Microscopes, Bruno Schulz Evenings, the Traffic of Letters.

Yesterday, in an email to Craig Conley, when we were discussing my last post on ellipsis juggling, and our mutual interest in punctuation, I mentioned that I was recently put in mind of when I was given a microscope by my father(who is a doctor and researcher.) I did look at blood and skin and onions and all the standard microscopic worlds that young microscope devotees explore, but the thing that most captured my imagination was looking at little bits of text on paper hugely magnified. I remember those long winter Bruno Schulz-like evenings before supper when I seemed to have endless time to follow my curiousities and inspirations. I remember discovering, through the yellow light of the view hole, the lovely bumpy, grainy, physical presence of an e very close up, of periods and commas, the ink making dark ridges on the bleached dunes of the paper, and I like a God or a space visitor examining huge symbols created far below, created to communicate especially to me, in my other world. I discovered the textured, tactile, sensory world of letters, a secret world accessible only through patience and close examination, like looking closely at a chair or a cup and seeing the molecules bustling, a traffic of electric and chemical whispers brushed past by the larger, louder world.