. . . there is a line of words crawling across a white lined page. Sometimes it's actually a piece of paper, sometimes one I picture in my thoughts. Or, more and more these days, it is not a piece of paper but a screen, or one window or frame on a screen. Regardless, the line of words behaves the same way. Sometimes it scurries across the page so that my transcribing hand can scarcely keep up with my thoughts; sometimes I nudge it gently across and set it down on the next line; sometimes I have to drag and shove it across, the way I once moved a desk through a house by myself.
After a time the lines begin to form rough rectangles of print. The rectangle gradually changes its dimensions, usually growing but sometimes shrinking. Periodically one ends and another begins. They all retain that ragged right edge, like all those vaguely rectangular states with ragged eastern borders--Tennesee maybe, or Kansas or Missouri. Sometimes I pick them up and move them around, throw them away, put them back where they were, and in general fool around with the cartography.
But this is all too much about words, too little about the meat of thw writing. What really happens is that . . . . .
Abstract | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: April 2, 1996
Last update: June 11, 1996