Mother & Child, Cycles of Creation

A body of work – addition. I just finished reading Carole Maso’s novel, Mother & Child. I have read all nine of her other books, so can truthfully say that I have read her body of work, in book form. Mother & Child took me a while to read, though as always with her writing, I found that finding the moments to sink into the lilting rhythms was the most satisfying way to appreciate the images, the “singing narrative.” The reading itself becomes almost a cradling, a sense of lullaby, both muted and softly incoherent at times, lucid as starlight on a cold night in other moments. I was carried along with the rhythm and pace of the Spiegelpalais, and the dreaming and waking images Maso created of the mother and child’s interaction, their growth cycles and changes, how experience and knowledge become a way of life as love shown, lived.

I now have one more image of how we create our reality, each of us, individual and collective, how we mold our world into reflections of how we know ourselves to be, each blinking moment in Time.

“Pupa is from the Latin for puppet, and from puppet, or young girl, comes an animated doll-like puppet creature. Pupa is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The Romans also noted that when you looked into the center of the eye, you saw a small doll-like image of yourself reflected, and this was called the pupil. Look, the child said, shining a light into the Grandmother’s eyes.”  (287)