I have always loved this piece that Robin Pecknold wrote for the liner notes of the first Fleet Foxes LP and I couldn't find it anywhere this morning when I was looking for it online to send to someone, so I just decided to type it up. It is a really incredible piece about the interaction between music and memory. I feel like I could write at length on what he's investigating here, which I might do if I have some time soon. My first really distinct musical memory akin to what he seems to be discussing was when I was 12 and went with my family to New Zealand for several weeks. For some reason, I decided to only take 3 CDs for the lengthy and winding drives through the countryside - Wave's Nothing as it Seems and State of Mind and Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head. Aside from that, I think I borrowed Red Hot Chili Peppers' What Hits!? from the son of some family friends and was scandalized by "Catholic School Girls Rule". Wave is still pretty awesome, and I actually don't really think they've aged too badly - "Think It Over" (from the debut) is a classic jam that I find myself singing probably at least once a week and the fake sitar effect on "Sleepless" still kills me. But A Rush of Blood to the Head was my real obsession in NZ, and whenever I hear songs from it, I experience these markedly strong visual memories of rolling green hills from the back of a rented Saab.

My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day down at some beach in Washington, along the Puget Sound somewhere near Seattle. I would be around two or three years old and we're with a friend of mine from the neighbourhood and his mom, walking around among the driftwood looking for crabs. Even now, I can remember the smell and temperature of the air, the feeling of the sand and the swaying tall grass. I can even remember looking over at my friend and how his face looked when he smiled back at me. Another memory that I'll sometimes recall as my first memory is dressing p in the dead of winter as Jack London, with tennis rackets on my feet and wearing my dad's hiking pack, in the middle of summer after seeing Disney's (terrible) version of White Fang. Or there's the memory of stealing my neighbour's big wheel and riding it halfway down the block before getting caught and having to turn around defeated, or of wearing a fireman's outfit while washing my parents' car, or eating an orange popsicle from the ice cream truck.

These are and have always been some of my most distinct and persistent memories of childhood, so it came as a disappointment to me when, one day as a teenager, I opened up a photo album and found pictures of each and every one of those memories. I didn't have a single memory that didn't belong to or somehow grow from pictures my parents had taken of me when I was growing up. Even the scenes I remember so clearly in my head are from the same angles as those photographs and I don't really know what to make of it. I'm going to guess that I'd seen all these photographs at some point, forgotten they were just photographs, and over time made them into my most tangible memories. That's scary to me in a way.

This leads me to something weird about the power that music has, its transportive ability. Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment or I was listening to at a distinct time, I'm instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear "Feel Flows" by The Beach Boys, I'm taken straight back to the back of my parents' car on the way to my grandparents' place, fourteen with Surf's Up in my Walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. Any song off Radiohead's Kid A brings back the sounds and atmosphere of the airport near Seattle, from when we were on the way to Colorado for a wedding and Kid A was the only record I brought or wanted to bring. "Crayon Angels" by Judee Sill is the whole winter of last year, and Brian Wilson's solo version of Surf's Up will take me back to driving my parents' car around town alone at the age of 16 with the windows down at night.

I can ascribe exact memories to songs by The Microphones, Joni Mitchell, Built To Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson, and so many others, and it's a form of recall that I can actually trust. There's no visual element to complicate things, no chance of a planted memory that wasn't actually supposed to be there and that is reassuring to me. Maybe I should be concerned that I'm alone in almost all these memories, but I guess I was just a private kid and music was a private experience for me. I can even remember the certain kind of darkness my room would have when I was in there alone listening to records. I can read a good book cover to cover and never once forget I'm sitting in the middle of four slabs of drywall on a spring mattress in Seattle - same with movies and TV and anything else. I can listen to music and instantly be anywhere that song is trying to take me. Music activates a certain mental freedom in a way that nothing else can, and that is so empowering. You can call it escapism if you like, but I see it as connecting to a deeper human feeling than found in the day-to-day world.

Thank you for listening to our band. We've made some mistakes and we'll continue to do so, but we are happy to be making songs and would love the opportunity to continue to grow and change as the years pass by. It took us a long eight months of recording ourselves at home, recording piecemeal in studios, scrapping dozens of songs and starting over, and borrowing money and rooms from friends and family to make this record and its accompanying EP and we hope you enjoy it. Music is a weird and cosmic thing, its own strange religion for nonbelievers, and what a joy it is to make, in any form. Also, don't trust your photographs.

Warren Gamaliel Bancroft Winnipeg Harding

Chicago, Illinois

April 6th, 2008.

