Minute #658, 7:58

1. Jeffrey, entering the Williams’s home, crossing a threshold that is a doorway. This is Sandy’s castle, guarded by her father the detective, who wears his gun holstered, even at home. Or is Jeffrey the detective? Or—more radically—is Sandy?

2. “Leaving the burning theater behind one begins to
ease into a new perspective. The stairway leads to
a doorway, the doorway to an alleyway, the alleyway
to another door, more stairs, another amber room
where one can forget again”

3. “He hacks desperately at the brambles and, as the hedge closes round him like the grasping flesh-raking claws of an old crone, imagines instead her dreams, sweet and hopeful and, above all, loving: loving him who is to come, slashing through the briars and scaling the castle walls to reach her bedside with his spellunbinding kiss.”

4. “Some people say that the girl detective is a natural blonde. Others say that she’s a redhead, how could the girl detective be anything else? Her father just smiles and says she looks just like her mother. I myself am not even sure that the girl detective remembers the original color of her hair. She is a master of disguises.”

5. “My childhood: closed to me. Or is it
under the mulch—fertile.
But very dark. Very hidden.”

Notes
2. From the poem “Antepenultimate Conflict with Self,” by Timothy Donnelly, in Cloud Corporation. Seattle: Wave Books, 2010.
3. From Briar Rose, by Robert Coover. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
4. From “The Girl Detective,” by Kelly Link, in Stranger Things Happen. Brooklyn: Small Beer Press, 2001.
5. From Averno: Poems, by Louise Glück. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.

Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of the project, click here. And here is the introduction to the project.