Just a Thought

I was just pondering the mention of circling vegetables by the ghosts that haunt Hugh and play with his dreams. I think these ghosts may be his own memories. Anyways on page 553 the ghost narrators say (I coould quote the whole page, but will not):
"Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetables of our first picture book encircled a boy in his dream--green cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potatao pere, Potato fils, a girly asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning ronde going faster and faster and gradually forming a tarnsparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet."

i picture a person's memories spinning like a halo around their head, like remembered salvation. Dancing in a variety of forms around oneself, like always trying to find ourselves, or something? Or different years of a person's life?

Something about Sight

There is an issue of sight for Hugh Person in his quest (for the Present?) In veiwing the world around him he is more often than not seeing it through the eyes of his past. In this way he "behaves as a ghost," by continually breaking the tension film and falling through to the past. Person needs a phoropter, as pictured above, which measures A. Person's "refractive error."

pg. 543: "that he would have to consult an ophthalmologist sometime next mouth. He substituted an 'n' for the wrong letter and continued to scan the motely proof into which the blackness of closed vision was now turning." Ha! That little trickster!

Tangled Tenses

I was just reading Transparent things for the ninety-ninth time and I noticed that the fire scene is played out three times: Once when Armande wants to simulate an escape from the fire by crawling out the window, once in his dream when he kills Armande, and then, of course, at the end of the book when he perishes. The only question is, what tense is represented for the three respective fires? Hugh dies while being reminded of a memory from childhood, a memory of a story from a book. He dies not only in the past, but thinking of a fictional story--he dies in art. When Armande demands they rehearse an acrobatic escape, she is foretelling the future--Hugh fails the escape, just as he will fail it at his death. She ends up peacefully wrapped in a blanket of the third floor, which can be seen as the future. She is living most comfortably in the future. We are left with the Present. How does the fire in Hugh's dream represent the present? That would be saying that the most tangible reality of the fire is brought to life in a dream, which would be saying, it turn, that the most real perception of our lives takes part in our dreams. Interesting.