the golf club

The experience that I am circling around as I go over The Glass Canoe is a remote irreducible tickling, the idea that that Ireland senses the possibility of a calm stillness and believes that the things of this world are either taking us towards that point or away from it, whereas Crowley by contrast perceives a net, without that poised, central, gladelike place.

No, you say, that's not a tickling, it's bloody obvious: look at the Meatman when he thinks about the scenery at the golf club. But I believe that the concentration of the still place in those clear and physical phenomena, the sunshine and the grass, and the mowing, is not that place itself, it is too outwards, too specific, and it's doing double duty, it is telling us that the Meatman is a sensitive person – it is sketching and dumping it in very crudely.

He likes dew! – well – there must be more to him than drinking at the pub – the book insists.

It's a defensive blow against the reader who wants to call him a yob.

The pub is a parody of that calm place or another species of it, a deformed species; the men are not calm so much as paralysed, and the fights are like spasms against the restraint of that paralysis.

The calm place exists somewhere outside the prose, and outside anything that is in the prose, and the noise of writing in this book exists in order to highlight a particular silence.

you'll see what I say you'll see

Having, now, The Glass Canoe next to Little, Big in my mind I wonder about the different ways in which the two authors find a character or structure for the Unknown in their books, Crowley building a kind of horizontal (rather than hierarchical) maze in which a revelation in one story will lead you sideways to another story – not a clarity through the unknown but a passageway into another room of it. Mrs Underhill says "Wear this," as she sticks a magic leaf on Lilac's forehead but the enlargement is only in a certain direction, "and you'll see what I say you'll see." By implication, what I don't say you won't see, and who knows what size that is. The dream that seems to be taking Grandfather Trout into a memory of his original human self turns, instead, towards the story of (maybe) the Frog Prince, disenchanted, leaping from the water, "legs flailing and royal robes drenched," then to the Fish-Footman from the first Alice, a "bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm" – till the trout wakes, in shock, back to his own edition of the tale. *

Irrevocable revelation in the Glass Canoe, however, is not only achievable, it is horribly forced on you, and you will be catapaulted into the misery of knowledge against your will when you point out the anthropomorphic mystery of the record player to your girlfriend and she easily shows you the knob that explains the technology.

The Meatman, who loved not knowing, is troubled by the new absence of his pet ignorance, and the information is not an addition to his mental landscape, it is a loss forever. He laments.

Binarily he shifts over into that knowledge as if through a door that shuts behind him. And there are other such doors in the book, but he avoids them: he won't look in the sealed barrel, and he won't draw the obvious conclusion when he sees his girlfriend in the window with several men. The knowledge is being offered so starkly; Crowley's people should envy him. But it would mean sadness if he took it (we know that from the record player episode), and sadness with no compensation that the reader is ever allowed to see. He is wiser than Victor Frankenstein; instinctively he has resisted (or shied away from, take your pick) temptation, he is aligned with those books and authors who have worried about the effect that technical knowingness, ie science, will have on the state of knowledge-less anticipation that is described with words like wonderment. Lord Dunsany wrote with a feather pen in the age of biros.

When I think that we, as a species, have only just become aware of the lymph vessels that run up into our brains, and that this discovery is not the end of anything (as the discovery of the lymph system itself was not the end of anything, and the mapping of it, falsely wholly, over a century ago, was not the end of mapping it or knowing it), I want to believe that, out of the two of them, Crowley's formulation of the Unknown as story beyond story is closer to what is …



*After I posted this I went over and read, for the first time, the post from June 4th at Wuthering Expectations, which also mentions the Alice Footman. Coincidence.

Alice never knows whether she is looking at a fish or a man: "she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish." Carroll's illustrators are always sure that he is a fish-headed person but this is more than you can say for the author, who only ever refers to a resemblance in the face. And the way he has packed man into footman is very strange: if the person had been naked, without the livery, but still running up to a door with a letter under his arm, then what would Alice call him?

the

Doors, doors, as Tom says. The characteristic of a door is that it is neither in nor out but both. Edgewood is a door name (not in the wood, not out of it, "Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest") and there are the character names that are inside and outside humanity, George inside and Mouse outside, or Alice inside and Daily outside, or Smoky Barnable, which is swinging always towards the word barnacle without ever reaching it. The Wind in the Willows has a man in a car who is also Toad.

