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bending_sickleThat I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In the face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one...
- Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” extract
I am and will be. There is no time when I am not.
This is the first lesson.
My need creates my self.
This is the second lesson.
Alone is safe.
This is the third lesson.p. 14 – Now I shall use what I have been taught. Listening to the old farmer breathe, I feel for the appropriate form and concentrate myself to a tiny, isolated point like the sun focused through a magnifying glass. My fur erects, and I see the sparkling point into which I fall, saying the name that comes to me: Robert Lee Burney. I shift.
p. 26 – It is a rare thing for me to be involved when I Have shifted. For the most part I am a detached observer, partially because my usual senses are in abeyance and I find the scene rather boring, and partly because the physical nature of the shift seemed to be such that I could not really interfere very much without forcing a transformation back into my natural form.
p. 107 – Robert was awake now. [...] He felt sad, looking at these people [...]. He understood what had happened and also that he could not stay here, perhaps could not stay himself, understood perhaps this was the same as his last night on earth, for only with these people could he be himself. And he had done something unforgivable to these people. He wanted to cry, but he could not. He stood there watching the people wake up the themselves, begin to be their own personalities again after such a shock as he had accidentally given them. [...] And Robert listened to all of this, his fingers feeling down the long rip in the front of his nightshirt, a rip he could not have made with both little hands, knowing how that rip had happened, and knowing it was not his fault. He began to be angry, very angry at these grown-up people who would now do something terrible to him when he had only wanted to live among them and love them and learn about what it was to be a little boy growing up with other children, wanting to be a little boy and loved. He grew angrier so that his face suffused with blood, and he though about Mr Duchamps getting hit with the hail and about Willie crying over him and the bog shouldered man getting up in the icy grass and hitting Willie and knocking him down and Willie hurting Anne, and Martin’s face with the rain streaking his grey hair across his dying eyes, and Aunt Cat staring at him in horror, and the need he felt to come back to them all, to his beautiful Vaire and brave Anne, and how he wanted to love them if he knew how, if only he could know how to do it, and now he would never be able to do it, and he must runaway in the night and hide again, and he thought about the dirty men under the railroad bridge and their sickness and cruelty, and about the dogs on the farm and the snakes in the chicken house and being in the cow barn with Martin and the cats getting squirted with milk and now it was all gone, and about Rusty and the smell of him and his old hatred that smelled like rotting fish, and remembered what it was like in the cold rain dancing with Willie and the sandwich game and Anne reading to him from the book about Happy, and now he had to run away again, be something else, someone else, forever, because they had made him do something he didn’t want to do, and that Mr Sangrom, he was glad of the claws that had sprung out by accident, because there was no way now to get back into the family again, no way for them to know him, Little Robert, because they had pushed him into something else, no way for it not to be; there was no way to go back to this afternoon and not go to the hideout and not want ever again to play the game with Willie, and not even come in to supper but run and hide under the porch so Mr Sangrom would go away and it all would not have happened, no way for it to be anything but right now with all these strange people hating him, afraid of him, no way for it to be anything but now, NOW!
p. 114 – "I begin my concentration, the name comes closer as I feel myself contracting to a fine point like a brilliant spot of light, and it says itself in my mouth as the shift comes: Charles Cahill.
I am still present at the shift, as I usually am when a new person arrives."
p. 152 – I notice, in a more objective mood now, that the power to control creatures does not yet extend to people, at least not for me.
p. 171 – “It says in both stories that the monster was so unhappy it want to kill other people. [...] But it doesn’t say why the monsters are so unhappy they have to kill people and eat ‘em up and things like that,” Charles said, flipping through the pages of the Beowulf story.
[...]
“They, I mean the Beast and the giant Grendel, are wicked, and that’s why they’re unhappy,” she said, very certain of her ground. [...]
[...]
“Well,” Charles said, thinking, “maybe so, but which came first? Where they unhappy and got wicked, or were they wicked that that made them unhappy? Either way, it looks funny that they would just sit around being unhappy and wicked all the time. Looks like they were just waiting for some hero to come along and knock ‘em over.”
