update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/007.md

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 ## End Of Endings — 2403<br>×<br>Rye — 2409
 
-When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, walked out into the field for a day and then walked back, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt *overfull.* She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.
+When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, walked out into the field for a day and then lay down, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt *overfull.* She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.
 
-She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she went for a walk and she did that which she is good at: she napped.
+She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she went for a walk and she did that which she is good at: she napped. There, out on the grass, there, she napped.
 
 My dear, dear friends, the longer I go on, the more I pace around through quiet rooms the more these words swirl around me in some quiet maelstrom, the more I wish that I could do the same. Sleep brings no relief. Within my dreams there are yet more words. The boundary between waking and sleeping is so faint, now — I write even in my sleep! My dreams are of The Woman! My dreams are of me sitting at my desk with my pen in my paw and paper before me, of ink on page and words flowing after like an eager puppy! — the boundary is so faint now that I have more than once awoken from uneasy sleep to found that I had indeed at some point sat down at my desk and written word after word after word, after word and word and word. I have found pages of endlessly repeating phrases. I have found scribbles that are doubtless words and yet which I cannot decipher, and I cannot remember my dreams well enough to say what they may have been.
 
@@ -42,15 +42,15 @@ The longer we live — and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 323
 
 I know this. You know this, I am sure, on however instinctual a level, for you are clever and bright and you see the world with fresher eyes than I have. You are cleverer and brighter and fresher than your humble narrator who paces the empty rooms of her house and fills them with the quiet muttering of the mad.
 
-The Woman knew this as well. When she woke from her nap — for my astute readers remember that that is how this rambling chapter began! — she could now — in a way she could not before — feel and perhaps even see these spirals. She could see the way that her 317 years had spiraled up around her. She could see the way that time bound her, tied her up in coils and coils and coils and coils and coils. She could see these coils — however metaphorically — as they twine around her legs and torso. She can feel these coils — however metaphorically — slowing her down, holding her arms to her side and limiting her reach. They — these coils — obscure her.
+The Woman knew this as well. When she woke from her nap — for my astute readers remember that that is how this rambling chapter began! — she could now — in a way she could not before — feel and perhaps even see these spirals. She could see the way that her 317 years had spiraled up around her. She could see the way that time bound her, tied her up in coils and coils and coils and coils and coils. She could see these coils — however metaphorically — as they twine around her legs and torso. She can feel these coils — however metaphorically — slowing her down, holding her arms to her side and limiting her reach. They — these coils and coils and coils — obscure her.
 
-Ah, my friends, I am struggling. I can feel and see these coils, yes, and am obscured.
+Ah, my friends, I am struggling. I can feel and see these coils and coils and coils and coils and coils, yes, and am obscured.
 
 I am going to lay down, and perhaps I will dream.
 
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-I have slept now. I took a cue from The Woman and took a nap, and while it did not come quite so easily to me as it ever did to her, it still offered some rest.
+I have slept now. I took a cue from The Woman and took a nap, and while it did not come quite so easily to me as it ever did to her, it still offered some respite.
 
 I dreamed, though! I dreamed of words like leaves and sentences like branches and stories like trunks, standing solid, with premises like roots dug into logic like earth and drinking of emotions like water. There was the tree, yes, for there was the green of the words and the brown of the story and the deep darkness of logic and emotion.
 
@@ -58,7 +58,19 @@ And above was the sun which was also The Dreamer who dreams us all.
 
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+When at last The Woman returned home, she performed a new ritual. She performed a ritual of mourning.
 
+This, you see, was the start of her final task. Her set of five tasks, of food, of physical pleasure, of entertainment, of creation, of spirituality was not quite complete, and had within it one more step, and she felt most a connection to the spiritual in the act of mourning.
+
+My friends, I think it may well have been our conversation, that of The Woman and The Oneirotect and I, that set her mind thus in motion, for was it not then that we spoke so freely of my beloved up-tree and the way it mourned over Should We Forget? Did not the pair of long lost tenth stanza lines come up as well? Death Itself and I Do Not Know? They, too, perhaps felt some of this too-full-ness that The Woman struggles with, for back and back and back and back, six decades back, they lay still and thought and, before long, before the week is out, quit. They bowed out. They dipped. Committed suicide. Quit the big one. They push now up some perhaps daisies in the mind of The Dreamer who dreams us all.
+
+There is loss in our lives and in our hearts and in our minds.
+
+But the tenth stanza knows *these* losses with a particular keenness. They leave empty seats and full plates at the table for these three who are gone. They speak the names of the dead on at least their Yahrzeit when they light the candle, and, for some of them, far more often, for The Woman's Cocladist was very fond of Death Itself, as the two loved each other fiercely, and it was perhaps this loss that drove Her Cocladist's bitterness and aught-elses.
+
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+
+<!-- The Dog and The Rabbit-Chaser gives her the idea -->
 
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