Why don't Crowley's unhumanning names belong, in my mental categorisation, with the names in the David Ireland books I've read, also unhumanning, "The Meatman," for instance, from The Glass Canoe, or "Far Away Places" in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner? All of them are named like this: the Sandpiper, the Humdinger, Land of Smiles, the Two Pot Screamer, etc. Why do I think of Ireland's names as nicknames and Crowley's as proper names, even though Ireland doesn't tell you the other name that the nickname has replaced?

(I start to suck my teeth and consider the "the" that prefaces so many of the Ireland names while Crowley's are "the"-less. And want to say that this prevalence of "the" is a sign that we should consider the names as if they are titles attached distantly to the people, in the way that a man who is a modest Dan might be "the king" or "the colonel" when people point at him. That emphasis on the name coming from the outside and not growing from within, as Crowley's names appear to have grown: as though they have come to the characters to express the fluttering intrinsic fairy unhumanity of which they are not necessarily aware.

But Ireland's characters have their humanity displaced or disregarded or narrowed by the name in spite of themselves; it is not the truth of them, says Ireland implicitly when he shows you the Meatman daydreaming over the grass at the golf course. If the Meatman had been named for himself, he would be Lawn.

Also the satirical hostility of Ireland and the gentleness of Crowley.)

born not made

I was reading Tom’s blog when I came across the Trout from Little, Big being described as a gateway between different states of the world,* which is true, but it made me think of the moment at the end of Crowley’s Four Freedoms when a few of the characters are travelling down a road with a dog and suddenly he shows you Dorothy, Toto, and the others from the Wizard of Oz.

Inside that phrase the characters were present to me for the first time in the story (hundreds of pages long); I could see them radiating outwards in that state of transition, dimensionally lit, and undergoing a motion that was important. They had been jerked unstuck from their realistic narrative onto the same plane that the people in Little, Big occupy from the beginning of their book until the end: they were vibrating between realism and archetype.

In the last chapters of Little, the characters will move finally to the place that represents one of those two states and the suggestion is that they’ll stay there: this is the time for the book to close down, the trembling action of its being has been transformed into a new, less trembling, action, with which it chooses not to deal. With a fairy (says the book without using the word) you can say that it is one thing and also, equally truly, say that it is the opposite of that thing: they are “born not made” but also “made not born,” and so on: they are precise and imprecise – in short, the essence of a fairy, understood from the real world, is a motion.

So I began to wonder how often the noun in Crowley is superimposed into a verb, if you want to put it that way: the movement, the travel, the state of being not in one place, not in another, is made to seem three dimensional because it is named Trout or Dorothy, in contradiction, you’d think, of its smoke and mirrors presence. And yet the motion not arrested by this noun but active, in fact positively conjured by the association, made into a solid point, but a solid point that draws action into it and through it, specifically the action of travel.


* But that passage doesn't actually exist in Tom's blog: where did I see it?

the supposedly self-maintaining organism

Claire Colebrook's Death is not about Modernism, though I quoted from it a few posts ago and that quote was a quote about Modernism; but she is writing about the extinction of the human race. The arts are not dealing well, she says. One day it will happen but we are not prepared. Artists go up to a point and then they baulk. All of our post-apocalypses have people in them. The end of the world will come and go and we think will still be running around the streets shooting vampires. Summoned into a fresh life of weary heroism. Untrue! This is where prose and its “disintegration” come into her argument. “[I]t is only when writing is liberated from life, when one no longer grounds systems of inscription on the supposedly self-maintaining organism, that one disrupts the normalizing figure of bodily life.” The apocalypse is the moment of incorruptable disruption. The normalizing figure of bodily life will vanish.

Modernism seems optimistically added-on in this book, not conclusive or even decisive – it comes along like a thought that has just occurred to her -- but her central point still stands, and if personal death had always been dealt with as falsely as species death usually is, then literature, I think, would feel like a more dishonest enterprise or maybe a more relentlessly playful one, very sweatily playful, until frivolous might be the word I'm looking for, and every character would come back as a ghost, not really gone, just feinting, now returning to continue the story in a slightly different way, maybe with two heads, the equivalent of the post-apocalypse with the campfire 'mongst the muddy ruins and all the can openers gone missing.

