It Makes One’s Head Heavy And Giddy,

To Set One's Name To A Work Gives No One A Title To Be Remembered, For Who Knows How Many Of The Best Of Men Have Gone Without A Trace? The Iniquity Of Oblivion Blindly Scatters Her Poppyseed And When Wretchedness Falls Upon Us One Summer's Day Like Snow, All We Wish For Is To Be Forgotten.

This Then, I Thought, As I Looked Round About Me, Is The Representation Of History. It Requires A Falsification Of Perspective. We, The Survivors, See Everything From Above, See Everything At Once, And Still We Do Not Know How It Was.

I Felt That The Decrepit State Of These Once Magnificent Buildings, With Their Broken Gutters, Walls Blackened By Rainwater, Crumbling Plaster Revealing The Coarse Masonry Beneath It, Windows Boarded Up Or Clad With Corrugated Iron, Precisely Reflected My Own State Of Mind.

The More Images I Gathered From The Past, I Said, The More Unlikely It Seemed To Me That The Past Had Actually Happened In This Or That Way, For Nothing About It Could Be Called Normal: Most Of It Was Absurd, And If Not Absurd, Then Appalling.

I Suppose It Is Submerged Realities That Give To Dreams Their Curious Air Of Hyper-reality. But Perhaps There Is Something Else As Well, Something Nebulous, Gauze-like, Through Which Everything One Sees In A Dream Seems, Paradoxically, Much Clearer. A Pond Becomes A Lake, A Breeze Becomes A Storm, A Handful Of Dust Is A Desert, A Grain Of Sulphur In The Blood Is A Volcanic Inferno. What Manner Of Theater Is It, In Which We Are At Once Playwright, Actor, Stage Manager, Scene Painter And Audience?