Endless Nights.
Fifteen Portraits of Despair.
(на любителя; впечатлительным/брезгливым/тонким натурам сильно не рекомендуется)
(текстовка из графической новеллы)
1) The first portrait.
Her eyes are grey.
Her hair is straggly and wet.
Her fingers are stubby.
The nail are chewed and broken.
Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.
There is a vacancy in her glaze, the feeling of absence when you are near her that is impossible to put into words.
Her sigil is hooked ring.
One day her hook will catch your heart.
Describing he we articulate what she is and why she is:
when hope is past, she is here.
She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey concrete buildings and anonymous hotels.
She is on the other side of every mirror.
When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.
She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.
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2) So when the Bishop's secretary said he wanted to see me I know is had to be something to do with drinking. It's not that I'm a problem drinker. I'm Irish: son of the hundred generations of serious drinkers. But these days, the church needs to avoid even the apparency of wrongdoing.
I know a few priests go to A.A. I couldn't go as a cleric. It'd have to be "Hello Dermot," not "Hello Father Byrne." when I stood up to say my little bit.
And I've been letting things slide a little recently.
It wasn't the drinking. He said, ten years ago there was a girl. He showed me her picture. I said I remembered her: Odd little thing, always making up stories, wanting for attention.
She says you interfered with her, he says.
I told him I never. I could prove, it too, even after all this time.
No, he says. You cannot. We're paying her three quarters of million, Dermot. And you need to reconsider you vocation. It's the insurance company, you understand.
But I never, I said again. And, and I'm a priest.
We need to be seen to be taking action, says the Bishops' secretary. We can't seem to be condoning this sort of thing. If you stay in the church, we'll have to report you to the police.
For what, I say?
Molesting young girls, he says sadly.
But I never, I told him, and I could hear the whine in my voice, like a dog you've kicked when you've had the one too many, who can't get it into his head why.
This isn't fair, I said.
No, he says. But it's right.
And when I get to the door, thinking about trying not to cry, at my age, about starting all over at 54, about a bottle of Canadian Club in the bottom drawer of the desk in my study, I say, Father, think for the moment. What would Jesus do?
The Bishop's secretary shook his head. If he had to deal with the insurance companies, he'd probably hang you out to dry, same as rest of us, he said, and he didn't smile.
3) She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy.
She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper.
Then she stares at the paper,
unable to think of anything else.
Eventually it begins to get dark.
4) Is stats with cat twining against your leg, two, maybe three years ago, just after you hurt your leg, and it's a stray, and you put down milk in saucer for it, and when you live in a damn trailer on the edge of the town you can be glad of the company and hell the kittens were cute and you put down more milk and pretty soon don't it seem like all the money you collecting on disability is going to buy there sacks of catfood and you can hardly keep clear who is whose mother or brother or sister anymore and the trailer stinks of spray but you don't hardly notice it, because those cats are family and so it's a bitch when your brother-in-law over in Moose Hill says he's got you a job on the dairy farm there and it's three hundreds dollars a week, and a place to stay, and that's the best money when you nothing but farmhand with leg that's shot and you don't know what to do with goddamn cats, the kittens in the drawers, sixty maybe even seventy cats and there's more now out in the fields who'll come back tonight to be fed.
Be here Friday, says your brother-in-law, or they'll get somebody else in.
And that disability won't last forever.
So you lock the trailer door and you go, thinking maybe you'll be back at the weekend to feed the cats, and knowing that you won't.
And then there's just the face on the sheriff's man as he tells you that they had to wear air masks to go into the trailer, that five of them cats were somehow still alive, and sixty of them, maybe more were found part eaten, and he waits for you to say something, anything, and you shake your head and you don't say nothing at all.
5) He collects his lover.
He has nail clippings, and photographs he has cut from magazines, and a ticket from the only tram journey they took together, to late-night Chinese restaurant, where his lover was not recognizes.
After sex, while his lover sleeps, he takes things, slips them into his bag, a tee shirt that smells like his lover, underpants, a dusty aspirin taken from his toilet kit.
His lover exists for him as a body in a sequence of hotel rooms.
In his bedroom he has made a small shrine to his lover: his greatest treasure is knotted condom, retrieved from a waste bin, with the cold remains of his lover's seed congealed inside it.
Sometimes he does not see his lover in the flesh for months at a time. At night he watches his lover on the television.
"If you smile before the commercial break," he whispers to his lover, "it means you are thinking about me. If you blink now it means you love me, you truly love me, and one day you will come out here for always."
He buries his face in a tee shirt that no longer smells like anybody at all, and waits for his lover to blink.
6) It wasn't the loving each other or the knowing they could never be together.
It wasn't the wind in the eaves of the empty house, or the bone-dry rattle of the pills in the brown-glass bottle.
It wasn't the bitter taste, with only a stale box of red wine to wash it away.
It wasn't waking, with her dead and you all too alive.
It was the way your fingers shook. It was a summer, and the thickness of your tongue as yout tried to speak. It was a sound of sirens, coming close.
It was knowing that you would never get another chance.
7) Despair remembers.
It is a peculiar, flat memory,
in which things become bleak and bounded be the dark.
