The possibility of ruin

The following creative thesis is composed of a novella, followed a critical postscript.The novella examines the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi, questioning why the story is very seldom read as a romantic love story between two women.It also engages with the research into the paranoûnal conducted by Lillian and T.G.Hamilton in V/innipeg during the 1920s, using the story of the Hamilton's research to study how haunting functions in the transmission and passage of texts.The novella studies the transmission of stories as they pass through bodies and words.It examines the ruin that lies at the very process of representation, and, while weeping over the ruin of language, the novella also suggests a way of reading and writing that listens to the 'other' who haunts the text.The novella concludes that the ruined space of writing contains a great possibility-it is haunted by the silenced ghosts of the 'other.'Both the novella and the critical postscript conclude that to understand writing as haunted enables one to read and write with a politics that is always searching and listening for the voices of the silenced, oppressed and hidden.-lt-You have all heard this story beþre.It has been written in many languages: Latin, Greek, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, and German, to name only a few.You may have heard it in the most familiar of settings.Perhaps your mother read it to you as she tucked you into bed.Maybe you listened from the hard varnished chairs in a Sunday school room, watching as your teacher stuck felt figures onto a board wrapped with flannel, the characters muzzled with spray-on felt adhesive.Perhaps you were surrounded by friends and family at a wedding.Some of you don't go to Sunday school, and you try to avoid weddíngs, and you are, in some ways, the most interesting.Like a sign on your back that you don't know is there, you carry this story without knowing that it has written itself onto your body.You think you're original, travelling to the far ends of the earth, sending back word that you've fallen in love, sleeping with women, sleepíng with men.You think you're the only one who married for love, who married for protection, who left their lover for the famity who cared too much.And all along, you were only following the text burned into your back, listening to the ink which long ago leached through your meninges, and slipped along your spine, until it reached the shiny, succulent folds of your brain, blinding the pupil ofyour inner eye.Some of you will be horrified to hear this story again, to realize that stories, Iike dolls and puppets, don't always stay where you put them.It ís upsetting, to be sure, when that soff backing wears out, and the characters refuse to stay stuck on the flannel board.It is shocking to realize that when they fell from the board, some of the characters lost their muules and now they won't stop talking about how tight it was, compressed between the letters on either side of those tissue paper pages.Like babies with new sounds, they are elated with their fresh words, rolling them around in their mouths like a sweet candy, savouring their texture, flavour, scent.How funny it is, they laugh, that no one wrote about..nnd they tell stories until they are laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their faces, and they are weeping, weeping with how their captivity was translated as love, how desperation rewrote itself as wisdom, how the years of hunger, rape and manipulation could ever be described as "perfect" and "idylicl."They weep until they have to breathe in great heaving gulps, breathing life into those spaces that were never traced with a quill, never did get typeset, are still waiting to be translated ínto ones and zeros and printed with lasers or a matrix of dots.., 1923 -3-The room is cold, and her fingers are stiff as she adjusts the lenses of the camera.A narrow slat of light gleams into the room from the edge of the black paper covering the windows.Her husband is sitting at a small table, numbering sheets of paper in the bottom corner.A tiny woman, Elizabeth, is sitting beside him, drinking a cup of tea."Are you ready?" she asks Elizabeth.The man stops numbering the pages, and moves closer to Elizabeth.Elizabeth closes her eyes, and starts to breathe deeply.The man glances at his watch.Elizabeth starts to brush her hands over her face, muttering about cobwebs.She is not pleased, purses her mouth and blows over her face.Elizabeth's movements grow heavy.Her hands raise slowly into the air.The man reaches up to guide her arms downwards, but they will not move.Catatonic rigidity, he notes.He glances at the camera, and his wife opens the shutter.He tries again to move Elizabeth's arms.This innipeg is a city of white.Any memories of green fields that ripen into purples, reds and deep yellows, have been frozen inside a fresh coat of white that paints the city from sidewalk to rooftop.Considering the prevalence of white, it is somewhat remarkable