Across the backs of my sleeping eyes waking visions haunt my sleep:
The garden oasis was lush and barren, if that dichotomy were possible it existed there. Rocks covered in chrome lichen, stilted trees growing from arid soil; life persisted and flourished. The brook supported the glen and the flowering trees. A veranda overlooking the garden, red stones warm underfoot give way to the soft summer grass. The small white flowers buzzed active with the multitude of bees foraging pollen. I step onto the path and as it widens the walls to this palazo become evident. Towering granite glistening with calcite curving fifteen feet into the air. As I approach the gate swing toward me as the guards alerted of my approach open it from the outside. I stand before the arch of my heart. Searing light bounces of the mica and silica the world is refracted in an instant.
****
I have started reading Justine or the Misfortune of Virtue. Written by the infamously ignoble Marquis de Sade in a mere 15 days in 1787. The book is notorious for creating the world of sadism. I have not and will not spend time, at the moment, researching more details. So, please, forgive my forthcoming fallacies when they occur.
A passage strikes a particular resonance with me, reminding me fully, completely of Dorian Gray. This blast of insight has specific importance as I have recently been discussing how grateful I am to have the ability to make literary connections. The practicality of me covering new terrain in the scope of literature limits my ability to reread past selections. That being said, I am forever grateful that I can imagine Oscar Wilde reading this passage:
To these horrors Madame de Lorsange added two or three infanticides. The fear of spoiling her attractive figure, strengthened by the necessity of hiding a double intrigue, several times encouraged her to have abortions; and these crimes, as undiscovered as the others, in no way hindered this clever ambitious creature from daily finding new dupes and increasing, moment by moment, both her fortune and her crimes. It will thus be seen that it is, unfortunately, only to true that prosperity often accompanies crime, and that from the very bosom of the most deliberate corruption and debauchery men my gild the thread of life with that which they call happiness.
and receive the first glimpse of Dorian.
Of course I don't know if Wilde read a copy of this book, but it is hard to imagine that he did not. I am equally titillated with the purity ideal that is so decisively rebuffed.
And again I find myself grateful for having read Jane Eyre and Gulliver's Travels. Which for some reason this book seems to have also inspired.
Like Polaris these voices coax something inside of me into a sofa, under a blanket, and into sleep.
(I have taken to marking my books with a pen or pencil. Making notes in the margins. This blasphemy is acceptable as they are my books and obsessions and I want to go back later and connect patterns.)
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