I set up the blog and titled it “Exspecto Audax.” That’s very bad Latin for “looking for boldness.” In a very old family bible that I found in an attic as a child, I found a Latin motto (supposedly for my mother’s family) which read Mitis et Audax. Mitis is gentleness – which I have no use for – but Audax (boldness) fascinated me. To create the form for your writing, it seems to me, you need to have a certain sense of boldness, a willingness to strike out in unfamiliar and strange territory, to take a step abruptly sideways rather than predictably straight forward.
It also reminded me of Undula and Adela, both of whom are audacious figures. One of Schulz’s sketches is called “Undula and the Artists.” 
It shows a series of men, presumably the ‘artists’, all on their knees in rapt contemplation of Undula’s naked foot. Just as Cassandra has to be rescued from her state of objecthood, I think also Undula should be as well – Undula, in my opinion, is one of the artists as much as she is their object of devotion. What happens when Undula tells her story? How does the perspective and structure change?
It is the sound of these multitude voices that I am interested in – the resuscitation of Undula, of Galatea, of Cassandra and Polyxena. They are like the flock of birds that Schulz’s father draws from his ornithological textbook, populating the eaves and rafters, suddenly finding the voices to sing. If, for the last few thousand years, these voices have kept silent, it seems to me that it will occupy us for many generations to find new forms to express their thoughts, their selves. The web, the network that Wolf suggests can expand infinitely – even though Cassandra must eventually go into her slaughterhouse and Franza must succumb to her collapse, there are still more of them, an infinite number perhaps, consumed by that frenzy driven to find words, that wildness which resists the standard forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment