(N+7)

Jack and Jill went up the hilum to fetch a painted bunting of water blister
Jack fell down and broke his crown lens
And Jill came tumbling after.
Up got Jack, and homemaker did trot as fast as he could canter
He went to Bedivere and bound his header
With vino and brown paper hangings.

Pataphor

Everything I know, everything I am, everything that has and everything that will is here in my shell. My pearly white shell protects the slimy, stenched blob that is only mine. It is my creation, under my control. Everyone has there own, but only some utilize it.

The Invention of Morel

Beautifully Simplistic. A love story of such obsession, this book idealizes women and there power of seduction that is all consuming. Through reading our narrator gradually fall in love with the women, Faustine, I too become mesmerized. I imagine that she mocks the beauty of 1930s temptress Louise Brooks, a known obsession of our author Adolfo Bioy Casares. To never touch or talk to our fantasy, but to only watch does portray a stalker status. But the connection and pity you feel for our narrator, the way Bioy rights of our narrators longing for companionship, turns this “stalking” into an admiration of great love. In the beginning of the book, I too looked forward to the time she spent at the beach alone, hoping only that she would respond. He idealized her. She was elegance. He would get carried away with himself as he did throughout the book in moments of excitement.

 All his thoughts would come at you with such passion and such speed only to be concluded at the end with such concrete distinct answers. I enjoyed following the narrator through his rants of questioning, just so I could hear the simplicity and distinction of his conclusion. He always has a conclusion, whether true or fantasized. His conclusions in the beginning were nowhere close to what he overheard that night of Morel’s speech, nowhere close to anything I would have guessed either. This invention of Morel’s is fantastical, and only until you discover this do the previous pages fall together. Bioy foreshadows beautifully, with scenes and paragraphs that only makes sense after the invention is discovered. It creates an “a ha!” or “of course!” sense of thinking. I was waiting for all these pieces to fall together, for the meaning behind the impenetrable life of this group on the hill. This answer for the narrator’s lack of connection was nothing I could have guessed and everything it should have been. Morel’s machine of artificial images enacting the events of a recorded time is powerful. I don’t yet understand if Morel meant to steal the soul of ones created, causing the slow degradation of any recorded. I knew he wanted to portray the senses of those images, to live in an eternal happiness but the conclusion of death I don’t think was thought through. The power of this machine amazed me, to be able to recreate the moon, temperature, walls, touch and thought was immense. What was greater was that these recreations were unyielding. I did not truly believe the stability of these projections until our narrator was trapped in the room of blue tile, the room where the machine was held. I feared his death.

I adore the conclusion of our narrator. He wanted nothing more than to live with Faustine, a past image, dead in reality. He studied her every move and recorded himself into her life artistically enough to appear together that week. I wondered of the ability of the machine to record a prior recording. To loop and play the narrators production of himself imposed onto the projection itself is questionable. But I accept it, a beautiful conclusion to an almost heart aching book.