Them words and meaning -reading of The Bluest Eye

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Writers’ playful ways of applying words always lure and intrigue me. Toni Morrison makes words dance and sing in The Bluest Eye. Every character rises from the flat paper and walks right to my face, making big noises. It’s a party celebrating life, only with the saddest theme.
Each living environment contrasts the next one, with little angels growing into big monsters just so that they conform. The knife they carry around for self-protection grows another blade, this time on the side that cuts through the flash that has been holding and polishing it.

Claudia and Frieda are among millions of the beautiful souls with one fatal flaw that is birth-marked on their back: they are black. In the fall of 1941, they still believed that their marigolds didn’t grow because Pecola was having her father’s baby, despite the fact that even the gardens fronting the lake showed no marigolds that year. “But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be all right.”
“……What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too.
“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
The tone is set before the story unfolds and grabs our heartbeats. “Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.” The two kids drag their feet back home after filling burlap sacks with the tiny pieces of coal lying about, “glancing back to see the great carloads of slag being dumped, red hot and smoking, into the ravine that skirts the steel mill.” They “stare at the patch of color surrounded by black. It is not impossible not to feel a shiver when our feet leave the gravel path and sink into the dead grass in the field.”
The kids live in an environment that I can’t imagine; theirs teach them how not to feel special and not to fear death. I’d indulge myself and pretend I’m also capable of handling sudden departures, cold backs, eyes of solitary and hands of refusal as if they can’t hurl me down to the cliff the second I recognize them.
“Adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information. When we trip and fall down they glance at us; if we cut or bruise ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their heads in disgust at our lack of considerations. How, they ask us, do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick? We cannot answer them. Our illness is treated with contempt, foul Black Draught, and castor oil that blunts our minds.” (pg 6)

But then they love. Their love is silent and echoes faraway as the tributaries extend from the vast savannas by the Amazon River which runs from the highland biomes in the foothills of Andes Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.
“Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into the cracked window… sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue… when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repined the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.” (pg 7)

In the real world, it’s the greenish beginning of another season, another summer. Grounds are covered with fluttering leaves swinging in their own shadows. Among these we hear moist whispering breeze hurrying away, getting ahead and surprising each turn, each bent it takes, each corner it slips. It is already someone else’s present and your past the moment you think you feel it brushing across your bared skin.

Start to have imaginary friends that I miss now...

This is another book that I think I would have to re read soon. I'm missing Helene Hanff's witty narration; I'm entertaining the thought how a rather old-fashioned bookkeeper opened up his heart little by little, day after day, by corresponding with this crazy book-loving lady. I start to doubt if life is long enough for us to really waste on waiting for something that long, when you have known your possession/claim over it all this time, until our only choice is to accept the loss, the permanent empty space that the forsaken one has left behind.
They are minor characters in the large picture of a universe, whose greatness lies in the forever innocence and faith in growth and permanence.
Should we or shouldn't we. Could but we didn't. Wouldn't but still had. Maybe there are never questions and answers on wait, there are just endless sleepless nights along with countable happy moments.
I read this poem below and somehow it touched me.

Uh
--Sonnet L'Abbé

The shyness, the delay to say
I'm thinking, I'm processing,
the silence before the words
string into coherence I can't leave
unfilled, all my ignorance,
the mice scurrying in the maze,
please wait while the images
load, sound saying I'm not
dumb

or the coyness, the delay to say
I'm answering, when I'm processing
the first thought into a string of words
less hurtful, less assessing,
less revealing of the blunt fact
of my unkindness, all my interiority,
the scurry to hide it behind my back
please wait while I remember
your heart, sound the safety on a sharp
tongue.

Re(dis)cover a Book

Half way through the book I'm reading now. Then I realized, there are so many plots to digest, so many characters to get familiar with, so much emotion and recalling to wander upon, yet so little space indulged in the telling for all these, that with the speed I'm reading I'll never fully capture the intended message or respect. But you never comprehend the effect of your current reading on you until (years) later, by remembering what has accompanied you through those reading afternoons, what you've accomplished without noticing.

My attention was caught, when clearing up some space at home the other night, by these lines in The Bluest Eye:

"Standing a little apart from the choir, Ivy sang the dark sweetness that Pauline could not name; She sang the death-defying death that Pauline yearned for; She sang of the Stranger who knew...

"Precious Lord take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storms, through the night
Lead me on the light
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on.

When my way grows drear
Precious Lord linger near
When my life is almost gone
Hear my cry hear my call
Hold my hand lest I fall
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on."

I remembered the ups and downs I felt as the story goes on; I recalled tragedies and bitterness. The visional layout of the text, the repetitiveness imitating life's strangest circulation. The girlhood, womanhood, tortured and battling souls.

"He came. Strutting right out of a Kentucky sun on the hottest day of the year. He came big, he came strong, he came with yellow eyes, flaring nostrils, and he came with his own music."

Then years later, or maybe it's just an instant,
"Finding the deepest shadow under the pier, he crouched in it, behind one of the posts. He remained knotted there in fetal position, paralyzed, his fists covering his eyes, for a long time. No sound, no sight, only darkness on his eyelids. He even forgot his messed-up trousers."

Maybe they loved each other, maybe not. Maybe the love is the reason why he hurt her, claimed her, disclaimed her, re-claimed then dropped her.
"Evening came. The dark, the warmth, the quiet, enclosed Cholly like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its own seed."

Standing by my nightstand, I pictured how I would re-read this cover to cover, and how I would be shocked and disturbed again.
Realizing how different your understanding becomes toward a reading when time comes in between, I may also seek out Beloved and read it again (I've read it in both Chinese and English).

PS.A quote from The Song is You, which is not that irrelavent:
"The Muses are virgins... Cupid, when sometimes asked by his mother Venus why he did not attack the Muses, used to reply that he found them so beautiful, so pure, so modest, bashful, and continually occupied... in the arrangement of music, that when he drew near them he unstrung his bow, closed his quiver; and put out his touch, since they made him shy and afraid of injuring them."
---Francois Rabelais,
Gargantua and Pantagruel, 3:31

Cooling as a Day

When you are used to come daily in early mornings of late spring to a place looking like this one to the left, to sit, to read, to even write a litte, you forget the wars out there, the quarrels and betrayals, the upheaval and restless. A breeze carrying baked smell of leaves, a shadow fluttering with folk singing trumpets, are suddenly all's needed for enpowering the sense of substantial realism.

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Midnight on Etta James, Chicken Shack, etc.

The wordless comes after the thousandth word.

There are great music and popular music.
When the great ones are so great, you don't mind it when it's also popular.

The singing sings, like the river runs, the slower, the deeper.
She dresses up, or dresses down.
She looks up, then drifts away.
She hums, perhaps swings, a heavenly body creamed with imagination.
She peels off a night bled colors, and lights up a fire called fragrance.

It's to last; a Sunday kind of love.
Up chasing, down and one less time,
Words floating upon beats, rhythms, dissatisfaction, a dove.
What prevents you, only riding the beehive.
Vision,
That we do have.

Consider the Hands That Write This Letter

A Present for Mother's Day from a Daughter's Clumsy Heart

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or the strangest birds.

And consider, then,
the right hand, and how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I've held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse's reins,
loping, the very fists
I've seen from the roads to Limay and Estelí.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds and gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
and my right hand closed inside
of another hand.

And how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body's position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.
--by Aracelis Girmay

(Read more by Aracelis Girmay)