The Sleeping Beauty and the Cantadora's Antitheme
During the day I live in an American suburb so typical I experience it as surreal. It is manicured, litter-less, and signless. It is, as my visiting friend Robyn once remarked, "a scale model of a neighborhood, not a neighborhood." It is not a reality with jagged edges, squat crooked trees bent by salt winds, and neon script littering the too hot sky, like we were used to in venereal Florida. Oh, no: On my parkway in this temperate mid-Atlantic state, the trees and shrubs are sculpted into the most improbable geometric shapes dreamable, nothing natural allowed to cross the man-made bounds of those profiles we are supposed to experience as order and control and perhaps unrelieved peace itself.
So it was on some level hilariously funny when, late last night, while I was sleeping, the sky of my suburb turned orange, and a toxic iris opened unblinkingly where the moon was supposed to be and sucked everything inexorably into its devouring eye. The bare sweet gums and maples were black as ash and pulled all the way over toward the ground, in enforced homage to the horrible iris. It was Armageddon, and how had I deserved it?
So I had to call on the nightingale-voiced Cantadora to lull me to deeper sleep with stories of gold plates encrusted with jewels, damask tablecloths dripping in gems and lace, and a Sleeping Beauty so perfect she had to be cursed with premature death to give the story any conflict at all, without which, you know, you haven't a perfect story. And the Cantadora, the sweet Latina storyteller, did more than tell the story of how the 12th faerie softened the 13th faerie's curse on the Beauty by making the death at age 16 merely a sleep for 100 years.
The Cantadora did tell how suitors came and tried to penetrate the impenetrable hedge that had grown up around the sleeping girl, none succeeding until Prince Charming came. But the spell wasn't necessarily broken by his True Love; the hedge didn't yield to him alone because he had the faith to deem the hedge a protection for the girl instead of a barrier against unworthy saviors. You see, the Cantadora, deemphasized all that--the importance of faith, will, love--as she lulled me on to a deeper sleep.
She reassessed the theme of The Sleeping Beauty, you see. And here is how it goes: the girl awakens because the time for sleeping is simply over, not because true love cracked destiny apart. Destiny is simply the good that awaits, not a product of will, purpose, or meaning. The beauty, upon waking, says with soft eyes, "I have waited such a long, long time," but the Prince never knows whether she means for him, or whether she means she has waited such a long, long time to be fully awakened. The Cantadora speaks softly, soothingly, of the need for these as-dead "spaces" in one's life, these instances we don't inhabit but lie apart from, sleeping, as it were. These lulls, these negative drags on our dreamed of constancy of antigravity--these drags restore us to ourselves, our lives, our geometric possibilities. No one can coincide with himself or herself and be. There has to be a rhythm, a restoration. Therewith, the Cantadora, the only angel swooping down at my call last night, tucked me in, whispering, "There, there now . . ."
Now, consider this. People write so as to cull admirers and then hold them at a distance. No one who takes seriously the writing project wants to be "known." No one wants to believe his or her profile is distinct and traceable against your own particular screen. And if you say to mister and madam, "I understand your problem, maybe X or Y action would help," they become angry at you. They may even foam at the brain and stop speaking to you. Forever. And if you happen to be one of these people yourself, one who doesn't want to be "known," and yet empathize or otherwise read others "transparently," well this is perhaps a problem, and perhaps why I, in particular (to drop all pretenses now), cultivate conflicts with penpals, even though at the time I'm not consciously doing so.
Well, be that as it may, sleep, sleep, little trumped up self . . . Armageddon comes eventually anyway, so be and retreat, true only to the rhythm drawing out this scripted profile, here . . .
During the day I live in an American suburb so typical I experience it as surreal. It is manicured, litter-less, and signless. It is, as my visiting friend Robyn once remarked, "a scale model of a neighborhood, not a neighborhood." It is not a reality with jagged edges, squat crooked trees bent by salt winds, and neon script littering the too hot sky, like we were used to in venereal Florida. Oh, no: On my parkway in this temperate mid-Atlantic state, the trees and shrubs are sculpted into the most improbable geometric shapes dreamable, nothing natural allowed to cross the man-made bounds of those profiles we are supposed to experience as order and control and perhaps unrelieved peace itself.
So it was on some level hilariously funny when, late last night, while I was sleeping, the sky of my suburb turned orange, and a toxic iris opened unblinkingly where the moon was supposed to be and sucked everything inexorably into its devouring eye. The bare sweet gums and maples were black as ash and pulled all the way over toward the ground, in enforced homage to the horrible iris. It was Armageddon, and how had I deserved it?
So I had to call on the nightingale-voiced Cantadora to lull me to deeper sleep with stories of gold plates encrusted with jewels, damask tablecloths dripping in gems and lace, and a Sleeping Beauty so perfect she had to be cursed with premature death to give the story any conflict at all, without which, you know, you haven't a perfect story. And the Cantadora, the sweet Latina storyteller, did more than tell the story of how the 12th faerie softened the 13th faerie's curse on the Beauty by making the death at age 16 merely a sleep for 100 years.
The Cantadora did tell how suitors came and tried to penetrate the impenetrable hedge that had grown up around the sleeping girl, none succeeding until Prince Charming came. But the spell wasn't necessarily broken by his True Love; the hedge didn't yield to him alone because he had the faith to deem the hedge a protection for the girl instead of a barrier against unworthy saviors. You see, the Cantadora, deemphasized all that--the importance of faith, will, love--as she lulled me on to a deeper sleep.
She reassessed the theme of The Sleeping Beauty, you see. And here is how it goes: the girl awakens because the time for sleeping is simply over, not because true love cracked destiny apart. Destiny is simply the good that awaits, not a product of will, purpose, or meaning. The beauty, upon waking, says with soft eyes, "I have waited such a long, long time," but the Prince never knows whether she means for him, or whether she means she has waited such a long, long time to be fully awakened. The Cantadora speaks softly, soothingly, of the need for these as-dead "spaces" in one's life, these instances we don't inhabit but lie apart from, sleeping, as it were. These lulls, these negative drags on our dreamed of constancy of antigravity--these drags restore us to ourselves, our lives, our geometric possibilities. No one can coincide with himself or herself and be. There has to be a rhythm, a restoration. Therewith, the Cantadora, the only angel swooping down at my call last night, tucked me in, whispering, "There, there now . . ."
Now, consider this. People write so as to cull admirers and then hold them at a distance. No one who takes seriously the writing project wants to be "known." No one wants to believe his or her profile is distinct and traceable against your own particular screen. And if you say to mister and madam, "I understand your problem, maybe X or Y action would help," they become angry at you. They may even foam at the brain and stop speaking to you. Forever. And if you happen to be one of these people yourself, one who doesn't want to be "known," and yet empathize or otherwise read others "transparently," well this is perhaps a problem, and perhaps why I, in particular (to drop all pretenses now), cultivate conflicts with penpals, even though at the time I'm not consciously doing so.
Well, be that as it may, sleep, sleep, little trumped up self . . . Armageddon comes eventually anyway, so be and retreat, true only to the rhythm drawing out this scripted profile, here . . .
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huntersmencken:
You? Fickle? Curious? LMFAO! 
huntersmencken:
Regina Spector