Or else the last person on earth poisons themselves and the book ends there, predicting the moment of disintegration but not venturing in, or it is like John Crowley's Little, Big and the cast has moved on to a different place, the slow crumbling of the old place described by the author but this description is a sweetly sad goodbye from a creator who can't follow them to the next iteration of their existences. They have gone to fairyland, which is beyond description. Their adventures will have to be imagined in some other way. Dead but not dead dead. Equivalent to the inhabitants of an escape pod volunteering for detachment from the mother ship. Compare Gertrude Stein at the end of The Making of Americans, hammering herself spastically into a cul de sac. She tries to summarise everything, she gives up, there's nowhere smaller to go, she has pounded her “history of men and women” into fragments but each set of words, no matter how basic they are, makes her pen hop on to another set of words, nothing final, but nothing more to say that is meaningful either, the story told and told and told but the words keep coming in their ever-tinier permutations, rattling on almost beyond meaning but retaining a trace of it, that indelible serpent of intent.

lightbulbs

Sometimes in a long book I forget who's who and then one note in the juxtaposition chorus goes dung in a baffled space, the present is supposed to echo deeply off the past but it does not; there is a deadness in some aspect of the character's behaviour when they appear after a long time away and speak again, when I can tell (by the way the author has made a phrase) that their conversation is supposed to have extra meaning due to who they are, whatever the hell that is.

And sometimes I only realise that I could tell in retrospect when the clues mount up, memory hits me, and I think, Wait, this is so and so. Then I see that there have been clues for pages and that I was disturbed by them without knowing what I was disturbed by: it was disquiet, it was a stranger coming up to you fervently and calling you by your name and Hey, yes, hi, hello! you say, while you wonder, Who are you?

That happened last year when I was reading Pynchon's V. and there was a character who was supposed to have resonance when she turned up again, but I thought she was new, and didn't realise that she had been there in the beginning, chapter one or two, then gone underground, the buzz of juxtaposition not there, the character dead, or not dead but subdued. Here was a woman who had been brought in, I thought, to fall in love with one of the male leads, a fresh existence in the book, but then I realised after she said a few words about gear sticks that she had to be the one who had appeared at the beginning, and then she was also that woman; they were not separate, and this new doubled-person had a different point of view on everything; she was more tomboyish than she had been a moment earlier (though her behaviour on the page had not changed) and in an instant this behaviour made no sense, ladies and gentlemen, or else seemed too convenient (for the plot) and too warped from what she should be (in my mind: suddenly she was out of character), and not even aging a few years and shifting to another part of the country (as she'd done) accounted for it I thought, this abrupt girlfriendishness in which she had become engaged, and which I had been following tamely and which I imagined she had been introduced to conduct (so she had, but earlier than I had imagined).

And she was left there by her creator, who had to finish the book somehow, sending off his characters or abandoning them when they were still in the middle of an action. Some books will kill their characters, some will chase them away (Christina Stead does one or both), some will summarise their fates (Dickens), some will philosophise (Middlemarch), some will present themselves with a problem, as does Yambo Ouologuem when he spends the book, Bound to Violence, describing massacres, armies, wild huge actions, then finishes the manuscript with two people sitting alone and holding an unrushed discussion; some will fade their people out gently, like John Crowley in Little, Big, when everybody is at a table among trees and the book looks over the weather that attacks their house, the lightbulbs going out (darkness setting in as the story prepares to vanish); then there is Titus Groan and everyone in a procession, going inside the castle -- the book ends -- they go in and the book ends at the same time; they have walked themselves out of the book. Inside the castle and outside the book they are still walking; they continue on, they are going past the spine, they are off the edge of the table, they are out of the room, they have found their way into the kitchen and they are heading past the cockroach traps into the area under the fridge with the crumbs and shadows and those hard objects like springs and boxes that hide under there, the workings of the machine.

in thy heart a child he lies

"Hears not my Phillis how the birds
Their feathered mates salute?
They tell their passion in their words:
Must I alone be mute?"
Phillis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.

"The god of love in thy bright eyes
Does like a tyrant reign;
But in thy heart a child he lies,
Without his dart of flame."
Phillis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.

"So many months in silence past,
And yet in raging love,
Might well deserve one word at last
My passion should approve."
Phillis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.

"Must then your faithful swain expire,
And not one look obtain,
Which he, to soothe his fond desire,
Might pleasingly explain?"
Phillis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.

