Korridorium

♫ Nel mezzo del cam­min di nos­tra vita ♫

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I enter the cor­ri­dor. (Pre­vi­ously on…: Many dif­fer­ent cor­ri­dors have been entered by var­i­ous per­sons of all gen­ders, in dif­fer­ent eras, and for a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons.) I was told I’d find you here. (Some of the sto­ries end well, some badly; many are barely sto­ries at all, and some have open end­ings.) Sure enough: Behind a plas­tic sheet on some scaf­fold­ing, I see a sil­hou­ette. (Besides his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, a hand­ful of extrater­res­tri­als, ani­mals, and non-phys­i­cal beings, numer­ous first-per­son nar­ra­tors appear whose iden­ti­ties remain dubi­ous.) A paint­brush moves steadily across the ceiling—the cor­ri­dor is receiv­ing a fresh coat of blue. (The nar­ra­tive style shifts from fac­tual to exu­ber­ant, from doc­u­men­tary to fairy­tale and sur­real, from word­play to exis­ten­tial­ist; included are satires of cur­rent pop-cul­tural phe­nom­ena.) And there you are: It’s you wield­ing the brush, with blue flecks in your ash-blond hair, hum­ming our song, obliv­i­ous to the world. (For reg­u­lar read­ers, numer­ous hid­den cross-con­nec­tions between the cor­ri­dors emerge in this frac­tally frag­mented blog-novel…) I take you in my arms, and you bliss­fully close your eyes. (…and in a cer­tain way, it seems to be about dif­fer­ent aspects of one thing, or stages of a par­tic­u­lar quest.) “What’s your name this time?” I ask. (It could be about the search for the blue flower, the Grail, or the Snark; for hap­pi­ness, love, mean­ing, myth, or insight—and per­haps this will be revealed as the story pro­gresses.) “Red Naia,” you gig­gle, swing­ing the paint­brush like a sword. Not to be out­done, I bare my hairy chest and thun­der: “Then I am Tino Urmaus, the Bar­bar­ian!”

Snark: