Alida Allison 2011

Once more into the breach--

The streets in my little Colorado town are extremely steep and extremely icy today with our unusually cold weather--- so for now I've put my yellow paper on a table in my house next to Li Po, who is obviously toasting Russ. The quotations below are from a volume of Hoban’s short stories and essays, The Moment under the Moment:

Consider fiction phenomenologically. The word itself is derived from the past participle of the Latin fingere, to shape, fashion, form or mould. We take it for granted that there will always be fiction of one kind or another in the form of stories: forming; shaping. Why do we take that for granted? Why do we make fiction? Why do we say, ‘What if?’

We make fiction because we are fiction. Because there was a time when ‘it lived’ us into being. Because there was a time when something said, ‘What if there are people? A word, perhaps, whispered in the undulant amorphous ear of the primordial soup: ‘What if there are people, hey? What if?’

It lived us into being and it lives us still. We make stories because we are story. The fabric of our myths and folk-tales is in us from before birth. The action systems of the universe are the origin of life and stories. The patterns of blue-green algae and the numinous wings of the Great Nebula in Orion and the runic scrawl of human chromosomes are stories. Begotten by no one knows what, stories beget people to live them. We are the offspring of innumerable ideas.

The myths that are in us, whether they be of Demeter/Persephone’s winter descent or Orpheus losing Eurydice, are the dynamics of thing-in-itself acting itself out in the collective being and consciousness of which each one of us is a particle.

- from “Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” The Moment under the Moment, London: Jonathan Cape, 1992, 141-155.

Huck Finn, standing alone against the authority of the failed-child establishment and refusing to sell his dark brother down the river, is about as unfailed a child as you can find: a child eminently practical and resourceful, cunning enough to survive the grey city of the world, a child in touch with the mystery of being and always in a state of innocently becoming. An American Dream with him in it has a good chance of not being a nightmare.

 - from “I, that was a child sleeping…,” The Moment under the Moment, as above.

Alida Allison 2006

My yellow paper quote for 2006, placed randomly around Ouray, Colorado:

One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesure in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simpy raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion of being into the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.

from Pilgermann

Bes',

alida