I had a great thought as i looked at the Seattle Art Museum's African collection: NARRATIVE IS A MASK. Narrative is to what happens, as a mask is to the face. The mask dances; the mask in repose. It is story because we live in time & all that we perceive we perceive in time. Description becomes animated as much as characters are. Symbols are only: inanimate characters. And the Africans knew this...

   "A Black Man Talks of Reaping

I have sown beside all waters in my day,
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
That wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

I scattered seed enough to plant the land
In rows from Canada to Mexico
But for my reaping only what the hand
Can hold at once is all that I can show.

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
My brother's sons are gathering stalk and root,
Small wonder then my children glean in fields
They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit."

--Arna Bontemps, op cit

'God is saved by the void.' --Jabès

"Values are vowels." --Ron Silliman, "The Chinese Notebooks"

"We anew view swart waves' flowing wilderness..." --C M Doughty, Mansoul