Ray by Barry Hannah

I didn’t realize how old-fashioned it was, and how much it had been talked about before, but I was after the presence of all time in one moment. Hardly anybody is in the moment. You go buy something at a counter and you see the clerks staring away. They have a past, they have a future but no present. The past is never over, you’re still in it; or you’re projecting yourself into the future. So there’s hardly room for a present. Ray was supposed to answer that.

But, you know, I don’t think I have the, let us say, psyche that I had when I wrote Ray. I was drinking heavily and almost manic-depressive. Up down, up down, and fragmented. Now I’m very sober, for twelve years now, and clearheaded. I can concentrate longer, yet I still believe what I was doing with logic in Ray. I was trying to skip logic, trying to make time and place and space move quickly. Real quickly. I still like that. Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

- Barry Hannah on Ray (from The Paris Review)