This Is Christmas Metazen

“Me too,” said Maggie. “I’m drinking whiskey.”

“I’m alone,” said Steve.

“Alone,” said Deirdre.

“Alone,” said Wang.

“I want to read something,” said Steve. “I’ll read something, out loud.”

“Do it,” said Deirdre.

“If I do it, will you do it?”

“Sure.”

“OK,” said Steve. “Here is a quote from Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood: ‘Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn’t looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.’”

“Although she was looking all the time,” said Richard.

“I love that,” said Ana. “Me too,” said Richard.

“Your quote made me think of another,” said Richard. “In Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ when Gabriel realizes how much that boy had loved his wife years ago, loved her so much that he died for her.

‘Generous tears flled Gabriel’s eyes,’ it says. ‘He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.’” “’What is the phrase for the moon?’” Deirdre said. “Virginia Woolf. The Waves.”

“Yes!” said Steve. “‘And the phrase for love?’” Deirdre said. “‘By what name are we to call death? I do not know.’”

“Yes,” said Steve. “‘I need a little language such as lovers use,’” Deirdre said, “‘words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and fnd their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.’”

“Yes,” said Richard. “‘When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the foor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.’”