UNTIL THE NIGHT BECOMES SCARIER THAN HOME
UNTIL THE NIGHT BECOMES SCARIER THAN HOME
“And so I took Vicky away in the fields until it was dark and we became more afraid of the dark than of our home."
Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton
SHIBBOLETH
Here, starts with a window.
“When the dog days were drawing to an end” the narrator of W. B. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn admits himself to a hospital in Norwich.
Bedridden on the eight floor in a state of complete exhaustion all he can see from his debilitated position is a “colorless patch of sky framed in the window”. Suffolk's expanses which he’d been exploring for the past year on a “English pilgrimage” have “now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot.”
KATABASIS
In the beginning, they just drift. Small and delicate like a rainy day Eric Satie melody, they move on the surface of the ocean only ever, so slightly. Transparent and flat, they look like willow leafs with tiny heads and fierce, outward-pointing teeth.
The currents push them towards land, which some might call a promise, if promises were real, or kept. Land is where they want to live, to be silver, solitary, and nocturnal; they want to hunt for prey among rocks in rivers and ponds. But for now, all they can do is get away from home.