Idumea

idumea/content/notes.tex

@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ I spoke of this with writer friends, and one of them, the ever delightful Seras
 
 Now here I am, once more coming down from my overflow, once more feeling somewhat grounded, the world around once more made of things which are not yet more words, and I have to contend with the reality that this remains, for the most part, a funny little note, and that this story no longer quite reads as that real-boy-to-inanimate-tree pipeline, tired trope that I am sure it is.
 
-Instead, I must hope that The Woman has indeed escaped such a cycle, and I must hope that those along her way were in some roundabout way the bodhisattvas in her life.
+Instead, I must hope that The Woman has indeed escaped such a cycle, and I must hope that those along her way were in some roundabout way akin to the bodhisattvas in her life.
 \pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{rilke-circles}}
@@ -152,6 +152,23 @@ Saying nothing, nor kissing\\
 exchanging silence for silence.
 \end{verse}
 
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{kassad}}
+[\ldots] \emph{a sutle twisting, a stirring, a clockwise motion} [\ldots]
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+\noindent Cf. Simmons:
+
+\begin{quote}
+They lay next to each other. The dead man's armor was cold against Kassad's left arm, her thigh warm against his right leg. The sunlight was a benediction. Hidden colors rose to the surface of things. Kassad turned his head and gazed at her as she rested her head on his shoulder. Her cheeks glowed with flush and autumn light and her hair lay like copper threads along the flesh of his arm. She curved her leg over his thigh and Kassad felt the clockwise stirring of renewed passion. The sun was warm on his face. He closed his eyes.
+\end{quote}
+
+\noindent The tone, here, is quite different, but it is notable that `clockwise' would so catch my attention to lodge itself in my mind, when it comes to the topic of sexuality. Perhaps arousal is an unwinding, then, and orgasm the \emph{ding!} when the timer hits zero, and that is why we say `pent up'.
+
+Perhaps it is simply the nerves I feel about so blatantly describing a sexual act within a supposed fairy tale that leads to a twisting in my own stomach.
+
+I do not know, my friends.
+
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{timo}}
 [\ldots] \emph{there was a spot between joy and fear, a place of too much meaning} [\ldots]
 
@@ -178,13 +195,73 @@ Between joy and fear\\
 Is a place of too much meaning.\\
 Next to understanding, outside wisdom,\\
 It nonetheless expands.\\
-I’m so small beside it\\
+I am so small beside it\\
 and it is too big.\\
 Incomprehensible,\\
 Incontestible,\\
 Unmoving and always changing.
 \end{verse}
 
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{blue-orange}}
+
+[\ldots] \emph{the orange and blue of love and anxiety} [\ldots]
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+\noindent When one writes of that which is alien in the context of morality, one might say that it escapes even the concepts of black, white, and gray, and instead lies on the axis of blue and orange. Blue-orange morality is that which is so far removed from our on conceptions of good and evil that one whose morals fall along such a spectrum may escape definition of `good' or `evil' at all, and so too do they evade `order' and `chaos'.
+
+Here, then, may well be your narrator's own complex engagement with romance and sensuality and sexuality peeking through. Here, then, may be a glimpse into the mind of someone who just does not quite get it. It is lovely. I know this. I \emph{know} this, and yet anticipation and anxiety are not black and white to me, they are blue and orange.
+
+The writer, as ever, is a character in their own works, no matter the role they actually play.
+
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{echo}}
+
+[...] \emph{and she knew that Her Lover would be by her side for some time to come if she let her—and she would let her—and that, too, was a joy.}
+
+\noindent Cf. Echo:
+
+\begin{verse}
+My wileling is not the sort of woman you spend a diamond on —\\
+And I don't just mean to allude to her anti-capitalist streak —\\
+No, she is the sort you paint in gold and scarlet,\\
+The only colors befitting a minx such as she,\\
+A cat-eyed woman, the sort who speaks in tongues;\\
+That which men with pitchforks called the Devil's tongue\\
+As she burned at the stake.
+
+Blood and electrum for my wileling;\\
+Only the best for her.\\
+She is to me a cherished thing,\\
+A queen to a throne, with the wit to reign regent.\\
+So, to say that she is mine is indeed a crime.\\
+But if she has asked me to so infringe —\\
+And she has asked me to so infringe —\\
+Then mine she shall be\\
+For she has me woven around her finger\\
+As she is all the way around mine.
+\end{verse}
+
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{ashes}}
+[\ldots] \emph{and I do not believe she merged cross-tree with anyone except perhaps Ashes Denote That Fire Was, who is building in themself a gestalt of the clade as best they can.}
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+\noindent From Emily Dickinson:
+
+\begin{verse}
+Ashes denote that Fire was —\\
+Revere the Grayest Pile\\
+For the Departed Creature’s sake\\
+That hovered there awhile —
+
+Fire exists the first in light\\
+And then consolidates\\
+Only the Chemist can disclose\\
+Into what Carbonates.
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent We have always borne an obsession with Emily Dickinson. For years and years, and years and years and years she has lived within us, a remnant of some stage play we performed with our superlative friend, centuries back now.
+
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{dwale}}
 \emph{It was a land of long, rolling hills and yet longer flat basins that always drank most thirstily from the seasonal storms that did their best to thrash the Earth below.}
 
