There's no way the written word can open into simultaneous voices, each moving its own way against the others, not the way music can. The sentence progresses in a linear sequence without chord structure or counterpoint. Even if a single word resonates with overlapping impressions or meanings, continuation in the manner of a key signature is impossible. The writer and reader are stuck with a line of melody, then, attempting to amass the evidence.
But that's not how my mind works. A cluster of words – often, not even a full sentence – is cast against random visual observations, bits of conversation from elsewhere in the room, musical passages from a radio or television, aromas in the air, whatever my fingers are touching, emotions somewhere within me, and so on. Assembled, this would resemble a measure or two of a symphonic score far more than they would any sentence or paragraph I could compose.
Graphically, I glimpsed this possibility when viewing a reconstructed Egyptian funeral crypt, where four simultaneous horizontal lines of hieroglyphics and illustrations conveyed the twenty-four hour journey from human death to immortality – a story continuing around the walls of the room. A corresponding literary form, I realized, would ideally require either long walls or a running scroll, rather than the pages of a book.
To open the book, Preludes Two.
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