10 What Birds Have Done With Me 



lumbered up with spoiled reams of paper and 

 ruined squares of canvas upon which blind men 

 have attempted to make those who have eyes see 

 what they never saw themselves, Shakespeare, 

 strangely enough, in his closing of "The Tem- 

 pest," assured the audience that the actors are 

 spirits, the play, a baseless fabric, the whole set- 

 ting of the stage, an unsubstantial pageant that 

 would leave not a rack behind. 



The old preface was a kind of declaration of 

 superior wisdom on the part of the author who 

 found it expedient to call his audience to look 

 over his shoulder while he explained the profun- 

 dities of his creation. Nevertheless, explana- 

 tions often require further explanations, and so 

 on, like a nest of Chinese boxes that turn out, 

 finally, to have nothing in the last box. On the 

 other hand, real things may be safely trusted in 

 the hands of real people, and the rest do not 

 count. 



To one who sees everything as in a picture, 

 whose mind is actually photographic, memory cor- 

 responds to a film that may be developed into per- 

 manent pictures, or rejected and thrown away like 

 seed that will not grow. With films developed 

 into permanent pictures, I shall utterly fail unless 

 I have the cunning to put them together and make 

 them something like moving pictures; make you, 

 in fact, see a real forest with trees that sway in 



