Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
ecidyruE
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
In the way of all archetypal stories, Orpheus didn’t make his trip to the underworld and back just once. As each generation retold and reinvented his story, he relived it, and he never learned: he always looked.
Sisyphus probably didn’t notice anything when his repeated predicament repeated. But Orpheus couldn’t stop himself from hoping any more than he could stop himself from looking.
One day, while amusing his future bride by making boulders jig in time to his lyre, he found himself increasingly depressed with everything that was waiting to happen. He thought he’d visit Daedalus. It was an age of invention, and maybe the spirit of the age even moved in the old tales. He told Eurydice he’d be right back and left her and the stones humming his last tune.
The inventor’s single word suggestion: “Mirrorshades.”
“That’s hardly my style,” said Orpheus. “And how will that help?”
“The underworld isn’t well lit. No one will notice,” said Daedalus. “The trick is to turn one lens backwards. She’ll be in the edge of your vision all the time, no need to turn back yourself, so, technically, you won’t be breaking the rules.”
“Perfect,” said Orpheus.
“I’ve made a sketch,” said Daedalus. “I’ll have the boy build you a pair while I flameproof these wings.”
What Orpheus didn’t realize until he pulled out the glasses at the foot of the stairs out of the underworld was that Icarus never did anything except to excess. Both lenses were mirrored on the inside.
He put them on and played. He’d climbed the stairs so many times that his feet knew the path by feel. The peripheral glimpse-image was enough for him, he kept his eyes steadily ahead, and he made it all the way to the top.
He took off the glasses, expecting sunlight, but saw he hadn’t left the shadowland. Hades and Persephone shook their heads. Eurydice was gone.
“Looking forward is the only way to leave here,” said the king of the dead.
“She’s always behind you now,” said Persephone.
Wonderglass / Lookingland
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
A series of zooms, like a camera moving in steadily on its subject.
In through the French doors, over the book-carpeted floor.
Past the couch, lingering just briefly on the open notebook, most of it diagrams and runes but also the words “Carroll as photomancer / Dodgson as positive to L.C.’s negative — vice versa?,” and, in a more frantic hand, “decode to enact incantation to summon white rabbit.” This last is both circled and underlined, and it’s next to the part of the page that’s been ripped out.
Under the arch that divides one room from the next.
There’s a camera on a tripod, both of them antiques. A split second glimpse through the viewfinder, everything upside down and tiny and then we see it for real: the dining room table with everyday objects set on the checkerboard tablecloth like pieces in some mystical game. Our passage slows, as if we’re staring, as if these things mean something other than complicated madness. Oyster shells. A thimble. A caterpillar. A small bottle. A chess knight. At the corners, nonsense words on scraps of paper — speeding up, we’re gone before getting enough of a glimpse to figure them out.
Through the pass-through into the kitchen, along crumb-covered counters, rising up just in time to clear the glass of milk souring beside the sink.
(For a moment, against the silence, faint, rapid ticking, then it’s gone.)
Out the back door, over the fire escape rail, into somewhere else.