Time
Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons
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Balancing Weight & Lightness of the Feminine
A stillness keeps all three hands of the clock from moving: snows one wakes to finding limbs, wires, roofs, roads, windshields, balustrades, fire escapes covered in glistening magic, once sun rises. Lime-green of the house diagonally across the way subtly seeping out of the all white. White smoke chimneys. For an extended time, since time disappeared, snow-covered earth drowns out clamor & woes of the twenty-first century. Right now sun reflects off topmost attic window of the lime-green three-story. Yesterday, shoveled drive & sidewalk back down to bare ground, then drove through storm to the library in search of the Feminine, wanting Woolf & Cixous. Truck jackknifed on highway in opposite direction. Decided to take lesser Route 1 on the way home. Only patron in halls of the academic building. Pleasure to deal with those most erstwhile of students, homework spread out on circulation & reserve desks, work-study kids who need to work to supplement tuition. However, when hoisting a shopping bag filled with eighteen books, receive a condescending, powerful stare from a man not quite my age, someone in power, obviously, behind the desk, taking out his own book or books. I’ve met before, & recognize that glare, which in youth might snarl back at, but now simply ignore, but do not smile. While the student checks out the stack of books, I check out the new book shelf: Joyce Johnson’s The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac is the volume Peter Anastas wrote to say he’d given himself as gift for the holiday, & here becomes cosmic gift balancing weight & lightness of the Feminine. Books can be conversations, especially when opening pages randomly, hermetically. Hélène says in Coming to Writing, “You just can’t get rid of femininity. Femininity is inevitable.” Virginia, in January 1933 attends a performance of Pomona at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, set design by Vanessa Bell, she describes as “Fra Angelico against a background of Cassis…” It’s my lime-green seeping out of Timeless white. Time just reentered, slowed down, though still more rapid than its absence. Joyce has Kerouac recall a drive “one night in North Carolina, he had seen the face of a black man… illuminated by the headlights of the car – a face that instead of showing terror as the car full of white men passed him in the dark had a mysterious look of ecstatic ‘gladness.’” At the same time, immersing himself in a text by Dostoevsky, “I studied it carefully & found that he begins with ‘ideas’ & then demolishes them in the fury of what actually happens in the story.”
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