Above is my first attempt at an altered book. I deconstructed a family copy of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. By grace of improvised-verging-at-times-on-desperate sewing tricks and jewelry clasps, I rebuilt the book as a small box. The clasps render it collapsible, allowing the box structure to fold out into the floor plans of the Notre Dame cathedral itself. On the back of the box, I made an erasure from the scene where Gringoire questions Esmeralda about her amulet. And her name.
THINGS I DID NOT KNOW UNTIL THEY FOUND ME /
THINGS I COULD NOT FIND WITHOUT UNKNOWING
THINGS I COULD NOT FIND WITHOUT UNKNOWING
i. Vincent Van Gogh ate paint.
ii. The entire moon could sit within the continent of North America.
iii. Leonardo da Vinci regularly bought caged birds in the marketplace and set them free. Historians attribute this to his vegetarianism, though I like think it's his obsession with flight. Not content with genius, he longed to be a winged thing. Wheeling about in the air. Furthermore, I think it is possible that somewhere in those journals swelling with mirror-image Italian, he recorded a dream. Wherein an unfamiliar voice whispered: Kitty Hawk.
iv. Birds with their hollow bones. Birds with a compass buried deep inside them, magnetic crystals skirting across the brain. A bird named Dear Friend, with an eye shot out and a wooden leg, decorated with the Croix de Guerre.
v. That a man could bend you at the waist--doubling you over yourself--and kiss the length of your spine and not even love you.
vi. First line of my newest ongoing fictive endeavor: "I enter my dead husband's room naked, with a harpoon in hand."
vii. The U.S. Department of Energy has amassed an enterprising group of scientists, anthropologists, linguists and (!?!) science fiction writers to devise a "Message for the Future" to warn those not-yet-born/not-yet-indoctrinated-into-chemical-witchcraft of its disposal site for radioactive waste in Carlsbad, NM. The preliminary plan includes miles of 25-foot pillars, giant earthen walls, explicit warnings in all extant languages, pictograms and finally--Edvard Munch's darling of Norwegian Expressionism, "The Scream."
viii. Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel.
ix. "We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows...
. . .Love is
not enough. We die and are put in the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body."
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body."
-Jack Gilbert
x. The Universe is heirarchical. And empty.
xi. Among Galileo's possessions preserved as relics for the starry-minded: his petrified middle finger. Here's looking at you, Rome!
xii. "Quiconque naissait poète se faisit architecte. " - Victor Hugo
xiii. I have decided to be more courageous, even in my confusion. What do I want? Not your mouth only but your mettle. After all this, our bodies can stand to be frank with each other. After all this, I can be roughed up and coo about it. I'm content with hair and teeth until my own dreamyheadedness takes over. Distracted all day by the fact that we're really just celestial afterbirth reiterated. Wondering lately: Do I really want the Obscure? Fumbling around in your chest, fool's hands grasping at your panicky bird-heart. Do I want the Arcana? O but there's so much fight in me. Sweet & Inexorable Pilgrim. O how I want to knock the star ash right out of you.
