“You asked me once how poems informed me,” she says. Almost a whisper—her microphone voice. “And you asked whether we, us, depended on the game, to even be. Baby?”—lifting Faye’s face with one finger under the chin—”Remember? Remember the ocean? Our dawn ocean, that we loved? We loved it because it was like us, Faye. That ocean was obvious. We were looking at something obvious, the whole time.” She pinches a nipple, too softly for Faye even to feel. “Oceans are only oceans when they move,” Julie whispers. “Waves are what keep oceans from just being very big puddles. Oceans are just their waves. And every wave in the ocean is finally going to meet what it moves toward, and break. The whole thing we looked at, the whole time you asked, was obvious. It was obvious and a poem because it was us. See things like that, Faye. Your own face, moving into expression. A wave, breaking on a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?”
Archive for October, 2009
“You hear stories, though,” Muffy says. “About these lonely or somehow disturbed people who’ve had only the TV all their lives, their parents or whomever started them right off by plunking them down in front of the set, and as they get older the TV comes to be their whole emotional world, it’s all they have, and it becomes in a way their whole way of defining themselves as existents, with a distinct identity, that they’re outside the set, and everything else is inside the set.” She sips. -David Foster Wallace, “Little Expressionless Animals”
Locus Solus 