Just two quotes and no post

Dear blog,

Yesterday I shared my improved retelling of The Book of Revelation, which was three times longer than a diary entry should be; therefore, I am taking today off and shall write nothing here. But I did not want to let down the multitudes of readers who check this space daily in their search for new imaginations. So, instead of composing something fresh of my own, I will just share two quotations that I discarded – I had intended to embed them in my Revelation rewrite, but I failed to find a place where they would fit.

This first passage is from “The apples we bit into . . .” by Serge Fauchereau (in John Ashbery’s translation). I wanted to work it into the scene where Saint John confronts his dream-whore:

. . . one begins looking up from the shoe, the ankle, the calf. Then the swelling of the knee, the more supple curve of the thigh that flees beneath the skirt. And yet one climbs, one continues to climb in time as far as the silky space where the thigh is cut off by the panty. But that’s enough. [. . .] The machine is straining now, as though fearful of running out of gas at the bend in the highway. To be continued. Up until the moment when the fingers of memory will grasp nothing but emptiness, the fear that can’t be shared, the last. End of the comedy, there’s nothing more to see.

This ultimately didn’t work out for me to quote, because John’s dream-whore, in my version of Revelation, is not wearing any panties; and that detail is the focus of the scene, as it always should be.

And here is the other excerpt that I could not manage to use – it’s from the poem “Fish” by D.H. Lawence. I was hoping that it might describe the death of the merman:

And the gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand,  

And the red-gold mirror-eye stares and dies, 

And the water-suave contour dims.

But not before I have had to know  

He was born in front of my sunrise, 

Before my day.

He outstarts me. 

And I, a many-fingered horror of daylight to him, 

Have made him die.

The reason that this wasn’t able to be added to my Revelation is that my merman is not slain by any single being, let alone a human with fingers. In fact, I don’t bother to explain how my villain dies; the text just announces that “The merman along with the crocodile and the earthworm are burnt to a crisp in the Lake of Fire.” So it wouldn’t work to say that his “gold-and-green pure lacquer-mucus comes off in my hand” unless I wrote into the scripture a first-person account of his being fondled to death. Which now I wish I would have done.