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A review by jacob_wren
The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth by Fanny Howe
5.0
A few passages from The Needle’s Eye by Fanny Howe:
The almond tree with its white blossoms teaches him that fruition is a sign of completion, the moment of failure to which everything aspires. The trees have fulfilled their cycle, turn white, click off, and die.
*
The binder for liquid bole is animal-skin glue. Almost honey. Without glue binder, bole won’t stick to the icon board. And then there is the gold leaf, or flake, like a dry fleck of pollen, to gild the wood. Everything is stuck together when the gold has come.
The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive too, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.
There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.
Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a kind of burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.
Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible mesh images.
Who will meet me on the other side, I ask you, to prove the error of what I say? Will it be someone who never loved me?
*
Did you know that Puritans believed a baby was only conceived during an orgasm? The Puritans had to spend a lot of time on making this happen, on sex, because without more children, there would be no settlement, no city.
*
Still, hope was like a throng of singers that circled the world both here and there having died and echoed over and over. What is a song but a call from the other side?
.
The almond tree with its white blossoms teaches him that fruition is a sign of completion, the moment of failure to which everything aspires. The trees have fulfilled their cycle, turn white, click off, and die.
*
The binder for liquid bole is animal-skin glue. Almost honey. Without glue binder, bole won’t stick to the icon board. And then there is the gold leaf, or flake, like a dry fleck of pollen, to gild the wood. Everything is stuck together when the gold has come.
The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive too, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.
There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.
Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a kind of burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.
Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible mesh images.
Who will meet me on the other side, I ask you, to prove the error of what I say? Will it be someone who never loved me?
*
Did you know that Puritans believed a baby was only conceived during an orgasm? The Puritans had to spend a lot of time on making this happen, on sex, because without more children, there would be no settlement, no city.
*
Still, hope was like a throng of singers that circled the world both here and there having died and echoed over and over. What is a song but a call from the other side?
.