1.09.2013

the narrow hinter side of destruction

"You think there is a door on the - hinter side of destruction?"

Susan Glaspell, The Verge

Claire is a new woman of the 1920's losing her grammar as she pours all of her power of speech into the plants she's creating in her house of glass.  Her plants will put an end to the "old pattern, done again, again and again" so that she can make new patterns--even as she creates new systems that will iterate again and again. The cycle continues.

But there is something useful here in the glass house made of Plato's patterns that stand "behind all life"--there are doors on the hinter side of destruction. Claire breaks things--husbands, daughters, lovers, Edge Vines, eggs, glass. She breaks them to see the fragments Humpty Dumpty's soldiers found impossible to reassemble.  [Imagine Dumpty post-defragmenting: a chimerical monster of shells, bowties, and caps.]  She wants to create new things from the fragments--to get through the destruction to the other side.

Today I dealt with something destructive that I haven't faced in almost three years. The destruction was done. It happened. It fragmented something in me that I thought was elemental. Indestructible. I was wrong. For three years I've lived in the narrow space between the destruction and the door I didn't know was there--the hinter side. It was a smaller space than I realized.

Today I learned there are doors where I once thought no escape existed.

1 comment:

crt said...

So thankful for the narrowest of doors which creak open with hope. Hab.1:5