INDIA

INDIA

How much does it cost the rest of the world to keep the letters of Indiana's name glued together and colored green. First, there is the i—n—d—i—a, which should cohere fairly stably by now, but adding the n makes for a whole set of erosions, indecencies, and unmistakable clues that the namers had imagined themselves in the wrong hemisphere. Then the a, which violates the inexact i—n—d—i—a—n by forming the inexact a—n—a, cousin to the even more tired r—a—m—a, as in f—o—o—d—o—r—a—m—a. The a—n—a implies a leveling of consciousness over a wide area. So, you have the search for i—n—d—i—a totally incomplete, and before anything of substance was initiated in the mind, it spread itself out insistently and destructively in an all is one howard johnson orange glow that is called health here, steel mills and florida orange juice, but is understood elsewhere as violence, appetite disembodied, misspelled.

from Bob Perelman, BRAILLE (Ithaca House, 1975)