[Prestidigitweeze]

It was Sebald's misfortune to be reborn as a human hand that dreamed of becoming a Japanese pictoglyph, so that all of its hours away from its grueling handjob at the Cuticle Refinery were spent practicing a kind of flesh origami in which it contorted its digits into impossible renderings of the character for mizu (itself suggestive of the flow of motion that might allow Sebald-hand-san to realize its ideal of metalinguistic transformation), so that it could be seen executing handstands and various difficult poses foppishly in front of the beige fingerfountain, imagining the tickle of innumerable gazes over its brushed-ink finger pad whorls while striking signifying attitudes, until it attracted the questionable attentions of IMPOLITE ALL-CAP IMPERSONATORS and fled in humiliation, its slinking retreat leading to reveries of commingling with entire volumes of calligraphy, where it could at last stroke the curls and cusps of Hiragana while envisioning a more tolerant world, in which thoughtful extremities like itself might apply careful fingerings as easily to other letters as to older lutenists, and were allowed to wear their kanji diagrams proudly, just as Sebald-san's Guidonian handmaiden friends donned their various Uts and As in the tinted windows of Amsterdam, where furtive paragraphs paid -- not handsomely but handily nonetheless -- as much for the handmaidens' inner euphony as for their outer adherence to an ideal as impossible as it would be to retain the image before an orgasm (or is that origami chasm?) as eternally as a letter is pronounced and a hand is lent (especially at Lent).