island winter garden




 don't look away.

(british) island notes dec / jan

there is a bright stripe in the pale winter sky.
---

this is you, this is your hand. this is the room. here, with this cold dry light, with the melancholic mix of the old accordion. me painted black, my body flaking, eyes shining half white, half black.

---

no disruptions to your story, or maybe they are not visible, did you patch them up? mine's all broken up like a plate of spaghetti.

---

'By the window of a small, darkened room Father lay on the floor, dressed in white, and looking terribly long. His feet were bare and his toes were strangely splayed out. His gentle fingers, now peacefully resting on his chest, were also distorted, and the black discs of copper coins firmly sealed his once shining eyes. His kind face had darkened and its nastily bared teeth frightened me.'
(first paragraph of My Childhood by Gorky)

---

'To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories - fragments of memories, transformed - emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story.'
(from Where The Stress Falls by Susan Sontag)
---

story - i want to work out my way of story building.
metaphors for story structures -  house of cards, jigsaw puzzle, mosiac.

don't look away.