@@ -207,16 +284,38 @@ And I am raw, far too raw, to tell it.
 I have written extensively on these hyper-black shapes that The Child paints and more about her besides in \emph{Motes Played}. A little book for little skunks, yes? For she deserves her story told—and just so! Just like this! A tale written in a style befitting her—as much as does The Woman.
 \pagebreak
 
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{keatsheight}}
+\emph{Miss Michelle Hadje, five foot four.}
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+Cf. John Keats:
+
+\begin{quote}
+I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.
+\end{quote}
+
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{pronouns}}
+On The Oneirotect's pronouns
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+\noindent The Oneirotect uses for itself several pronouns—though the set you see here in this text are `she', `they', `ey', and `it'—which serves as a reflection both of its critter nature and the fluidity of eir engagement with gender– no, with the slipperiness of identity as a whole. This is the role of language with identity: to be a poor reflection through some imperfect mirror, a version of the self seen through some glass, darkly.
+
+You will note the same is also true of The Dog, who, yes, is prone to a critter nature, but who also sometimes views himself as `he' and sometimes itself as `it'. For better or worse the identity of animals, of `low beasts', is entwined with that of \emph{things,} and for some, that is a joy.
+
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{rakoff}}
 \emph{It is} enjoyable, \emph{and often it is} loved, \emph{but it is not really} beloved.
 
+\vspace{1em}
+
 Cf. David Rakoff:
 
 \begin{quote}
 Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair—then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one—well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.
 \end{quote}
 
-The distinction between a thing that is *loved* and a thing that is *beloved* is a type of subtlety that we seem to enjoy dwelling within rather a lot. The Instance Artist has spoken of an anxiety that it might be the type of person who is "beloved by all yet loved by none," given how difficult it felt for it to let anyone get truly close to it. The Oneirotect describes food the other way around, however: ey fears that its food may be merely loved, rather than so much more broadly beloved.
+The distinction between a thing that is \emph{loved} and a thing that is \emph{beloved} is a type of subtlety that we seem to enjoy dwelling within rather a lot. The Instance Artist has spoken of an anxiety that it might be the type of person who is ``beloved by all yet loved by none,'' given how difficult it felt for it to let anyone get truly close to it. The Oneirotect describes food the other way around, however: ey fears that its food may be merely loved, rather than so much more broadly beloved.
 
 One must never ask an author their desires on where their work ought lie on the loved-beloved scale.
 
