It has whimsy tied with science. I was a whimsical little girl with a whimsical childhood. So the legend of the soldiers searching for Phocas and staying with him and all that worked with my mind. But then I love that William Bryant Logan then tells the rest of it, breaking down the break down of Phocas's body scientifically.
"But Phocas led them to the hole he'd dug in the garden, and there, with his consent, they chopped his head off. [...]
"And we must imagine Phocas's simple and hospitable soul, which took such care to return to the garden the body that had taken sustenance from it.
"The fungi colonized it first, hydrolyzing the tissues without disturbing the form. Then the white worms and the maggots and the mites took over, breaking off larger chunks, ingesting these, themselves defecating and dying. And this increasingly diverse pile of remains was attacked by wave after wave of further bacteria and fungi, until at last Phocas's mortal part had been completely oxidized."(Logan, pp.18-19)
Maybe movies have influenced me too much, but I envision those scenes in those movies that show everything, like germination, growth, flowering, erosion, etc. all hyper fast with heavy sound effects, like if you were listening to a stethoscope of the process, and the lighting/contrast is indulgently saturated. The cover of the copy of Dirt I have could be a still frame in one of these movies. (I'm just putting a copy of the cover in this post, but, as soon as I have an available photoshop, will revise the picture still-frame style!)
Just the smooth transition from fantasy to reality resonated with me. Maybe because that paralells transitions in my life. There is a beauty and briskness in how he talks about it. I relish how something rather grotesque, like chopping off this guys head, without real reason or emotion, is beautiful and poetic. Like Pan's Labrynth or Gabriel Gárcia Márquez's lyrics.
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” --
"If you want to be remembered, give yourself away."
(Márquez and Logan)
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