Excerpt from Oscar of Between, Part 1B
by
Betsy Warland
Narrow sidewalks of London. Everyone jockeying. Close shaves of near collisions. Each step: assessment/decision. This way? Or, that? Shoulder checking before stopping. Or turning. No A to B assumptions. No stay to this side. A world of difference in motion. Mostly wordless. Occasional “Sorry. Sorry.” Or, unnerving racial flare-ups.
Oscar searching for Virginia and Leonard’s house. Making way to Gordon Square.
There. Green exhale.
Small chestnut spaniel – perky tail – skimming grass soundlessly – like light on water.
Oscar spots empty bench. Purple beech canopies. A tree Virginia likely knew.
Green exhale – spaniel skimming.
Virginia’s “when the pen gets on the scent” (Oscar’s compass).
Oscar opens notebook.
Resides.
~~
“Narrative and the Lie.” Oscar’s essay. Three-quarters finished. Intended to work on it while in London. Has not. Needs to turn away from pandemic prevalence of. Also, question of publishing. Who would?
Narratives that provoke resistance.
Not protest, but to being read. At all.
Oscar wishes otherwise. Yet these are the narratives she’s given.
Readers’ resistances: how to take into account?
For writer has them too.
~~
1914. Camo and Cubism. British military needing to get an edge on. Two of its officers/artists invent “disruptive pattern.” Cubism inspiration for.
Announcement of war paint, agreed upon duel at dawn, eye-catching uniforms morph into first “war of deception.” Camouflage.
A different mind set.
Utterly.
~~
Tate Modern. Unexpected encounter with another Oscar’s words:
“The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”
Where that Oscar’s quest took him. On the battlefield of narrative. Outsider writing about insiders’ lives. Evoking their posturing. With wit. Fondness. Entertaining them. While he lived his unacceptable life.
True?
Point of view with flare?
~~
Then there’s Oscar’s body.
Being not either nor neither.
Not a fitting in.
Nor misfit flaunting out.
Even the most aberrant of groups garrisons its norms
: its not between.
Guest Writer:
Nancy Richler
Montreal, QC
www.nancyrichler.com/imposter-bride.html
Excerpt from her novel The Imposter Bride (2012)
Published by HarperCollins
October 1944
Who am I? A mound of mud in an autumn field. A pile of leaves to the side of a forest path. I tuck my hands beneath me as you pass, press my face into the earth. I’m a blur of motion out the far corner of your eye, utter stillness by the time you fully turn your gaze. In your cities I’m a rat scurrying beneath the surface of your life. I hide in your sewers. I infect your dreams with pestilence. Vermin, you call me. Insect. Cur. Swine. Once I was a girl.
Who are you, he asked me. He had uncovered me as I slept, pushed aside the layers of mud and leaves and lies to reveal me.
He scraped the last of the leaves from between the blades of my shoulders, swept the crumbs of soil from my neck. I knew his touch, the brush of his fingers on my skin. I turned from the earth to face him and my entire field of vision filled with light, the dreadful day, the indifferent Polish sky. In the centre was a shadow, an absence in the shape of him, his broad shoulders, his curls in silhouette against the sky. He held something towards me. A potato? A piece of bread? I reached out to take it but my fingers closed on my own empty fist. I reached further and my entire hand disappeared, my arm.
A crack had appeared in the Polish day, a drawing back of the world along a ragged seam. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, this parting in the shape of him, this opening to someplace else. “Get up,” he said. “Quick.”
I find it startling the way the lines narrow down to a single event. The language has a neutrality that is inclusive & yet herds the reader along to a single postion, to “reside” with all that has been said. You would think, in this narrowing, you would end up with a conclusion, but instead its like being at the bottom of a tornado – it sucks you back up again to see what else is there.
As for that battleground, there is always the question of honor (the work, the inspiration, the muse). I guess that’s why its so important to have those precious few venues where we can read our work. If I can touch a few people(even one) in a real way – damn it, I feel good about it all.
Nancy’s piece took an entirely different approach. She filled my head full of lovely clutter, then swept it away in one fell swoop, like a light going on, to see what is truly there lurking beneath the surface.
For me, both pieces take aim at the underbelly, seek out hidden motive, but arrive there from completely different paths.
I am loving Oscar. I trust Oscar and feel as if I will go anywhere with the tender and thoughtful Oscar. Together we meander through streets, through thoughts like… “On the battlefield of narrative. Outsider writing about insiders’ lives. Evoking their posturing. With wit. Fondness. Entertaining them. While he lived his unacceptable life.”
I feel a resonance with Oscar and cannot wait for our next journey.
Nancy Richler’s piece is evocative and viseral. I feel the mud. I am confused by the mud. I think of mud as earth which is good, life giving and filled with promise. I also think of mud as dirty and dirty as a sign of the unacceptable. I recall my mother’s panic at any hint of dirt on me as she feared that at any moment I might look like a “dirty little lndian”. I like that I am confused by the mud, that it may be both or either.
discovered from:
the flow
at odds
intersecting – in mud
camouflaged
left alone – in layers
outsiders inside
where is Oscar? in the
green of
provoked non-resistance
utterly misfitting
branches exhale
blur
cur – rently
Oscar
adored
no question love
where to now,
oh writer
wanderer?
reminded of 3rd outsider same name oskar
kokoschka shifting painting to expressionism
nazis considered degenerate
mud immanent
clarified interior by oscar’s
fine perception to new clay
word play & profound
shapes writer mother woman man
mud imminent
freezes body
rape
fear of suddenly being snatched
body no mud can hide
Hello dear commenters above,
I am finding your observations and flights of writing above so engaging!
And, I am struck by the various turning over of the underbellies you intimate; the subtle yet wounding hidden motives; the camouflage of mud; the necessity for the outsider’s narrative position you each address in your own way. Very rich. Very appreciated.
Betsy
A super-symbiotic contribution by the guest writer! Yay!
So interesting, Betsy, what you say about narrative. That this is the narrative form you have been given. I read an interview with you once where you said that, years ago. This must be 15 years ago, at least. A kind of sigh you made, that the narrative forms you are steeped in are so tricky/different/in between. But look: I’ve forgotten so many other things, and I still remember that sigh!
Barely half an hour ago, I was out and telling friends they MUST read Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride. Rich, resonant and truly remarkable, a book simultaneously Canadian and global, at once both personal and universal.
And now I am home, creating imaginary links between Betsey’s crowded London street where myriad strangers blur into unwanted others and Nancy’s single stranger who coalesces into a being both feared and needed.We have all symbolically dug our own graves in search of safety, and we have all been stuck in the mud of our past, or as Betsey calls it, “being not either nor neither.” Thank you both, for expanding my awareness and enriching my soul.