suddenly transparent

A re-discovered quote from Kavalier and Clay that captivated me for a little bit post-California. "The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire would be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might not have existed in the first place."

One night at Flipside a few of us started talking about poetry and the poems that we know by heart. It was really intriguing and somewhat telling to see what kinds of poems people have committed to memory. The poems that Ali knew were the kind that comment on love, flirty poems, fickle poems, men and women poems, Dorothy Parker-ish poems. Conor of course knew lots but focused on dirty limericks. And my poems were about things vanishing, things lost - lost love, lost self. And it felt as if we were suddenly transparent, as if anyone could see the metaphors and ideas embedded within us, the ones that cause us to move, to react the way that we do.

Everything vanishes.