Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

Cadfael now knows the name of the REAL prime suspect. Though we don’t, we sense real danger ahead!

Slow going, but always rewarding!

Planning for the getaway!

Eleven hundred miles east of the sailor’s graveyard of Cape Horn... lies the small, mountainous, snow-covered island of South Georgia.... On December 4, 1914, on the island’s eastern tip... lay the Endurance, its name evoking a Shackleton family motto - “by endurance we conquer.”
- so fitting, given later events!

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling you the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are....
The people who go by -
you wonder at their calm.

WOW! Stunning in its mastery.

Flora’s entire extended family is raucously bombarding her urbanite OCD-ish boss with Hebridean bluntness at their rundown farmhouse - hilarious.

I had to go back to the start of this beautifully intense long poem... one long act of bitter mourning:
´Everything, everything, and before
everything the possibility of something else,
the moment when a
moral gets minced by an account
a body makes of any other body,
and time takes place
instead of taking time.´
- cf. Prufrock: ‘it is impossible to say just what I mean!’, but WE understand.

- This Anglicized version is ENTIRELY credible. Mallarme comas across as an ordinary, earthy man caught on a cross between the Ideal and the Real.
THE AZURE
...Give, O
Heaviness of all things, forgetfulness of the Ideal
And of sin, to this martyr who sojourns
Among the sweat of mortal cattle.
I want out....
Vain! Azure triumphs. I hear it sing -...
I am haunted. Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure!
- Wonderful!

Brother Cadfael’s ‘little grey cells’ are every bit as active as Poirot’s - and the monk lived 900 years earlier on the evolutionary ladder!

Aphrodite drives everyone, Lucretius said - and she certainly drives Flora and her brother Fintan to weird extremes!

Phenomenal...

NEXT TO THE HAILSTONE
Next to the hailstone, in
the mildewed corn-
cob, home,
to the late, the hard
November stars obedient:

In the heartthread, the
knit of worm-talk—:

a bowstring, from which
your arrowscript whirrs,
archer.

Loads of fun! Flora and her homespun islander brother are dining at the new posh hotel on their remote and time-warped island... with the bemused American billionaire who built it.

HERE
I can’t speak for elsewhere,
but here on Earth we’ve got a good supply of everything.
Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows...
I know, I know what you’re thinking.
Nothing here can last... (but)
Life on Earth is really quite a bargain.
Dreams, for one, don’t charge admission.
Illusions are costly only when lost.

So meticulously researched - fabulous!

“‘You had a relative who was mentally ill, and everyone knew you were poor (back in 1946). Eloise (Psychiatric Hospital) was where the poor went....’
... I was trying to understand why my mother had made her sister’s existence into a secret.”

A dark, compelling read. His late aunt was a secret to Steve Luxenberg and all his siblings... until his mother died!

Flora returns home to the Isles:
‘It would have been nice, Flora knew, if she could have gotten married before she lost her mother. She’d probably have liked that. She’d have liked that so very much. She hadn‘t really thought about marriage, only in the abstract, as something that might happen....
Tears sprang to her eyes. Well. There was no point in crying about something that never happened....’

Lorna had always loved going to the MacKenzies’, Flora’s otherworldly-looking mother puttering about with steaming dishes on the go; perfect pies turned out of glass tureens; always a bit of shortbread to go with the warm, frothy milk that came straight from the dairy.

‘As they stood together gazing out to sea, Lorna leaned over toward her.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said quietly, because she was the best type of friend to have, the type who could never hold a grudge...
“Do you think?” (Flora) said...
“Of course it is! It won’t be the same - it’s never the same... when you lose a parent... (and) YOU(‘ve) cross(ed) that river.”
...”And it gets better?”
“It does.”’

FANTASTIC Escapist Novel! It’ll make you think of It’s A Wonderful Life - same idea of ‘Wow! Why does she want to disappear from life? Doesn’t she realize she’s had it made ALL ALONG??? Wake up - you have Everything you need to make you Happy right HERE, girl!’

Excellent autobiography set at the time of the Red Guard. Nien Cheng, falsely accused and sentenced to an interminable imprisonment, refused to give an inch or renounce her beliefs and values.