Lorna Crozier - The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things
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- Book:The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things
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- Publisher:Greystone Books
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- Year:2012
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The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things: summary, description and annotation
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In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the households inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and navels. Longing, exuberance, and grief colour her reflections on the familiar and the concrete, causing them at times to resemble folktales or parables.
Each of the vignettes in The Book of Marvels stands alone, but the connections are intricate; as in life, each object gains meaning from its juxtaposition with others. Crozier approaches her investigations with a childlike curiosity, an adult bemusement, and an unfailing sense of metaphor and mischief. With both charm and mordant wit, she animates the panoply of wonders to be found everywhere around and in us.
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To Patrick
We are at home with one another;
we are each others home.
I suggest that every person open an interior trapdoor, that he negotiate a trip into the thickness of things, that he make an invasion of their characteristics, a revolution, a turning-over process comparable to that accomplished by the plough or the spade, when suddenly millions of particles of dead plants, bits of roots and straw, worms and tiny crawling creatures, all hitherto buried in the earth, are exposed to the light of day for the first time.
Francis Ponge
A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow one another, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesnt exist. ABC is neither more or less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.
Edouard Lev
You can observe a lot just by watching.
Yogi Berra
Long before Alexander Graham Bell or Sputnik , air communicated across vast distances. Sand from the Sahara travels on the skys swift currents to end up in Moose Jaw, where it becomes an irritation in the eye. Atoms from exploding stars fall through space and time, blow through the kitchen screen; they move through our lungs and powder our bones. How many centuries do we hold inside us, how much dying light?
Once, air was not a thing, neither thick nor thin. It was weightless and invisible. The portmanteau word smog air that can be seencame into common use only a hundred years ago. It smells, of course, but some claim it can be felt, too, like scraps of soiled silk slipping across your face. Frogs are the canaries of the thermal shafts: their skin absorbs the air, and they are dying out. Along with them vanish fertility, transformation, abundance and the springtime theurgy of their songs.
Your friend cant bear the air inside a beauty parlour. She wears her grandfathers WWI gas mask with its long snout when she gets a perm. If we had to wear such ghastly devices on days when were cautioned against leaving the house, would we become more radical? Chain ourselves to fences? Change our habits? Play flutes, clarinets and oboes long into the night to pay obeisance to the gods of breath so they wont leave us breathless?
Mistral, Sirocco, Williwaw, Boreas, Chinook, Shoa: just a few of the names for air in motion. Wind becomes mind with a change of just one letter, but it slips away from rhymes halter and bit. It is no ones creature. Ungraspable, wind is like water moving through water, or like a thought, before its found the words, unfolding in the brains dark chamber. Though theres a scienceanemologydevoted to the wind, no one can cut it open, probe its left lobe or its right.
In a certain light you can see smoke from the ovens hanging over Auschwitz and Buchenwald. You can hear the rattle of a broken wind passing through the grasses of Wounded Knee, through the aspens of the Cypress Hills. You can sight wings of 1930s dust darkly hovering over the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. Air has a long memory. It insists we dont forget.
An alphabet of things often begins with apple. It goes all the way back to Eden, the serpents seduction, Eves gift. You find the last red apple left in the bowl just as beautiful, as tempting. Though it has a particular flush and ripeness, a unique blemish near the stem, it bears the weight, the import of the original fruit. Adams crunch through the peel into the flesh still echoes outside the garden walls and repeats itself with every bite. Eve bit too, and what they tasted was desire: they saw each others nakedness for the first time. Imagine thatthe apple striking the blindness from their eyes, casting a glow on the eager persuasion of their skin! Hunger entered the world then; their bodies blossomed, their tongues touched. That small grenade of lust you polish on your blouse and drop into the bag that holds the sandwich youll eat later is Eves legacy to all who multiplied across the earth.
Solid. Immovable. It does little more than take up space in the room it gives its name to, but at night the bed could be any kind of boata dory from Newfoundland, Cleopatras pleasure barge, Noahs ark noisy with mating calls and appetite. Most nights, your bed carries only you and a long-haired, bossy cat. When you nod off between the sheets, the bed unmoors, breaks away from the walls and floats into the dark. The cats breathing is enough to fill the sails of your sleep; you drift with the drifting boat across the water. Sometimes the night is a harbour, the surface calm and star-struck, feathered heads of ducks and gulls tucked into their wings as they float among the constellations, the bed gliding past. Sometimes the bed bucks and rushes toward a waterfall; you shout in your sleep, but you dont go under. Even deep inside your dream, you know the bed wont tip or sink and you hang on.
At the first sign of morning, the cat touches your cheek with his paw, and the bed slips into its familiar berth, the covers tangled, the sheets damp. When you dont move, the cat claws the mattress right beside your head. Though youre awake, just to show him, you dont rise, you keep your eyes closed. The floor, the walls, the chest of drawers, your heap of clothesone by one, morning light returns them to the room. The bed has settled. The air is dry as flour.
Both afterword and foreword, the bicycle leaning against the fence waits for you to write the in-between on the wide pathways of the afternoon. Like your grandmothers treadle Singer, it needs your feet and the muscles of your legs to stitch your body to the wind. To the bicycle schooled in Tao, all distances are near, hills are level, your knees are no different from an antelopes. Thank god its discreet; what its closest to is your buttocks, each side in its separate shapeliness, the glutei maximi below the sacrum and the swell of flesh that makes the hard seat tolerable on the long ride home. Horses lift their heads as you fly by. My Pegasus, my long-boned mare! The spokes find their model for delicacy and toughness in the spiders web and in the strings of a cello that journeys miles on the wheels of its own music. The bicycle is an anodyne for the tentative, the too-long out of use. Dont worry. Whether the fear is singing in a public place after years of silence, diving off a dock into the cold as you did as a child, or falling, as an old man, afraid of the hearts steep cliffs, in love, its like riding a bicycle. You never forget how to do it.
The man who invented them adored his mother and, later, his wife. The proof is in the hours he devoted to preventing the hair pin from scratching the scalp. After many experiments with the familys St. Bernard, he came up with plastic polyps, the size of the head of an ant, to cover the tips. Run your finger over them to see how finely they fulfill their purpose. What ingenuity, what premeditated care! Hed be the first to admit bobby pins are dull and unattractive. Still, he had an eye for beauty. Look at what they doexpose a womans neck, modestly reveal the delectable whorl of an ear. Theyre responsible for that intimate command, Let down your hair. After, at least one of them goes missing. When its found days later under the bed or inside the pillow slip, it carries loves rusted lustre, that small ache.
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