bopis

Rapture without end.

Alma Mahler-Werfel
January 4, 1902
Diary entry

a. An artist’s daughter named Alma pursued music.
b. On her January 3, 1902 journal entry, she wrote “Bliss and rapture.”
c. She began writing her journal when her affair with a certain Gustav gave her trouble, threw her into fits of pain.
d. She closed her diary before marriage with another Gustav, the one Mahler.
e. She sought Freud.

I received an account of her life and recast them into these points, sentences according to my chosen cadence and construction. Which of the five was more important? Which was the indispensable fact? Which was the one sentence that, upon deletion, would destroy Alma Mahler-Werfel? Was it possible that I have already erased her by condensing her into a measure of words. But that possibility would only follow contemplation on What I Do Not Have. Because, truth be told, that line of query would lead me to the undeniable fact that What I Do Not Have Is Alma Mahler-Werfel. If I go that route, then it must be fair to state that I only flattened her into a pad of sentences where not one word carried her tune. Rather than that, I valued What I Have, and so found it fine to believe that I extended Ms or Mrs Rapture five sentences farther than the case files of Freud, the letters of Gustav, her sheets of notations, and the wishes of her father the artist. But, again, a spin on the genetic question: given enough time and life to create an offshoot sentence from one of the five, which sentence ought I take as mother? Make a sixth from the first, second, or fifth? I chose. (Would a reader be so kind and choose the most important sentence about a woman’s life?)