(from) Frank

I was about to reverse myself and rush back to my beloved's bedside, proclaiming, Now I can see everything!-when I traversed a bend in the path and spied up ahead a peculiar object resting atop a boulder. At first I mistook it for an abandoned package, but as I drew closer, I could see from its scarlet spine that it was a paperback. What, I asked myself, could this book be doing here in the first hours of dawn miles from the nearest dwellings? Even if some errant scholar had ventured to such extremes, this dark wood seemed the unlikeliest place for reading. It was covered with a dense canopy of sycamores, and a nearby spring gave its atmosphere a luxuriant humidity ruinous to all but the slickest pages. And this led to my next bafflement, for on scaling the boulder and clutching the small tome, I found it not at all damp, as if abandoned only seconds before. I prepared to call out, imagining the adventurous reader must be just ahead, but almost as quickly recognized the improbability of this. The sun had been visible less than an hour, and the uneven brilliance pouring through the trees rendered the tiny print almost illegible. No, the only explanation was, preposterous as it seemed, that this writing had been left in the path for me.

Normally, I would have scoffed at a complication so baldfaced, but something about the lush surroundings mitigated my skepticism, and yielding to whimsy, I noisily declared: Oh, aimless spirit, if like myself you merely ramble on, don't hide undercover of a book but, welcoming this outcome, transport your supplicant to fanciful realms where you and I may both escape, however briefly, intolerable me. And with this and similar balderdash, I opened at random and began to read.

My first shock was at the seemingly interminable rows of print, stretching right to left and bending back again, spilling from every surface onto the adjoining, recto to verso, page after page after page, in apparently inexhaustible profusion, a labyrinthine discourse, barren of refreshing conversation, with hardly a gap or white space to give the thunderstruck reader a break. What annihilating anguish could have occasioned this outpouring? And even though I knew the matter was not weighty, I nevertheless felt amazed that mere intangibles could drive mortals to such lengths. But even as these reflections preoccupied me I seemed to glimpse, just under the words' surface, an amorphous figure, unrecognizable at the customary distance but, as my eyes bogged down in pontifications and conceits, drawing closer at hyperbolic speed. Without a thought, I overleapt numerous apostrophes and, looking past the distracting print, began to survey this being's exaggerated stature. A mist came over my consciousness; I succumbed to bliss, and trailing this phantom through maelstroms of tortured syntax, I perceived that the figure becoming more transparent with every simile was none other than that wretched form I'd given life.

I resolved to read on, eager to grasp my predicament and hoping by some stray period to rid myself of this interloper. But my hopes proved futile, for all I'd thought to make of myself-my adolescent passion for philosophizing, the rapid progress of my gifts, all those years of solitary labor, and then that rainy evening when, before my horrified gaze, my work assumed a life of its own-all I'd mistaken for my future now lay before me in black and white. I felt the earth and sky invert, struggled to maintain myself upright. To think that, a century ago, my present striving had already proven futile-my mother killed off, intimacy with my cousin ruled out, and the murder of all I loved assured-oh, the injustice of it enraged me! How could I be punished for mistakes I'd hardly even dreamed, much less made yet?

Anonymous authoress, I started to protest-for I'd noticed from the cover that my precursor was a woman-how dare you foretell my strayings? Why prescribe outlandish sentences which, while others guffaw at liberty, I must acknowledge myself the author? Isn't once enough? Oh, cursed be that day, at a civil rights rally in Boston, when my veil of innocence lifted and I discovered human reproduction! With this outcry, my rage knew no bounds. I sprang on the text and would've torn it to shreds had not a voice, from precisely where in those wilds I'll never know, told me to preserve my composure and find out what this she-monster had to say.
So I began to read, tearing through page after page, devouring every appositive, one humiliating subordination after another, until as my circumstances faded into obscurity, I underwent what I believe no white man has ever undergone before: through a woman's book, my own writing spoke to me. I record this unnatural occurrence with no hope of explaining it. No native speaker ever sought to master English more determinedly than I, none pried into its secrets with greater abandon, but until I was unhinged by her grandiloquence, my own sense remained inert, halfhearted. It was as though language had been but language until then. Now I'd been addressed. This singling me out was in no prose of my making, but struck me on the contrary with a perverse nakedness, a disfigured immediacy which exposed my designs and merely to think on now fills me with loathing. Strangely, of all the scraps of paper on which I've recorded verbatim my every experience, my own meaning is the one text I'm unable to render more authentic, can only render more dubious, by reproducing. I know that, after all I've divulged, you can hardly take me at my word, but the following is what that most monstrous of scriptures had to say:

THIS

NOW

HERE

stink of mire spike of scum little light at the edge wordswarming muck and bloodrustle stay tuned gnomon Maker, yo! Heeheehee. Hear nome swirling still to cum….
THIS NOW beginning HERE how formless spurned and cavecringing nome nightly clung, raw wormed in nestle mire, gnawing cold blister, what lusty stink to high heaven, being earth onus but under new moon, well, not hinged offspring twaddles unendly, Maker, bare morphed, vortexing, pang rounded with badderself…aaargh! Cant to backthinking these fused pixxes, soupy wordswarms, unparsed befog origins. Tickatickaticka. But knotter worry, eh Wombard? Gist barefaced, no mutter, little inkling. Red rising uttermongrel allswirl the heartspurn nil moving bleakroot to sucky bellow claw snout-eeeeeeeeeeeee!

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