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When your sights are on infinity, you don't fire blanks
This is a catalogue of talismans: the shrines we build without thinking about them. I didn't sleep much last night, so I started thinking about mine.
These are the things that would travel with me wherever I went. The three-hundred-year-old onion bottle. A netted fishing float, newer and much the same salt-green. A butter-colored fragment of Baltic amber. An eleke of seven colors. The sundial ring and the moonstone pendant I wear daily. The obsolete fifty-franc note in my wallet. A newsboy's brown corduroy cap from the 1960's. The blue-eyed, gold-satin fire lizard I sewed and stuffed in ninth grade. A metal silhouette of Kokopelli from New Mexico. A green-and-gold glass dragon with a melting ice cream cone. A two-thousand-year-old chunk of concrete and white tesserae. The eleventh card from a tarot of goddesses, Oya, the whirlwind, Strength. The mezuzah that was made for me when I was twelve years old. A pair of earrings, cat-headed mermaids. The necklace by Elise Matthiesen, "Remember What You Say in Dreams." A framed print of John William Waterhouse's A Mermaid. Another of Michael Parkes' The Creation. A photograph of the Sibyl's Cave at Cumae, taken by a friend of mine in college. One of a pair of candlesticks, dark blue and dark green. Whenever I moved, I would know which boxes they were in. I would pack them carefully and unpack them first.
And so many of my talismans are books—plays, verse, novels, scholarship—but for now I am leaving them out, because even a short list would run on to lunacy. The same with music and lately with DVDs, as though you can hold on to stories like coins or shells. One year in high school, I carried the same book everywhere with me, in my backpack to and from classes, in my hand when I went out with friends, a little red-spined Modern Library edition with black-edged pages and I still know which shelf it's on.
What do you hold on to?
These are the things that would travel with me wherever I went. The three-hundred-year-old onion bottle. A netted fishing float, newer and much the same salt-green. A butter-colored fragment of Baltic amber. An eleke of seven colors. The sundial ring and the moonstone pendant I wear daily. The obsolete fifty-franc note in my wallet. A newsboy's brown corduroy cap from the 1960's. The blue-eyed, gold-satin fire lizard I sewed and stuffed in ninth grade. A metal silhouette of Kokopelli from New Mexico. A green-and-gold glass dragon with a melting ice cream cone. A two-thousand-year-old chunk of concrete and white tesserae. The eleventh card from a tarot of goddesses, Oya, the whirlwind, Strength. The mezuzah that was made for me when I was twelve years old. A pair of earrings, cat-headed mermaids. The necklace by Elise Matthiesen, "Remember What You Say in Dreams." A framed print of John William Waterhouse's A Mermaid. Another of Michael Parkes' The Creation. A photograph of the Sibyl's Cave at Cumae, taken by a friend of mine in college. One of a pair of candlesticks, dark blue and dark green. Whenever I moved, I would know which boxes they were in. I would pack them carefully and unpack them first.
And so many of my talismans are books—plays, verse, novels, scholarship—but for now I am leaving them out, because even a short list would run on to lunacy. The same with music and lately with DVDs, as though you can hold on to stories like coins or shells. One year in high school, I carried the same book everywhere with me, in my backpack to and from classes, in my hand when I went out with friends, a little red-spined Modern Library edition with black-edged pages and I still know which shelf it's on.
What do you hold on to?
no subject
What, for that matter, is a mezuzah?
(I'm sure I could Wikisearch it, but your explanation will be more amusing).
PS have fun at the 'Con!
no subject
It's a text of the Sh'ma that can be affixed to the doorposts of one's house (although I kept mine on the doorway to my bedroom) in accordance with the commandment. There's a whole art form in their calligraphy and decoration about which I know very little. Mine was made for me: it's glazed porcelain painted with leaves and written with my Hebrew name and the parchment rolled up inside. This is a somewhat vague explanation because I am not very observant.
PS have fun at the 'Con!
Thank you! So far, so good!