Ringing Ovidian Changes on Love-Making and Nuptials

Ali Smith. Girl Meets Boy

She carries on for pages in a fashion that would make even Anna Livia Plurabelle blush.

Then it changed into a music I'd never heard before, so new to me that it made me airborne, I was nothing but the notes she was playing, held in air. Then I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before, who'd have thought being inside a simile would be so ancient and so modern both at once? Her beautiful head was down at my breast, she caught me between her teeth just once, she put the nip into nipple like the cub of a fox would, down we went, no wonder they call it an earth, it was loamy, it was good, it was what good meant, it was earthy, it was what earth meant, it was the underground of everything, the kind of soil that clings to things. Was that her tongue? […] and then I was sinew, I was snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke stake snake, then I was a tree whose branches were all budded knots […]

As signifier and signified slide over each other, the bravura performance takes off again in the dream-sequence wedding — some pages later but in the same imaginative space.

But back at the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played at all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cut-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds singing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don't yet know each other to meet exactly there […]

A fantasia based on the theme of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid Book IX of the Metamorphoses.

And so for day 1571
02.04.2011