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Suttree


Suttree is not the thing, the creature in itself, with which it is concerned - that endured beast has name not. This work is instead profusely and meticulously lambent across the creature's weathered surface, inferring its shape softly adumbrated of some fog gripped within our hot, perishable latticeworkings. McCarthy's words being small motions upon this material I am not priveliged to know yet which is our secret cargo and manufactured purpose - me being some foolish husk - and his words seeking to craft an architecture of it, gently fingering strange and trembling convolutions, carving out a notion in which the aforementioned original and shabby spirit to alight: hirsute and saucer-eyed owl, parasitic, paramount over this, our, forgotten layer of existence and lonely in it, paling with infinitude (closer, closer, closer to darkness though never becoming, not welcome), dimly throbbing and emanant; above all, lovely. This spirit which begets life not with charity but playfully, ignorantly and as new, pretty renditions of its centripetal melancholy; as passtimes of a unity and thus sharing in its loneliness ("...all souls are one and all souls lonely"). 


We are somber and flippant hand-shadows upon a murky wall, cast by a lone candle waning of absolute will and being its own and only audience to the horrifying breadth of these grotesque shows; our depths remain dark but by our own light, indeed being carved by it. And our salvation, though we are shackled, being this accidental secret and, I would wager, a necessary miracle. Untouched, invulnerable, rebellious.

Or at least the sheer inertia of McCarthy's prose, its mythic gravity, the beauty of this dwelling place to bring the universe to manifest a habitant. 

And doors, doors, doors; these halls do never end but rarely - and with relief - by how they find purchase in a heart's resolve to close upon itself. 


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