Miss MacIntosh, My Darling discussion
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6 -- The thin tree branches bending and scraping... (92)
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Nathan "N.R."
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Jan 23, 2014 07:30AM
chap 6 page 92
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Bleak. Violated. Broken dreams. Young pregnant woman on the bus...
Not yet named...
Brought to mind Henry Darger's "In the Realms of the Unreal"...
...a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades.
Fionnuala wrote: "Great find, Ce Ce!"Thank you Fio. Looking for the "like" response. ;-)
You are not yet reading Ch 6?
The book is back at base camp, Ce Ce - too heavy to lug around - I'm reading lighter stuff in the meantime....
"A star dropped upon a far horizon, making no sound as it fell, not even one splash as when a stone falls into a river, and the tin roof leaked, water streaking the bus-windows, and the pregnant girl screamed,feeling that she had lived through all these things before." MMMD, HBJ, p 96There seems to me something of the apocalyptic...this bus trip through raging storms...a reluctantly pregnant girl regrettably married...Vera in search of a normal that may not exist...a drunk and raving driver, named Moses, at the wheel.
"And the fifth Angel sounded the trumpet: and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit (Apoc:9 - V:1-11) - in the Beatus de Facunda - See more at: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/04... #sthash.Ixpmboll.2X72Zuc0.dpuf
What is in a name? The names are so unusual...and the naming so deliberate...it seems there has to be significance.Madge Edwards
Madge: Pearl, child of light
Edwards: English name, Prosperous guardian (her father seemed anything but...)
Married to Homer Capehorn (and taking his last name)
Homer: Homer was the Greek epic poet who wrote the 'Odyssey', about Odysseus's journey home after the war. (Madge's marriage, and this bus journey, is returning her to the place she escaped)
Capehorn: Unusual, but not unheard of, last name. The Pacific and the Atlantic, the two largest oceans on the planet, crash violently in a solitary place hidden away at the southernmost tip of the American continent. In this sinister landscape, storms sweep away the good weather....the cold would paralyze the heart of a shipwrecked survivor in less than five minutes. Only phantoms are able to survive....A black ram with a legendary name is an eternal witness of this fascinating natural phenomenon: Cape Horn.
Jacqueline...real or imagined rival for Homer's affections: French name meaning Supplanter
Dancing, Dancing, Dancing..."pale girl dancing herself to death..."
"poor little dancing girl..."
"dead child dancing in the storm..."
"surely she would always dance..."
"leading the dance..."
"so light on her dancing toes..."
"dancing with one foot..."
"solo dancer pirouetting..."
On no less than 18 pages in Ch 6 does Madge dream, mutter, bemoan, lament that she is a dancer...and now is caught, dead/living...dreaming/awake...pregnant and married.
And all I could think of was the little pink ballerina musical jewelry box of my childhood...it's plastic dancer whirling and its tinny, but magical, music repeating endlessly...
As I recalled...
"My (Vera's) mother had decided...long before the cruel hand of experience had been laid upon my brow, my death in the midst of my life (opium)...the alternatives were always worse. It was better...to think of dancing than to dance...better to evade life than to face it in all its enormities." MMMD, HBJ, p70
I struggled with the bleakness of this chapter. Captured. Trapped. Pregnant. Hostage. Death in giving birth. The harmful fathers. The anger. The rage. The insanity pulsing through. I wondered if Madge was a transparent layer more fully exploring Vera's mother's unwanted pregnancy and her fugitive marriage.
Over the past two weeks I peeled back layers in my own memory of a time not so long past. When marriage meant we became wholly invisible...in name and rights and financial independence. To become pregnant outside of marriage meant to be shamed & hidden until we were rid of "it"...or to be married.
Ivory Anomatomical Model
Ragnheiður Jónsdóttir, artist...“I was very tied down, and that’s why I hung the dresses on clotheslines or tied them to chairs. And some of them were of course were very bloated... Everything was registered in the name of the husband, and the wife was kind of in the background.”
http://www.etsy.com/listing/65752135/...
Artist, Barbara Kruger
"She (Madge) was rubbing paste rouge on her lips, for she had forgotten her lipstick as she lamented once again, and her fingers were smeared with red. She had forgotten many things. She had forgotten - almost forgotten her other face which she must wear, seeming alive when she was dead. She was painting her lips with a cupid's bow as the old bus jolted...oh my God, she screamed, looking at herself in her darkened mirror. What had she done? She had painted two mouths - two hearts." MMMD, HBJ, p 141
Artist, Ghada Amer
Ce Ce was here!Moving from discussion page to discussion page is like moving through the spaces of an exhibition.
The images you find work brilliantly with the text, Ce Ce.
Picking up on the issue of the narrative voice, I see the word 'omniscient' is mentioned on page 118, in relation to the dead, those who, having all knowledge, have no need of further knowledge, neither of the past nor of the prescience of unknown events which hover ever at the threshold of life and are never seen
This chapter seems to be full of unknown events hovering on the threshold of life, thought or dreamed by one or the other.
And yes, I thought of Madge being a version of Vera's mother, carrying her unwanted baby.
The name Madge is short for Marguerite.
I've still a bit to go in this chapter so I haven't read all the comments, just looked at the pictures..
Fionnuala wrote: "And yes, I thought of Madge being a version of Vera's mother, carrying her unwanted baby.The name Madge is short for Marguerite."
The multiple mothers. Two moons. Two ravens. I have to go back and look at my notes for the two's. And then we have this long chapter. Madge is important. And in the end of this chapter Madge, herself, has painted two hearts and two mouths.
"Madge is short for Marguerite"...my mind immediately returned to that sympathy note Marguerite wrote when her own mother died. Marguerite had "two" mothers in her own life...her "fairy tale" birth mother and the grandmother who raised her. If I remember correctly her grandmother truly believed Marguerite was the reincarnation of a cousin.
"Dearest Wayne My beautiful little fairy tale mother is gone - suddenly - without warning - and I feel that now I must die.
Love,
Marguerite Young"
Yes, Ce Ce, everybody seems to have a twin here. I had presumed the Madge voice as recounted by Vera, was imagining herself as two people when she spoke of 'her', the her who was still young and slim and not pregnant, but now there is this Jacqueline person who seems to be the 'her' and who is..dying as Madge herself fears she may be too..?And I've just noticed that the narrative has switched to Madge's husband's point of view, just like that...
Fionnuala wrote: "Yes, Ce Ce, everybody seems to have a twin here. I had presumed the Madge voice as recounted by Vera, was imagining herself as two people when she spoke of 'her', the her who was still young and sl..."Miriam Fuchs word "liquiescence" comes to mind. Amazing that a single word applies to such a tome.
I will revisit this chapter over the next weeks. I wrestled with it in isolation.
the death of "a" self, I think, throughout this chapter - the death of the dancing girl, necessary for the birth of the to-be-mother, and the death of the possibility in the birth of the child. The death of a free woman in the chains of marriage, the death of the lover in the deadened wife...And all this through the "I", of course, an unwanted daughter of a Mother who rejected her and rejected the World to swim in opium-dreams. Are each of these deaths necessary for self-progress? Or are some acts of murder by a patriarchal society which dominates and delineates the development of a Woman? There is righteous anger here, that is clear. The eternally-spinning ballerina as image of Woman-in-society is apt too, Ce Ce, as are the rest of your wonderful images. Listening to the music of the repetition helps, I think - it shapes and add dynamism to the text - flowing with it, and listening to it, rather than seeking to parse each sentence, seeking to uncover a "real" beneath each sentence, seems the best way to proceed for me.
Finally - such beautiful, lyrical landscape description too...really stunningly well crafted and composed...
