47094: 39 A Relocation
Which is all why she wasn’t keen on makeup or shaving, even though she did invest in maintenance. But there was always this awryness attached to how she proceeded, and one way of thinking about it was as a slow process of self-demolishment. It kind of headed off detractors and was discreet, nothing to shout about, and a decision which suggested relocation too, because if you knock something down its contents tend to be rehoused elsewhere, in a round-about way, even though it was all about the sense that her walls were opening up, and it being too expensive to fill the cracks, resulting in that some days they need to be accommodated as meticulous stripping, in an arc where some aspects remain in time and place, and might even be upgraded, whilst others fell behind the times, and still others became lethal, unviable and obsolete.
And she had the opportunities to see it as if the windows to herself were opened and her foundations trembled, utterly broken, split apart, violently shaken, staggering like a drunk, swaying like a hut, with heavy transgression on it, falling and not easily getting up again, a heap, a ruin, some nowhere place that was never going to be rebuilt, and there was nothing for it but to say that if you couldn’t take it you were screwing up human affectation with reality, and that wasn’t wise. If the situation was inescapably bad and couldn’t be helped, and was connected in some obscure way with law, which came beating down like a hawk’s claw to make us all feel a little condemned and wounded, then she was just as likely to say: ‘so what?’ because this was just what we were and how it was, she supposed, and there’s no use crying over it.
‘Permanence is undignified and a lie, and makes me a little mad,’ she growled, believing fierce nature was like that and should be respected and if not feared at least watched with caution swirling like an overhung skeleton.
But in this she wasn’t quite the same of purpose as most around her. She had a sense of actions that freed her into this knowledge most others didn’t. She opened a mouth to intelligence because she was severe and didn’t care to hang around or onto, a kind of gothic style translated into timber, a wooden church on stone foundations if you like, a heavy burden of civic aspirations, some humbler remains of more traditional wakefulness, but better flexed to accommodate seismic events than brittle stone.
‘Can’t you just think of it like a festival?’
‘No.’
‘The whole fucking world has gone to festival.’
‘I have an alternative plan for it.’
‘Then that’s sad.’
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.