Forty-five

A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can. Use me use me use me, they cry, I’ll be the easy child, the I-won’t-wake-you-up-in-the-night child. Wasn’t she through with all that – after years, on streets, in restaurants when all she saw were schlepping, wrung out, haphazard, misbuttoned mothers pushing strollers loaded with groceries, a dreadful toddler riding shotgun?

Now every city block boasts the popular miracle of children’s faces. Keep away, she says to civilized men who stop at crosswalks, Do you see this glittered fertility, this fishnet stocking hunger?

The possible calls and the body lunges – rapacious – for what? – every last urgency to be the body?


--Victoria Redel, "Suddenly" just published in Granta  (2010) [Follow link].
 
A very interesting vignette that explores the physical origins of what we might suppose are merely psychological urgings.   Redel's piece does not offer the sentimental rendering of last chances that we might expect, but instead, leaves us to contemplate what one becomes when one is no longer a "productive" body.   Can one pass this threshold without a "lunge" ---smoothly, gently, oblivous? 

Like the Knife of the Carver

Language is the principal tool with which the Eskimo make the natural world a human world. They use many words for snow, which permits fine distinctions, not simply because they are much concerned with snow, but because snow takes its form from the actions in which it participates: sledding, falling, igloo-building.  Different kinds of snow are brought into existence by the Eskimo as they experience their environment and speak; words do not label things already there.  Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside.  As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth but also is the very thing about which he is talking. 

---Edmund Carpenter, "Arctic Realities." Taken from the exhibition pamphlet for "Upside Down: Arctic Realities" on display at the Menil Collection, April 15-July 17, 2011.