Phillis is one of the rare times when the woman-character in this anthology of seventeenth-century poetry (it is a book called Seventeenth-Century Poetry, edited by John Hayward, Chatto and Windus, 1961) , seems to have a human presence and is not a conglomerate of flowers, birds, and weather; she is a bare spot in a gross of Arcimboldos. She is described less but suggested more; she is the same word but she is a different species of thing, with different attributes and manners, and though it is hard to believe that all the other poets really did love a woman with hair the exact colour of "gold wire," as they say, it is not hard to believe that Sir Charles Sedley one day in his life did try to butter up a woman who preferred to go on knotting, which, according to an online search I've just done, is a word that slashfic groups use when they want to refer to a subset of porn that goes on mainly between part-animal demihumans who are mostly but not exclusively gay.

It must have meant something else while Sedley was alive in the 1600s but the fanfic porn result sits at the top of my page, and under that the same definition, both from different wikis. Then there is a link to Urban Dictionary, which attributes knotting to dogs, and calls it with this Latin name, bulbus canis.

I start to wonder if every word is not like pink slip in the Matthews poem, a gateway to different trains of thought depending on the railway station: your brain the station, or more the platform, and above you a sign that says, "Epping," while other trains in the near distance pull away to Werribee or Deer Park but only one train is possible at a time for you, you're stuck with Epping, the word that characterises your language.

There are potato cakes in the food stall nearby and a seagull wobbling on the train cable where its feet can't grip; beyond that the block of flats behind the Arts Centre, and this is filling up your Epping-understanding of the world, which is not the Werribee-understanding, or the understanding that lands you in Belgrave among the eucalypts, a smell of smoke from the chimneys of the houses down the road and the corpse of a secondhand bookshop where once upon a time I found for seven dollars John Crowley's Little, Big, a book that seems to have borrowed one phrase from the poem Aramantha by Richard Lovelace (1618–1657), who belongs in this book of poetry (though whether he is in it or not I can't say because between Phillis and the end of this paragraph someone has gone to sleep in the room with the bookshelf).

Fairies (writes one character in Crowley on a typewriter, not using the word fairies), are "made not born." Then she crosses out "made not born" and replaces it with the opposite, "born not made."

Those colour'd things were made, not borne.
Which, fixt within their narrow straits,
Do looke like their own counterfeyts.

wrote Lovelace. And in Peake, the Doctor, giving Fuchsia a drug in a cup, tells her to "drink to coloured things" -- I think I am remembering that correctly but bear with me on some of these quotes -- still -- I think that's when the line comes out. He says it at some point. Put those three together and say that he is telling her to drink to unnamed fairies. The evidence I've assembled points to this conclusion; the conclusion is wrong. It mat be possible that every word in the world, in at least one mind in the world, has no resonance, and indicates no association, but points to nothing at all.

the states that began with an I

In some ways Old Bill was like a parent to us, or a grandfather perhaps. He not only taught us Latin, Greek and other languages, but he spoke to us as if we were already adults ...

I read those lines in David Musgrave's Glissando, and, strangest sensation, not one I've had before, I saw that Glissando was a tunnel or alternate doorway to Little, Big, opening into or out of the moment when Smoky Barnable's father teaches him "Latin, classical and medieval."

Because the two of them moved so often, Smoky never did go to a regular school; and by the time one of the states that began with an I found out what had been done to Smoky by his father all those years, he was too old to be compelled to go to school any more. So, at sixteen, Smoky knew Latin, classical and medieval; Greek; some old-fashioned mathematics; and he could play the violin a little. He had smelled few books other than his father's leather-bound classics; he could recite two hundred lines of Virgil more or less accurately; and he wrote in a perfect Chancery hand.

I know it's not unusual to believe that you've seen an echo of one writer in another writer's style, or another writer's themes, or sensibility (and later in Glissando the narrator talks about memory palaces, as Crowley does) but this wasn't that -- I didn't believe I was seeing an influence, or anything conscious; I didn't think, "So he's read Crowley and now he's copying Crowley's idea," although it's possible that he did (if so, it doesn't matter). This was something abrupt, like love at first sight, not a feeling of, "I've spotted a hidden connection, I'm clever," but a moment that seemed to exist outside one's perception of oneself as a reflective thing, or as an opinionated thing (I had no opinion, none, nothing). I wasn't thinking about myself at all, but I felt like a conduit, as a wire might feel when the electricity comes on, radiant or consumed.

