Texts about Texts

Once I read a text about a story. The latter I know and admire. I had not read anything by the author of the former. The reading inspired me to think about the possibilities of commentary. The theoretical apparatus used in the text was strikingly different from the set of theoretical frameworks I typically rely on in investigations into the potentials of interpretation. Hence, every attempt to accommodate the text to my idiosyncrasies turned out to be merely an instance of indeterminacy of translation. And yet, there were so many things in it that required a thorough analysis, so I started laterally approaching the points of significance. Instead of discursively clearing up the misty spots in the narrative, I imagined the text interrogating an individual. The dialogue would be of the approximately following content:

You should turn on flash on your camera. But, I don’t take pictures at night.

In your house there is no shoe rack. But, I only wear sneakers.

You need to borrow some money in order to buy that fabulous perfume. But, I can’t smell.

You must learn the formula to express the relationship between mass and velocity at maximum acceleration. But, there’s no such thing as the mass/velocity/acceleration nexus in the physics I know.

When you drive, make sure you change the tires every five hundred kilometers. I don’t drive.

In order to be famous, you must live out the illusion of your own grandiosity. But, I don’t give a fuck about illusions.

If you want to understand something, you must be an artist. But, fuck off!!!

In order to be somewhere, you must create space in the fantasy prerequisite for your somnambulist grandeur. 

You must be inherently incorrigibly mutable if you hope to inhabit somebody else’s delusions.

No concept can encapsulate the greatness of learning.

I have no idea if I made the ideas from the text clearer to myself. I’m not sure I’m interested in further decoding it. I was concerned about the vague areas that might remain impenetrable for me. I was nearly desperate because there was a possibility to persist in listlessness regarding the superknots in the narrative. I felt I was getting increasingly hopeless because the natural density of the text will irrevocably deny me access to the beauty hidden where I cannot find it.

I’m not concerned any more. I don’t care about the areas I cannot reach. Not because I cannot, but because whatever could be found there is not what I seek.

Indeterminacy of translation again told me a story about storytelling.