Traumhaus As Lipogram

Traumhaus as Lipogram

It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint. Loss of the function of a particular orthographic symbol—it’s a situation, hmm? A critical loss. Not just a car with bad paint, a lamp with a crack, sour milk. A car that can’t stop. A lamp that sparks. Milk cut with shit. A woman hid my thing and I can’t find it again. That’s just how it is. I cannot find what’s missing. I am trying and trying, and I cannot; as I fail, I shrink. I shrink down into dirt, wood, worms.

It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say?

(Also: Why did you stay?)

I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.

Carmen Maria Machado

“What a delightful speech,” he said. “The Cornish air has made you almost venomous. Or possibly it is the result of the fever.”

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier  (via wholesomeobsessive)

Even if she got her sums right and it turned out life owed her something, there was no way such a bill would ever be settled. Life isn’t illnatured; it’s just dirt poor, like any other public resource.

– Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time—telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

I’m going to build a little monastery just here, with a chapel and a hostel, so that in future no traveler on this stretch of road will ever have to spend a cold winter’s night sleeping in the open air. I’ll dedicate the hostel to the memory of my mother.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (via wholesomeobsessive)

For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion.

On Historical Materialism by Friedrich Engels (via wholesomeobsessive)