And his shadow on the border of the pond, was watching for a few moments, then he stooped and groped on the ground. Then again there was a burst of sound, and a burst of brilliant light, the moon had exploded on the water, and was flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire. Rapidly, like white birds, the fires all broken rose across the pond, fleeing in clamorous confusion, battling with the flock of dark waves that were forcing their way in. The furthest waves of light, fleeing out, seemed to be clamouring against the shore for escape, the waves of darkness came in heavily, running under towards the centre. But at the centre, the heart of all, was still a vivid, incandescent quivering of a white moon not quite destroyed, a white body of fire writhing and striving and not even now broken open, not yet violated. It seemed to be drawing itself together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was re-asserting itself, the inviolable moon. And the rays were hastening in in thin lines of light, to return to the strengthened moon, that shook upon the water in triumphant reassumption.

Birkin stood and watched, motionless, till the pond was almost calm, the moon was almost serene. Then, satisfied of so much, he looked for more stones. She felt his invisible tenacity. And in a moment again, the broken lights scattered in explosion over her face, dazzling her; and then, almost immediately, came the second shot. The moon leapt up white and burst through the air. Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide.

Yet again, they were flickering their way to the centre, finding the path blindly, enviously. And again, all was still, as Birkin and Ursula watched. The waters were loud on the shore. He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return.

And he was not satisfied. Like a madness, he must go on. He got large stones, and threw them, one after the other, at the white-burning centre of the moon, till there was nothing but a rocking of hollow noise, and a pond surged up, no moon any more, only a few broken flakes tangled and glittering broadcast in the darkness, without aim or meaning, a darkened confusion, like a black and white kaleidoscope tossed at random. The hollow night was rocking and crashing with noise, and from the sluice came sharp, regular flashes of sound. Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island. Birkin stood and listened and was satisfied.

Ursula was dazed, her mind was all gone. She felt she had fallen to the ground and was spilled out, like water on the earth. Motionless and spent she remained in the gloom. Though even now she was aware, unseeing, that in the darkness was a little tumult of ebbing flakes of light, a cluster dancing secretly in a round, twining and coming steadily together. They were gathering a heart again, they were coming once more into being. Gradually the fragments caught together re-united, heaving, rocking, dancing, falling back as in panic, but working their way home again persistently, making semblance of fleeing away when they had advanced, but always flickering nearer, a little closer to the mark, the cluster growing mysteriously larger and brighter, as gleam after gleam fell in with the whole, until a ragged rose, a distorted, frayed moon was shaking upon the waters again, re-asserted, renewed, trying to recover from its convulsion, to get over the disfigurement and the agitation, to be whole and composed, at peace.

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love - pp. 246-8

David Markson's list of rejections for Wittgenstein's Mistress. (via withhiddennoise.net)

Sometimes it seems to me that even my physical sensibilities have coagulated and stiffened within me like resin. In contrast to years gone by, when I observed the world with wide-open, astonished eyes, and walked along every street alert, like a young man on a parapet, I can now push through the liveliest crowd with total indifference and rub against hot female bodies without the slightest emotion, even though the girls may try to seduce me with the bareness of their knees and their oiled, intricately coiffed hair. Through half-open eyes I see with satisfaction that once again a gust of the cosmic gale has blown the crowd into the air, all the way up to the treetops, sucked the human bodies into a huge whirlpool, twisted their lips open in terror, mingled the children's rosy cheeks with the hairy chests of the men, entwined the clenched fists with strips of women's dresses, thrown snow-white thighs on the top, like foam, with hats and fragments of heads tangled in hair-like seaweed peeping from below. And I see that this weird snarl, this gigantic stew concocted out of the human crowd, flows along the street, down the gutter, and seeps into space with a loud gurgle, like water into a sewer.

[...]

For a few last moments I strain to catch the distant street sounds: the drunken singing from the near-by tobacco shop, the shuffle of feet, the rumble of trains arriving at the station, the repeated, stubborn hammering against the rails of the nightshift men working just around the corner—and I feel a terrible disenchantment mounting within me. I push myself firmly away from the window, as though breaking a rope which has been holding me there, go up to my desk with a feeling that again I have managed to lose valuable time, pull my long-abandoned papers out of the drawer. And since today the world has not yet blown away, I take out fresh paper, arrange it neatly on the desk, and closing my eyes try to find within me a tender feeling for the workmen hammering the rails, for the passers-by on the street below and the newly installed windows, and even for my wife who is washing dishes in the kitchen alcove; and with a tremendous intellectual effort I attempt to grasp the true significance of events, things and people I have seen. For I intend to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging, difficult world chiselled out of stone.

