riddles, rhymes and allegories

Mark, see you in the Dark

the law of 5

pulp, pith, core, frontier, marrow

gulp, myth, door, adhere, aero

Eternal Love

It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.

Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play The Real Thing

Ardis – Eden

ADA

            

“Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Ada or Ardor

It would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada he discovered the pang, the ogon’, the agony of supreme “reality”. Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws – in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master of madness).

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Mellow Dreams

What a warm feeling surrounds me and the black cloud I’m floating on. It contains millions of questionmarks. They carry my weak and sleeping body. In this darkness I sink in, I die and am reborn. Total, absolute, holy, beautiful knowledge is revealed to me. The universe in your eyes, the parallel in mine.

Billy

And we talked and were glad the two of us would be together…but then there was some doubt about this new life, as we discussed it and found out that something was off…that no one would just give you this perfect life and say LIVE AND BE HAPPY. That was just too good. And so we ran away and lived on the street but loved each other and cared and someday found our own eden, a forest, where the sun would glimmer through the leaves and the ground would make these rustling noises and I could feel the warmth on my face and smell the air, the clean air as I smelt it in my childhood, and feel so myself. We were in the forest and followed this small path slowly, me ahead of him, and all those senses came down on me and I wanted to share them with him, I looked up and closed my eyes to catch the sun and smell and then I turned around and looked at him and he was happy and I looked him in the eyes and we held hands the entire time but just now I felt his in my own hand. And so I looked him in the eyes and was just lost inside their blackness, I was sucked in and I saw his soul. Since this dream I know I love him, and I always will.