“To the Glory of God”

– epigraph to Monument Maker

Monument Maker by David Keenan, review @ The Gaurdian

Quotes

This is the voice of the first stone: silence!

Later that evening he requested my presence at dinner. I sat at the table next to the creature whose name is Xstabeth and ate biscuits and drank strong coffee. There are books on everything under the sun, the creature mocked. Gordon of Khartoum laughed. My companion is a great source of strength, he said, and he broke some biscuits onto its plate. What do you know of prophecy? I asked it. Mice know nothing of such things, it said. We are forgiven of history, exempted from time. All it asks of us is the shedding of our garments. Our disrobing is its pleasure. It is an insatiable lover. Does it always talk like this? I asked Gordon of Khartoum. Oh yes, he marveled, ask it anything you like. What of my father? I asked it. Do you know anything of the afterworld? We know nothing of fatherhood except as a form of gravity, the same gravity that draws us to the decomposing bodies where we love and lie. Mice love? I asked it. Do not planets dance around the stars? it said. You know of stars? Their stuff is inside us, it said, and it picked up a small crumb from its plate with both its hands and ate it.

I turned to Gordon of Khartoum in awe. A talking mouse made up of the stars,…

If you cannot meditate in a village that has been turned over by a death squad, then you cannot meditate at all.

There is no such thing as an ’erasure’, Miss Swedenborg insisted in the notes to her catalogue, though by this point she was said to be suffering from the early stages of dementia, her own mind riddled with inexplicable voids and hollows. An erasure, Miss Swedenborg insisted, removes nothing. In fact, it accumulates. By the act of erasure, you are building upon what was there before. There is no way to subtract, she wrote. There is no route backwards. Nothing is undone.