To accompany Coledridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner":

Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
near her hull,

a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
a sea-gull

of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
with wings spread--

curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
men long dead.

Marianne Moore, "A Talisman"

Read More 0 comments | Posted by Katie

[Alice] Walker described the 'essential' O'Connor as the portrayal of spiritual growth, or those moments when an individual comes face to face with her or his own limitations, and comprehends 'the true frontiers of her own inner country'. Or, in O'Connor's terms, to know what we are is above all to know what we lack, so that the first result of self-knowledge is humility. Walker explained that these moments of revelation tend to occur at times of extreme loss or crisis. Moreover, these revelations in O'Connor's stories show that, for her, art is not so much an idealistic view of what we ought to be as a revelation of what people actually are, in all their inner, hidden deformity and limitations. Hence, O'Connor wrote stories about characters, about people who are 'poor, afflicted in mind and body', and who have little (or at best a distorted) sense of spiritual purpose, since to her that is the norm.

Kathleen Wheeler, "A Critical Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists"

Commentary in progress.

The Pit of Babel

Es muß ein Fortschritt geschehen...
Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.

Some progress must be made...
We are digging the pit of Babel.
(Franz Kafka)

I am Katie Sharrow-Reabe and I am interested in structural and social architecture. Linguistic and cultural translation. Progress through retrospection. Subliminal and subterranean connections. And I would like you to help me put these fragments into a hole.

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