WE POINT THE BONE: AN ESSAY ON THREAT Part I: WE POINT THE BONE Little tough ones, little tall ones, like little tall trees, others yellow as hay, their tiny blades falling across the cracks, the stones. Blades moving a bit. There is no reason for you to wonder about this. Keep listening. Keep glancing out, small grasses in the driveway, perhaps following two lines of thought at once as a person does on the telephone on an ordinary day, little grasses like that pushing up, thrusting their way, can be expected in time to dissect and overturn the whole driveway and how strange this voice you do not recognize is using your name, talking about you as he, saying he had an accident, very bad accident. Very bad, taken to the hospital. Very bad, hospital, must proceed at once. He? You? No staircases go up to this moment where you perceive the second person cut from the third person within you and it all drops off into a past tense that will not have happened yet. Click. Dial tone. The little grasses look weak and cold. Pity them. Don’t pity them. Watch yourself. You didn’t know the blades hung in your mouth. The word “threat” comes from Old English thret, coercion, and Middle High German dröz, annoyance, also associated with the Latin verb trudere, to push, thrust, shove. People so pushed will leave town for a while, six months, a year, return quietly. See how things go. Resume as they say normal life. Keep listening, keep an ear cocked. Wake up stinging. You will dream of a man who hastens along pulling off a piece of his face as he goes, drops it on the sidewalk. Telephones are not the only way. You receive your own obituary in the mail. A person in black stops before you in the street then hurries away. And suddenly, at six in the morning, as if swept by winter rivers, everything changes. Your telephone, your kitchen, your driveway, all these things that had a notion of you now change their gaze and watch you from a different place - no, two places. Everything now happens from two places. You brush your teeth in the second and in the third person. You stand at the window in the second and in the third person, watching the driveway, waiting perhaps for your child who is late from school. You sweat from those places. So I was crossing the schoolyard one morning. Saturdays I go to early bike class at the gym and often take a shortcut through the yard behind the local schoolhouse where there are swings and monkey bars and a sort of roughly paved basketball court with benches for parents. I love the clear empty light of Saturday morning. There’s no one in the schoolyard at that hour except usually a guy reading a newspaper. He sits not on the benches but on the edge of a low stone retaining wall that marks off the paved area from the swings. He balances exactly on the wall with one leg crossed over the other and doesn’t look up. It’s funny you can tell just from how a person sits reading the newspaper that he is, as they say, off the grid in some essential way. Economically. Mentally. Who knows. I don’t like to say homeless. He’s not unclean. He wears regular clothes, a sort of sports coat, he has no collection of stuff parked nearby, just his newspaper. Yet he is different, sharper, sharpened on the air. He and I don’t look at one another straight. I cross the schoolyard briskly, normally. He is on my left as I cross. I do not feel his eyes on my back when I exit via the little path that runs along the sixth-grade science classroom, past the two old steelcase doors still marked Boys and Girls, onto the street. But that one morning when I crossed the yard he wasn’t there. I registered this with half my mind, I was a bit late and had put my T-shirt on backwards, the label was bothering my neck, anyway I kept going, stepped onto the little path, glanced into the dark science classroom, smoothed down my hair and was almost to the street when something white that had been pushing itself up through my attention on the left formed into a thought. White thing. Boys. Girls. I stopped and turned. In the place where he would have been sitting on the wall was a whiteness like a pile of paper. I don’t have time to investigate this, I thought, I’m already late, and I turned onto the street. A crease went through me, that’s the way it felt, a piece of me folded over in a crease inside and lay flat, knife-edged. I stopped, turned again, went back. The white pile looked like pieces of torn newspaper, words torn out, heaped on the stone wall. No not words, single letters. Careful job of tearing. I was late for my class but I had to stop and sit down on the wall and study them, arranging the letters this way and that. Nine letters. Alphabetically: ABDELLMOO. Other ways: DOLOMBEAL, MOBELLADO, BADLELOOM, BLOODMEAL. Bloodmeal. I paused. Looked at the red stain revealed by my moving the letters from where they’d been piled on the stone. A dark red stain. Recent but dry. I thought about the bike class, gave up on it. Glanced up the street and down the street. Quiet backyards in every direction, one behind the other, how deeply they nested like bowls of graded sizes, some empty, some cluttered, with their yew trees, their dropped toys, their clotheslines, their shadow. I am someone who knows