- Tadeusz Borowski, "The World of Stone," This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - pp. 178-80

Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forbears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly". We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.) And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the ever more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced. Even for our grandparents a "house", a "well", a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers . . . Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things. On us rests the responsibility not alone of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral value. ("Laral" in the sense of the household gods.) The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here,—in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible no longer dependent upon being visible and tangible, as our own destiny continually grows at the same time MORE PRESENT AND INVISIBLE in us. The elegies set up this norm of existence: they assure, they celebrate this consciousness.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925," Letters, 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herder (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 1948), pp. 374-5.

Tonight, I discovered that both volumes of the Bannard Greene & Herder translations of Rilke's letters are available freely at the Internet Archive - so awesome.

With the arrival of the Great Depression a few weeks later, Campbell spent the next five years (1929–34) living in a rented shack on some land in Woodstock, New York.^[5] There, he contemplated the next course of his life^[6] while engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study. He later said that he "would divide the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four hour periods, and free one of them... I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight."^[7]

Feeling awe-struck about - and envious of - Joseph Campbell's reading regimen.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has given us a definition of European culture which resonates, in a sinister way, with the naming of the new epoch. “Culture,” he says, “can be interpreted as an intention to remove the otherness of Nature, which, alien and previous, surprises and strikes the immediate identity which is the same of the human self.” As an intention which converts the otherness of nature into the sameness of humanity, Levinas’s culture sounds alarmingly like Calgary, eating its way steadily toward the Rockies, converting foothills into dismal suburbs of itself. It is against such reduction to the Same that poetry works, introducing otherness, or wilderness, into consciousness without insisting that it be turned wholly into knowledge, into what we know, what we own. Within poetic attention, we might say, what we behold is always “alien and previous,” whether it’s an exceptional fossil or an “ordinary” rock or chickadee. In poetry there is no “been there, done that”; everything is wilderness. The arrival of the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that the intention of culture, as Levinas sees it, has been all too richly realized, that there is little hope for an other that remains other, for wilderness that remains wild.

- Don McKay, "Ediacaran and Anthropocene: poetry as a reader of deep time"

By relating to beings in the openness of being, understanding finds a meaning for them in terms of being. In this sense, understanding does not invoke them, but only names them. And thus, with regard to beings, understanding carries out an act of violence and of negation. A partial negation, which is violence. And this partialness can be described by the fact that, without disappearing, beings are in my power. The partial negation which is violence denies the independence of beings: they are mine. Possession is the mode by which a being, while existing, is partially denied. It is not merely the fact that the being is an instrument and a tool—that is to say, a means; it is also an end—consumable, it is food, and, in enjoyment, offers itself, gives itself, is mine. Vision certainly exercises power over the object, but vision is already enjoyment. The meeting with the other person consists in the fact that, despite the extent of my domination over him and his submission, I do not possess him. He does not enter entirely into the opening of being in which I already stand as in the field of my freedom. It is not in terms of being in general that he comes toward me. Everything from him that comes to me in terms of being in general certainly offers itself to my understanding and my possession. I understand him in terms of his history, his environment his habits. What escapes understanding in him is himself, the being. I cannot deny him partially, in violence, by grasping him in terms of being in general, and by possessing him. The other is the only being whose negation can be declared only as total: a murder. The other is the only being I can want to kill. 

I can want to. Yet this power is the complete opposite of power. The triumph of this power is its defeat as power. At the very moment when my power to kill is realized, the other has escaped. In killing, I can cer­tainly attain a goal, I can kill the way I hunt, or cut down trees, or slaughter animals—but then I have grasped the other in the opening of being in general, as an element of the world in which I stand. I have seen him on the horizon. I have not looked straight at him. I have not looked him in the face. The temptation of total negation, which spans the infinity of that attempt and its impossibility—is the presence of the face. To be in relation with the other face to face—is to be unable to kill. This is also the situation of discourse.

- Emmanuel Lévinas, "Is Ontology Fundamental?" Entre Nous: On Thinking-Of-The-Other - pp. 9-10

Mapping the descent

Reading is a complicated, profound, silent, very personal, very private, a very solitary, yet civilizing activity. Nothing is more social than speech—we are bound together by our common sounds more securely than even by our laws—nevertheless, no one is more aware of the isolated self than the reader; for a reader communes with the word heard immaterially in that hollow of the head made only for hearing, a room nowhere in the body in any ordinary sense. On the bus, every one of us may be deep in something different. Sitting next to a priest, I can still enjoy my pornography, although I may keep a thumb discreetly on top of the title: The Cancan Girls Celebrate Christmas. It doesn't matter to me that Father McIvie is reading about investments, or that the kid with rusty hair in the seat ahead is devouring a book about handicapping horses. Yet while all of us, in our verbal recreations, are full of respect for the privacy of our neighbors, the placards advertising perfrume or footware invade the public space like a visual smell; Muzak fills every unstoppered ear the way the static of the street does. The movies, radio, TV, theater, orchestra: all run on at their own rate, and the listener or the viewer must attend, keep up, or lose out; but not the reader. The reader is free. The reader is in charge, and pedals the cycle. It is easy for a reader to announce that his present run of Proust has been postponed until the holidays.

