As water clothes the waterfall.
Dear Anthony,
At the start of Chapter 6 Vera notes that the bus is on a road “turning and turning upon itself,” appearing to be going back the very way it had come. Outside is a “haze of fitful twilight,” through which Vera sees a flowering tree branch, “like something spontaneous as in a dream of apparent disrelations which were secretly related.” She hears a far-off train whistle,
“like something heard in a dream as one awakens, unable to determine whether one is awake or asleep, whether the sound was heard before or after the dream was broken, these continuities persisting from one world to another, it seemed, so that there should be no other world but this which was many-valved, an intricacy like the roaring of the sea which knows no limitations but its own.”
Two gorgeous dream metaphors just within the first four paragraphs of Chapter 6!
These illustrate what Phil Bevis, in his editor’s preface to The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young, calls the “immeasurable tonnages of metaphors” in Young’s prose, a result of her sustained commitment to lyrical poetry. Bevis asserts that Young considered her prose to be the logical progression of her poetry, and indeed Young’s own introduction to this collection cites one of her poems as foreshadowing our old friend, the opium-addled Catherine Cartwheel. Here is a sample from that poem, Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne:
For if matter were taken away, the Bishop Berkeley said,
The vast majority would never notice at all,
We eat and drink ideas, we are clothed with them
As water clothes the waterfall.
And the annihilation of realism is to close our eyes.
Are Vera’s eyes closed at this point in her bus journey, all realism annihilated?
And what of Vera’s fellow passenger Madge, the pregnant girl, who contemplates the nightmare of her “birth” and her “marriage,” each more terrible than what she imagines her death and funeral would be today. Madge mourns the “birth” of the woman she has become, five months pregnant and unloved, because this means that her former self—a carefree girl, pretty, and flirtatious—is destroyed. She mourns the “marriage” that occurred on the night her father raped and “killed” her. Madge must compete with this former self, an unencumbered, unviolated young woman, now irretrievably lost. What exists for her instead is a loveless marriage to the former football player, an impending baby, and their return as a new family to smalltown Indiana where they will reside with her husband’s mother. Perhaps Madge’s situation is all too real, whether or not she closes her eyes?
I love Young’s images of a “many-valved world,” like the chambers of the human heart. And being enshroud in ideas, “as water clothes the waterfall,” which makes emphatic how much we are made up of our thoughts and ideas.
At the close of her introduction to the Collected Poems, Young writes about how wonderful she finds it to see on the faces of her students, the “power which comes not from excluding but including without undue censorship the riches of their perceptions which make out of this world something very old and very new.” It is a pleasure to see the old world anew through Young’s uncensored perceptions.
Yours in enchantment,
Lori
A note to fellow readers:
We are happy to share that writer Tara Cheesman will be joining our correspondence. As we incorporate her letters as part of our regular posts, we look forward to Tara’s perspectives on her reading of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. We hope that you will continue to read and follow along with us.
Lori and Anthony