A Text is like a Body, a Country, a Language...

A text is like a body, a country, a language. You can know it on the surface, what you see at first, how it is first read. There is the literal text/body (story) that you encounter - yet, to see the literal is not to know it in it itself. It must be explored and journeyed over and the heart must fall in love with the story - the metaphors and symbols becoming intertwined with the imagination. Then there is the punctuation within the story that gives it form - defining the parameters of souls and existence.

“I was at that time seldom in Cairo, there about one month in three. I worked in the Department of Egyptology on my own book, Recentes Explorations dans le Desert Libyque, as the days progressed, coming closer and closer to the text as if the desert were there somewhere on the page, so I could even smell the ink as it emerged from the fountain pen. And simultaneously struggled with her nearby presence, more obsessed  if truth be known with her possible mouth, the tautness behind the knee, the white plain of stomach, as I wrote my brief book, seventy pages long, succinct and to the point, complete with maps of travel. I was unable to remove her body from the page. I wished to dedicate the monograph to her, to her voice, to her body that I imagined rose white out of a bed like a long bow…”

~ The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

“Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Candaules becomes the wife of Gyges.

 Libraries burn.

What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?”
~ The English Patient

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pendant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently….But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”
~ The English Patient

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps…. into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.... where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.”

~ The English Patient