APPROACH

After listening to Andrew Riggsby's shoptalk on houses of memory in ancient Roman oratory, wanting to derail our assumptions that the text of memorization must be linear: since it isn't linear, memory, & requires traversals of us forth and back, jagged, in response to the only partial accommodations of the present: & this must be why the orators chose architecture as their metaphor—for can't a body move other than bidirectionally, in unpredicted passages from facade to facade, stanza to stanza, arch to arch? Improvisation: the animation of memory against this rhetorical frame, responding to contingency or to sense accumulated along the way. How undesignedly lovely when sense experience agglomerates further gloriousness within & about certain fetching contours of approach, once ghostly & lit in ravenous mystery, now sinewy & green in being, from farther angles and nearer distances, known.