A Brief Statement on Behalf of the Bereft Mother

She was the light of my life, my only child,

and now I live in darkness.

I exist but I am not alive.

There is never a day

when she is not my first thought

when I awake.

I feel like my heart has broken into a thousand pieces.

I can’t believe she will never walk through

our door alive again.

Never will I forget her.

Not until the end of my life.

There is no reason on God’s earth for this.

Honest to God,

I wish there was justice.

The last time I prayed was in the Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral where all the statues in their niches and the ‘superstitious’ shrines are destroyed. They were smashed by the iconoclasts following the Dissolution. It’s a barren, soulless spot to choose for prayer. I wonder what Jung would have thought?

The prayer is from        

The Three-Tiered Grave        

Sister Morphine (2008)         

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

An Oxbridge Tragedy . . .

             Eyes dart, evade. Cheeks flush. “Must dash, I’ve
             barely time for my next viva.”
             She never looked quite so alive
             as when they dragged her from the river.

  Catherine Eisner                  

Words in Time of Pestilence . . . Plague: Are Allegorical Pandemics Instructive? Albert Camus and Kurt Vonnegut.

The spikes on the outer edge of the COVID-19 virus particles
resemble a crown, bestowing on the disease its potent name.

The Plague (La Peste) a classic existentialist novel that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It poses a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. An allegory of stoic resilience, charged by hope more than faith, the novel charts the challenges faced by individuals unsustained by any communal ideology other than a sense of duty, fellow feeling and the will to live.

La Peste by Albert Camus,

a philosophical novel

published 1947 

ICE-9: An alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature, whose crystals cause all the water in the world’s seas, rivers, and groundwater to turn into ice-nine. The freezing of the world’s seas at once causes illimitable catastrophes from a causal chain driving violent storms and tornadoes that ravage the Earth’s terrain.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, 

a science fiction novel

published 1963

COVID-19: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), previously known by the provisional name 2019 novel coronavirus, is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA (ribonucleic acid) virus. It is contagious in humans and is the cause of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has been designated a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization.

Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...

                        Brightness falls from the air, 
                        Queens have died young and fair, 
                        Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. 
                        I am sick, I must die:
                        Lord, have mercy on us. 

Postscript:

One can predict that a catastrophe on the scale of Coronavirus will spawn reflexive cinema and even now developers are in intense conclave in Hollywood. It is said that the movie, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a 2004 drama directed by Mary McGuckian, was a consolatory narrative in response to the 2001 9/11 attack on The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey_(2004_film)

A Visit Recalled: Dame Edith Sitwell.

‘Chocolate?’
I had foolishly arrived with a scarce box of fancy liqueur chocs.
‘My dear, the last time 
                                       I ate
                                            chocolate
                                                  was Nineteen Twenty-Eight.’
The half-smile of the poetess was 
                                       matched only by her half-rhyme.
Points of light flashed from a large blue agate
set on one of the rings 
                                      with which her fingers were laden.
Bangles jangled as the empress extended her hand with
                                      a flourish
                                            as though it were some form
                                                  of impish
                                                        sabre-rattling at the whim
of a capricious potentate.
                                      ‘Mais non . . . !’
She selected a chocolate-coated fragment the size of a crumb.
‘. . . Maybe I’ll simply choose the makeweight 
                                      en hommage à la poésie concrète!’

‘She was impressively grand, quite eccentric . . . 
She wore her usual loose, dramatic robes, her high,
Plantagenet headdress. Her lovely hands were
covered with the most beautiful rings I had ever
seen actually worn: they were deep, deep, coloured
stones — aquamarines, blue agates, large and
pool-like.’ (A Drink* with Dame Edith by
Muriel Spark. Literary Review. February 1997.)

Special Note: A ‘makeweight’ was, according to custom, a small, very thin, tablet of pure chocolate added, as occasion demanded, to a box of chocolates to meet trading standards when the tray was underweight.

*Dame Edith’s favourite tipple was, apparently, Gin-and-Pineapple-Juice.


See also: Variation on a Theme by Edna St. Vincent Millay
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/variation-on-theme-by-edna-st-vincent.html

See also: Premature embalmment of anti-art
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/dotty-premature-embalmment-of-anti-art.html

See also: Poésie trouvée, the unsought text
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/colour-blind.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html