Must a Violence

Selection

49 — for the Real Animals, the coded animals with their finite sequences, live in a physical space surrounded by all the versions they could have been, the invisible, the Almost Animals, almost given breath to exist— or breath in time— just as breath sculpted in time makes a rhythm of real words that fill portions of the invisible grid of stressed and unstressed syllables, all the infinite words that could have been spoken, sounded in space. The grid extends in the air, unfolding back through centuries, back before the first words were hung upon it, ornaments of proof and stretching onward, beyond the languages we recognize, far beyond our own scattered patches where on the tapestry we sewed words, spoke, surrounded by the selves that could have spoken, those ghost selves that lifted from us as we turned toward, as we turned away— and invisibly became all the selves we never became, for whatever reason— Selection ...