WEBVTT

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OK, I'm going to read a
little bit of the newer stuff.

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So section three deals with
the nature of language.

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And in this section, a figure
emerged, a character emerged.

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She has been through a trauma--

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I'll just say that.

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And she has come to a
new place in the city,

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and she is contemplating
how can one speak of trauma?

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So this is "A
Labyrinth of Houses."

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"She thinks the city
could disguise her body,

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that from the outward
shapes of clothes,

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the shape of her
body beneath them

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would be impossible to infer.

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There are rules for
writing letters.

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For instance, she might
write, 'Dear Blank,

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The tangles of
nests in the forests

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are not now green but broken.

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I know that you cannot answer.'

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She can only point and
say broken, say a shard.

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But the tangles of
nests in the forest

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are not now broken or
green, and I can no longer

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understand how to
walk through the city,

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having no map of my body,
no grid of the streets.

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Perhaps this tangle arises
from my failure to understand,

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in the way that sun and
sunlight cannot be the same,

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as the deepest pain in the body
is in fact not pain at all.

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So the forest in
her probes the city

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as if with the
proboscis of a moth.

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She writes, 'There is
rustling near the nests,

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so their shadows
need not be damp.'

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So she imagines the forest
now that she has left it.

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But she thinks now that the
body is a flimsy proposition.

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Therefore, a city
is a set of names.

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She thinks she can no
longer write a letter.

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The lines of her hands
unscroll, though it

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might, after all, be possible
to represent a thing.

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For instance, she might write,
'Moth is to proboscis as,

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or pigeon is to city
as, or city is to mouth.

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So there might be a brittle glue
holding a word to its cause."

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