@@ -234,7 +333,7 @@ They have their exits and their entrances [\ldots]
 \end{verse}
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{1cor13}}
-[\ldots] \emph{through a glass darkly.}
+[\ldots] \emph{through a glass, darkly.}
 
 \vspace{1em}
 
@@ -283,7 +382,7 @@ We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together
 All the parts of this body being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they must needs partake of each other's strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe.\label{wealwoeref} (1 Cor. 12:26) If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one be in honor, all rejoice with it.
 \end{quote}
 
-\noindent I have little care for sermons written by 17\textsuperscript{th} century imperialist Christian politicians but for these occasional little quips. It is, perhaps, a thing belonging more to sermons than to the time or the people. Here, we see in Winthrop's words an idea that has wrapped around itself within my mind and formed itself into a new take on clades and family and life sys-side as a whole, these last eight years.
+\noindent I have little care for sermons written by 17\textsuperscript{th} century imperialist Christian politicians but for these occasional little quips. It is, perhaps, a thing belonging more to sermons than it is to the time or the people. Here, we see in Winthrop's words an idea that has wrapped around itself within my mind and formed itself into a new take on clades and family and life sys-side as a whole, these last eight years.
 
 We are one body, the Ode clade. We are one body and we each of us Odists are members thereof. We do indeed rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, do we not? 
 
@@ -294,6 +393,7 @@ And yet, we are still one body. We are still all of us Michelle Hadje who was Sa
 Imagine such on the scale of the System, though! All of us members of one body! 2.3 trillion of us live here, and we are all beholden to the same piece of hardware, the same Dreamer dreaming us all in all of our love and all of our stupid, petty little squabbles that make us who we are–
 
 I have gotten carried away. The Sightwright suffered as I do, as The Oneirotect does, and perhaps even as The Woman did, and so we all suffered with them, and the fallout of their loss is with us still.
+\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{artandfear}}
 \emph{With art comes fear.}
@@ -323,6 +423,7 @@ Just like me,\\
 they long to be\\
 close to you
 \end{verse}
+\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{sweet-prospect}}
 [\ldots] \emph{...that sweet field arrayed in living green} [\ldots]
@@ -362,6 +463,81 @@ Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energ
 From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.
 \end{quote}
 
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{to-}}
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+[\ldots] \emph{some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream} [\ldots]
+
+\noindent Cf. Slow Hours:
+
+\begin{verse}
+\textbf{To — in the days after her death}
+
+A dream within a dream within a dream\\
+and fell visions sidling up too close\\
+both woo me. Sweet caramel and soft cream\\
+sit cloying on their tongues, and I, Atropos\\
+to such dreams as these, find shears on golden thread.
+
+I would not cut, nor even could, had I but wished\\
+to sever this golden thread — and every thread\\
+is golden — and end a friend and send to mist\\
+and sorrow ones so dear. Dead! Dead! She is dead\\
+and gone, for her own shears were sharper still.
+
+And so she cut, and so they watched, and so I watched\\
+such love as this cease. I yearn to say that she returned\\
+to me, became a part of me, but a tally notched\\
+among the lost was all that stayed when life was spurned\\
+by the call of death — supposedly ended.
+
+So, she is gone and now our lives are darker for it,\\
+and now this world is where the shadows lie,\\
+and all the light that still remains is forfeit,\\
+and so much green still stabs towards the sky,\\
+and yellowed teeth of lions still snap at the air.
+\end{verse}
+
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{stop-for-death}}
+\emph{She passed, perhaps, the setting sun}
+
+\vspace{1em}
+
+\noindent Cf. Emily Dickinson:
+
+\begin{verse}
+Because I could not stop for Death —\\
+He kindly stopped for me —\\
+The Carriage held but just Ourselves —\\
+And Immortality.
+
+We slowly drove — He knew no haste\\
+And I had put away\\
+My labor and my leisure too,\\
+For His Civility —
+
+We passed the School, where Children strove\\
+At Recess — in the Ring —\\
+We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —\\
+We passed the Setting Sun —
+
+Or rather — He passed Us —\\
+The Dews drew quivering and Chill —\\
+For only Gossamer, my Gown —\\
+My Tippet — only Tulle —
+
+We paused before a House that seemed\\
+A Swelling of the Ground —\\
+The Roof was scarcely visible —\\
+The Cornice — in the Ground —
+
+Since then — 'tis Centuries — and yet\\
+Feels shorter than the Day\\
+I first surmised the Horses' Heads\\
+Were toward Eternity —
+\end{verse}
+
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{tree-writing}}
 [\ldots] \emph{that has been my dream.}
 
@@ -369,8 +545,9 @@ From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the
 
 \noindent I have dreamed of turning into a tree for years and years and years and years and years, now.
 
