If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbor to your hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle. You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.
I could hardly glance at you before marriage never touch you — your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers. I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them over smoking tar, helped the honey gatherers…
When we swam once I touched you in water and our bodies remained free, you could hold me and be blind of smell. You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.
You touched your belly to my hands in the dry air and said I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife. Smell me.
It is conceivable that the artist might once again be completely integrated in society as he was in the Middle Ages. Today he is hardly likely to find himself unless he is a non-conformist and a rebel. To say this is neither dangerous nor new. It is what society really expects of its artists. For today the artist has, whether he likes it or not, inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist, and bonze. How could such a man be free? How can he really “find himself” if he plays a role that society has predetermined for him? The freedom of the artist is to be sought precisely in the choice of his work and not in the choice of the role as “artist” which society asks him to play. – Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, these two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” —Albert Camus
“I hate it if I notice that I like something, if I am able to do something, so that I just have to repeat it, that it could become a habit. Then I stop immediately. Also if it threatens to become beautiful.”
Roth drew on the similarity between chocolate and feces in appearance and no doubt saw his works as coming to fruition when they turned rancid. Shit Hare (1975), which embodies the organic process of decay, illustrates some of Roth’s subversive tendencies. Pressed into the shape of a chocolate Easter bunny, rabbit excrement reverses the viewer’s response, turning an initial attraction into revulsion. Ironically, the piece was commissioned by Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery because Roth had been working with food. The maverick Roth, however, not wanting to deliver what was expected of him, instead presented food’s opposite. Having taught for a short period (1968–1971) at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Joseph Beuys was his colleague, Roth also saw the commission as an opportunity for a biting commentary on the artist-prophet.
For Roth, food and other organic materials were a way to defy established categories and frustrate those who wished to nail down his work and his identity. He did, after all, refer to museums as “funeral homes,” implying that once art was in a museum, it was on its way to burial in the archives of history.
Adding to that, rabbit excrement is used as a fertilizer—and we all know how “prolific” bunnies are—so Roth’s Shit Hare performs a weird double inversion to gesture back to the hare’s role as a fertility symbol connected to the Easter holiday.
The model Cortazar uses in Hopscotch gives me hope that it is possible to subvert linearity in a text — or that a text can be both text and texts. It is a beautiful and brilliant book. Though my work is not specifically concerned with “telling stories,” I found this book incredibly generative for me as a writer.
