from "Cups and Mutts"
an Introduction by Vanessa Place
A parapet is a low wall, a useless thing in some senses, as it keeps nothing out and less in. It is in this sense a gesture at a wall, a wall like a wall. Things that are alike are the cause and effect of metaphor: with things that are most alike, the metaphor becomes too porous, like the parapet, and the simile stands for the thing itself. Dark as night is dark. The tree is a metaphor for the tree.
[...]
The [books] in this series resemble themselves and their opposites, which are sometimes one another, and sometimes themselves again. The self-negation that circles around Ifland and Apps finds its counterweight in the god-act of creation celebrated by Adair and Taylor, and the shadowed part of this Venn diagram is joyously occupied by Thormhälen, who is his own Adam, tasting of the apple and pronouncing it picaresque. But Adair’s haver dares the pregnant nothing, the void that came before creation and will endure after, and Taylor says it’s all story, nothing but, while Ifland makes and makes, mask upon mask, and Apps lets lyric burst like birds from barren plane, the sheet of paper Adam will impress from the tree. We cannot help our walls. They give us something to raise and raze, to scale over and stand beside, one side or the other, it doesn’t really matter. The point is the parapet and the brazen trumpet of our own sweet making.
[continues in TrenchArt: Parapet]