silent stones, gifts from 3 Kings’ Day
my lovely wife, Priscilla, desires a New York holiday with her daughters after our trip to Florida with Deirdra and her 3 children. On King’s day I heard these stones, silent stones,
Elisabeth in conversation about lupus told Priscilla, her mother,
- Deirdra in Tampa, Florida, has more ‘than one bald spot’ at the at the back of her head; she has multiple lesions
Priscilla did not know.
- Sarah, the middle of the three sisters, told Priscilla that she ‘had to stop running …her legs, toes, big, small are, were ‘hurting so’
We did not know.
- Elisabeth mentioned that her Whole30 plus diet was ‘helping with her inflammation’. She has arthritis and lupus.
We know.
For Beckett’s Molloy, the process of moving a stone from pocket to pocket to pocket to mouth and back to pocket is life: move, remove, suck, absorb, replace and move again. What are these stones? Why this process?
I can’t and won’t answer for another, including Beckett. For myself, the stones are my memories, objects and items; absences and silences. They haunt me; they absorb as they speak or rest. They are silent though. And I can not speak with them within me; within my mouth. Silent. And I can’t hear either as I focus in on their movement from pocket to hand to mouth and back to pocket. Only they matter. Or do they matter? They don’t.
They don’t. Not as long as I can not speak or hear. And I can’t this 3 King’s Day. I echo Molloy here,
Deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed…
Silent stones are about me-may ‘never’ being with and never ‘being without.’ It doesn’t matter which, as long as there is silence.
silent stones.
drafts 