To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness. But this “commune” is not, even in the broadest sense, the language of the human society at large. To write in English is not only to belong to a language-world different from French or Aranda but also to belong to a language-world different from, though within, the English-speaking world at large. Writing and reading is itself an initiation as special as the totem-dance of the Aranda, and just as the Aranda learns to read his own parts in the parts of the landscape about him, so that the body of the world becomes one with his own consciousness, so we learn to find our life in a literature, and, in turn, literature itself is valued as it seems true to life.
— Robert Duncan, The HD Book, p. 192
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