Girl on canal
Absently, he sat there watching and musing on the shadows her movements cast across the rippling water: a muted play of undulating chiaroscuro which disturbed the uniform glare of the sun's highlights. How different her life was from the hurried and harried existence lived in America!Like Haidée, can she be a rescuer from this shipwreck called modern life?
The maze of canals that crisscrossed the alluvial plain of the Mekong left a shadow on the senses. It was hard to separate what was real from what was not. That was part of the land's liberating effect: to be relieved of the Occidental's paranoiac, panic compulsion always to insist upon distinguishing the real from the imagined. Ah, to discover the integrative values of a diffuse mental state! Now, that was something worth writing home about. Capitulating to the landscape.
Riparian splendor is the landform eructed in rills, by loosing loam, by keening forth ripply rivulets borne on distant mountain rain.
Oh, Nature's profligate almoner! A river, a migratory nectary, an itinerant roam inspiriting arboreal hodgepodge, aquacade, vale of vegetal nourishment.
But no prosy tendentiousness, no ripsnorter of a plea, will wallop the opportunistic scourge threatening these luxuriant banks.
He saw that she had stopped washing and was staring at him. Lucidly lambent look. Their gaze locked, inducing empathic vibrations. . . or was he just imagining it?
Ohoho! but dear Comus always in his severed nymph a feast for the senses will find. Sabrina. . . Sabrina. . .
The mutual fascination began to embarrass each of them; for fifteen minutes, they had not stopped eying each other. No words had been spoken, no gestures other than a smile had been exchanged. His emotions, nonetheless, had reached an intensity he found hard to understand. Goddamned! how he hated the fucked-up ambivalences of his present situation. Long since totally disenchanted by the panoply of spiritually empty life options provided by modern civilization, he could not help identifying with this girl and her acute dependencies on the natural rhythms of her environment. The participatory mystique those dependencies inculcated and represented constituted an inner liberation he had been flatly denied by his own culture. It was demanded of him that his I-sense be projected into action in the life-world in just such a way that a feeling of participation in the processes of nature be completely denied him. Her I-sense, on the other hand, was diffuse, and readily read in the natural world around her. Oh, the place, the intelligence of place! Habitus is projected-introjected as Butor's le génie du lieu. This was patently apparent from the ritualistic approach her animistic people took to their labors.