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Ah Gunslinger! Weary of Time
When the man pauses, having assigned itself the task of tak- ing on comers, it crouches wrinkled, full of strength-it cannot know what will be next and is defeated by successive layers of self awareness: (Yes I know I'm waiting [yes I know about that (yes about that too [yes . . .])]) He waits on a moonlit hill, great arms dangling like a gun- fighter's, ready, he says, for "anything" Have I sketched in enough for you to tell what is of no use? Isn't it interesting how he can win but loses and loses? Not that foes rise fantastic but that the scene can seem to shift, he disappears, is caught off guard And what keeps coming, rolls of it, the semi-digested back- ground that can't be looked at it's so drab, is the clue, the next step Oh draw and draw There is nothing too familiar to express the subject-not the thing remembered but the words, the unnoticed, once- brushed name of the kind of thought How much can it hold? Of a certain weight not overflows but the bottom gives, emptying into a broader small container This is the classic stand, there is nothing older: and here I want to say that the alternatives are limited, like musical notes, like words of a language So that the surprise is not that things seem to recur but the small ways the repeats differ: the origin of these must be a still smaller alphabet and the focus of the next change. Gunslinger, hugely inap- propriate, you are the hero, the actor brought in for his good looks-shall we dub the lines or splice them word-by-word, until a wholly piecemeal intonation is achieved?