Why can't the United States of America ever have writers
on our paper money like Ireland and England?
In a novel of so many unforgettable lines and phrases, one passage more than any other stood out for me when I first read Joyce's Ulysses as an undergraduate. It was this:
"A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.
His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly longingly.
Wine."~ James Joyce, Ulysses, 172 - 73
The ache in Bloom's midriff brought to mind a few lines from a poem that I had loved back in highschool:
"I felt a soft caving in my stomach
As at the top of the highest slide
When I had been a child, but was not afraid . . ."
So unexpected to encounter in fiction, poetry, or otherwise, such a visceral sensation described so accurately -- and the word longly -- had I ever heard it before? I don't think so. Though I've never fancied myself a poet, Joyce's strong, sad imagery inspired me to attempt my own rendition of heartache in the gut:
The Ache You Wear
You fall into her arms like crying,
feel her lips in your hair,
soothing like a parent
and something else.
Wooden and broken,
you lean rigidly.
Your forehead rests against breasts
which must be like your own.
With each soft motion,
the ache you wear like a brace
begins to melt, drips
slowly down your back.
Like congestion, it seeps inside,
fills the space between every rib,
then tatters into loose bits
that choke upward and sink within you.
Yearning for a familiarity,
you move toward this woman
and this one comfort
after taking leave of him.
For this time you fall away
from any pain.
Thick rags are floating
now in your stomach.
As connection and coincidence would have it, I recently came across the following within just a few months of each other:
1." . . . The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough
weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though
its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’ . . . "
2. "The pain he had felt in his chest after breakfast was gone: in its place he now had in his middle a curious, dry, empty, swollen feeling. As if he carried something inside him, hollow, but beyond his size and growing bigger."
3. "For weeks, thinking of that made me feel like a chute had opened in my stomach and my heart was descending through it."
4. "This is what I liked about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. . . . I couldn't help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them -- it was kind of sad I didn't mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in mine, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way."
5. "They were nowhere near butterflies in the stomach. They were electric bricks. They sunk. They zapped. They made me want to keel over."
6. "You wake up and you feel -- what? Heaviness, an ache inside, a weight, yes. A soft crumpling of flesh. A feeling like all the surfaces have been rubbed raw."
(see Highlights from 2006 & 2007)
7. "But in a few minutes it was back again,
that ugly jagged ache beneath her rib cage."
Suzanne Berne, A Perfect Arrangement, 212
*******************
Not unlike the sunset:
" . . . all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl . . . "
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, November 28th
Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
From _Olive Kitteridge_
ReplyDeleteBy Elizabeth Strout
p 43: "Kevin [felt] an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening."
p 64: "But she feels a physical reaction as she leans back down, a soft ache beating on her breastbone for a moment, like a wing inside her."
p 145: "Instead of a lump in her throat, she felt a lump in her whole body, a persistent ache that seemed to be holding back enough tears to fill the bay seen through the front window."
p 150: "Pain like a pinecone unfolding . . . "
From _Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind_
ReplyDeleteBy Suzanne Fisher Staples
p 54: ". . . I have an empty feeling in my stomach that presses outward as if I'll burst.
p 62 - 65: "As I watch them disappear into the dim light, I know without a doubt that my heart is crumbling up inside me like a burning piece of paper. . . . But at the center of my self is an aching hole. . . . the dull ache around the hole where my heart used to be leaves me drained of all energy."
From _High Maintenance_
ReplyDeleteBy Jennifer Belle
p 64: "My heart felt tied - off like a sausage."
p 161: "I remember being told not to get my hopes up as a child. I would bear down inside myself, pushing like a woman in labor, trying to keep my hopes down in the pit of my stomach, where I thought they were."
p 257: "I felt his final words to me in my solar plexus. I felt my stomach fill up with tears."
p 290: "My heart bounced in my chest. Then it felt gripped like a pale red rubber ball in a dog's teeth, slimy and wet from saliva."
From _Book Lovers_
ReplyDeleteBy Emily Henry
p 3: " . . . the pit opening in my stomach as he maneuvers the conversation toward a cartoon-style drop off a cliff."
p 23: "My stomach plummets, then rebounds."
p 42: "My stomach feels like someone tied it to a brick and threw it over a bridge."
p 60: "I squint against the fierce light, my stomach rising as I place him as the coffee shop Adonis."
From _Gemma Bovery_
ReplyDeleteBy Posy Simmonds
p 57: " . . . it really depressed me . . . I had a strange pang, as if a tiny rodent was gnawing my diaphragm."
p 69: " . . . The sensation I'd grown used to over many weeks, as if a tiny rodent lived in my diaphragm -- had become insupportable. Now something immense -- a beaver, a coypu surely, gnawed and gnawed at me. Only then was I able to identify this feeling . . . ."
Willa Cather describes the sensation of relocating from Virginia to Nebraska:
ReplyDeletep vii: "For the first week or two on the homestead I had the kind of contraction of the stomach which comes from homesickness."
quoted in Doris Grumbach's forward
to Willa Cather's _O Pioneers!_
From _ Lives of Girls and Women_
ReplyDeleteBy Alice Munro
p 75: "The decision was physical; humiliation prickled my nerve ends and the lining of my stomach."
From _Travels With Charley_
ReplyDeleteBy John Steinbeck
p 36: "I do wonder if the stab of memory doesn't strike him high in the stomach just below the ribs where it hurts."
Poet & professor Joseph J. Benevento : "A dozen or so years ago, I invented a form of poetry called the "After" poem; it had very simple rules, the title of the poem had to start with the word "after," and there would be 26 lines, 5, 5 line stanzas and a one line coda."
ReplyDeleteBased on this formula, I re-did the above poem, just for discipline (& fun!):
After Taking Leave of Him
You fall into her arms
like crying,
feel her lips in your hair,
soothing like a parent
and something else.
Wooden and broken,
you lean rigidly.
Your forehead rests
against breasts
which must be like your own.
With each soft motion,
the ache you wear
like a brace
begins to melt, drips
slowly down your back.
Like congestion, it seeps inside,
fills the space between every rib,
then tatters into loose bits
that choke upward
and sink within you.
Yearning for a familiarity, you move toward
this woman and this one comfort
after taking leave of him.
For this time you fall away
from any pain.
Thick rags are floating now in your stomach.
From Joe B.:
A really fine poem and I think you used the "After" form to your advantage -- it all tries to lead to a big last line. And you had some excellent teachers [Andrew Grossbardt, Jim Thomas, and Jim Barnes]"