Betwixt
. . . for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 17
The space between then and now, its crumpled, folded, damaged, rolled over qualities. In my body with its crookedness, from all those breaks and woundings. Mis-healings. My shoulders rising protectively to hide me.
I try to go to the space between and come up instead with anecdotes. Histories. Space between then and now, my word and their word, this word and another. Between me and you. Between me and the word. Space between two people in a house with many rooms and many children. A space in nowhere.
Wilderness.
I look through the indexes of books for the word memory. In the index of the book called Hysteria I do not find memory, but find instead, mind-fucking, on p.149. This is of course irresistible. Anastasia’s mind is her sex object, the paragraph which contained mind-fucking begins. This too is irresistible.
I like to keep a kind of distance. But I carry around with me a book I have never read entitled The Failing Distance. It is about Ruskin. It must be the title I cling to, as I have no particular interest in Ruskin.
There was a book in my parents’ bookcase that fascinated me as a child. It was called Memories of an Aphasiac. But now I realize I remember the title wrong. The correct one is Memories of an Amnesiac. I never read it.
My grandparents, at my grandfather’s wish, wrote a book in which their respective memoirs were intertwined. Its title was Damit Wir Nicht Vergessen. Another book I never read. The English title, which was not published, was to be Lest We Forget.
Later my grandfather got Alzheimers and remembered nothing.
(((((((((((remorse. from re-mords. to bite again.)))))))))))
Joan Harvey's fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Otoliths, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Danse Macabre, Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, A Trunk of Delirium, Noua Literatura, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Worcester Review, and others. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and has translated the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.
. . . for my body does not have the same ideas I do.
Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 17
The space between then and now, its crumpled, folded, damaged, rolled over qualities. In my body with its crookedness, from all those breaks and woundings. Mis-healings. My shoulders rising protectively to hide me.
I try to go to the space between and come up instead with anecdotes. Histories. Space between then and now, my word and their word, this word and another. Between me and you. Between me and the word. Space between two people in a house with many rooms and many children. A space in nowhere.
Wilderness.
I look through the indexes of books for the word memory. In the index of the book called Hysteria I do not find memory, but find instead, mind-fucking, on p.149. This is of course irresistible. Anastasia’s mind is her sex object, the paragraph which contained mind-fucking begins. This too is irresistible.
I like to keep a kind of distance. But I carry around with me a book I have never read entitled The Failing Distance. It is about Ruskin. It must be the title I cling to, as I have no particular interest in Ruskin.
There was a book in my parents’ bookcase that fascinated me as a child. It was called Memories of an Aphasiac. But now I realize I remember the title wrong. The correct one is Memories of an Amnesiac. I never read it.
My grandparents, at my grandfather’s wish, wrote a book in which their respective memoirs were intertwined. Its title was Damit Wir Nicht Vergessen. Another book I never read. The English title, which was not published, was to be Lest We Forget.
Later my grandfather got Alzheimers and remembered nothing.
(((((((((((remorse. from re-mords. to bite again.)))))))))))
Joan Harvey's fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Otoliths, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Danse Macabre, Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, A Trunk of Delirium, Noua Literatura, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Worcester Review, and others. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and has translated the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.
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