Restrung

Brigid Brophy writes in a forward to a book offers the image of reading Baudelaire's Poems in Prose as being akin to "picking through a box of marvellous but unstrung beads." The tempting rattle of marbles secures the tragedy of recitation for the

The images in By Grand Central Station are individually beautiful but beautiful also in the order in which they are strung.

And so comes this devotional note

Reading the book is like saying a tragic, pagan, erotic rosary.

and the assertion

The entire book is a wound. Even when its rhythm expresses the throb of pleasure, the pleasure is so ardent that it lays waste the personality which experiences it.

And so with potent magic invoked, I turn to the intensity of the intervals in the garland-like layout of the cover illustration by Janet Woolley and return again to the dispersing power of projections, the power to disperse both the depicted personality and the person reading aloud the text of that personality's experiences. The cover art suspends just as the reading does.

A rosary being said is meeting place that suspends prayer in breath. Of the many pleasures, catharsis is one that like the slipping of beads along a path releases self and self and self no matter how often is experienced the laying waste.

Path is to string as bead is to step. Rhythm is to beat as experience is to experience.


And so for day 38
21.01.2007