At the same time I knew that I was holding Musgrave's novel in my hands, and I remembered the position of Little, Big in a pile of books on the other side of the room. Not only the position of it, but the way the front cover would have looked if I had taken it out of the pile. My mind was performing practical functions; it was also putting itself in the position of a medium. This amphibiousness, this two-in-one, reminded me of the hippocampus Wikipedia page I'd found while I was looking up seahorses.

The appearance of hippocampi in both freshwater and saltwater is counter-intuitive to a modern audience, though not to an ancient one. The Greek picture of the natural hydrological cycle did not take account of the condensation of atmospheric water as rain to replenish the water table, but imagined the refreshening of the waters of the sea oozing back landwards through vast underground caverns and aquifers, rising replenished and freshened in springs.

So I was in two kinds of water, one physical, one chemical or spiritual, observing the imagined souls of two books, and when I thought of Proust's narrator, who describes himself as, "a man, one of those amphibious creatures who are plunged simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the moment," I wondered if this experience could be split in another way as well: the love-perception and the feel of Glissando in my hands were "the reality of the moment," and the idea of Little, Big hidden in the pile at the other end of the room, where I could only look at it with my mind, not my eyes, was "the past," since it was memory that was providing me with a picture of the cover.

When I arrived at Musgrave's lines about memory palaces I paused, wondering if the connection would come to me again, but there was nothing aside from a kind of mechanical recognition. "He has just mentioned memory palaces. Crowley mentions them too." I couldn't make myself feel that this duplication of memory palaces meant anything significant. Dozens of authors, fiction and non-fiction, have talked about Giordano Bruno and his ars memoria or art-of-memory. There was no reason to assume that Musgrave should have come across it in the same place I had, which was, first of all, Little Big, in the character of Ariel Hawksquill.

So it was that Ariel Hawksquill was rooting around in one of the oldest attics of her memory mansions, looking for something she had forgotten but knew was there.

She had been reading an ars memoria of Giordano Bruno's called De umbris idearum, a huge treatise on symbols and seals and signs to be used in the highest forms of the art. Her first-edition copy had marginal notes in a neat Italic hand, often illuminating but more often puzzling. On a page where Bruno treats of the various orders of symbols one might use for various purposes, the commentator had noted: "As in ye cartes of ye returne of R.C. are iiiij Personnes, Places, Thynges &c., which emblems of cartes are for remembering or foretelling, and discoverie of smalle worldes."

...

The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had invented the universe -- what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge is the centre of all, contains within it all that it in the centre of?

a strange and wonderful motion takes place: the memory arts

Titus Groan, I decided. I'll read it from start to finish. How often have I done that? I didn't know. My usual way, with a book I like as much as I loved this one when I was in my mid-teens (devoutly), is to read it in pieces, out of order, opening the volume in some region of the story (near-the-endish, in-the-middlish, at-the-startish, expecting in one instance to find myself reading Fuchsia in her attic or Steerpike on the rooftops; in another instance that Flay and Swelter would be in the middle of their battle or that his Lordship would be, slightly post-battle, coping with the owls, or Barquentine, post-owls, would be listening to the messengers in his room) and running my eyes over half a page or so of words, a soothing exercise, like moving your feet in bed and realising that the blankets are still there.

I must have read the book in the start-to-finish way at least once, because I remembered how the plot was ordered. I knew that Steerpike meets, first Fuchsia, then the Doctor, then Irma, then the Twins, and not, say, Irma, then Fuchsia, then Nannie Slagg; and I knew who would die in the fire, and why it would be lit, and how those events would lead to the closing chapter. So I had this evidence, quod erat demonstrandum, that I had read it, but no actual recollection. I must have, or else how did I know the plot so well? But I couldn't see myself, standing or sitting, for the first time, reading Titus. (Why don't we remember the moment we learnt we would die? asks Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in Stoppard's play. Why didn't it sear itself into our brains?) My absence of memory was so complete that it would have been easy to erase my own assurance, and convince myself that I had never read Titus before from start to finish, that this would be the first time, and that I had, forever, only known the book in pieces.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing about Godard's Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma --

Curiously, Godard accords the ultimate honor of achieving some sort of power through art to Alfred Hitchcock, “the greatest creator of forms of the 20th century,” who “became the only poète maudit to meet with success.” We may forget the plots and situations of his films, “but we remember a handbag . . . a bus in the desert . . . a glass of milk . . . the sails of a windmill . . . a hairbrush . . . a row of bottles, a pair of spectacles, a sheet of music, a bunch of keys” because “through them and with them Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Napoleon had all failed, by taking control of the universe. Perhaps there are 10,000 people who haven’t forgotten Cézanne’s apples, but there must be a billion spectators who will remember the lighter of the stranger on the train.”

