Merely the Author Using Handy Language
We can have no idea how often or on what scale such
names have dropped out of sight.
We should not know it had happened here had not
a few frivolous, intoxicating nullities chanced to
survive and to be reported.
Very likely, page after page, we have not the slightest idea
what was present to the mind of Gardens, the sheer audacity
of whose umbrapoeia holds together impenetrable
remarks about corn-ringed promises which
for all we know may have been
promise-ringed corn
since the syntax permits that understanding,
and may even have come to the American mind from Mexico,
grain-boundary and word-bond.
There is no way to tell.
Sometimes we can tell something.
Athletic wit: the etymology is balbuzie, a stutter in the
lingua franca of paperback antipsychiatry’s
“conditions of possibility” and “resistance to all authoritative readings.”
Gardens wittholds this indiscretion till the penultimate “ward,”
where attention to detail must rhyme it with the daughter’s limping
dance in a passage written (but not published)
two decades prior.
