What is the subject of this photograph?

How can you tell?

What is in the foreground? The background?

Does the photo have a middle voice?

Who is speaking?​​

How is the effort to sound familiar or comforting a form of deception?

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The caption above the photo— “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in the novel” — comes from the first page of Roland Barthes’ alleged autobiography, which is titled Roland Barthes.

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“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

Ander Monson writes in his essay, "Index for X and the Origin of Fires.”

Is the caption the alias or the alibi?

How does the subject’s relationship to the foreground or background alter the as if of speaking?

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In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song." The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil, but its Latin name is Arista Lakia elegans, which sounds like "a person, unique and singular. "

If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name— which Berger thinks you wouldn’t do, if you knew it as birthwort. Archaic language is singular – it jostles and demands attention, it asks to be seen and tasted as unique.

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Black cherry (Prunus serotina) represents immortality in Chinese lore; its wood wards off malevolent spirits.

Humans acquire values from cultural events that tell us something matters. We are socialized into valorizing certain things, like baseballs, hot dogs, barbeque.

Vervain was a divine weed for the Romans; it cured the plague, stopped rabies from progressing in animals, halted the damage of snake and insect venom, and reconciled enemies. It had the power to draw out poison or evil. Annual feasts, the Verbenalia, were held in its honor. These feasts created relationships between young Romans and the plant, vervain. A village woman in Romania told me that she placed a wet rag with vervain over the foreheads of women in labor.

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“If you love something, does it need to love you back in order for you to feel connection? Think about the story of The Velveteen Rabbit: loving the doll so much that it became real.”

- Markie Louise Christianson Twist in an online presentation on digisexuality

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Robert Walser’s sentences are extraordinary. His short piece, “Fragment” (translated by Tom Whalen) constantly shifts between speakers and places and situates the reader inside the mind of writer exploring a story. Or picking up a thread, and dropping it for another. Lifting a lens, staring through it, and then setting the scope back on the table.

There are no transitions—and no paragraphs. Notice how he gives us the “noselet” in describing a character he invented:

She has turned out a bit thin, strong nose, a noselet would suffice. With its feather plunging down in back, her hat makes an impression. Skirt short. Magnificent how he succumbs to her threat. Since then I can't shake free of this Edith.

The writer is diddling, piddling, playing with thoughts, but the characters obsess him, which is to say, they intrude in his life. He would like to meet them. Or, as Walser continues:

Recently I sat in a restaurant and stared out into the street in the hopes of seeing her pass. But it didn't occur to her to show herself, which I found proper. There are wishes we don't wish to see for the filled because they are too to to us. If they were fulfilled, they would be lost. The desire to see her means more to me than her appearance.

A beautiful frame inside this collage of fragments.

I fear greatly for my hero. No hair do I leave unharmed on the one sauntering across fields, who perceived nothing more important on his ramble than a peasant woman swerving off to where, from time to time, we all discreetly swerve. It was night, and with the good book in his head—thus intent on generating literature—he paced slowly back and forth in front of a façade, drawing the attention of cabman to his Renaissance behavior.

The male narrator has a love interest, and his wooing comments mock the posturing of courtship, the strange gallantries of puffed-upedness:

He continued: “I climbed through a concantenation of encouraging constellations, apparently high into life, in order, apparently, to fall. One is what one presents.”

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Anachronism and archaic language expands temporality; it brings to prose the broadness of poetry and photography. Obviously, this isn’t an argument. It is merely what others have called an opinion.