Erasure Read Online Free Page B

(HER. period), connoting an extremely short sentence or, a mark of finality connoting the end of the self (SEM. self), thus casting away responsibility for the text to follow. And of evaluation, are we to attach this word to I which precedes it or to the text which follows? If the former, does it reiterate the shedding of culpability?
    The “ascetic practices enable them” is curious as it seems to personify and give credit to the practices of the buddhists as if they exist in the world apart from their practitioners. It is because of these things we call practices that it is buddhists who are enabled and not catholics or muslims. Though the term practices is vague here, we might reasonably take it to mean “certain practices,” so practices (SEM. buddhists) becomes attached via the “/,” in that special way, to those whom it enables (SEM. practices) … to see a whole landscape in a bean. * What must it be to see a whole landscape anywhere, as our vision must stop somewhere, peripherally left and right, and away from us at the horizon. So, is the whole landscape always a fragment of a greater landscape? Or are we to understand that all landscapes exist as fragments and that those fragments are in themselves whole? A landscape can only be seen whole “in a bean” and therefore the trick which is enabled by the practices is really not so special at all. And why “in a bean” and not in a glass marble or within the footprint or in a close-up photograph of a face. The bean is present and therefore means something (even if it means nothing [SEM. Zen]) and we shall refer to units in this symbolic area with SYM. The bean of course implies the seed which it both is and contains, being what it is and that from which it comes. It is its own birth, complete and whole, from the ground, the land and so, is complete as a picture of itself, a landscape. This growth from the self while being the self is the ultimate action. We shall refer to such actions with ACT and we shall number each of the terms which constitute it as they appear (ACT. in a bean: (1) what is seen; (2) the seed of itself; (3) the idea of itself…). Finally, it is not the buddhist whom we should find interesting, but the bean. 1
    (3) Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories. * Precisely is terribly imprecise, as the “first analysts” were not trying to see a landscape in a bean, but rather define the necessary and sufficient conditions for calling a story a story. So, “precisely” is ironic, quietly claiming that the subject text is above the pedestrian efforts of the “first analysts” (SEM. precision). What is implied by reference to the likeness in mission of the buddhists and the first analysts is that the buddhists are not in fact among the first analysts. Those bean-gazing, fat boys have no need for the establishment of narrative model because the model is already contained in the bean. Precisely—the buddhists do not look to the bean for a representative landscape, but for the landscape therein contained. Theirs is not to extract the essential quality which makes that thing what it is, but to see it completely, in which case attention to particular features might well destroy the achievement we have been told we should admire. Is our first analyst to be Aristotle and his concern with praxis and proairesis? Or shall we wonder about the prehistorics who must weigh the telling of two descriptions of events and decide which is true and which is fabrication, the assumption here being that telling the truth requires only remembering, while offering a fabrication requires a picture of what a telling of the truth might sound like. But maybe we are simply to choose the Russian formalists and leave it at that (SYM. analysts). And they are attempting (ACT. attempting) to undercover this model, the obvious implication being that they have failed. One never says of a man who has struck the motherlode,