Anodyne
Friday, July 13, 2007
 

Horseshoe Bay --> Langdale; Earls Cove --> Saltery Bay; Powell River --> Little River; Duke Point --> Tsawwassen.

"She gave up, and was lifted again to a sitting position, where she remained, her head thrown far backward. The sudden roar of the plane's motor behind her smashed the wall of the chamber where she lay. Before her eyes was the violent blue sky -- nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her."

Sitting out in the sunshine on the aft deck like Kit's idealist husband Port, with my backpack, camera, and Eddie Bauer cap. Low blue smudge of Texada Island to the south; tow boats and booms working mid-channel; the Forbidden Plateau's distant snowfields glimmering in the terrifically harsh flat light. Like Port, already dying of fever, conscious of something like "a cold piece of metal" high in his chest. Robert Stone must have looked carefully at Bowles' clear prose, Robert Bingham too. Those last eighty pages, with Kit wandering lost in the desert, no longer human but "an object," a reflexively registering machine, felt like being punched repeatedly in the face and head. Or at least this was my excuse when I drove off the ferry into oncoming traffic.
- posted by cjb @ 9:13 AM


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