the third bank of the river...

jose guimaraes rosa's third bank of the river is a wonderful tale suggesting that there is generally more to a space than meets a logical eye. in the story, a father leaves his family to inhabit the center of a river - choosing not to live on the left bank or the right, but creating his own life space in between. i love the implications that a kind of directed perception can create a third space where once there were two (reminding me of the calvino story 'the baron in the trees' where the treetops become a new landscape to navigate above the old..).

the images above are from the end flaps of the dust jacket of an early edition of rosa's stories titled "the third bank of the river and other stories". i've been reading it slowly for the last few months, and every time i open the book, i tend to spend time with these little images - savoring them both before and after i read each one of the stories they are connected to. the jacket says "flaps adapted from the brazilian edition", so no idea who drew them.

for me, these two panels of little pictures have become another kind of third bank - a small space between the the cover and the text that continually demands attention even though it speaks in whispers. the images are not really telling stories as much as they are suggesting them - creating trajectories of wandering through how they connect and disconnect with the text before and after reading. they have become another space of the book that demands attention over and over again...