Reading, that is, is not a public imposition. Of course, when we read, many of us squirm and fidget. One of the closest friends of my youth would sensuously wind and unwind on his forefinger the long blond strands of his hair. How he read: that is how I remember him. Yes, our postures are often provocative, perverse. Yet these outward movements of the body really testify to the importance of the inner movements of the mind; and even those rapid flickers of the eye, as we shift from word to word, phrase to phrase, and clause to clause, hoping to keep our head afloat on a flood of Faulkner or Proust or Joyce or James, are registers of reason: for reading is reasoning, figuring things out through thoughts, making arrangements out of arrangements until we've understood a text so fully it is nothing but feeling and pure response; until its conceptual turns are like the reversals of mood in a marriage: petty, sad, ecstatic, commonplace, foreseeable, amazing.

In order to have this experience, however, one must learn to perform the text, say, sing, shout the words to oneself, give them, with our minds, their body: otherwise the eye skates over every syllable like the speeder. There can be no doubt that often what we read should be skimmed, as what we are frequently asked to drink should be spilled; but the speeding reader is alone in another, less satisfactory way, one quite different from that of the reader who says the words to herself, because as we read we divide into a theater: there is the performer who shapes these silent sounds, moving the muscles of the larynx almost invisibly; and there is the listener who hears them said, and who responds to their passion or their wisdom.

Such a reader sees every text as unique; greets every work as a familiar stranger. Such a reader is willing to allow another's words to become hers, his.

[...]

So this reading will be like living, then; the living each of you will be off in a moment to be busy with; not always speedily, I hope, or in the continuous anxiety of consequence, the sullenness of inattention, the annoying static of distraction. But it will only be a semblance of living—this living—nevertheless, the way unspoken reading is a semblance, unless, from time to time, you perform the outer world and let it live within; because only in that manner can it deliver itself to us. As Rainer Maria Rilke once commanded: "dance the taste of the fruit you have been tasting. Dance the orange." I should like to multiply that charge, even past all possibility. Speak the street to yourself sometimes, hear the horns in the forest, read the breeze aloud, and make that inner world yours, because, whether Nature, Man, or God, has given us the text, we independently possess the ability to read, to read really well, and to move our own mind freely in tune to the moving world.

- William H. Gass, "On Reading to Oneself," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 227-8

I left poetry for history in my youth. A terrible turning. I've no excuse. I could have pressed harder. Put the point down upon my paper with more exalted purpose. Perhaps, then, a poem would have written its indented way onto the next page. No, that's inexact. I tried as hard as any archer to have an aim, overhear a calling. I remember the effort, the resolve to be high-minded, the sober choice of models; I remember reading only what would do my genius good, the straining for greatness; and I remember watching every word I wrote unravel like a poorly knitted sleeve. My rhymes clanged predictably, my meters were military, my metaphors fled the mind like frightened mice, assonance set good sense to sleep, and though my alliteration was lively, its lilt always arrived when there was actually nothing to fear, peppering pages which had planned on being bland with a sudden seasoning, mumbling when the night was supposed to be clear.

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 635

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

- Susan Sontag, On Photography - p. 4

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas.  What did it mean?  For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?  Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

- E. M. Forster, Howards End - pp. 162-3

On their way thither they too looked up at the Wilcoxes' flat.  Evie was in the balcony, "staring most rudely," according to Mrs. Munt.  Oh yes, it was a nuisance, there was no doubt of it.  Helen was proof against a passing encounter but--Margaret began to lose confidence.  Might it reawake the dying nerve if the family were living close against her eyes?  And Frieda Mosebach was stopping with them for another fortnight, and Frieda was sharp, abominably sharp, and quite capable of remarking, "You love one of the young gentlemen opposite, yes?"  The remark would be untrue, but of the kind which, if stated often enough, may become true; just as the remark, "England and Germany are bound to fight," renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation.  Have the private emotions also their gutter press?  Margaret thought so, and feared that good Aunt Juley and Frieda were typical specimens of it.  They might, by continual chatter, lead Helen into a repetition of the desires of June.  Into a repetition--they could not do more; they could not lead her into lasting love.  They were--she saw it clearly--Journalism; her father, with all his defects and wrong-headedness, had been Literature, and had he lived, he would have persuaded his daughter rightly.

