I have stared at the sky, blotched with night-white clouds and the wheeling light of planets, and phantasied myself the fixed point, with sky and light and earth shifting across my life. Deep rivulets of shadow have I crept through, sloughing away the clinging light. I've watched flocks, flights, murders of feather-beasts cross the air; I've seen the messages, lines, words between their twisting, creaking flight, in a language I do not read, or speak. I have waited on the crests of industry-shattered hills for the thunder to come, and listened to it shout wet triumph to the ticking ground. Cloth is an anagram of endless triangles, and Babel the impresario of sound and fury.

The tower and the plain, white salt the one and red rushes the other, crouch in the folds of all brains, the tooth and the gum, awaiting that one, salt-corpuscle moment. Turned inward, that tour blanc becomes an arrow of thought, meat-claws sinking into erudition and fancy.

I have felt water clutch at me, pull at me, push at my lungs and nose, creep its way into my neck as panic squeezes my eyeballs and employees earn their pay by ripping me from below the meniscus.