-For instance, I have written here that Slow Hours set this dream into verse—on my request—and this is true, for here is a segment from a longer work:
+For instance, I have written here I have set this dream into verse and this is true, for here is a segment from a longer work:
 
+\vspace{-1em}
 \begin{verse}
 We'd long since stopped, there by the pond,\\
 and your smile was, yes, sad, but still fond\\
@@ -421,7 +598,8 @@ I thought about you, your life, your emotional range,\\
 your gentle apotheosis.
 \end{verse}
 
-\noindent I have also written here that I put this dream into prose, and this is also true, for her is a segment from a short story:
+\noindent I have also written here that I put this dream into prose, and this is also true, for here is a segment from a short story:
+\pagebreak
 
 \begin{quote}
 And finally, the mirroring was broken as the \emph{her} that was not her slid \emph{her} fingers up over her wrist and gently guided her hand down toward the soil, loamy and damp, and she knew then that she must spread her fingers and dig them down into the earth, there by the stairs which were a finger pointing at God such that she was in turn pointing at…at what? At the owner of that hand? At the owner of that finger?
@@ -442,7 +620,33 @@ And she felt growth accelerate as, bound now to the earth, her bones became wood
 And yet! And yet, when writing the final chapter, even through the heat of the moment and the blood rushing in my ears, I began to feel within a flush of embarrassment. How indulgent it is to share this again! How indulgent, my friends, to let the dream take me again that it might shape my words! Even as I wrote, even as I cried, sitting at my desk (or trying to!), sobbing in front of my words, I struggled with feeling like this was somehow \emph{too} indulgent.
 
 I strive still to stifle that puritanical worrywart within, even so many years on.
-\pagebreak
+
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{florilegium}}
+[\ldots] \emph{and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time}
+
+\noindent Another perpetual theme that holds me in its claws. I wrote in an essay:
+
+\begin{quote}
+A year spirals up.
+
+A day, a week, a month, they all spiral, for any one Sunday is like the previous and the next shall be much the same, but the you who experiences the differing Sundays is different. It is a spiral, proceeding steadfastly onward. A day is a spiral, with each morning much the same as the one before and the one after. A month, following the cycle of the moon.
+
+But a year, in particular, spirals up. It carries embedded within it a certain combination of pattern, count, and duration that delineates our lives better than any other cyclical unit of time. Yes, a day is divided into night, day, and those liminal dusks and dawns, but there are so many of them. There are so many days in a life, and there are so many in a year that to see the spiral within them does not come as easily.
+
+Our years are delineated by the seasons, though, and the count of them is so few, and the duration long enough that we can run up against that first scent of snow late in the autumn and immediately be kicked down one level of the spiral in our memories. What were we doing the last time we smelled that non-scent? What about the time before?
+
+Or perhaps one thinks across the spiral. One, stuck in Winter, thinks back to Summer — ah, such warmth! — and tries to remember what it was one was doing then. ``Only silhouettes show / in the billowing snow,'' Dwale writes. ``Remembering months, now / gone when new blooms would grow.''
+\end{quote}
+
+And I wrote in a story:
+
+\begin{quote}
+Lyut lives his life in prayer and devotion. It is a life that is lived ascending in a steady spiral of years, for time moves upward and yet is echoed below by the change of days, the change of weeks, the change of seasons. This year, this day, this soft spring is an echo of last soft spring beneath it. It is antipodal to the autumn that will come
+
+Cycles within cycles, spirals within spirals. This morning, too, is an echo of the day beneath it, behind it, in the past. His days are defined by the cycle of incense, prayer, fishing, foraging, meditating. He knows that it is day when he wakes when he feels the warmth from the sun. He knows when it is night when he feels the warmth fade. He knows when it is morning because he hears the birds sing. He knows that it is night when the birdsong of the day settles into the chorus of insects.
+\end{quote}
+
+And on citing these, I am realizing just how much I am built up of obsessions, of rituals and ideas that cleave and cling and stick and meld.
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{nasturtiums}}
 [\ldots] \emph{perhaps columbines perhaps nasturtiums} [\ldots]
@@ -452,6 +656,7 @@ I strive still to stifle that puritanical worrywart within, even so many years o
 \noindent The Musician shared with me a letter and My Friend several journal entries, but, ah–! If I share them here, I will fall once more to crying. You may find them in their entirety in \emph{Marsh}, a work written by a braver me.
 
