Ava BREATH

AVA

BREATH

            Who is AVA?  A person, the text, the author or perhaps the reader or all of the above. Maso writes that “Ava is a living text, is a work in process and will always be work in process, and is filled with last minute things.” This text is never finished because the author can continue to work on it, filling it up and when the author is long dead. It will live on through the reader which pulls their own ideas out and creates new meaning, thereby making sure that Ava will still never be finished. The text will breathe and come alive. “I cannot keep the body out of my writing” maso states, that ‘body’ can have vast meanings

            Maso tells “She was a thirty nine year old woman confined to a hospital bed and dying, yet extraordinarily free.”, and continues saying, “I gave Ava’s father the task of growing roses” which the writer state that her own father grew roses. There is a parallel that can be seen between the Ava and the author; it makes the reader want to know if the author was confined to a hospital bed at some point in her life. But that is not the only parallel that exists in the text, Maso explains “In Ava I have tried to write lines the reader (and the writer) might meditate on, recombine, rewrite as he or she pleases.” The reading and writer both have that power and are interchangeable. I feel that she is asking to put our two cents (sense) into Ava, be Ava, and be the text. As shown in the first paragraph in the quote about the body, I believe (this might be stretching it a bit but) that the ‘body’ is somebody that can always influence the text, and that somebody is both the writer and the reader.

            Near the end of Precious, Disappearing Things,(p70) she states, “ If I have succeeded at all you will hear me breathing.” Once again the ‘me’ is interchangeable with Ava, the writer, the reading and of course the text.  Also in the text Maso tells “I have tried to create a place to breath sweet air, a place to dream.”, which I believe she does, I feel text coming alive through my eyes and imagination. I see the motion of the body and I hear the breathing through the silence of the space. I can see the breathing written on the pages of Ava, an example, “Her breast rose and fell with each breath” (Maso). As I continued to read, I did not realize how absorbed I truly was in the pages or in the body of Ava, until the twenty-third page.

 “BREATHE”,

Alone surrounded by space and silence, I stopped as if commanded to breathe, I did. I heard her (Ava or the author I don’t really know) breathe though me. As I filled my lung with air, I was one with the text, as with Ava and the writer.