“I love you infinity.”
a written sketch | an encountered text
sketch⬩text
monthly on The Matterhorn
SKETCH: The following is a word (& multimedia) sketch for a work of fiction.
⎯⎯⎯⎯
I drift into space. My body - once chiseled and strong - softens into a vessel and back again. Flowing like a balloon or accordion. It reaches out, into the world. Laughing back at me. Where did you go?
I float down the steep mountain - willingly losing the edges in soft whiteness - like death under and all around. A foggy day. We and death are one. Does that mean the dead are hiding in those water droplets? Aren’t they?1 Psychopomps beckoning us to their surreal beyond.
My skis seem to release me into space until the realization I must slow and turn at some point is remembered by some joint or muscle who shares it with the rest. I allow a final moment of acceleration that seems to take me into another world, just before engaging my muscles to shift slightly to safety.
The movement pushes me into sharp back and forth, creating zigzag designs on the snow, not jarring but rhythmically connected to the ground, where I catch glimpses of literature lining the pistes. They at once entice and overwhelm me. They seem to tell each movement to take weeks of reading contained in an instant as time warps to funnel me forward.
I’m making a snow angel though I will never be one (again). Child days are over. And I have frightening premonition that just a couple of minor years will spring my son into that space after snow angels.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
When frivolous moments are replaced by actions leading to consequences, to ‘success.’ Together, we roll down a huge snowy hill, creating a ball that could suffocate us. We reach the entrance to a mountainside lodge where the ball disintegrates, exploding into the sky as a rainbow of icy crystals that float up - up - up into the great beyond.
“I love you infinity,” he says.
⎯⎯⎯⎯
TEXT: I share with you a recent encounter with a text.
⎯⎯⎯⎯
French Ways and Their Meaning2 by Edith Wharton (free on Gutenberg)
I adore the work of Edith Wharton which I was first introduced to in high school. We read Ethan Frome, the Massachusetts-set tale of unfaithfulness, a sledding near-death accident, and purgatorial years after shameful actions. The book is short but constantly causes us to question our understanding of morals and relationships and is packed with literary layers and symbolic meanings.
Wharton’s other novels and short stories often take us to high society New York, subversively poking fun at traditions or fashions and questioning many behaviors or rules, including those imposed on her by her parents and the rest of society.
French Ways and Their Meaning is a collection of essays Wharton wrote during WWI about society, women, equality, culture, and manners. It’s a wonderful early exploration in the realm of cultural studies and comparative literature. Wharton spent a lot of time in Europe and France as a child and later in life. Like many of her male contemporary New England writers (especially Henry James), she found deeper understandings through this comparative investigation of America and Europe.
As a New England born writer and francophile who has lived in France (and other parts of Europe), this is right up my alley. It is remarkable how modern and timelessly relevant much of Wharton’s comments feel. Part of her agenda is in sharing the central relationship the French have with the arts:
The difference is that in France almost every one has the seeing eye, just as almost every one has the hearing ear. It is not a platitude, though it may be a truism, to say that the French are a race of artists: it is the key that unlocks every door of their complex psychology, and consequently the key that must be oftenest in the explorer's hand.
The gift of the seeing eye is, obviously, a first requisite where taste is to prevail. And the question is, how is the seeing eye to be obtained? What is the operation for taste-blindness? Or is there any; and are not some races—the artistically non-creative—born as irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?
- “Taste” IV
Wharton also attempts to keep French notions of culture not just on a pedestal but also non-gendered. She questions the concept of American and British gendering of many things in society:
The very significance—the note of ridicule and slight contempt—which attaches to the word "culture" in America, would be quite unintelligible to the French of any class. It is inconceivable to them that any one should consider it superfluous, and even slightly comic, to know a great deal, to know the best in every line, to know, in fact, as much as possible.
There are ignorant and vulgar-minded people in France, as in other countries; but instead of dragging the popular standard of culture down to their own level, and ridiculing knowledge as the affectation of a self-conscious clique, they are obliged to esteem it, to pretend to have it, and to try and talk its language—which is not a bad way of beginning to acquire it.
The odd Anglo-Saxon view that a love of beauty and an interest in ideas imply effeminacy is quite unintelligible to the French; as unintelligible as, for instance, the other notion that athletics make men manly.
- “Intellectual Honesty” III
I’ll let you do the rest of the exploring. Wharton is the supreme francophile. Her conclusion is that France has shaped the world into a more beautiful place of human philosophy, art, and culture: “…the whole world is full of her spilt glory.”
Although her view may seem rather narrow due to her lack of travel on five other continents, the essence — “French Ways” — might arguably be found in the best forms of culture, government, society, and humanity elsewhere, even if they emerged and evolved independently. What do you think?
⎯⎯⎯⎯
What are you reading/viewing or writing/creating? Let’s hear it.
Thanks for being here.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Ending of “The Dead,” James Joyce and in which I discuss in Snow.
If you’re in the US, you can click on the above link to purchase the book through my Bookhsop.org affiliate page and support both local bookshops and my work. Thank you!
With the skiing, I like how you made it sound like you’re entering a flow state, it’s so hard to capture that.
As for France, well, I think I’d come across as a lot more masculine there.
Very interesting. I enjoyed Ethan Frome. I hadn't realised that Wharton had written essays too. I think her observation that people who don't have knowledge try to give the impression they do is true of some of the English too. At least, I've met loads of such people in my time! I think Wharton's view of them is very generous- --- I find such people rather obnoxious!