Friday, October 07, 2005

already dead

May be I'm already dead, like the protagonist of Ali Smith's novel Hotel World. The farther she drifts from the land of the living, the more she loses her grip on the names of things. The wandering spirit talks about her (dead) body:

"I left her there, in her sleep, unravelling each of the letters of our shared name and throwing away the little coloured threads that made it no one else's name in the world.
I want to ask her the name for the things we see with. I wanted to ask her the name for heated-up bread.
I have already forgotten it again, the name for the lift for dishes. It has tired me out telling you her story, all you pavement-pressing see-hearing people passing so blandly back and fore in front of the front door of the hotel. I lose the words; like so many chips of granite tapped out of a stone to make the shape of a name, they litter the ground."

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