Meandering Through the Writings of Others as Lament Practice: Glassy Sea

“The Bridge from the Gallery”

Phone Photo DS

Sometimes exceptions to the novel meandering are made with forays into memoir, biography, autobiography, journalism as well as Scripture. 

Here are the explorations:

Engel, Marian. Glassy Sea. 1978.

971 words

*** Since then I’ve been sitting in an exhausted reverie. *** I feel very strong, very calm, as if indeed grace had been conferred. *** Interesting mind he had. I didn’t expect that in a psychiatrist. *** Because I have robbed you of a certain amount of your past, I have given you a future. *** Why should I get my authority from men? *** You said it was perfect by the sea. *** There is a ceremony that confers authority, authority like a bird arrives. *** Oh, are we supposed to be avoiding pain now? *** I have set up a card table on the porch so as to be outdoors . . . *** It is shabby and comfortable, nothing to bother describing, just a farmhouse . . .  a summer place. *** Will my outstretched hand be bitten? *** I have been indulging in a great deal of sloth. *** There are a hundred grass colours . . . *** There are lupins and Queen Anne’s lace is opening. It’s a life’s work to keep an eye on the field. *** I go for walks . . . on the shore  there are gulls nests. *** Sometimes I just sit and stare at the sun . . . *** And so now I write and send you greetings, particularly from these roses. *** I came of a plain people not made of mysteries. *** She used to like to brush my hair in the sunlight. *** The priest would have let the mother die while the baby lived. *** Never marry a man because he is a good dancer. *** Anyway, my father wasn’t big enough to beat him up . . . *** We had food, we had clothing, we had heat. *** The wind came from the west, from across the American border (fools to blame their weather on us) . . . *** My father was permanently tired from that war. *** It was the hymns that made the theology, not the preaching . . . *** My mother had fur cuffs o her winter coat . . . *** I knew I was a girl, but that hardly seemed relevant. *** The boys, raised to believe they were certainly superior have had to deal with women they were unable to prove their superiority to . . . *** Lace was something that got torn in the wringer. *** Our social life was the family and the church, and in our own limited way, we were very happy. *** I had understood heresy but I had not yet understood charity. *** Once my knees learned to bend, my ears snag with the poetry of the service . . . *** I’m willing to be that from most anchorite caves there was a view. *** My Keeper informs me that my social standing here is based on one’s acreage in potatoes. *** I had no money for make-up and wouldn’t have asked for it. *** I always liked being looked after. *** Gym was the only thing I got a D in. *** And last child at home I watched my parents grow close, so close their voices became interchangeable. *** You don’t have a come hither eye, my mother said, and I accepted her judgement contentedly. *** It was a soft summer night and I loved the music and the wind when we went outside. But we were shy of each other. *** We were like French and English in Montreal, looming invisibly over each other’s shoulders. *** One knew very little, one walked alone. *** My parents fixed for me one year to work in the library in Pekin . . . *** He was in luck; he had found me. *** Boris, always a gentleman, came to see me in the library. *** Birds who wouldn’t leave the nest had to be shoved, she knew that. *** I looked up shyly and said I wanted to be a philosopher. *** But there must be appoint Philip, a point or a pattern. *** I worked at the Hydro office sorting out electric bills and liked the job. *** clothes for a scholar *** Nobody was going to rumple me. *** She was one of the rare creatures whose beauty is sustained by no artificial aids. *** All her underwear was made of lace. *** When she was bored, she went to the bookstore rather than the library; she liked her books new. *** She had seventeen term papers leftover to write and had none . . .  to my amazement, she shut herself up for a week . . .  and wrote them all. *** I began meeting other readers in the stacks, some of whom took me to coffee and to dances. *** I remember now the smell of roses, the smell of furniture polish . . . *** I am very busy, very busy wasting time. *** People are always sending me back to university Philip, I have one of the great unfinished minds. *** But I continued to teach, and in fact got a little better at it. *** The shell of innocence was broken. *** I suppose that’s what sex is for, isn’t it? It increases the will to live. *** We spun into each other’s arms. *** Somebody like me. The idea went through me like fizzy ginger ale. *** What’s the use of grieving? The birds fly high. *** We laughed and laughed at that and it did something good for me. *** Where do the discarded go? *** Leave me here, please, to dream my redemptive dreams. *** I remind myself that it is mortification to return here as Martha when I so much wanted to be Mary. *** What are my dreams . . . *** 

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