Friday, June 29, 2012

from "Candor" by Anne Carson

Could 1
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

(for Roni Horn)

2 comments:

litlc said...

Thank you for sharing this; the passage is really beautiful. I haven't read through your archives yet but I can say that so far I really love how you are able to connect memory + emotion with food + wine (and images of such) on a truly evocatively sensory level. I'm looking forward to reading more.

Redbird said...

Thank you so much. That is entirely my goal-- connecting these things, trying to tease a narrative out of these shared experiences around food and wine. Sometimes I wonder if there is a through-line to what I write. I hope that there is.