Excerpt A

[The following excerpt is from the early moments of the conversation, after Frank had told Dave about the dispute between himself and Laura over Tape 1 and Dave had proposed to Frank that they record their discussion of Tape 1 for research purposes.]

Frank: I want the tape to eavesdrop on our conversation, rather than being the central character.

Dave: Which is part of your motivation in taping Laura, too.

Frank: Yes. [pause] It started because I was very sick last week. I had 102 degrees fever. And I woke up and I took this tape recorder because I, I had a lot of thoughts which I wanted to get out. And, um, my mind was kind of saturated, and some things were kind of precipitating out. And I was trying to catch them. So I put on the tape. And, by the way, when I put on the tape I was shocked. It was terrible. Just meandering...and how slow my mind was when I thought it was going rapidly. Also, how abstractly the thing was being conceived.

Uh, which reminds me of a story. [Frank here tells a rather long anecdote about the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his son, in which Coleridge poses for his son the question of whether a mirror image of a landscape is as real as the landscape viewed directly. The image/reality question perplexes the son; his facial expression of perplexity becomes Coleridge's image of what it means to be laboring in thought--hence, its relevance to Frank's laboring in thought.] So...that...recording my thoughts on tape...can't remember what gave rise to that story, but in any case [pause]...and, and, I was moved also to make a message for Laura and that's what I wanted to play back to her. And then I thought it would be kind of fun to just record the conversation that she had ensuing. And so I did, and I thought, maybe she knows the tape is on and maybe she doesn't, but I knew it was on, of course, and I actually committed in her eyes, an act of...of...well...immoral exploitation...of manipulation...and [very plaintive tone], I maintain that while this was true, and it really was true, um, I would never have thought this was anything that was not solely for our private consumption. In that sense, nothing other than a record of what passed between us and both of us knew. It wasn't something I was going to reveal to the world.