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The Imaginary Iceberg

...Verbum Caro Factum Est...

...The land of writing, icebergs and other partitioned things...
Ramblings from a Distant Mind

It is not fiction...

We'd rather have the iceburg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel. Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock and all the sea were moving marble. We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship; we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea as the snow lies undissolved upon the water. O solemn, floating field, are you aware an iceberg takes repose with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for. The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles correct elliptics in the sky. This is the scene where he who treads the boards is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain is light enough to rise on finest ropes that airy twists of snow provide. The wits of these white peaks spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within. Like jewelry from a grave it saves itself perpetually and adorns only itself, perhaps the snows which so surprise us lying on the sea. Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off where waves give in to one another's waves and clouds run in a warmer sky. Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, air, erected indivisible.

-Elizabeth Bishop, "The Imaginary Iceberg"

Why this journaling?

I see this space as an Imaginary Iceberg named after a medieval saint Christina Mirabilis or better known as Christina the Astonishing (also a song by Nick Cave). This name was bestowed upon me by my former teacher of medieval literature, Gail Gibson (Davidson College). I see this identity as that which resides deep within me (the soul or whatever other name). Like a phoenix rising out of the ash, my astonishing feat was to die and come back to live again. Astonishing. Mirabilis.

Looking Outside the Ship

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Email: mmirabilis@gmail.com