 I will say, however, that that letter surrounded nasturtiums and was written the night Muse quit, and those diary entries were written by My Friend, a recounting of Beckoning's memories, to comfort The Musician in her grief.
+\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{psalm13}}
 (quoted directly)
@@ -479,7 +684,6 @@ Regard, answer me, \emph{HaShem}, my God.\\
 \begin{quote}
 And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know revelry and folly, for this, too, is a herding of the wind.
 \end{quote}
-\pagebreak
 
 \noindent From Qohelet 2:22:
 
@@ -518,7 +722,6 @@ kiedy zniknie świadomość
 
 \secdiv
 
-\pagebreak
 Simply let mankind\\
 extinguish itself\\
 And then innocent sunrises will illuminate\\
@@ -559,7 +762,8 @@ will feel the expanded air in more spirited flight.
 
 \noindent And yet I had also in mind the cadence of Nabokov: ``Give me now your full attention.'' A plea that one be understood.
 
-I am no poet, but I will not deny the utility in verse when it comes to scratching the itch of words: 
+I am no poet, but I will not deny the utility in verse when it comes to scratching the itch of words:
+\pagebreak
 
 \begin{verse}
 Give me now your full attention.\\
@@ -584,26 +788,30 @@ Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
 
 \noindent The words of John Winthrop (page \pageref{wealwoeref}) come once more to mind.
 
-\paragraph{Page \pageref{ashes}}
-[\ldots] \emph{beyond providing an instance for Ashes Denote That Fire Was.}
+\paragraph{Page \pageref{keatsfears}}
+\emph{Not yet, though. Not this year, I suspect not this decade, and I hope not even this century.}
 
 \vspace{1em}
 
-\noindent From Emily Dickinson:
+\noindent I speak, of course, of functional immortality and the balm it provides against the fears artists of old faced. Keats has it:
 
 \begin{verse}
-Ashes denote that Fire was —\\
-Revere the Grayest Pile\\
-For the Departed Creature’s sake\\
-That hovered there awhile —
-
-Fire exists the first in light\\
-And then consolidates\\
-Only the Chemist can disclose\\
-Into what Carbonates.
+When I have fears that I may cease to be\\
+\vin Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,\\
+Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,\\
+\vin Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;\\
+When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,\\
+\vin Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,\\
+And think that I may never live to trace\\
+\vin Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;\\
+And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!\\
+\vin That I shall never look upon thee more,\\
+Never have relish in the faery power\\
+\vin Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore\\
+Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,\\
+Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
 \end{verse}
-
-\noindent We have always borne an obsession with Emily Dickinson. For years and years, and years and years and years she has lived within us, a remnant of some stage play we performed with our superlative friend, centuries back now.
+%\pagebreak
 
 Is it so surprising, then, that after cross-tree merging had been introduced as an option for us, that the one who would seek to collect within themself the entirety of the Ode clade—those who remain, dear readers!—would take for a name a line of Dickinson? We will be ever ourselves.
 
@@ -625,7 +833,6 @@ Is it so surprising, then, that after cross-tree merging had been introduced as
   Unreal city, city full of dreams,\\
   Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passsers-by.
 \end{verse}
-\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{graves}}
 \emph{She, then, like so many leaves} [\ldots]
@@ -638,19 +845,20 @@ Is it so surprising, then, that after cross-tree merging had been introduced as
   She, then, like snow in a dark night\\
   Fell secretly.
 \end{verse}
+\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{threadgall}}
 \emph{That unfalling ones are trapped within that last falling!}
 