about stains, it’s my business. I do cleaning. Also I have occasionally been engaged as an expert witness in criminal investigations. Expert witnessing is well paid. Much can be inferred from a stain. This one for example. I glanced up the street again, vaguely expecting to see the egret, then remembered it had been kidnapped. Some rich people (a judge and his striking Northern wife) who live up the street have an ornamental pond and used to keep a pet egret in the backyard until the judge fell afoul of certain local cocaine financiers and the egret got snatched. Ransom was paid. They slaughtered the egret anyway. Life went on for the judge who persevered in his efforts to clear our small town of drug trade. One day the local paper published a political cartoon about the judge, his involvement in some municipal controversy I can’t remember now, and there in the background stood the tall white-skinned wife, balanced on one leg in what looked like an ornamental pond. The judicial procedure was soon discontinued, technical reasons, and there went my hopes for a Xmas vacation in Rio. I’d been scheduled to testify about various stains found in various places at various crime scenes and, as I say, the pay is good. But now back to BLOODMEAL. BLOODMEAL was furnishing me with several points to consider. Letters cut out with scissors, not sloppily done. Different fonts but all caps and roughly the same font size so the word, laid out on the retaining wall, looked emphatic but amiable, not crazy. The blood, for it was blood, showed a stain pattern not created by passive drops (gravity) but swiped onto the stone (human purpose), its viscosity indicating leakage from a lower extremity, not a major organ and not copious. It was a few hours old. The body goes dark, inside and out, at times. The mind stops down to a narrowness. Why were they threatening me with minor wounds to a person I scarcely knew and didn’t care about? This is meager, I thought, this is feeble, what a pallid degree of enemy I am to them! I was on some level insulted. Yet my reactions felt rudderless, I struggled to get hold of them. Let’s review the facts, my facts. Mother and father gone. No children, wife or waterfowl. You’d have to grasp at straws to find a way of menacing me. I went to a conference of hemotophonomists in Krakow last year. People who analyze bloodstains for forensic purpose are a varied lot, as you might imagine, but a kind of bluff stoicism seems characteristic of them. Queasiness not an option. Pity not an option. Facts are what matter. Striding about the old stone streets of Krakow in the small hours of the night, I was listening to PJ Harvey on my headset and pondering ethical types. Every bloodspatter analysis is proof that strength alone cannot earn you the world, you with your bludgeon raised. I can know you. I can read your trace. People who do violence or who threaten to do violence do thereby to some extent reveal themselves. And I admit, rising from the retaining wall and stuffing BLOODMEAL into my pocket, I began almost to enjoy myself. Matching wits. It’s the best thing in life. Clearly I would have to rethink my role in the war on drugs, at least locally, meanwhile I was involved with worthy opponents, intelligent maybe not but they understood close observation of facts. And their interest in the nuances of me would eventually show me their own. I felt cocky. I felt singular. I rose to my full outline, sharp and white against the day. We point the bone. No more bike classes. I opened my research. Got all the old police reports, began sifting the judge’s data, working out a certain picture of how things went down. During this time I stopped answering my cell phone and forgot to eat. There were a couple dozen packets of gummi bears in the fridge and some Ryvita, I subsisted on these. Also during this time occurred the action at the schoolhouse. I had to lean my head on my notebook and weep. Our local schoolmaster, a brave and innovative soul, decided to not pay the spring semester’s installment of protection money and see where that led. It led to a Wednesday in March when the entire student body, give or take a few kids home with colds or flu, was mowed down by machine gun fire as it emerged for recess. Those chubby advancing knees. Boys. Girls. I wasn’t enjoying myself anymore. Several nights I went and stood outside the judge’s house, watched dark shapes move behind his blinds. The pond lay still. Threat is a communication system that functions best with a high level of noise. My research had narrowed down to five people. I found out a lot about them, facts, every fact available. I used regular mail, priority mail, parcels, faxes, FedEx, a dead fox, money and messengers in black. I used sulfur, pollen, beet juice, blackberries, meat, ashes, urine, rust, semen, feces and blood of every type in my lab. I threatened everything those five people were or did or knew or hoped or had kinship with. I polluted every surface they met, touched or saw in the course of the day and every place their dreams went in the black sleep of night. I confused their categories and contaminated their information. One of them received a pizza with his wife’s email password in black olives across the top (his mistress’s, underneath, in roasted pepper). Next day both women changed their passwords. I sent another pizza. Does it sound like I was having a merry and mischievous time? In fact there was no mood I can name. Expert witness or not, it was all so clumsy, it was all so inadequate, so DIY. Nothing I did matched what they had done or tied off the loose ends of sin. I was flailing at trauma. I worked without realistic expectation of follow-through, I’m not much good at actual harm. Still, it felt better to me to live this way than to be circling my perfect calves on a bike at the gym. I meant to lower the quality of those five lives, just a bit, every minute of their lives that I could reach. Make a small mark, nothing sublime. You know that drop of the heart you feel when you turn and see stain on your best shirt. I lasted a couple of months. In ancient times there were tribes who rode into battle shooting volleys of curses before them. Little papers attached to arrows such as those now fluttering down across my windows in a white storm, I do not see the wording. Feeling my way upstairs in the dark, some day I can’t remember morning in, old mothy smell in my nose, how I hate carpeted stairs! why have I never replaced these stairs - I imagine the old tried-and-true language. May you walk wrong. May you never sleep again. May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat. Go astray a hundred times. We point the bone. They will arrive this evening or possibly tomorrow. If I call don’t pick up the phone. Let me leave a posthumous message. I’ve always wanted to do that. Part II: ASPIRIN FOR TRAVELLERS They did not kill me after all in the kill house. I’m still here. Still working stains and blood. Still listening to PJ Harvey. I’ve started going to bike class again. Not every Saturday but often. I take the shortcut. There’s a guy on the wall again. Not the same guy. Sitting. He sits at an angle, uncomfortably, on the wall, gazing sort of down and off, with the constraint of an animal feeling itself watched. Meanwhile I go on with my sociopolitical action program. I have added an assistant to the program. His name is Short Pants. He befriended me during long afternoons at the kill house. The qualities that endear Short Pants to me are alacrity and wrath. He also eats my garbage. Short Pants is a carrion crow. I saw him on a tree in the backyard. He saw me in the kitchen. I was eating toast. He seemed to know about toast. I opened the screen door and laid toast on the railing. He moved his eye onto it. We paused. That’s for you, I said. That’s for me, he said right back. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he could talk. He has four pairs of labia embedded in the muscles of his throat and an auditory midbrain nucleus proportional in size to my own. But the grammar was surprising. How did he learn pronoun function? His voice had cracks in it. Suddenly he hurtled from the tree and toast was gone. Short Pants and I share a narrow but nourishing social bond, also a politics. You recall I was harassing local drug lords previously. Short Pants and I persist in this. The corvid brain thrives on a diet rich in protein and fat. Compared to other creatures’ a crow’s brain is big, can weigh up to 2.7% of body mass (cf. human brains at 1.9%) and more brain means more thinking. What is thinking. We call it thinking when data coming in from the world passes through and out of the brain different than when it arrived. I began laying out toast with peanut butter on the railing. Short Pants and I evolved our thinking on several topics gradually. I wouldn’t exactly say I trained him, any more than he trained me. We each had a blank in us that got filled in. Our first action involved the judge with the ornamental pond and the Northern wife. Since selling out to local criminal interests the judge had acquired new anxieties and a guard dog out back. I don’t know much about dogs. Big black-and-tan fellow and what a barker. You could hear that dog all over town. Short Pants and I staked out the property a few days to get the pattern. Generally the dog slept till 7 or 7.30 a.m. when the judge came out in his Nikes, whistled three times and called the dog’s name. The dog would explode from his sleep place and off they go down the street to the path by the lake. Short Pants had no trouble mastering the whistle and call. His talents go beyond mere mimicry - a firefly after all can mimic another firefly by some mindless reflexive chingchingching of cranial circuitry but to impersonate a ninth-circuit court judge so competently that his own dog can be induced to wake him with ecstatic cries at 4 a.m. nine days in a row required not only conscious and complex manipulation of all the musculature of Short Pants’ throat but a philosophical awareness of the aims of human speech. Weekdays I waited in the schoolyard till I heard the barking then went home to lay out toast on the railing. Nine days of this and then the weather turned. Rain of an extreme nature was predicted and hurricane-force winds. No doubt the autumn rains depress me. So, I’m sitting on the backporch watching the trees sway at the top and pondering the value of our activist efforts when Short Pants comes rattling out of the gloom and drops a gift on my knee. Two long thin strips of rubber. Facings from the windshield wipers on someone’s vehicle, likely the big silver Maybach we’d seen parked in the judge’s driveway most mornings. Short Pants had a good sense of coda. Moving on. No one in our town drives a Maybach except it’s been awarded to him by a certain person. You can’t buy them anymore, not many of us were in the market anyway, but a certain person appears to have his own supply. This person’s name is Tiplady and “boasting lavish shit” is how he puts it on his website under Tiplady’s Harmless Pleasures. You might not think someone so deeply involved in the other kind of pleasures would be this frank on his website or even have a website but then Tiplady proves an exception to most rules of classical mechanics, common sense and social gesture. That he is dashingly and majestically generous to his friends, to waiters, to dancers in strip clubs, to the boys who detail his cars and the girls who buff his nails, seems an aspect of boasting. But can someone tell me what is it about Louis Vuitton? Why do gangsters love this stuff? It’s just luggage, right? Whenever he’s bored at home Tiplady drives out to the mall with a carload of people and drops in at the LV outlet. He consults every new item of stock, analyzes trends with the head salesman and never leaves without buying satchels or cartridge belts or monogrammed this and that for everybody who came along. A lot of people come along. I’m not against altruism as such. I just wish Tiplady’s unselfish impulses extended to the middle school children who buy ready rock from his runners at lunch hour behind the schoolhouse. It’s an old lament but the fact is you can enslave a child’s life so easily and Tiplady knows this, he knows education. He knows the price he gets for a rock from a 12-year-old barely covers the baking soda that went into it but a little addict is a bound-down future for the merchandise, a reliable crop. Tiplady gardens as he pleases. Facts and accuracy are what I’m good at, speculation not so much. A bloodstained stocking for example. I never was one for standard puzzle-solving, crosswords, brainteasers. Stains and evidence, tracing the pattern, that’s my expertise. The science of stains sort of runs a puzzle backwards. You’re given the errors and chaos of how the answer went wrong, you work back to a right answer and maybe the original question. Recently I attended an auction of “Bonnie and Clyde Death Car Items” recovered from the floor of their bullet-pocked car on May 23, 1934, Arcadia, Louisiana, including: silk stocking stained with blood unspent .45 caliber bullet single armature from a pair of eyeglasses one small wooden flathead screwdriver one small Bayer aspirin tin Ambush is a shabby tactic but you get a sudden snapshot. They had been living in their car, where Bonnie wrote bad poetry and Clyde cared for his guns - or maybe not since the rifle jammed when he raised it to shoot on May 23. The aspirin tin is provocative. Aspirin for travellers. The tin is very small. It is empty. Who had a headache? And why did she take off one stocking? However I digress. What I started to say is that facts themselves no longer satisfy me. I am restless at a different level of accuracy. As far as facts go, I know who Tiplady is and what he is doing to our town. Crime, method of crime, perpetrator of crime, not a mystery. Something else hangs in my dream. A flock of crows, a horde, a hover, a misery, a muster, a murder, a parcel, a storytelling of crows, in their shapeless black overcoats, gathering, perhaps to mourn. Making that sound that crows make. Actually crows make two sounds. The caaaaw sound signals danger. The haaaaw refers only to meat. “Now that I’m old I wake up early. I like the sound of my shoes on empty streets at 5 a.m. The solidity of heels, the klopklop of a good horse on its way and I like my reasoning at that hour. Thoughts fall into slots, actions plan themselves. So it was while perambulating the streets of central downtown one morning at first light that I attained two clear realizations simultaneously: 1 the girlfriend 2 the oven Not my girlfriend, not my oven. I had turned the corner of Front St. onto Esperanza and saw two black shapes frolicking in the airshaft between a tall bank and a high-rise. One unmistakably Short Pants, the other conjecturally his mate. They were riding the airshaft to the top of the bank, alternating with each other, hurling themselves headfirst into the updraft and snapping their wings open fast to catch the wind. On top they perched and exchanged remarks before plunging to the bottom to start over. The monogamy of crows is well known. I expected to see Fury (for that was her name) showing up on my backporch for peanut butter toast and I was not mistaken. But I get ahead of my story. The vision of those two corvid playmates combining so simply and joyously with wild air made me halt and think. Two can be better than one. Could we apply this logic to Tiplady and if so how? My next action became clear then. Tiplady has a rival who operates from the outlet mall on the edge of town and who had to be discouraged from freelancing in Tiplady’s territory a few years back. Discouragement took the form of popping three of the rival guy’s street-level pitchers and a bit of mutilation thrown in to make it look Mexican. The rival guy backed off. The rival guy has a reputation for barging in and backing off as well as a general slipperiness, why they call him Swimsaway. But Swimsaway never swims entirely away and I’d heard rumours he was buying up weapons. Planning something. What if Tiplady and Swimsaway could be encouraged to think of one another as playmates again? What if they got the notion to harass, threaten, distract, detoxify or destroy one another, leaving our town temporarily or even permanently better off, the self-cleaning oven scenario? It was a bonus as soon as Short Pants and I went into action that Fury joined in, proving herself a fast learner and decisive coactivist, with some sense of humour. Our program was one of continual minor delinquencies performed, usually at early dawn when corvid eyesight is most acute, upon Tiplady’s premises, usage and pride. To confiscate his garbage-can lids, the windshield-wiper blades from his fleet of Maybachs, the votive candles from the shrine in his backyard and half the tail feathers of his pet peacock - but only from one side of the tail and only one feather at a time over many days so the bird grew gradually more unbalanced and at last toppled sideways on the grass - these were tasks that pleased all three of our childlike souls equally. Whitewashing the porch with excrement was not my idea, I just don’t like mess, notwithstanding an image that I still cherish of the morning Fury managed to target Tiplady’s bodyguard just as he emerged from the house in all his bulletproof puffery. However - if I may slightly boast, for the score was mine although the orchestration belonged entirely to the crows - our most elegant and efficacious action that season, doom aside, was the cigar switch. Some crows are very good at undoing packaging. Fury specialized in FedEx. Now Tiplady was a vegan and a hypochondriac and had a box of homeopathic remedies delivered once a week (FedEx). The box remained on the porch until the bodyguard took it in but with the bodyguard now grown wary of porch appearances, the box might sit out for some time. Meanwhile I had rekindled my acquaintance with Swimsaway, whom I knew from court cases in the old days. Arraigned a few times, always got off. Something likable in him, less caught up in himself than other gangsters, one eye on the future, which he realistically expected to be bad. One eye too many as somebody said about Oedipus but my advice would be, don’t start sympathizing with Swimsaway, don’t go down that road. Lots of skeletons lined up on that road, lots of master-slave stuff, they all get into it these kingpins, stories abound. Like that the girls who cut his heroin are forbidden to wear anything but plastic gloves. He denies this. We met for a drink Swimsaway and I, talked about old times. I stole his cigars. Evenings I was spending on the backporch in an uncomfortable deck chair until it was too dark to see. I liked watching Short Pants and Fury side by side on a branch of the yew tree piercing one another’s hearts with fiery love and doing that grooming thing on one another’s heads, lifting each feather and twisting it sideways then laying it down. Good for the feathers. They took turns. He always finished by tweaking a point very precisely in the centre of each of her eyebrows. Afterwards they leaned their shoulders together and tilted their heads at a common angle as if pondering the same piece of air. Is it George Eliot who says that if we could pay enough attention to the world to hear the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, we would die of the roar of it - no, I looked it up, she says “die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Melodramatic but she’s onto something. The silence is where to start. It’s not the caaawing and the haaawing and the flap and din of other creatures that is completely mysterious, it’s when they sit silent staring at the same piece of air. Swimsaway’s cigars are Romeo y Julieta Mini (SMOKING KILLS) Cigarritos from Havana. Back in the beginning, when Swimsaway and Tiplady were still colleagues, that is, one game in town and Swimsaway working for Tiplady as a kind of mid-level manager, they had a big falling-out over the cigars. Tiplady went vegan and prohibited smoke everywhere in his operation, the cars, the kitchen, the factory, the library, the clothing of employees. A soupçon of tolerance would have gone a long way for Tiplady at that time but you know what new vegans are like. Anyway Swimsaway felt he was at the top of his jump and he jumped. All this to say that Romeo y Julieta Minis with their trademark maroon-striped packaging and inset embossed goldleaf portrait of Romeo promising the moon to Juliet on the balcony would have been immediately recognizable to Tiplady when he pried open his week’s supply of homeopathic remedies and saw that telltale glint of maroon and gold. We had arranged the pills and tinctures in an attractive radial pattern around the cigars and stuck the label with 800-number (ADDICTED? WE CAN HELP!) to the inside of the box lid. Tiplady came out onto the porch. He had a look on his face of a shout-out gone wrong, of deep person-to-person disappointment. People always said this about him, the personal touch, made you want to be on his team, build up the brand, crack his smile. He had on blue silk pajamas. The big creamy hands hung down like paws. And because he is so big I didn’t notice the bodyguard emerge and stand behind him. I was crouched in the hawthorn hedge at the turn of the drive, my coactivists roosting somewhere above and if I’d seen the guard, if I’d tuned in the nightmare, if I’d had my coffee yet, I would have jumped up and warned her not to. But Fury took one look at that big blue silk gameboard and came plunging towards him with a loud crow sound (haaaaaaaaw) that hung only a second, transected in air by the hot little zip of a bullet and she dropped. Nobody moved. Then everybody moved. The bodyguard shoved Tiplady inside, hustled in after him and slammed the door. I thought Fury had fallen on the far side of the driveway somewhere. When I arrived Short Pants was circling. He made a low sound I never heard before, the tiniest font on the font list, then descended to the body which was lying on a speed bump in the driveway with its head pointing uphill. He pecked around the body two or three times and pulled once on the wing, still making that weird microscript sound. He pulled again on the wing and kept pulling until he had reoriented the body with its head downhill. He waited, watched. The body did not move. He turned and flew off. I approached closer. There was not much blood. A single neat hole through the cerebellum at the back of the skull. Maybe the crow thing to do would have been to leave it as carrion. But I buried the body below the yew tree in my backyard. After a few days I gave up hoping for Short Pants to reappear at the bleakporch for bleaktoast from the bleakrailing. I continued to see him in trees around town, with a dishevelled appearance even when sitting still. He seemed more thoughtful, this may be a projection on my part. We want to believe that other creatures grieve like we do. Have we any proof or knowledge of this? Not really. Do we understand how we ourselves grieve? Not really. Grief is big, grief is little, grief is cranky and comes at the wrong time, usually disguised as something else. Chemically, a conspiracy of hormones, opioids and dopamine in the forebrain. I have a sense most grief is also deeply and horribly humorous but we’re not supposed to say so. Aspirin for travellers, grief. On my way to bike class this past Saturday, the guy is on the wall as usual. He has acquired a friend. Short Pants beside him on the wall. They both sit silent, looking off. I feel questions flooding my mind and stop on the path. I’ve been a scientist all my life, a moderately successful Aristotelian-type person, understanding human existence as a set of questions to which there are answers. I am determined to know who the guy is, and if he’s the same guy that used to sit on the wall before bloodmeal, and if he is the same guy how he survived all that, and if he isn’t what does he know about it, and how has he come to co-opt my best crow friend, and how does this crow make his decisions, and what had the crow thought of me, or was he even aware of me at all - were the crow and the guy aware of me at all as something more than a shape on the landscape. I am hopping and popping with scientific method, I am ready for final realities. Then Short Pants moves his eye onto me. And the signal turns inside out. His awareness of me, my awareness of him, their awareness of each other, a bead of electricity speeds down some axon in my brain and these three separate accountabilities seem all at once indistinguishable, one very old, very early lament in which we all have a part, one same uncomprehending core. I have always felt stunted by my own loneliness but now this strikes me as inaccurate, or the answer to a question that has not been asked. What do answers answer anyway. They fit onto questions like a stocking onto a leg but the bloodstains still refuse to evaporate. The crow and the guy on the wall and me, travellers all, what closes its lips on us, the big secret if there is a secret, I relinquish all right to. The pair of them are leaning their heads at a similar angle, watching the same piece of air, as I follow the path to the street and go my way. Part III: SWIMMING IN HÖLDERLIN When I remember that time now it is in layers, I move through the layers, I move through the layers and I find one connected to another by staircases that surprise me because I didn’t build any staircases. Staircases became the most important part of my reasoning about all of it. I would never use an audio tape recorder or a video tape recorder, a taped conversation functions entirely on one plane. This seems to me to lack accuracy. What I mean by accuracy is hard to sum up. There is a sentence of Hölderlin’s that fell out of a book of fragments of his that I read once and then I couldn’t find the book again. A sentence using the verb “to swim” in the passive voice, as in: Mein Herz ist schwimmt in Zeit. My heart is swimmed in time. This sentence seems to me an example of accuracy.