. Ondaatje. How is that plant doing, anyway?
Posted by: dianna at March 30, 2004 02:03 PM
it's lingering along, lingering along. not dead yet. i give it a little pep talk every evening. sort of a "you're doing good there! and that's excellent! because you don't wanna know what happens to a plant that does badly..."
Posted by: didofoot at March 31, 2004 07:55 AM
A la Crowley. An excellent plan. If you'd let me give you two of them, you could have designated one of them the whipping boy and done shockingly cruel things to it to coerce the other one into growing well.
Or they might have become united in their fear and resentment, learned to operate doorknobs and stairs, and come down to strangle you with their leaves in your sleep. Maybe it's just as well you only have one.
Posted by: dianna at March 31, 2004 09:43 AM
wow. how did gaiman/pratchett never consider this retaliation?
Posted by: resolved to be nicer to plants at March 31, 2004 10:44 AM
Given that they've considered just about every other humorous possibility and impossibility contained (or not contained) in the universe, it's a damn good question.
Posted by: dianna at March 31, 2004 12:26 PM
Especially since plants in pots hopping down a flight of stairs ranks among the top 10 amusing mental images in my brain. That could, however, be because I've read a lot of BtAF.
Posted by: dianna at March 31, 2004 12:28 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)