dantejanvier-blog

[dantejanvier-blog]

WIP Segment

The gunmetal sky hung oval shaped on a plane of leaning grasses, they oscillated between earth and the clouded air. An Oval door gave way to the scene within, men in long, draping garb, men in knee high boots, men armed with swords, staffs, and scripture; a brace of columns gave way to the rhombuses of light piercing the floor. The lady carried her bags down the spiral staircase, she flickered, skipping a frame. A ivory light hung at the round room’s vertex; a match struck, a puff of smoke; the lamp’s reflection; the washed out sliver of window light filling the curtain like a vial of iced water, all conspiring to cut through the shadowy shapes. A pair of piercing Slavic eyes, an impenetrably bearded half-face, peering across to a counterpart yet revealed. Cyrillic interruption. The man with the light eyes put his hand around the bare arm of the bashful woman, her giving less than enough room to the bald, mustachioed man glancing admirably, head crushed by another in a three-piece; the ladies crowded with their smiles and interest at the gravity of the ingenue.

It was remarkable to me at the time how much the girl on screen resembled Diorbhorguil. I couldn’t help but glance at her through the dark with half an eye, I wondered if she felt similarly. The round, jejune face infrequently lit by the scenes playing out in front of us stayed fixated. I always was distracted, and in large part capable of taking in multitudes. Dior was the other type of person, a sort of completest offering herself to one thing at a time. She was a glaring contrast to Amandine. Where my girlfriend was innocent, somewhat naive, hopeful, and ultimately generous with her curiosities, Dior gave the impression of experience, sexual or otherwise, rightfully cynical in light of the war her old continent lived through, and reserved in the manner of a lady who chose her words carefully. Yet the two shared something important that I would not find out until later.

[dantejanvier-blog]

Polina Darrow

Polina Darrow worked her way back slowly to the apartment on Fifth, not sure what, if any connection to Claire might still remain. There had been a clearing of a lifelong fog. There had been the revelation of her real last name. There had been Maxim’s failed suicide. The Damoclean tumult loomed. She had been waiting for a manifested distraction.

She was cloaked in a pall of bodies, they could not look through her and see the immense dread. Nor could they talk to her, for she was a masterful psychic architect, walling herself off from their barbaric inquiries, from small talk, from intimacy, and lust. The hotel and residences began to rise higher as though peering at her above the treeline. Precisely at the moment where she resigned herself to heading up, without the conciliatory plan she hoped to formulate, a large man, likely a Scot, judging from apricot hair and the burr in his throat made apparent in excusing himself, crashed into her. In a few words she had her detour, and they would spend the next few hours together, putting off reunion with Claire until long after she returned from her next trip to the Marais. 

[dantejanvier-blog]

A house risen from verdant

Foliage, lined with eyes peering,

Wings that cut the air in two.

Candlelight shakes in absence;

In absence, she broods, in want; 

Vermillion window-sill, and walls

She rages at the moon both can see,

And maybe he can feel her trembling

In the alabaster moons-glow.

Alone in the house, airless rooms

Void of the organ’s sound

Banished to a state of tranquil

Stripped of chattering, long-thoughted,Imbecilic suits and gowns.

She would run to the heavy door

Not mirrored by his presence,

Mimicking a woman manifested

In desire and moot designs.He would conjure her deftly

In the moments of bitter need

In waterlogged boots, iced hearts,

Treble miseries: severed limb,

Forsaken crimson blood, agonized

Mouths of the younger.

She would pirouette across

Barbed wire, gas cloud, mortar;

She would be sun blasting through

Fog of humanity, fog of waste.

And yet in the trenches, battle pressed,

He would not feel her touch,

Electric and symphonic in hand.

Amandine quivered in the wispy willow,

William watched from the quiet armory.

The cavalry rushed on defiant

Of hatred and dissolved hope,

Across bullet strewn land

Commandeered in struggle,

Muddy from rain washed blood,

Silt and ground bone once moonlit.

The horses rearing and rushing

Like sand smeared ships dancing,

As the men lay shattered.

William saw her in the distance again,

Her blue eyes piercing through

Layer after layer of misery;

Their stories written on the surface

Of immense bubbles contracting

Pulsating, creating a morbid Human foam, tinted in ruby,

Tinted in broad and unquenchable woe.   

- Dante Janvier ‘19

[dantejanvier-blog]

Oval doorway, triple gray shadow, sole point of alabaster lamp-light; a man ponders the absence of company. Temporary rhombuses of summer crawl along the wood-grain. Cigar smoke curling up like fiddleheads. The bird keeps circling, never to land on his sill. The room itself has relationship to them. The piano also longs for her. There is a melody left unplayed, left to hang in the space between. He can only wonder if death can bring him closer, just to make her think of him again. He resolves to that end, once the bluebird shows it’s powdered peach breast on that sill.

[dantejanvier-blog]

An Everpresent Eidolon

Lizaveta Nadyovna Sheremetev is the first in a series of eidola I am creating. The concept is somewhat arcane but very simple. It has Homeric and Euripidean literary origins but its concept is likely much older than that. The Eidolon is an idealized image of someone, which usually appears like a spirit or a phantom, not quite a ghost, more like a doppelganger or a copy of sorts. In Homer, Helen of Troy is merely an eidolon of Helen of Sparta who herself is a full fledged goddess, Daughter of Zeus, and while it might be in dispute, likely Daughter of Nemesis. Helen in Troy is a fabrication, derived from Helen in Sparta, and thus part her, part not her. This concept is fascinating and could certainly be the impetus for a unique literary character. 

Lizaveta appears to the protagonist of a novel I am writing. For the purposes of keeping things largely spoiler free in this forum, I will not reveal which story that is (and it is possible it wont see the light of day anyhow), nor will I reveal much about her associations with characters beyond the basics. Though the concept of her character is important to the overall project of the literature I want to create, and at its most basic level, something that occurs in all of it.

As she is drawn currently, she is a White Emigre, a Russian immigrant in the post revolutionary era, who objected to the Bolsheviks, and came to Boston. She was from the aristocratic class, and tells her counterpart a very tragic story of the presumed loss of most of her family. She happened not to be at the family estate when it was raided, and had been tipped off in the immediate aftermath by her great uncle who helped smuggle her to the west. She falls precipitously, with no access to the power stripped of her family, and in her mid twenties is working as a high class escort among the Elite class of Boston and New York. Her impeccable education in Russia, and her wild beauty make her quite desirable, and while she generally does not like her work, she identifies her attraction to it as a rejection of the meticulous grooming she grew up in. 

The interesting part about her character is that she is an eidolon, in the way I am interpreting it. She is a phantom that only appears to every protagonist I will write about, presumably she appears to everyone in some way, but from a literary perspective her relationship to protagonists is the only one that is shown. Lizaveta is one image of billions, like light from a prism, displayed from a single source set upon the world in the time of Homer. She will represent an idealized form of something personal for a protagonist, and will play roles from nearly invisible to integral to a plot.