I think we were talking about what it means to recall certain moments, certain crossroads, certain parcours, as you say in French (basically: the ground you've covered)-what it means to reconstruct, however fictively, those tales of origin. And I was remembering when I began to read Callaloo, in fact, as one of those origin tales. I came across an issue in the winter of 1987 that featured two essays that became very important to me: Nathaniel Mackey's and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol and Jay Wright's Desire's Design, Vision's Resonance. I was especially struck with Mackey's piece, about figurations of black music in literature, and its concern with the ways literature invokes stammering, stuttering, obliquity-what Mackey calls telling inarticulacy-in trying to capture the elusiveness of the music on the page. I actually went back to that volume of the journal recently, volume 10 I think, and was surprised to notice how many of the names featured in those issues are writers I read closely now: there's a story from Samuel Delany's The Bridge of Lost Desire, a section of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Wilson Harris, Maryse Conde, poets like Ed Roberson, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nicolas Guillen ... Still, as Delany points out at the beginning of The Motion of Light in Water, memory is a tricky instrument-we keep having to ask ourselves why we turn to particular origin tales, why we need to stand on particular ground. And so I can push myself to think that same winter from other directions, to focus on other layers: it was around the same time that I started studying modern dance seriously, for example. It was just before I started playing in a Balinese gamelan orchestra, which was very important to me for a while. I came across Mackey's piece around the same time as Amiri Baraka's Black Music, too, which for a couple of years I read over and over as a bible of jazz