Taken radically out of context, Iain Sinclair (from his book about retracing John Clare’s footsteps from Epping Forest back to Northamptonshire, Edge of the Orison): “Vision is also a form of narrative” (p.18). Also, “Punctuation is superfluous when you transcribe the diction of a multitude of dumb things” (p. 21). “Transcribing the diction of a multitude of dumb things” seems true to me, especially as regards Clare, who, like Christopher Smart, understood the loquacity of dumb things, their fulsome testimonies.
