The Invention of the Novel
There were two hundred of us, we needed a language. Not spoken – there was chatter from every direction like birds. We needed a written language, and it developed like photos: we immersed paper in our chatter until letters revealed themselves. The characters were casual, loopy, linked together in chains. We exchanged them for necklaces.
Pillow Shot
We are walking on a bridge over a wide river. It is night, both shores are unknown to us. Nothing is known to us but this moment.
The street winding away from the bridge is in a different city at a smaller scale. It may be a street we walk together every day at noon.
The office has a view over a shipping channel. There is a razor factory at street level; each evening we hear scrap metal clattering.
The moon shines in our window, or it may be a streetlight behind the curtain. A train horn echoes from across the river. A screech owl is close at hand.
Nikki
I keep a diary, it is silent. Each day, my diary is ready to continue or to conclude, because the final entry in any diary is a silent one. Were you to read my diary with attention, you might find it dense with allusion, implication, overtones and compression. But I am not offering it to you for reading. I will only share this preface to your own silence.