Sky Saw by Blake Butler

page 24:

I've spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I've read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues slim and white and speckled with the words.


page 57:

Behind her eyes were also stairwells, which also led to something gone. 


page 106:

It replaced the definitions of certain words in dictionaries no one would ever open. 


page 176:

Milk all through the years in lather leather held out only by an idea.


page 183:

The man said I am sorry I could not remember but now I remember many things I think and as time progresses I will continue to remember more things and there will be more things to remember. 


ibid:

He turned around and found the world.


page 191:

[...] time catching time there where time had meant never to be.


page 219:

Curds of syntax mad in old names.



page 245:

I might look down and find my arms there typing language and believe the language and know it was or I would look down and find the words there in my body written always, I could hold my body as a book, [...]

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. 

~ Jonathan Swift

The aspects of the thing that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ocean at the End of the Lane

I went to see Neil Gaiman a few weeks ago. I've been wanting and waiting for months and years to meet him. And when I heard this was his last signing tour, I couldn't not go.

I wanted to show him my tattoo. And I did sort of. He was busy with signing hundreds of books and by the time I was there in front of him, I stuttered. I awkwardly showed him my tattoo and had my copy of Brief Lives in front of him to sign on the page where my ink is from.

I started to read his new book that night, while waiting in line to get it signed. I remember reading Amanda Palmer's review. I remember her words while Neil was talking about the book. I remembered her words while he was reading passages to the audience. 

There was no way I wasn't going to like the novel. There hasn't been a single thing that he's written that I didn't love. (Except Good Omens, I'm not a huge fan of that so much.) My gateway drug to the land of Gaiman was American Gods. Shortly after it was published a copy went around my circle of friends. Around almost the entire theatre department of my college to be honest. I fell in love. Eventually my friend Dave lent me the Sandman comics and Jacob watched over me as I read them, knowing they were going to affect me in a deep deep way. 

He was right. 

I don't think I cried as hard as I ever did at a series or book, before or since. There's just something that resonates to my deep soul. My deeper consciousness. I had never read anything like it. When people say something "moved" them, I had no idea what that truly meant until encountering this graphic novel. 

I reread the series earlier this year, or late last. I can't remember. But upon rereading, I found the words that became my tattoo. A clear headed crazy woman because someone needed to hold it together if her brother couldn't. There are things that even the person who knows everything doesn't know. There are ways to travel and understand that others just don't see or get. How can I not understand that?

The Ocean at the End of the Lane moved me like Sandman did. It touched me. I cried and was scared and I believe I've had some nightmares because of the book. My heart aches and I want to know more about the family and about the narrator. And about that land that is neither there nor here. I want to find those places in my life where I can dream and remember and feel that otherness. 

This is not a book for the day time. Read this book at night. In the quiet of 2am with a cup of tea that will probably grow cold as you read chapter by chapter. Read this book during a summer thunderstorm (like I did) that's as ferocious as the one you'll read in the pages. Read this book alone. And when you are finished, find someone to hug. 

Other people have said it, but yes I firmly believe that this is his best work yet. The Sandman comics are my water mark, and (like I stated before) this is at that level. 

It's a story about a boy and the wonderful and awful world his neighbor shows him. It all starts with a birthday cat. From there there's an opal miner. And then a nanny. And lots of other fantastic stuff. And more cats. And a fantastic storm. 

Not to mention, beautiful writing. 

And beautiful truths that I only half knew before going into this book:

"I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."

[...]

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children's books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations. 

Read this book. Even if you don't like what I read. Read this book. You might not love it as wholly as I do. Actually, you can't: none of you are me. But I'm pretty damn sure this is a book that will stay with you long after you close the book. 

Especially when you look outside when it rains and just wonder. 

I never told you my favorite number is 4

I'm contemplating fate.

I personally believe in it. There are people I am fated to meet, fall in love with. People I am fated to care for regardless of the distance.

It doesn't matter if I took the path less traveled, I would still meet you.


And the coincidences that happen to follow you? Those numbers that keep popping up, that color that is always around? Are just path markers. The more you see them, the more you know you're on the right path.

People leading you to people leading you to love. Or a toss down a flight of stairs leading you to the one you marry.



But in the morning, when the sun rises; and the evening, when the sun sets, there is no fate. Everything and nothing is possible.

Endless.

All the choices
and none.

Constantly falling cadences keep suggesting the end of something. The plaintive melody builds up a sense of loss, of finality, of nothing more being left, which is profoundly sad. 

Yet, in the midst of the mournful passages, again and again there's a reprise, the original refrain reappearing as an assurance that there's been no break in continuity, a reaffirmation of the singers' former declaration of otherness...other values... introducing a hopeful note at the very point where a tragic climax might seem imminent and inevitable.

But then, immediately afterwards, sombre low notes restore the later version, so that two different conclusions are presented simultaneously and without any perceptible bias towards either....In the end one is left to choose between them; an choice implying the non-existence of a fixed or final form of reality, for which is substituted the idea of all eventualities being equally plausible or unlikely. 

-- Anna Kavan MeRcUrY

Oryx and Crake

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul's constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance. 


-- Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake

Quotes

Daniel has a tenderness about him, and when I couldn't sleep, he'd do this thing where he would slip his hand under my shirt and rub my back in circles until I fell asleep. He waited for me to be asleep before he slept. 

-- pg 93 Daniel Fights a Hurricane by Shane Jones