This was my Titus Groan, before I began to re-read: a bitten pear ... a thin man ... a mountain ... Fuchsia ... glass grapes ... and the dark cactus ... a series of scenes, without anything between them, disconnected from a plot, or at least, the plot never seemed important, it gave the scenes some background, therefore a purpose, but everything else stood out on front of it -- it was the wax in a lost wax casting. The map of authors inside my head is like this as well -- a fog or a cloud, with bright or dark patches here and there and each patch an author -- not a picture of an author, or the name of an author, but some sign by which I know the author -- like a memory palace, come to think of it, but a palace with planless architecture, outhouses constantly tacked on the wings, fresh random cupolas, not as orderly as the ones John Crowley gives to Giordano Bruno in his Aegypt books.

And now by degrees, more quickly for some than for others, a strange and wonderful motion takes place: the memory arts of the Brunist have begun to create within the souls of the ladies and gentlemen the image of a living world, a world of innumerable and endless processes producing an infinite number of things, inside every one of which is a divine spark that orders it without error or hesitation into its place in the ranks of creation from lowest to highest.

Ruskin inside my head is a book, a specific book, open to a specific page, and one long sentence standing out from the others, somehow, by a light of its own that I can feel but not see -- that's Ruskin -- George Eliot is a mass of books superimposed on top of one another, as if the books were spirits, all coexisting. Those books are, specifically, The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt the Radical, and Middlemarch. Christina Stead is my copy of The Man Who Loved Children, with its diagonal white crease running across the bottom right-hand corner.

All of this changes from time to time.

Strange to have Titus Groan reassemble in front of me as I read, regaining its length and distance. For the first time in how-long I was doing this journey one foot in front of the other, not darting down from the sky into the castle like a hovering god. I was wing-clipped, very slow. I had forgotten, if I had ever known (it felt like a brand new realisation), how much scenery there is in this book. How much weather. And I had forgotten entirely the bit at the end, all the cats on turrets, looking down at the procession. New! I was astonished.

A little to the left and about fifty feet beneath his window was a table-land of drab roof around the margin of which were turrets grey with moss, set about three feet apart from one another. There were many scores of them ... every turret was surmounted by a cat, and every cat had its head thrust forwards, and ... every cat, as white as a plume, was peering through slit eyes at something moving -- something moving far below on the narrow sand-coloured path which led from the castle's outhouses to the northern woods.

representments

John Crowley's Love and Sleep takes Francesco Colonna's 1499 Venetian incunabula Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for a skeleton and how long has it been since I first read Love and Sleep? Years. Yet it wasn't until I came across an Amazon page dedicated to the new 1999 translation of the Hypnerotomachia (by Joscelyn Godwin, who I thought at first must be a woman, but no, a man, a musiclogist) that it occurred to me to look online for the older translation, an incomplete one published in 1592. This translation is attributed to someone whose initials were R.D., perhaps the courtier Robert Dallington -- they guess -- who died in 1636, leaving bread for the poor in his will and donating a large bell to the church of Geddington. Project Gutenberg has it.

The _Pægma_ base or subiect for this metaline machine to stand vpon, was of one solyde peece of marble … At the hinder end in like sort was a garland of deadly Woolfwoort, with this inscription, _Equus infælicitatis_. And vpon the right side there was ingrauen certaine figures, shapes, and representments of men and women dauncing together, byformed or faced, the formost smiling, the hynmost weeping: and dauncing in a ring, with theyr armes spred abrode, and hanfasted man, with man and woman with woman. One arme of the man vnder that of the woman, and the other aboue, and thus closing together, and houlding by the hands, they floung about one after another, that alwayes still in one place, a smyling countenance incountered a foregoing sad.

There's a nice completeness of the imagination in that description, in the mind's eye that sees not only people dancing in a circle, but also the detail that rounds out the object, "a smyling countenance incountered a foregoing sad," which reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's point about the flying elephants. It's the writer's exactness that makes an imagined thing seem real.





Some hours after I'd posted this, as I was watching my blood elf fly his dragonhawk across Northrend, I thought, "When does a person want to pay precise attention to a thing? When they feel a strong emotion towards it, when they love it or hate it, or, when they want to eat it."