JOI's father's garage monologue (p. 165)
My wood Wilson from my stack of wood Wilsons in their trapezoid presses was a sentient expression of my arm, and I felt it singing, and my hand, and they were alive, my well-armed hand was the secretary of my mind, lithe and responsive and senza errori, because I knew myself as a body and was fully inside my little child’s body out there, Jim […]
Context
The monologue's 1933 primal scene: the one match his own father ever attended, recalled at maximum rhetorical altitude — the hand as "the secretary of my mind," playing senza errori, Italian dropped into a Tucson trailer-park garage. The ornateness is the pathos: a failed actor performing eloquence for an audience of one silent ten-year-old, minutes before recounting the sentence ("Yes, But He'll Never Be Great") that ended him. Without errors is precisely what nothing in this family ever is.