Fiction: a well-spoken wunderkind

Are you in school? Julie asked the children.
Of course we are in school, Hilda said. Why does everyone always ask a child if he or she is in school? We are all in school. There is no way to excape.
Do you want to excape?
Didn't you?
What do you study in school?
We are invigorated with the sweet sensuality of language. We learn to make sentences. Come to me. May I come to your house? Christmas comes but once a year. I'll come to your question. The light comes and goes. Success comes to those who strive. Tuesday comes after Monday. Her aria comes in the third act. Toothpaste comes in a tube. Peaches come from trees and good results do not come from careless work. This comes of thoughtlessness. The baby came at dawn. She comes from Warsaw. He comes from a good family. It will come easy with a little practice. I'll come to thee by moonlight, though--
I think this child is a bit of a smart-ass, said the Dead Father. I shall cause her to be sent to a Special School and her rusty-mouthed companion there also.
If you do that we shall jump into the reservoir, Lars said, together. And drown. I am going to tell you something utterly astounding, surprising, marvelous, miraculous, triumphant, astonishing, unheard of, singular, extraordinary, incredible, unforeseen, vast, tiny, rare, common, glaring, secret until today, brilliant and enviable; in short something unexampled in previous ages except for one single instance which is not really comparable; something we find impossible to believe in Paris (so how could anyone in Lyons believe it?), something which makes everyone exclaim aloud in amazement, something which causes the greatest joy to those who know of it, something, in short, which will make you doubt the evidence of your sense: We don't care what you think.

- Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father, 15-16.

Fiction: Another glass mountain

Somewhere in the vastness of the Reaper's Woods, which is said to reach to the very ends of the earth where the sun eats wayward children and the moon and stars hang in the trees like lamps, there is a glass mountain with sides so sheer and slippery none can climb it unassisted, that assistance when granted being either magical or a gift of nature, as in the case of virgin maidens who, according to legend, are able to slide up the mountain as easily as others slide down. Why would they want to do this? For some-- like Stepmother's fugitive daughter, for example, did she still qualify-- the mountain offers sanctuary, and not only from men and other earthly predators, but also from the disappointing impurity of the diurnal world, for the mountain in its lofty inaccessible beauty and crystalline transparency is the very emblem and embodiment of purity. As such it represents not merely escape but also transcendence, the desire for which is said to be the deepest of humankind's desires and the source of its strange magical systems.
Certainly it is a desire that often invades the hearts of those princes and ordinary mortals who aspire to surmount it. Their goal is ostensibly to rescue, or at least have a good time with, the beautiful maiden who, according to legend, resides all alone in the golden castle at the top, and for many, drawn by the seductive thrill of going where no man has gone before, the prospect of this conquest (some think of it as liberation) may be sufficient. But for those of a more soulful bent, there is also a need for illumination and self-understanding, which is to say, an understanding of the universe itself wherein for a short time one resides. Thus it is that the transcendent merges with the erotic and the manly in the heroic effort to pit one's strength and will against the mountain, to assail the unassailable. ...The quest, being impossible, draws wave after wave of brave seekers after love, honor, truth, and spiritual repose, thought to be attainable atop the glass mountain, where one is offered, so it is said, a contemplative view of the whole world and a life thereafter without cares, at least to the extent that bodies can be freed from cares.
Even at its base, visible or invisible, one experiences a great serenity, the mountain's untrammeled grandeur making the earth which bears it seem less an illusion, one's terrestrial passage less transient and insubstantial. Life's messy perplexities and sufferings (elsewhere, the story of the fugitive maiden and the royal princes-- as it must-- continues) fade away, as though absorbed into the pure luminous depths of the crystal mountain, wherein, like consciousness itself, all exists but as if it did not exist because one can see through it. And yet, for all that it attracts, it also, like all things pure, repels, for purity, unlike beauty, does not exist in the eye of the beholder but in the body of the beheld, quite apart from the awed self and all the dim ordinary things of the world, as if not a thing at all (this mountain, that maiden), but only its idea, something one can believe in, strive for, worship, but never know. Or love.
Although... it is transparent, the mountain ghostily reflects the striving climber in his perilous ascent, making him thus a witness to his own exertions. Which are strenuous. Even the gentler slopes near the base require great concentration, all one's strength, an indomitable will.... As the slope rises more sharply, however, even one's perspiring flesh turns against one, and what the climber sees in the mountain's dim reflection is a damp glittering brow and his own gathering despair. Yet most press on, gripping the mountain with their bodies, reaching for inch after inch, unwilling, like most mortals, to surrender to the inevitable. Which, being inevitable, arrives: the climber falls. Sometimes to his death, more often merely into humiliation, chagrin, lifelong desolation: to have glimpsed such grandeur and beauty but never to attain it.

- Coover, Robert. Stepmother. 45-48.

Letters: Misplaced words

Your Hamlet is a disgusting romanticist who remains disgusting because he can't show his own horror without ranting and half-boasting about his own virility. The world "greenhouse" has a strangely Victorian feeling about it when used in such a poem-- it strikes me as being out of place. And so has "charms"-- my god, how loathsome an expression that is. It represents surely one of the worst sides of masculinity-- to sum up three or four more exciting features of female anatomy and label them all with one convenient word. I think Ophelia quoting at such length is a little odd.
You know Ophelia doesn't mean a word of it when she goes on about "reverence, honor, beauty, charity," etc. She has already hinted that she wants to be kissed again. The whole thing is messy, Don (and so are my remarks on it) and Hamlet leaves me convinced that he just wanted to impress his Ophelia with the strength of his passion and that he's the kind of man who enjoys creating scenes and then brooding about them.

- Elizabeth Bishop to Donald E. Stanford, March 15, 1934

Self-worship

The individual may desire, earn, and deserve deference, but by and large he is not allowed to give it to himself, being forced to seek it from others. In seeking it from others, he finds he has added reason for seeking them out, and in turn society is given added assurance that its members will enter into interaction and relationships with one another. If the individual could give himself the deference he desired there might be a tendency for society to disintegrate into islands inhabited by solitary cultish men, each in continuous worship at his own shrine.

- Goffman, Erving. "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor," 1956. American Anthropologist 58(3): 478.

poetry: the manipulation of christ "A Distance From the Sea"

To Ernest Brace

"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not." --REVELATIONS, x, 4.

That raft we rigged up, under the water,
Was just the item: when he walked,
With his robes blowing, dark against the sky,
It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up
His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over,
Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud
Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore
The crowd's response was instantaneous. He
Handled it well, I thought--the gait, the tilt of the head, just right.
Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves.
And then we knew our work well worth the time:
The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails,
The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution.
But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it,
Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump
Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle
Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires
Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job
Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work.
--And now there are those who have come saying
That miracles were not what we were after. But what else
Is there? What other hope does life hold out
But the miraculous, the skilled and patient
Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves?

Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked
By questions of Messiahship and eschatology,
Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come,
Perhaps to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted worshippers
Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not
Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes
When the torrent of that time
Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage
And our enterprise. It was as though the world
Had been one darkening, abandoned hall
Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we
Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but
Out of the fear of death, came with our lights
And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames
Against the long night of our fear. We thought
That we could never die. Now I am less convinced.
--The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains
At a distance; then he loses sight. His way
Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path,
The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else
Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft
(For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience)
And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave
We stocked with bread, the secret meetings
In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit,
The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials,
The angels' garments, tailored faultlessly,
The medicines administered behind the stone,
That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune.
Who managed all that blood I never knew.

The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite--horn-shaped and scaly, choked with

thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.--It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.

-- Weldon Kees, "A Distance from the Sea"