Martin Seay > Quotes

“As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he is looking for is key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings- reading sideways, reading upside down, reading white space instead of text- but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions.”
― martin seay

“If one is to wield power, he says, then one must control the image of power. Or”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“Often we are told, and rightly so, that we can know God by knowing ourselves, for we are made in His image. We are not base, it is said, but divine. Yet this, perhaps, is saying too much. For even in our baseness—in our excrement—we might discern the work of our Creator. All things come from God, Crivano says. Even shit can be sublimed. But should it be? Tristão fixes Crivano with a fierce glare. Then he steps to the windows, and with a smooth sudden motion slings the chamberpot’s contents into the canal below. The liquid strikes the surface with a weak slap. Should it be sublimed? Tristão says. Should it be transcended? When we seek to do this, is our desire truly to know God? Or is it to know that God truly is as we always have imagined him: the perfect distillate of our corrupt selves? So—we are made in the image of God. Have we considered what this might mean? Innumerable are the egos in man, Paracelsus writes, and in him are angels and devils, heaven and hell. Perhaps God too is like this. Pure and impure. Is it so difficult to imagine? A God of flesh and bone? A God that shits? His voice chokes off, as if overwhelmed by some passion: rage, sorrow, Crivano can’t guess which. Tristão drifts away, toward his own approaching form in the mirror-talisman; the image of his torso gradually fills the glass. With the silver window eclipsed the room seems to grow smaller; Crivano shuffles his feet to keep his balance. I want to know, Tristão says, how God is unlike us. I want to know how our eyes become traitors. To know what they refuse to see. I no longer seek to transcend, nor even to understand. I want only to dirty my hands. To smell. To feel. Like a child who plays with mud. I believe the key is here— His fingers brush the flat glass before him; they’re met by fingers from the opposite side. —but not in the way that others have said. The Nolan warned us of this. Do you remember? He said the image in the mirror is like the image in a dream: only fools and infants mistake it for the true likeness of the world, but likewise it is foolish to ignore what it shows us. Therein lies the danger. Do we look upon these reflections without delusion, like bold Actaeon? Or, like Narcissus, do we see only what we wish to see? How can we be certain? With love in our hearts, we creep toward each shining surface, but we are all haunted, always, by ourselves.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“The moon will answer through the smoke: Imagine me not as a mirror, but as an opening, an aperture, a pupil admitting light. Imagine the earth curves around you, not under. Imagine this world to be the eye of God, and the ocean it's retina. Know that you are always seen.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“We sought out signals and traces with an unerring antennae of our desires. If this sounds effortless I promise that it was not. It required dedication and tremendous fortitude, because the enemy is always present within us. Desire is treacherous, it wants only to be satisfied, and thus it is always ready to accept ruinous compromises. We hoarded our dreams like pirate treasure, and like all proper treasures, they generated maps.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“The house sits on its wide sandy lot like a lunatic on a park bench, tricked out in his best suit, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but fix passerby with a silent crooked smile.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“Places become defined by what they lose. Once it’s gone, it’s eternal.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“The night is cool, maybe fifty degrees, and ambivalent breezes rustle palmfronds, spread exhaust.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“No one lives here. Everything is not real.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“His gait is feline, or viverrine, not quite human. He walks with bent knees, on the balls of his feet; his small deep-set eyes scour the room with raw contempt. Crivano recalls a torch-bearing dervish in Tiflis who made a run at their powder store; the janissary archers shot him so full of arrows that when he finally died their shafts kept his limp corpse off the dirt. The dervish’s face as he charged bore an expression identical to the one the Nolan wears now. The world, Crivano thinks, is a poor container for such men.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“A slow smile creeps across her face like a dropped egg.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“Her wide smile is probably intended to be disarming, but it's straying into cymbal-playing-monkey territory and has pretty much the opposite effect.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“Stanley reads The Mirror Thief. It’s a book of poems, but it tells a story: an alchemist and spy called Crivano steals an enchanted mirror, and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city. Stanley long ago stopped paying the story any mind. He’s come to regard it as a fillip at best, at worst as a device meant to conceal the book’s true purpose, the powerful secret it contains. Nothing, he’s quite certain, could be so obscure by accident. As he reads, his eyes graze each poem’s lines like a needle over an LP’s grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he’s looking for is a key: a gap in the book’s mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings—reading sideways, reading upsidedown, reading whitespace instead of text—but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. The usual suspects.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“Maybe when he first started it was an act, he says. Maybe there was always a grain of truth in it. Sincerity. Fantasy. Wishful thinking. Maybe he’s been doing his act for so long now that it’s become who he really is. Or, hell, kid, maybe all any of us do is just an act. Who knows?”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

“When I opened up your book, I couldn’t follow hardly any of it. I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be, even. I could tell somebody worked on it really hard, and spent a lot of time on it. And that really got on my nerves. Because, okay—here’s this complicated thing that somebody made. And I come across it just by accident, in a pile of crap on some hoodlum’s floor. And I can’t understand any of it! It made me mad, to tell you the truth. I’m not saying I rescued it or anything. It didn’t seem like it gave a damn what happened to it, whether anybody read it or not. But every time I open it up, it makes me think of all the crazy stuff in this world that I don’t know nothing about. That I never even heard of. And I guess that’s a feeling that bothers me, Mister Welles.”
― Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief