The World Within the Word

William H Gass

Photographs represented occasions once upon a time. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money; they recorded important moments; you faced front' you seldom smiled, since levity was not the mark you wanted put across your face forever; yet the result of this resolute Egyptian solemnity was to separate people as they sat or stood together, man and wife or members of a band, to emphasize the withdrawn, inward look they all had, because there was nothing in front of them but a lens as cold and darkly caped as God's eye. Even the dogs were docile, cow-jawed, stiff as porcelain. There were, of course, no cats.

The lovely countryside was filled with suicides. They hung themselves from trees, of course, and exploded their brains from their heads with guns. They threw themselves in front of trains, cut their own throats, used morphine. They ate the heads off matches, swallowed cigar stubs, carbolic acid, arsenic. Paris green. They drowned themselves in rain barrels, rivers, ponds, wells (as, in pique, a child did). They hammered in their own heads, set fire to themselves as they had torched that dog, and with dynamite blew apart their painful being. Occasionally they murdered others first. Or ran away into the woods. They became hermits. They froze to death, rime on their limbs like blond hairs. But the plague of man was as relentless as that of nature.

Nothing was too mean for his imagination because he did not believe there was any insignificance on earth.

I can hold a stone to the light, set it in silver, let it decorate my finger, even permit it to reveal my marital intentions, but I"m not supposed to walk through Kant as through a cathedral, admiring the beauties of the nave, transept, and choir, curious about the catacombs, dubious about the dome, and positively frightened by the spire. What an affront to the serious purposes of the great man! Isn't that the conventional opinion? Only the writer who writes to provide such careless strolls is worse, they say. This villain, who puts words together with no intention of stating, hoping, praying or persuading...only imagining, only creating...is to many immoral, certainly frivolous, a trivial person in a time of trouble (and what time is not?), a parasite upon whatever scrofulous body the body politic possesses at that moment.

A word is a wanderer.