Paper, Scissors, Rock — Continues with a Fushigi* Cave — 2010.12.19

I began Paper, Scissors, Rock on 2010.10.06. I just finished Part II "Evidence," and though I had strong ambivalence about this book when I began it, it is beginning to grow on me. In the closing balance of Part II the description of the general strike was very compelling. The moving between perspectives and time worked very well.

But I have come to blog the 2nd fushigi this book has provided within  30 pages. It begins with my reading, this afternoon, an e.mail that I received from MH, a Goodreads friend, two days ago:



Within the e.mail MH links me to a story she wrote, called 'Bear.' It is an excellent short story about a woman living with a golden furred bear in a cave. I highly recommend it. It has some very nice imagery, and a great feel to it. For example:

Day Twenty-one

I’ve set up housekeeping and Bear loves to watch. I made a pine broom. I sweep the hard dirt floor. There are bones from the bodies of small animals that came here to be eaten. Bear is happy about this. He tells me this by carving an X on one of the tiny skulls. He says that a mountain cat must have lived here and that her maternal power and the power of her eating small animals fill the place. All of this is still in the cave and don’t I feel it?

“No,” I say.

Later, after eating supper, I picked up Paper, Scissors, Rock and finished the balance of Part II "Evidence." This is a well written chapter that culminates with a general strike being broken in small town Canada by government sanctioned and paid violence. The actions within this chapter switch between the denouement of the strike being broken and the experiences of the narrator in a later time reflecting on it — the writing is complicated. However, it closes with:

Jane runs a hand across the soft moss and remembers. Removes her shoes and lays her feet on the moss. Remembers. A cave. The cave. She scrambles down the path to the water, turns left and leaps from rock to rock. Up behind the old pump, climbing, childlike. Hand food hand foot. Sliding sideways on her ass. A cleft in the rock. The cave. Gene. Gene is here, somehow, in the cave. She climbs in. A cleft in the rock. Slate. Lava rock. Cold. Cool moss beneath her. Soft.
"Gene," she says, faltering. "I found the cave."
... Listen. "You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine." Up up up sky and trees.
Blue.
Safe cave.
Cheek against. Stone. Cold.
Tonight.
Tonight maybe Jane will walk to the phone booth across from the beach, put in the quarters she has been saving and call the wild woman, back here in the big city where everything is always happening. Maybe Jane will tell her about trees and children, moss and caves, about Clementine and her father. "Who knows," says Jane quietly, 'maybe she'll be listening"(57).

So, as you can see, there is the nice 'cave'-link in the two stories. But also a bit more. In Paper, Scissors, Rock Jane is to 'call the wild woman, ...'[my emphasis].

From 'Bear' there is a similar description given to a women. From "Bear", picking up from where 'Bear' left us.

No,” I say.

Bear will not let me take the bones out of the cave. He lets me arrange them in a pattern around the cave’s perimeter. He says he never thought of that and that I am a clever witch.

And finally, while the writing between the two snippets is very different, you will find that the feel is similar in a way. Not the same, but that they evoked, for me anyone, a similar feeling.