snowbound...not

As some of you may have noted from the news, Atlanta was essentially immobilized for the better part of a week by ice after a Sunday snowstorm. I had no internet access.

I post hereafter one of my most digressive posts ever, with drafts of a few others held in abeyance out of compassion for my small but persistent readership.

And I commend, to John Crowley fans especially, the works of Wendy Given, whose show "Turn Your Back to the Forest, Your Front to Me" was the only exhibition to open amid the general condition of repeatedly frozen snowiness, which was appropriate (currently over on Edgewood at Whitespace Gallery, but also findable online at wendygiven.com). She and her husband arrived from Oregon with the work less than an hour before the oncoming storm:

digressions and divagations, only more so than usual

History has cunning passages, contrived corridors…
[something something] in a wilderness of mirrors.
--T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion” (maybe)

I cite this thoroughly garbled epigraph from my thoroughly unreliable memory for a purpose that will become apparent, though nobody in their right mind will read far enough to find out what it is. This is one of my worst-ever digressive meditations on why the dizzying entanglements of history are closer to the normal course of events than are the simple-minded forward marches of enormous armies or nomad hordes changing the course of whole civilizations.

Most of the events of the past, whether collective or individual, are much more weirdly contorted than the simplified narratives we are given. It is one reason I cherish utopyr’s true story of how he went from translating Plotinus in a college library in one season to hunting bears illegally with a mentally unstable Indian on a reservation in the next season, able to trace each individual step of the process and yet unable to make complete sense of how he got from one situation to the other. In like fashion did I begin with bewilderment (as a Florida freshman at the same college where utopyr later translated Plotinus) when I first read Hugh Kenner’s gloss on T. S. Eliot’s poetic metaphysicalizing of the Polish Corridor and the hall of mirrors at the Versailles Conference (see the epigraph, above) and end up now, on the verge of Medicare eligibility, with a realization of how much the edges and borders of phenomena become undecidable blurs and sites where ethnicities, ideas, and geographical terrain turn into interpenetrating but seldom interlocking mazes.

It’s interesting to encounter this form of self-discovery in Aleksander Hemon’s thoroughly strange novel The Lazarus Project (which I bought a year or two ago after hearing him read, having forgotten the review in the New York Times I had set aside along with hundreds of other reviews, presumably for later perusal). [You have been warned, above. So you can stop reading ( here )