“Did you all notice,” Miss Wrigley said, “that both the Beast and the giant Grendel were different from other people? And that they didn’t have any friends to talk to, not a single one? Maybe they were unhappy and wicked because they weren’t like other people and had no one to love them.”
[...]
“Even if we say that the monsters are unhappy because they are different and not loved by anyone, it is puzzling because they do seem to be waiting,” she paused in genuine thought and ended the sentence as if to herself, “for disaster.”
Little Joe Ricci had been following the discussion but nit the argument. “They’re just monsters,” he said, “and monsters do bad things because they’re monsters, and they’re monsters because they…” He stopped, perplexed by the circle he had created. Then his round little face broke into a grin again. “Anyway, if I were a monster I’d have lots of fun!” And everyone laughed.
p. 178 – I am present with Charles as the music pounds now like breakers against the shore with a heavy joy and expansive power and lightness combined that I more than just listen to , but want to live in as I live in air or water or the beauty of a cold night with a full moon as I lope along in the free air [...].
p. 191 – upon holding an anti-werewolf amulet – He felt after a moment that for the past few minutes, he had been alone for the first time in his like, and it was not for sometime hat he was able to grasp the implication of that feeling.
p. 200 – I felt the wine as Charles became more comfortable and sleepy, but I am waiting in these times, for he takes the powerful stone with him when he leaves the house. It is in his coat pocket now, and when it is in the house I find it difficult to rise to consciousness, as if I were in hibernation. The voices I hear and the dim senses that come to me are lost in a dream, soft, yielding, unimportant. I feel that it would take much to wake me now. It is not important. I sleep again.
p. 210 – “Don’t be a dead hero,” the voice said quietly.
p. 224-6 – Inside the warm house he head the screaming of the youngest Bent, another boy, born early in December, and he listened to it with sudden clarity. It was a child, and it would grow up to be a boy, then a young man, go to school, get a job, get married, have children, maybe become famous. He could do that, the baby. And as Charles mumbled something to the angry Mrs Bent and backed out of the house to start the walk home, he kept thinking about the baby’s cry, how it was born, how it would live. [...] He felt the cold, buzzing stone in his pocket, the leather thong he had put through the hole and pinned into his jacket so he would not lose it. If he did not have this, what would happen?
Was he, Charles Cahill, the only creature of his kind in the world? Or was it like Doug when he jerked off in the darkness thinking his was the only guilt in the world? Was anybody like him? But they didn’t show it. Maybe the whole world is like me, Charles thought with a sudden burst of illumination. But the next moment he knew it wasn’t true. [...] Animals were animals, people were people. But what was he? As he approached the dark stand of woods and the hidden house of the widow Stomway, Charles felt again the uncertainty, the empty feeling of fear in his guts that he always felt thinking back about what had happened at Thanksgiving. For a time then, he had simply not existed. He had no memory, no feeling of being when the Beast had shifted into somebody else by mistake. He recalled the thing that stood in the dim bathroom of the Boldhuis house, looking at its giant bulk of power and terror, and feeling that it was part of him. But then he knew that wasn’t right, because of the strange shift that the Beast remembered but he did not. And he knew he had it all turned around. It was not part of him, even if it did save him from death and try to keep him from getting hurt. It was only trying to survive. He was part of it, and he would exist only as long as that power needed him for its own ends, whatever they were. Unless he could always have the stone, what Mrs Lanophier called his “amulet”. If he always had that with him or in the house he was in, could he be like other people?
[...] He thought of Beauty and the Beast, the light-hating figure of Grendel, the wicked ones, the unhappy ones. Was he waiting for a hero to come along and rub him out?
p. 246 – He clung to the sandpaper-feeling roof as if it were tilting him over an abyss while the idiotically happy Beast rose in him, coursing in his blood, and he feeling it luxuriating in his flooded nervous system as he shook with fear and lust and shame, and all he cold do, his eyes still boring through the curtain as he was afraid to make any movement at all, was to hold himself still as that thing inside him crawled about its loathsome business of savoring his painful state.
last lines – And I set off down the hillside for the river, heading northeast.
* Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
