A collection of short stories. Prose poems. Sketches of consciousness as it moves through the world, sometimes in music, sometimes in colours, sometimes slowed to a snail in a garden bed, and sometimes, as rapid as the flight of a heron. At all times, this closely followed, breathless conscious chatter in the mind poetically recorded, the rough sketchbook of human thought, mind and being.
The whole of the book needs to be excerpted, or perhaps to be read again and again. I had to read the stories twice or more at times to get a working appreciation of where the author wishes us to go with her. But such rich rewards of language, thought, perception, sensibility! Delight and joy.
In one of the stories, to make good books and good people. In another, after a person goes through a series of social chatter,
"If the mind’s shot through by such little arrows, and—for human society compels it—no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this engenders heat and in addition they’ve turned on the electric light; if saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires—if it’s all the facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen’s swallow-tail coats, and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface—what chance is there?"
Excerpts do little. One has to read her over and over. Perhaps the way I ask myself to read a little bit of poetry or prose by poets every now and then, so goes for the trio of Woolf, Joyce and Proust. A little bit of one of those every now and then, if not for anything, just as a close meditation in the act of being conscious, being a being. If poetry is about the human and language and existence and meaning and nothing and about becoming, these artists of consicousness are about the being. So a little bit of both needs to be woven through all the rest of the reading.
