“Early Days”

“The first glimpses came in early childhood when the coarse wooden bottom of the cocktail table disc spun round and round above his tiny guiding hand. A brass metal band engirdled the rim of this furnishing and created, in his new-to-the-world sensitivity, the intoxicating dizziness that dervishes derive from their own endless spinning. Its underbelly had been stamped with a manufacturer’s code and number. In the twilit evening, alone in the living room, he would ceaselessly revolve this tabletop with the merest push of his index finger against one of its supporting radii. As the top spun, singing its own little song of plangent friction, his head would grow big, bigger, and still bigger until it filled the entire room. Such sweetness there was in this feeling of expansion. He imagined himself blown up through the mechanism of some invisible air pump into a Humpty Dumpty character, a psychic hydrocephalus of amazing proportions.”