- E. M. Forster, Howards End - pp. 58-9

Judee Sill - "The Donor"

I'll chase 'em to the bottom
'Til I've finally caught 'em
Dreams fall deep
Where voices come a-chimin'
Moanin' and a-rhymin'
Warning me-- their words are
Ringin' and a-whinin'
Hear 'em weep

Songs from so deep
While I'm sleepin'
Seep in
Sweepin' over me
Still the echo's achin'
"Leave us not forsaken"

Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Eleison, Eleison, eleison
Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison

So sad, and so true
That even shadows come
And hum the requiem

Oh waters of the moon
Your vapors swirls and swoon
Your wake is wide
And sorrow's like an arrow
Shootin' straight and narrow
Aimin' true, its sting goes
Reachin' to the marrow,
Silence cried

Now songs from so deep
While I'm sleepin'
Seep in
Sweepin' over me
Still the echo's achin'
"Leave us not forsaken"

Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Eleison, eleison, eleison
Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison

So sad, and so true
That even shadows come
And hum the requiem

Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison

We begin with a desire to describe, to render, to capture even a bit of the world. We wish to stand in the way of time. We wish to gain a little information about things. We wish to understand the make-up and the connection of events. But first we must make things stand still. We must lift things from their world of things and find a place for them in the realm of thought. We must represent. I take my example from an extraordinary and beautiful book by Danilo Kiš.

Late in the morning on summer days, my mother would come into the room softly, carrying that tray of hers. The tray was beginning to lose its nickelized glaze. Along the edges where its level surface bent upward slightly to form a raised rim, traces of its former splendor were still present in flaky patches of nickel that looked like tin foil pressed out under the fingernails. The narrow, flat rim ended in an oval trough that bent downward and was banged in and misshapen. Tiny decorative protuberances—a whole chain of little metallic grapes—had been impressed on the upper edge of the rim. Anyone holding the tray (usually my mother) was bound to feel at least three or four of these semicylindrical protuberances, like Braille letters, under the flesh of the thumb. Right there, around those grapes, ringlike layers of grease had collected, barely visible, like shadows cast by little cupolas. These small rings, the color of dirt under fingernails, were remnants of coffee grounds, cod-liver oil, honey, sherbet. Thin crescents on the smooth, shiny surface of the tray showed where glasses had just been removed.¹

This tray is not handed to us on a tray, all its elements in order coexistent, communal, clean of commentary. Rather the tray is broken apart and strung out, the glaze preceding its surface, the flaky patches on the raised rim as much in front of its frieze of metal grapes as the soup is in advance of the fish. Our reading runs in loops of understanding as we gather a phrase together and then carry it on through the sentence like a package under our arm. The complexity, character, the length, the chronology of every quality's occurrence is carefully regulated by the writer. It is true that in "real life," as we continue so foolishly to call it, our experience of the tray would have many serial characteristics. We turn the tray over in our hands, for instance: first front, then back. We look here, then there. We try this, then that. Taste the sherbet; run our finger along the tray's rim; look through the curtains, through the window's haze at the lawn escaping toward the trees. How ideal language is for that. Meet Gertrude. Meet Ophelia. Meet Maud. Put on the left shoe, drop the right. But the tray is not entirely present, even in this recital of bits and pieces. I remember there was a maker's mark on the back of the real one, crudely indented, as if stepped on. The boy for whom honey and cod-liver oil are being brought cares only for its bearing surface, where a teaspoon might rest along with the jars. We have all the tray we need, for it is a tray we hold in our heads, and not in our hands. We think not only to the nickelized tray, but through the details of its development. The odd sound of the word 'nickelized' stands in for the nickelization itself. We watch a thought in the process of composing itself. No "real-life" tray does that. It does so, furthermore, largely in terms of visual details. The tray is touched but once. It is not a thing we're thinking, with its molecules and secret laws, but a perception, a perception remembered.²
_______________________________________________________________________
¹Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975). The book opens with this passage. The translation is by William J. Hannaher.
²The recursive character of reading is almost impossible to represent. The first sentence of our specimen "reads" something like this: Late in the morning, late in the morning on summer days, my mother, late in the morning on summer days, would come into the room softly, late in the morning on summer days, my mother would be carrying that tray of hers, late in the morning on summer days, when my mother would come into the room, softly, with that tray.

^{- William H. Gass, "Representation and the War for Reality," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 80-1}

"I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I have only the bottoms and stone animals I collect. I blink and breathe. My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge."

- Breece D'J Pancake, "Trilobites" from The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake - p. 25