that most Winnipeggers do not comment on this colour.Like readers who have been taught to look past the white spaces of the page and focus, instead, on the letters and dots that have been carefully pressed onto the paper, Winnipeggers desperately look for anything to distract them from white.If pressed to comment on something other than the streets, which are carefully cleared of white, they will remark on the thin blues and pinks that line the sky in the late morning, when the elbow of the sun makes a brief gesture over the city, and again in the late afternoon, when it retracts its half-hearted gift.On the one hand, this reluctance to look at white is understandable.As anyone who lives in the North knows, white can blind you.The first stage of snow blindness begins when the eye becomes tired of looking for any lines, whatsoever, and even the faintest shadows dissolve.At this point, people begin to walk with their hands in front of their body, ready to break their fall, as they have no way of knowing whether the next step will require them to sidle downwards or press uphill.The second stage of snow blinding begins, somewhat ironically, when the eyes begin to see things that are not there.A polished white expanse gives birth to lakes, suns, and birds, which dapple only the landscape of the eye.Snow blindness is generally curable-patients may need to rest in dark rooms or wear eye patches and dark glasses for a few days.Occasionally, however, these same people will close their eyes, hoping to see those lakes and suns that only exist in the memory of their blindness.1 On the other hand, white sometimes arrives as relief.Yards of broken bicycles and stray bottles are painted in the same all-purpose colour as their neighbours' manicured yards.Initially the bicycles and bottles become misshapen lumps, but after a few blizzards they fade from sight entirely, rusting, frozen artefacts in a layered bank of white.Winnipeggers, like many other Canadians, devote a great deal of effort trying to domesticate white: they wield shovels and snow blowers and plows, loading snow onto garbage trucks and hauling it out of the city limits.When Winnipeggers talk, they prefer to concentrate on the words that fall from their lips, instead of paying attention to the wilds of white that billow from their mouths.They civili ze the white that they can'r remove, building forts, roads, men, and ammunition.But soon the prairie wind, with its wide open arms, will welcome these white structures back, for white does not like to be domesticated-it escapes wherever possible, through chimneys, dryer vents and mufflers.Even in suûuner, when Winnipeg glows green with hope, and white evaporates from memory as a forgotten dream, white continues to present itself without warning: it will show itself in the creak of a watermelon, in the gleam of a new potato pushing out of the shadowy earth, between the letters of a book left open in the sun.But most people do not remember the white of summer, as they have become so accustomed to looking over, through and away from this colour.For these reasons, it has never surprised me that the Hamilton house was painted white.Built on Henderson Highway, across the street from the Elmwood cemetery, the Hamilton House is an old, white, three-story house which was built in 1910 for Dr. T.G.Hamilton and his family.T.G., as everyone called him, had his medical office on the holding hands are a group of Mennonites, and they are pronouncing the house haunt-free.This is important, because they plan to run a non-profit gift store in this house, selling crafts from all over the world.For their way of thinking, away of thinking that acknowledges only the white that comes, at least originally, from the robes of the pope and his pulpit, it is a commendable goal.It is no good to be scared while you are selling carvings from Zimbabwe, weavings from El Salvador, chess sets from Bengali, beaded moccasins from northern Manitoba.At the moment only one of the second floor suites is occupied.The tenant's name is Ruth Reimer, and when she saw this picture, she rolled her eyes and laughed.The tenant's uncle, one of the men who runs the gift shop and who encouraged her to rent this apartment, is in the picture, his eyes closed and earnest.Ruth borrowed the picture from her uncle, and is now hard-pressed to give it back, since a couple of weeks ago, while talking on the phone, she absentmindedly drew black-marker moustaches and beards on the praying Mennonites, and Casper-like ghosts peering from the windows.She keeps the augmented photo on her fridge and occasionally feels a faint sense of horror that she, the daughter of a Mennonite pastor, has desecrated this picture of prayer.She didn't know about the house's reputation when she moved into her apartment, and some days she looks at the picture, and wishes that her uncle would have thought to inform her about the house's history before she moved in.And yet, when I remember th

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.