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
~ Longly, Longingly my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
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