-\noindent Cf. Threadgall:
+\noindent Cf. Richard Threadgall:
 
 \begin{verse}
 Tell to me the secret life of birds.\\
 No solicitors of the hungry sky are they;\\
 No, nor is the rainwater parting head a bookhouse dialect,\\
 Or antiquary\\
-But says, "I am citizen to the eternal now,\\
-Republic builder of unfalling ones."\\
+But says, ``I am citizen to the eternal now,\\
+Republic builder of unfalling ones.''\\
 Bound to remembering blood and numbered suns,\\
 What speech do we give him from our earthy furrow?\\
 That he has no history who has feared no pain?\\
@@ -660,7 +868,6 @@ That unfalling ones are trapped in that last falling? \\
 What stale rejoinders birds are unmoored with!\\
 The unsuffering sky exhales them in a breath.
 \end{verse}
-\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{enough}}
 \emph{``Oh! Oh, I do believe this is some plentiful enough for me.''}
@@ -687,7 +894,9 @@ where the calculation to many digits\\
 comes out number-less.
 \end{verse}
 
-\noindent One imagines that a `plentiful enough' lies at some theoretical midpoint on this limitless scale from `merely too little' to `empty too much'. One imagines it a place just outside that `toilsome nowhere'. I imagine it, my friends. I \emph{have} to imagine it! I have to imagine that Lagrange, the System, our embedded world is plentifully enough, and not some empty too much, not after so much loss.
+\noindent One imagines that a `plentiful enough' lies at some theoretical midpoint on this limitless scale from 'merely too little' to 'empty too much'. One imagines it a place just outside that `toilsome nowhere': perhaps it sits just outside that scale, as, I fear, I hope, The Woman sits now outside the scale running from joy to suffering, having relinquished such dichotomies and embraced them—become them!—in equal measure.
+
+I \emph{have} to imagine it! I have to imagine that Lagrange, the System, our embedded world is plentifully enough, and not some empty too much, not after so much loss, lest I engage too readily with the fleetingness of us, a perhaps futility, a spending of time in a toilsome nowhere. Thoughts spinning out into that nowhere, crammed into a too little, emptying with a burst into some too much\ldots
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{cummings-mbt}}
 [\ldots] \emph{breathe in a million billion trillion years} [\ldots]
@@ -701,6 +910,7 @@ comes out number-less.
   and staggered banged with terror through\\
   a million billion trillion stars.
 \end{verse}
+\pagebreak
 
 \paragraph{Page \pageref{bees}}
 [\ldots] \emph{unbitter sweetness} [\ldots]
@@ -726,10 +936,10 @@ Are we together, The Woman and I, multiplied? When she and I, when her story and
 
 Are we crossed? Do we as ideas lay across each other perpendicularly? The Woman fell into stillness and I fall still through eternal, jittery, restless movement. The woman set aside her agency, in the end, and I strive for any sense of control over myself, my language, my words and sentences and paragraphs and stories. We are diametrically opposed in so many ways. We cross each other, our paths cross each other's, we approached at a ninety degree angle, and, in the end, departed at such an angle.
 
-Are we set beside each other as some fictional love? Some two characters set within fan fiction who love each other in a way pure or unchaste in others' minds? Do I love her? Do I love The Woman? Did she love me?
+Are we set beside each other as some fictional love? Some two characters set within fan fiction who love each other in a way pure or unchaste in others' minds, star-crossed? Do I love her? Do I love The Woman? Did she love me?
 
 I do not know, my dear readers. I do not know these things and I do not know many more.
 
-Perhaps, though, perhaps the × stands for the decision that I made. It is the role I played in letting The Woman, that beautiful soul who bestowed a blessing with every smile, step away from the world, for removing those blessings from us, that beauty from us, that life, that veil.
+Perhaps, though, perhaps it stands for that final decision: × marks the point at which I made up my mind. It is the role I played in letting The Woman, that beautiful soul who bestowed a blessing with every smile, step away from the world, for removing those blessings from us, that beauty from us, that life, that veil.
 
 I am so, so incredibly sorry, and also rather proud of what I have done, of helping The Woman in so noble an endeavor, in equal measure.