Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2020-09-17 05:59 am
white_oleander) wrote2020-09-17 05:59 am
Entry tags:
Room 210; Thursday Afternoon [09/17].
Astrid came out of her class that day and discovered a letter from her mother; Ingrid had finally written a response to Astrid's last correspondance, the cut-up photo from the history book and just four simple enigmatic and questioning words. She didn't open it right away. She was almost afraid to, as if she wasn't ready for the answer to the question she had asked, even if she didn't imagine it would ever be explained to her, even if she knew Ingrid would never tell her. So she went for a walk around the island to bolster herself, and then she wound up back in her room, with a bag of beignets and a single black to-go coffee, which would probably go untouched on her nightstand as she sat cross-legged on her bed and finally opened the letter.
Dear Astrid,
A girl from Contemporary Literature came to interview me. She wanted to know all about me. We talked for hours; everything I told her was a lie. We are larger than biography, my darling. If anyone should know this it’s you. After all, what is the biography of the spirit? You were an artist’s daughter. You had beauty and wonder, you received genius with your toddler’s applesauce, with your goodnight kiss. Then you had plastic Jesus, you were a princess held hostage in a castle, you were the pampered daughter of a shadow. Now you send me pictures of dead men and make bad poems out of my words, you want to know who am I?
Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest—-where you want to erect a museum.
Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
Mother.
Astrid lowered the letter into her lap, and blinked across the room at the window. She turned her head toward the fanciful Romanesque landscape of her current mural. Took a breath in, released it, then climbed off to the bed to pull out a box of letters from underneath it, found a container that she figured would be large enough, dug her lighter out from the hodgepodge of miscellany in the bedside table drawer.
Then she settled on the floor and slowly started to burn each and every one of the letters, collecting the ashes in the container, where, once she was finished with the last one, she would mix those ashes with copious amounts of glitter and blue-black paint, and spread them all over the wall like the vastness of space.
[[ door and post are open! Ingrid's letter taken from and slightly modified from Chapter 27 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch ]]
Dear Astrid,
A girl from Contemporary Literature came to interview me. She wanted to know all about me. We talked for hours; everything I told her was a lie. We are larger than biography, my darling. If anyone should know this it’s you. After all, what is the biography of the spirit? You were an artist’s daughter. You had beauty and wonder, you received genius with your toddler’s applesauce, with your goodnight kiss. Then you had plastic Jesus, you were a princess held hostage in a castle, you were the pampered daughter of a shadow. Now you send me pictures of dead men and make bad poems out of my words, you want to know who am I?
Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest—-where you want to erect a museum.
Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
Mother.
Astrid lowered the letter into her lap, and blinked across the room at the window. She turned her head toward the fanciful Romanesque landscape of her current mural. Took a breath in, released it, then climbed off to the bed to pull out a box of letters from underneath it, found a container that she figured would be large enough, dug her lighter out from the hodgepodge of miscellany in the bedside table drawer.
Then she settled on the floor and slowly started to burn each and every one of the letters, collecting the ashes in the container, where, once she was finished with the last one, she would mix those ashes with copious amounts of glitter and blue-black paint, and spread them all over the wall like the vastness of space.
[[ door and post are open! Ingrid's letter taken from and slightly modified from Chapter 27 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch ]]
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"Bad day?" Sabine guessed from the doorway.
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She could sort of understand how this might have looked though.
"I needed to get rid of some of this stuff, anyway," she added, looking at the small stack still left to go before her attention shifted to Sabine. "How was work?"
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Still kind of on the open flames in the dorm room.
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"Old letters," she said. "I'm going to mix the ashes with glitter and paint and redo the wall, I think."
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"It is," she admitted, and then, both hating herself for it and reveling in it, she added, "The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge."
And, no, Sabine's own use of a firebird for her own art did not escape her in all this, either.
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What with the symbol and constant reinvention.
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"Not too long," Astrid said, considering the pile of ash and kind of marveling over how so much could produce so little. "I sort of took a long walk after my class today, and then that's when I had the idea."
She'd skipped a few steps in her explanation, but they were...extraneous.
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She turned back to Sabine with a small smile. "Probably not as moving to someone from space, though. "
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"We did space walks in giant hamster balls for science class on Monday," she added, because that part of the inspiration was the easy, mostly normal one. "I think it kind of stuck with me."
She wanted to just wake up every morning for a while with that same weightless endlessness surrounding her again...
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She considered the letters left, and decided to take a small break from the burning, her attention more on Sabine now.
"Have you been working on anything interesting?"
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Of course she did.
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