The Persistence of the Word

These hours, ever growing early, so also ever grow later. Merlin lived backwards in time, proceeding forever from an ancient state to a youth unfettered by our amnesiac births. We often, men, not characters in books, point ourselves on a line fixed in a conceptual and unknowable distance for the sake of our narrative conventions. The cult of the goal and the cult of purpose rule the stories we and our neighbors live out, nimbly avoiding any acknowledgment beyond technical instruction that these stories take advantage of arcs, zeniths, nadirs, azimuths. The lines these trains run, these words read in are curved, enclosed, and on occasion memory intrudes strongly and boorishly into inappropriate alphabetized chambers we occupy from morning till night. We live always on both sides of time, and memory, that dream we never wake from, proceeds ad infinitum, not stopped, but occurring as the grain of simultanagnosia in moments we have experienced and must always experience. We live in memory, memory ordered by privelege. Memory informs even the crossing of the apparently airless lock between experience and reaction. We hear the music first always on the ebb, always first meeting the ear at its most dramatic, thunderous, frightening. If you would dare to be so surprised as to forget yourself, hypnotised, moved to dream through your memories as you wake and let unfurl the languages you know according to the naturally inscribed laws of their expression- then you would find in that ebb and decline new grammars which are, to the one, the wake and tumult of retreat from order, but to the other the same declension is the verbing of nouns in a world in reaction unrelenting in moulting its names and the addresses of its names' stations. All tongues fold at the end in clover's fractal, and all fingers persist at the ends of arms in dreams in the extension of impossible motions. All languages, would that you could again forget, fold and bend like protein, each word recalling all the others it is piled upon and beside, advancing concurrent with all events that the word remembers, for the word remembers and is simultaneity.