A shirtdress has that trenchcoat-ish thing of looking appealingly crisp and chic on the hanger or page, but somehow dissolving into a crumpled blob when you put it on.
I must have read and reread those particular words from Adrienne Rich's poem "The Blue Ghazals" thousands of times, as if the repetition would somehow dissolve the lines drawn between the personal and political, the singular and the collective, the private and the public, the body and the earth.
For to buy in is to buy into blindness; it is to pretend that a good policy (or a good man) can have a poisonous wrapping, and that a toxin known too well to history will this time somehow dissolve harmlessly, all on its own.
So for me to be accepted, for a female voice – with all the anxiety there is about the female voice in Ireland – for that somehow to dissolve, and this symbolic thing of the laureateship, is just lovely.
To her credit, however, she never embraced the delusionary belief that an aesthetic revolution — a new art language — would somehow demystify and dissolve the bourgeois order.
Somehow, as drinks dissolve into dinner and the band strike up a tune, your cares about the planet and its people may dwindle.
But early on Saturday the calculations and machinations of the week dissolved, somehow, into the ritual and personal solemnities of the moonlit night.
She is equally direct about his womanizing, especially his 15-year affair with a former actress and close associate, Helen Wynn, that somehow did not dissolve his 53-year marriage to Lois Burnham, a remarkable woman who married beneath her social station, devoted her life to Bill's personal salvation and crusade as a redeemer of lost souls, and nursed him as he died of emphysema in 1971.
And somehow, all the problems dissolved.
But while Joan was tender with her baby, she was also dying to get back to work, bickering with her mother, with her whole history (affair with Roger, sparring with Peggy, the horrifying and never-acknowledged rape, her not-bad marriage to the rapist, those intra-office struggles, her Queen Bee power dissolving) feeling somehow entirely intact, as if she'd never gone away.
