I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

I tell you that I see her still

At the dark entrance of the hall.

One gas lamp burning near her shoulder   

Shone also from her other side   

Where hung the long inaccurate glass   

Whose pictures were as troubled water.   

An immense shadow had its hand   

Between us on the floor, and seemed   

To hump the knuckles nervously,   

A giant crab readying to walk,   

Or a blanket moving in its sleep.

You will remember, with a smile   

Instructed by movies to reminisce,   

How strict her corsets must have been,   

How the huge arrangements of her hair   

Would certainly betray the least   

Impassionate displacement there.   

It was no rig for dallying,

And maybe only marriage could   

Derange that queenly scaffolding—

As when a great ship, coming home,   

Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail

And loosing all the tackle that had laced

Her in the long lanes ....

                                       I know

We need not draw this figure out.

But all that whalebone came from whales.   

And all the whales lived in the sea,   

In calm beneath the troubled glass,   

Until the needle drew their blood.

I see her standing in the hall,

Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam,   

And the black flukes of agony

Beat at the air till the light blows out.

Howard Nemerov

The Dark Side of the Moon

Well, you never achieve everything you wanted to. It's the simple act of writing. You begin with a platonic ideal that is a shimmering tower carved out of pure diamond, that is this perfect thing that stands there unfouled by gravity and the weather. And, then, the thing that you build is this thing that you have to build out of whatever is at hand and you use empty sushi boxes and chairs and get friends to hold it up and try to make it look like it's standing. And at the end of it, people look at it and they say, "It's amazing." And you say, "Yes, but if only I could have done the thing that is in my head."

—Gaiman, when asked if he felt he'd achieved everything he wanted to with The Sandman. (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 20)

I don't know many people who speak in perfect prose, but Neil's one of them.

—Dave McKean in an interview (Hanging out with the Dream King, p. 6-7)

What does that mean, to 'speak in perfect prose'? That it sounds, to the rest of us, like something worked out on the page and subsequently revised, I suppose. This is perhaps why interviews will Gaiman go so well: people read the author's person as they'd hoped to find him from his texts. 

Yesterday I read the Bouchard/Simon translation of Foucault's What Is an Author? Unsurprisingly, it's very, very good. My work has become ruled by the author-function as a point of obsession: applied to Gaiman, we call this celebrity; applied to Shakespeare, we call this scholarship.

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Undoubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension as we speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Nevertheless, these aspect of an individual, which we designate as an author... are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.

When we read The Sandman for pleasure, we rely on our ability to address Gaiman's authorship as an entity in flux. Fans beg for backstory, annotated editions*, preliminary sketches. We interview him, over and over, we follow the blog and lose our knickers when the prequel is announced. Why? I like to think of it as a response to the world the text evokes, a kind of moving literary shadow. It's the reason we send up probes to take pictures of the dark side of the moon, the way we crouch down and peer into the backs of drawers when looking something, even though our hands have already come up empty. We want to confirm our suspicions, we want the intangible real. Realized.

But we can't have that with Will. Not until, as I have often fantasized, we dig up his grave and find The Long Lost Journals or recover Cardenio will we have 'new' academic flesh to sink our teeth into. What changes is the conversation--Shakespeare stays the same, but 'Shakespeare' evolves.

*A word on The Annotated Sandman v.1: yes, it is that good, except that The Sandman Chronology the editor uses is of variable quality.

Endless Nights, 147

(although the wish and the thing are so close in the realm of the Endless that you cannot get a thin-bladed knife between them)

Milo Manara's Desire

 originally published in Endless Nights, which I found here.