There is joy in there,
of course,
and love,
and touching.
The presence that makes the present absence unbearable.
Without triumph,
without love,
without joy,
her work would be for nothing.
8) To begin with, he lost his job.
It was not his fault.
It was an honest mistake.
You must believe me.
It was a shame, not despair that moved him.
Each day he got up and showered and dressed, he kissed his wife and babies, and drove away.
he spent the day in libraries, on in the parked car, or walking.
He applied for jobs, but was turned down.
When his severance pay run out he slowly, methodically emptied his saving accounts. He told his wife he had been promoted.
The first break-in was easy. A wallet, jewelery. No one was home. No one was hurt. It was practically a victimless crime.
Today his wife said that police had been by asking about him.
She told them that he was at work,
and they said that was odd,
that they thought he'd been let go.
He told her that people made mistakes.
That new girl on the switchboard.
But he wasn't feeling well.
He thought he'd stay home today.
Now he's in his bedroom,
in the empty house,
listening to someone pressing the doorbell.
And the bell.
Which rings.
And rings.
And rings.
9) Her kiss is the deep ocean.
Her kiss is not the deep ocean.
Her kiss is the gray sky.
Her kiss is the blind allay.
Her kiss is her touch is her breath is her fingers is what remains after the laughing is over.
Her kiss is the blackness.
Her kiss is not the blackness.
Her kiss is the black dog that follows you in the darkness.
There is a black dog beneath the grey sky, by the blind alley, beside the deep ocean.
It is not her kiss. Come closer...
10) And people ask, does Despair despair, does Despair dream, does Despair desire?
It is simple than that.
He is dream.
It is desire.
She is despair.
Take away the despair and there is nothing left.
Nothing but empty room and a hook of the perfect shape and size for snagging your heart.
11) It is a writer, with nothing left that he knows how to say.
It is an artist, and fingers that will never catch the vision.
12) He was not rich man, and it took all he could raise from his fields, his house, his friends, to take the man to the court. He was mortgaged his future for fairness, for relief, for Justice. What happened to his child was not right.
And now the judge comes out and his mouth opens and he explains the verdict, his words a tangle of legalities.
"What does he say?" the man asks his lawyers, but already he knows by the smile it the eyes of his opponent. It is the same smile he sees on the face of the lawyers on the other side. On the face of the judge.
He feels his lawyer's hand on his arm and he would have it be over. Have everything be over. But he knows is has only just begun.
Drumclown at birthparty for the dead.
Sitting in a grave, reading a newspaper. Bank teller. Driving a cab. Visiting a jail. Fishing in a church. Playing flute at storm. Rowing a boat in a swamp.
Moon hook.
Hook the moon.
Moon hooker
Barb hook
Suffer. Line and suffer age.
Toy. Sinker.
Doll. Fisher.
Windows. 13 f.
Planets. Men in my bedroom. There are universes of suffering.
13)
A) If you can't be happy where you are, you can't be happy anywhere. Discuss, with examples from your life.
B) Hell is Other People. Do you agree? Demonstrate how this might or might not apply in the case of
i) The Armenian Massacres of 1915
ii) Either the life of Algernon Charles Swinburne or the death of Walt Disney.
iii) the darkness before creation
(Answer two of three)
C) Construct an analogy using the saline nature of either tears or the sea and salt that makes a dish palatable and adds piquance and savour.
(Examinees are encouraged to refer to either the third daughter of Llyr or Lot's wife, but not both)
D) If I was God I wound abolish......
Complete in 250 words or less. Physical practicalities and human nature are to be respected. The Law of Conservation of Happiness may not be violated.
(Counts for 50% of your final score)
14) She has waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She has wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman, You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodyless and afraid, waiting for happiness to start.
15) To be Despair. It is a portrait.
Only close your eyes and feel.
Fifteen Portraits of Despair.
Endless Nights.
Fifteen Portraits of Despair.
(на любителя; впечатлительным/брезгливым/тонким натурам сильно не рекомендуется)
(текстовка из графической новеллы)
1) The first portrait.
Her eyes are grey.
Her hair is straggly and wet.
Her fingers are stubby.
The nail are chewed and broken.
Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.
There is a vacancy in her glaze, the feeling of absence when you are near her that is impossible to put into words.
Her sigil is hooked ring.
One day her hook will catch your heart.
Describing he we articulate what she is and why she is:
when hope is past, she is here.
She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey concrete buildings and anonymous hotels.
She is on the other side of every mirror.
When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.
She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.
читать дальше
Fifteen Portraits of Despair.
(на любителя; впечатлительным/брезгливым/тонким натурам сильно не рекомендуется)
(текстовка из графической новеллы)
1) The first portrait.
Her eyes are grey.
Her hair is straggly and wet.
Her fingers are stubby.
The nail are chewed and broken.
Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.
There is a vacancy in her glaze, the feeling of absence when you are near her that is impossible to put into words.
Her sigil is hooked ring.
One day her hook will catch your heart.
Describing he we articulate what she is and why she is:
when hope is past, she is here.
She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey concrete buildings and anonymous hotels.
She is on the other side of every mirror.
When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.
She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.
читать дальше