(no subject)
Nov. 29th, 2003 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception(Sometimes I write stories or sketches for specific friends, somewhat tailored to them; this one is from just over a year ago.)
This letter is composed of words which are composed of letters. You are accustomed to reading every line left to right, from the topmost line to the bottom, because this is how written information is ordinarily conveyed. But this particular block of letters and spaces can be read differently. You see, hidden within this text is another text, another order of letters, of words, of lines that conveys a meaning of a different sort. This text tells (at first in English but increasingly in a new language of its own, a simpler clearer language that gently and thoroughly teaches you to read and even speak it as it invents and then modifies itself: a language with a direct and reliable relation established among sign written and reality signified and emotion evoked, with an alphabet that is a menu; phonetic and memetic distinctions that are inclusions, clear and precise revelations of to what extent and in what manner every impression is and is not every other; and punctuation that precedes its constituency, lucid and helpful suggestions on how to change yourself to best receive the words that come laughastrophating and combounding and lingroiteromping behind)... I will repeat the beginning of my sentence, 'This text tells' ... a story that is a map and also a meal and perhaps an alternative childhood. The story's characters are yourself - that is, a soul-shaped hole full of all manner of objects that have fallen in and formed planet-sized reefs of bugplantnotebookpopcornstreamcannongoatelbowShelleyWinterslegotelegramcarpetstaincitystatenightlight material from which the dark maplesyrupstar thoughts native to the place make robopets to throw out of the hole and into theyknownotwhat - , a man in a bright hat you must learn from then kill, and a girl who is really an ocean that's really a darkness that's really a girl. The plot of the story is in every way ingenious and I don't dare give anything away, except to say that at times you will think the main character - you - is dead, mad, another person entirely, her brother, a hologram, lying about everything, dreaming everything, living life backwards, congenitally mistaken, not yet born, the author, God, a bag of drives that don't get along, or ugly. Its end involves an apathy and a forgetting and a storm out of which comes running a worried child with an unopened, full bottle of coke with a plastic bag inside containing a puzzle piece with a single word written in blue ink on its brown speckly back. The last sentence, English again, is: "And they remembered why they hid it there of all places and why they hid that place just there among the others, but for the life of them couldn't recall why it existed in the first place, and set about washing it shining it soothing it beating it shushing it cutting it fixing it arming it, wrapped it up in everything they disliked, held it high up between them over their heads and kissed it away." The way to read the text within the one you are reading now, which must involve changes of direction and letter leaps and counting spaces and finding shapes of larger letters within the press of smaller and antonyms and repetitions and diving in behind the words and forming others into ropes to climb out the window to get to the payphone to order crucial missing verbs... is lost. All I can tell you is where to begin, which is with the very last letter, which is i
This letter is composed of words which are composed of letters. You are accustomed to reading every line left to right, from the topmost line to the bottom, because this is how written information is ordinarily conveyed. But this particular block of letters and spaces can be read differently. You see, hidden within this text is another text, another order of letters, of words, of lines that conveys a meaning of a different sort. This text tells (at first in English but increasingly in a new language of its own, a simpler clearer language that gently and thoroughly teaches you to read and even speak it as it invents and then modifies itself: a language with a direct and reliable relation established among sign written and reality signified and emotion evoked, with an alphabet that is a menu; phonetic and memetic distinctions that are inclusions, clear and precise revelations of to what extent and in what manner every impression is and is not every other; and punctuation that precedes its constituency, lucid and helpful suggestions on how to change yourself to best receive the words that come laughastrophating and combounding and lingroiteromping behind)... I will repeat the beginning of my sentence, 'This text tells' ... a story that is a map and also a meal and perhaps an alternative childhood. The story's characters are yourself - that is, a soul-shaped hole full of all manner of objects that have fallen in and formed planet-sized reefs of bugplantnotebookpopcornstreamcannongoatelbowShelleyWinterslegotelegramcarpetstaincitystatenightlight material from which the dark maplesyrupstar thoughts native to the place make robopets to throw out of the hole and into theyknownotwhat - , a man in a bright hat you must learn from then kill, and a girl who is really an ocean that's really a darkness that's really a girl. The plot of the story is in every way ingenious and I don't dare give anything away, except to say that at times you will think the main character - you - is dead, mad, another person entirely, her brother, a hologram, lying about everything, dreaming everything, living life backwards, congenitally mistaken, not yet born, the author, God, a bag of drives that don't get along, or ugly. Its end involves an apathy and a forgetting and a storm out of which comes running a worried child with an unopened, full bottle of coke with a plastic bag inside containing a puzzle piece with a single word written in blue ink on its brown speckly back. The last sentence, English again, is: "And they remembered why they hid it there of all places and why they hid that place just there among the others, but for the life of them couldn't recall why it existed in the first place, and set about washing it shining it soothing it beating it shushing it cutting it fixing it arming it, wrapped it up in everything they disliked, held it high up between them over their heads and kissed it away." The way to read the text within the one you are reading now, which must involve changes of direction and letter leaps and counting spaces and finding shapes of larger letters within the press of smaller and antonyms and repetitions and diving in behind the words and forming others into ropes to climb out the window to get to the payphone to order crucial missing verbs... is lost. All I can tell you is where to begin, which is with the very last letter, which is i
