i am a saxophonist playing a set with other jazz musicians. We are all improvising, each searching for a melody, which slowly begins to assume a common shape. Then i begin to solo, and am overcome with grief--not only musical notes come out, words do too! i am not saying the words, but playing them! The audience is shocked. One of the musicians leaves in protest. i continue until, with unconscious agreement, the melody begins again. Later, i am walking with one of the musicians. He says, "What was that about?" i reply that i was trying to play in a way that's never been done before." "You did," he says. "And i felt it. But i didn't understand it." The vague similarities to a human form are accidental; the Bride (Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) is an apparatus, and her humanity lies neither in her shapes nor in herphysiology. Her humanity is symbolic: the Bride is an ideal reality, a symbol manifested in mechanical forms, producing symbols in its turn. It is a symbol machine. But these symbols are distended and deformed by irony; they are symbols that distill their own negation. The way the Bride works is physiological, mechanical, ironic, symbolic, and imaginary, all at the same time.

Cold morning. Spongy moss covers everything, making a bright green primeval forest. Small waterfalls drop below my visible breath. Although Mother is nearly blind, she is not a seer.

The Goddess rejoices. Her water breaks: it is not new life she bears, but change. With each dip in the path the temperature lowers, rising again by degrees. For forty years I apprenticed to others, then finally to myself.

    Before existence,
                         there is
    someone else's dream.