Day 31.1: Eudora Welty's 'A Still Moment'
Jun. 15th, 2024 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionRapturous.I feel I did not fully understand the story but reading it gave me the feeling of divine beauty. At its heart it is historical fiction but I think infuses the historical figures with such great and powerful fate-movement. Each of the characters' visions bleed the landscape. The white heron is the prism with which we read most sharply about them.
I'm not sure how I can go about writing what I felt because it was if anything religious akin maybe to what I would feel if I were faithful. But the way Mrs. Welty writes about Murrell's constant unmaking (the way he tells those stories and then becomes himself the silent protagonist), and Lorenzo's torrential mission (his efforts to 'transmute a man into an angel', shiver), and Audubon's non-speech and enlargement of the eye to drive the hands and expand the heart, and the heron itself: All. I think I've just experienced a minor religious vision. The moment of the gun's firing - by Audubon! - and the swirl and swirl of each of the three's thoughts, and each of the three's mythologies: Murrell's 'excitement', his 'Mystic Clan' claims of conspiring to foment a slave rebellion like in Haiti, Audubon's being the lost son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Lorenzo Dow's quixotic quests. My my my my so much is beautiful. The story is one long sung song.
I'm probably being extremely silly and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop - that this story isn't special at all. But I have faith. If I cannot believe in anything at all the let me believe in this.
I'm not sure how I can go about writing what I felt because it was if anything religious akin maybe to what I would feel if I were faithful. But the way Mrs. Welty writes about Murrell's constant unmaking (the way he tells those stories and then becomes himself the silent protagonist), and Lorenzo's torrential mission (his efforts to 'transmute a man into an angel', shiver), and Audubon's non-speech and enlargement of the eye to drive the hands and expand the heart, and the heron itself: All. I think I've just experienced a minor religious vision. The moment of the gun's firing - by Audubon! - and the swirl and swirl of each of the three's thoughts, and each of the three's mythologies: Murrell's 'excitement', his 'Mystic Clan' claims of conspiring to foment a slave rebellion like in Haiti, Audubon's being the lost son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Lorenzo Dow's quixotic quests. My my my my so much is beautiful. The story is one long sung song.
I'm probably being extremely silly and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop - that this story isn't special at all. But I have faith. If I cannot believe in anything at all the let me believe in this.
