Each I encountered is a mouth that we are swallowed in. It's okay to be consumed in another's brain as long as we can cast it off eventually, a wig, a borrowed coat, a Halloween costume. I have been thinking about the self, about consciousness. About our ways of trying to represent consciousness: first-person narration, stream of consciousness, memoir, compulsive neurotic footnoting and increasing annotations, essay after essay after essay. They are beautiful and necessary. They are problems waiting to be solved. According to a 2009 study conducted by Nicole Speer and Jeffrey M. Zacks, when the brain reads a narrative text, it actually simulates what is described, and reruns the simulation as the story situation changes. Reading is not a passive act; we are simulating another. Anyone who reads a lot knows this already. We try on selves, run simulation programs, enter into magic. The act should not be treated lightly.

--from Vanishing Point by Ander Monson, forthcoming from Graywolf Press