Sarah Connell > Recent Status Updates

Very sloooow.

Realizing that this is going to be a leisurely stroll thru Hell. Enjoying the slow pace so far.

“She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea.”

“It was a jewel of a city, a confection wrought in red-gold and studded with sapphires. Rather than merely spreading next to the sea, Raistinia took the ocean to its bosom”

“ the night was huge, velvet, sewn with stars, their veiled and delicate light barely casting shadows. All that quiet space received and smothered the silence of their passage and smoothed the stillness of the night over it.”

“Meet every man as you find him, for we’re all made the same under habit or robe or rags.
Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern all. But there it is.”

“I've washed and scrubbed and scrubbed again, such that I had to discreetly ask a parishioner for stain with which to color again the pews, the floor.

Would but that I could equally take my memory down to the grain as such. But so says this whole nation, I know.”

“As I fell back, the stars above were scratching lines across the sky, and if I didn’t smile from this brief vision, then mu soul did. I was being born anew.”

…i think i know…

“"How is your heart, Three-Persons?" he asked then, leaning forward to look into and through the windows of my eyes, into my very soul, a drop of blood yet dripping down his chin, from the corner of his mouth.
"It is weak, Good Stab, it is weak, but it is willing." Then I said it, as I must: "I listen."”

“Scratching across its black eyes, I knew, were the stars that fell across the smoke-hole of my mother's birthing lodge, and I cried again, tilting my head back to open my throat wider to the night, to let it all in, and I told Feather Woman that that magic turnip she was looking for to get back to her world, here was its top, right in my throat, she could just grab on and pull and pull, unwind me into the stars”

“All happiness ends in death anyway.”

“After the tragedy of last week's loaf of German bread having disappeared so quickly but lingered so long in memory, I am…limiting myself to one middling thick slice after lunch and one after dinner, and, so far, only a single thick slice betwixt lunch and dinner, as a crutch to get from one to the other.
Self-denial is fine and well when public approbation looms, but in the absence... It's a very good cake”

“‘I am broken,’ she replied. Her throat was dry. Did she have a fever? Her head was too hot. ‘But broken things can still kill.‘“

“I love the garden and the garden loves me, but it isn't mine, not really. I will always share it with the woman who began it, who arrived in a sun-dress to a newly built council house and cared for this garden all her life. I don't know where she is now, but her bulbs are buried here. The first morning I walked through her garden, her daffodils' buttery hellos were easily translated: they nodded. I nodded back.”

“My bellybutton grimaces there, the invisible cord that will always connect me to my mother, just as hers connects her to her mother, and on, and on, and on. I study this body of mine, just one more in a long line, and feel no revulsion, only pride. This is a female text, I think. My body replies in its dialect of scars. Ta-dah! it seems to say, Ta-dah!”

Getting bogged down a bit now.

“Fast, I clapped my hands, and fast, fast, I galloped, fast as ever I could have, until I found you before me, murdered… with no Pope, no bishop,
no clergy, no holy man to read your death-psalms, only a crumpled old hag who'd draped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades, and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.”

“In writing their lives from this distance…in recounting this horror I must inflict it all over again. I wish I could stop the pain this telling will soon cast over Eibhlín Dubh, but I can't. The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.”

“I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlin Dubh's days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of all those blunt, brief sketches presenting this woman in the thin roles of aunt and wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women she knew instead?”

“the element I cherish most of all in Eibhlín Dubh's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.”