ShopDreamUp AI ArtDreamUp
Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Growing up, the drafting table was a strange contraption lording over the basement and over the crown of her then small head. As she slowly came to understand the table's function, it came to teach her that A) work and home are inseparable, and B) the world is flat. Skyscrapers collapse into thin piles of layered printer paper and torn, pen-marked transparency sheets. Mountains and forests reduce to stacked shapes. Fathers compile into cramped calendars.
Now the early lessons are thoroughly embedded. Art and architecture are inseparable in her mind. The easel is her own table, similar to a draughtsman's and yet completely different in the ways that matter. She is not a draughtswoman or a designer. Instead, exactly like children imitate their parents naïvely, she plays at being an architect, mimicking the actions but doing them backwards. Architects use flat means to create real objects. She takes real objects and recreates them as flat.
Buildings, trees, cliffs, clouds, the figure, the animal, love: they are as substantial as shadows on the empty playroom floor. The subject of the image isn't important. It's about experiencing that three-dimensional subject through flatness, about being immersed in flatness, about fasting from life and repeating the ritual until there is finally a paper girl who can link hands with the paper father.
It's about being the architect's daughter.
Now the early lessons are thoroughly embedded. Art and architecture are inseparable in her mind. The easel is her own table, similar to a draughtsman's and yet completely different in the ways that matter. She is not a draughtswoman or a designer. Instead, exactly like children imitate their parents naïvely, she plays at being an architect, mimicking the actions but doing them backwards. Architects use flat means to create real objects. She takes real objects and recreates them as flat.
Buildings, trees, cliffs, clouds, the figure, the animal, love: they are as substantial as shadows on the empty playroom floor. The subject of the image isn't important. It's about experiencing that three-dimensional subject through flatness, about being immersed in flatness, about fasting from life and repeating the ritual until there is finally a paper girl who can link hands with the paper father.
It's about being the architect's daughter.
Literature
For My Daughter
Dear daughter-I-do-not-have-yet,
You will be my perfect. You will be my proudest moments in one small person. You will be made in love, or maybe anger, or maybe even desperation. But that won't matter. What matters is what you will be made into.
You will have Daddy's hair and his nose, and my eyes and my smile, the smile that happens not because someone with a camera told you to, but because you're genuinely happy. But you will have your very own heart and will be full of all the things that give you your you-ness. Whether you sing in the bath or make Valentines for everyone in your class or give your last homemade chocolate chip cookie to
Literature
100 Years Minus a Day
I am strong because I am weak.
The last time we fought, she punched me in the chest. Her knuckles broke, but my heart shattered like ice.
I've learned that there's more to strength than muscles.
I'm beautiful because I know my flaws.
There are girls that hide their beauty, and there are girls that flaunt it. She is neither.
She wears ripped-up Converse and old clothes. She smudges her mascara and still captures boys' hearts with her playful smile.
I'm a lover because I'm a fighter.
Her heart beats like a war drum. She plays with war paint and she'll fight for love.
Didn't you ever wonder why Cupid's arrow is stained with blood?
I'm f
Literature
Recipe for Disaster
196 Nations
1 Nuclear Strike
1 Retaliation Maneuver
Zero Diplomacy
6 Billion Dead
Don't bother baking -
the radiation will take care of it.
Suggested Collections
Featured in Groups
Thoughts.
One of my poiēma. That's a wonderfully slippery word I've adopted for the prose pieces I catch harboring runaway poems.
_._._
EDIT 9/01/11: Daily Lit Deviation? Whoops. I kind of let this account slide a teensy bit when I started working full time, and thus I completely missed the fact that I got another DLD...in July. That may be a new personal record for obliviousness. But AWESOME!
I'll be moving this to my main account (=ErrantCrow) when I have some reorganization time. In the meantime, feel free to check out my other DLD (also a Daily Deviation) on my main account here:
Happy reading.
_._._
I'd love some feedback on this. The evil critic in me whispers that it starts too slowly. I also wonder how much, if any, of the daughter shows through. Is she sympathetic? Is she real? The piece is written minimally, and part of me says it fits to write it that way, but I worry that too much has been lost in the...flatness. Thoughts?
lit.fish
(recent critique: [link] )
One of my poiēma. That's a wonderfully slippery word I've adopted for the prose pieces I catch harboring runaway poems.
_._._
EDIT 9/01/11: Daily Lit Deviation? Whoops. I kind of let this account slide a teensy bit when I started working full time, and thus I completely missed the fact that I got another DLD...in July. That may be a new personal record for obliviousness. But AWESOME!
I'll be moving this to my main account (=ErrantCrow) when I have some reorganization time. In the meantime, feel free to check out my other DLD (also a Daily Deviation) on my main account here:
Needs Saying It's always the shy ones. Memories, that is. They hang back, letting bright moments of cartoons and Christmases hold your entire attention so they can creep away to a forgotten mental corner. They don't want your reverie; they want to be left alone.
Some memories shouldn't be.
Some have something needs saying.
When I was eight, I thought I was a horrible child. I was greedy and selfish, wouldn't eat anything I was given, treated guest children like they were stupid, ran off three of my aunt's maids, ran out the hot bath water, could have gotten my cousin killed, and very nearly did the same for myself.
Perspective is funny that wa
Happy reading.
_._._
I'd love some feedback on this. The evil critic in me whispers that it starts too slowly. I also wonder how much, if any, of the daughter shows through. Is she sympathetic? Is she real? The piece is written minimally, and part of me says it fits to write it that way, but I worry that too much has been lost in the...flatness. Thoughts?
lit.fish
(recent critique: [link] )
© 2011 - 2024 LittlestFish
Comments13
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
This is brilliantly and deeply written, well done. Congrats on your DLD!