The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

Author:Kathryn Davis [Davis, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

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BECAUSE, of course, anything can happen in a dream. A fierce old woman can be turned into a soft and trusting creature; she can be made to act in ways which betray her true nature. In a dream the dead can come back to life, and make you do things you’d never have done when they were still alive. They can make you let them touch you, make you open your body to them. They can make you doubt your own true nature, leave you lying there on your bed sick with spent desire for something you never thought you wanted in the first place. How many times did Helle show up in my dreams, her skin like a sheet of water, thin and clear, an insufficient disguise for the glassy stalk of her will? Watery hands, watery mouth, turning suddenly, unexpectedly, to soft, pliant flesh. I could never resist her, whereas when I dreamed about Sam there was always an impediment to passion, a missing body part, an entire body disintegrating into vapor, thin air. Helle, I’m sure, would have seen this as yet another piece of proof that there was nothing substantial about sex, that it was yet another of the waking dreams we are afflicted with, and given its foundation in the physical world, a particularly insidious one. “There is no greed,” she told me, “worse than the body’s.” The body, so greedy for transport, simultaneously longed to remain intact, a greedy bag of skin, forever and ever. Music, Helle said, alone of all the arts, could not only replicate but also remedy this condition. This was due to the fact that music—unlike a book, a painting, or a piece of sculpture (which she called “puppet droppings”)—didn’t exist as matter, nor did it require the presence of a material body to register its existence.

As for the obvious objections to this scheme—the role played by the ears, for instance, or by the musicians and their instruments, not to mention the overwhelming materiality of an opera house, its sets, costumes, and lights—wasn’t that, when you got right down to it, exactly Helle’s point? Body and spirit, she said. Naturally the senses played a part. They were like doorways to the mind, to its boglike furrows and folds, grayish, unfurnished. So you might provide the onstage image of a single ghostly jib sail, the moon’s light filtered through it. Three singers. The doors open and there is the stage, magically reduced in size, magically lodged in the boglike landscape of your mind. Stuck, really. It isn’t until the music begins that you recognize the existence of another doorway; it’s the music which calls that doorway into being, the music which enters through it, the music which suggests a way out. Unlike sex, Helle said.

Thus I came to understand the guiding principle behind The Harrowing of Lahloo, its musical structure all entrances and exits, just like Helle’s face when she would talk about her struggles composing it, the face of a

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