Kathleen Ferrier is who was singing The Alto Rhapsody.

I assume I do not have to explain that any version of any music that comes into my head would be the version I was once most familiar with.

In SoHo, my recording of The Alto Rhapsody was an old Kathleen Ferrier recording.

And now that strand of tape is scratching at the window in the next room again, again sounding like a cat.

One does not name a seagull.

Once, when I was listening to myself read the Greek plays out loud, certain of the lines sounded as if they had been written under the influence of William Shakespeare.

One had to be quite perplexed as to how Aeschylus or Euripides might have read Shakespeare.

I did remember an anecdote, about some other Greek author, who had remarked that if he could be positive of a life after death he would happily hang himself to see Euripides. Basically this did not seem relevant, however.

Finally it occurred to me that the translator had no doubt read Shakespeare.

Normally I would not consider that a memorable insight, except for the fact that I was otherwise undeniably mad at the time when I read the plays.

As a matter of fact I only now realize that I may not have been cooking after all, when I burned that other house to the ground, but may well have burned it in the process of dropping the pages of The Trojan Women into the fire after I had finished reading their reverse sides.

Conversely I have no idea why I would have stated that it was a life of Brahms I had set fire to, out on the beach, when it was not ten minutes earlier that I had noticed the life of Brahms next to the atlas behind where the painting was.

Certain questions would appear unanswerable.

Such as, in addition, what my father may have thought about, looking through old snapshots and then looking into the mirror that had been beside my mother's bed.

Or whether one would have ever arrived at the castle or not, had one continued to follow that same road.

Well, in that case doubtless there was ultimately a cutoff.

To the castle, a sign must have said.

In a Jeep, one could have maneuvered directly up the hillside, instead of following the road.

Meanwhile one does not spend any time viewing castles in La Mancha without being reminded of Don Quixote also, of course.

Any more than one can spend time in Toledo without being reminded of El Greco, even if it happens that El Greco was not Spanish.

All too often one hears of him spoken of as if he were, however.

The famous Spanish artists such as Velazquez or Zurbaran or El Greco, being the sort of thing that one hears.

One hardly ever hears of him being spoken of as a Greek, on the other hand.

The famous Greek artists such as Phidias or Theophanes the Greek or El Greco, being the sort of thing that one almost never hears.

Yet it is not beyond imagining that El Greco was even directly descended from some of those other Greeks, when one stops to think about it.

Surely it would have been easy to lose track, in so many years. But who is to say that it might not go back even farther than that, to somebody like Achilles, why not?

I am almost certain that Helen had at least one child, at any rate.

Now the painting does appear to be of this house.

As a matter of fact there also appears to be somebody at the very window, upstairs, from which I watch the sunset.

I had not noticed her at all, before this.

If it is a she. The brushwork is fairly abstract, at that point, so that there is little more than a hint of anybody, really.

Still, it is interesting to speculate suddenly about just who might be lurking at my bedroom window while I am typing down here right below.

Well, and on the wall just above and to the side of me, at the same time.

All of this being merely in a manner of speaking, of course.

Although I have also just closed my eyes, and so could additionally say that for the moment the person was not only both upstairs and on the wall, but in my head as well.

Were I to walk outside to where I can see the window, and do the same thing all over again, the arrangement could become much more complicated than that.

For that matter I have only now noticed something else in the painting.

The door that I generally use, coming and going from the front deck, is open.

Not two minutes ago, I happen to have closed that same door.

Obviously no action of my own, such as that, changes anything in the painting.

Nonetheless I have again just closed my eyes, trying to see if I could imagine the painting with the door to the deck closed.

I was not able to close the door to the deck in the version of the painting in my head.

Had I any pigments, I could paint it closed in the painting itself, should this begin to trouble me seriously.

There are no painting materials in this house.

Unquestionably there would have had to be all sorts of such materials here at one time, however.

Well, with the exception of those that she carried to the dunes, where else would the painter have deposited them?

Now I have made the painter a she, also. Doubtless because of my continued sense of it being a she at the window.

But in either case one may still assume that there must be additional painting materials inside of the house in the painting, even if one cannot see any of them in the painting itself.

As a matter of fact it is no less possible that there are additional people inside of the house as well, above and beyond the woman at my window.

Then again, very likely the others could be at the beach, since it is late on a summer afternoon in the canvas, although no later than four o'clock.

So that next one is forced to wonder why the woman at the window did not go to the beach herself, for that matter.

Although on second thought I have decided that the woman may well be a child.

So that perhaps she had been made to remain at home as a punishment, after having misbehaved.

Or perhaps she was even ill.

Possibly there is nobody at the window in the canvas.

At four o'clock I will try to estimate exactly where at the dunes the painter took her perspective, and then see how the shadows fall, up there.

Even if I will be forced to guess at when it is four o'clock, there being no clocks or watches in this house, either.

All one will have to do is to match the real shadows on the house with the painted shadows in the painting, however.

Although perhaps the real shadows at the window when I go out will not solve a thing in regard to the painting.

Perhaps I will not go out.

Once, I believed I saw somebody at a real window, while I am on the subject.

In Athens, this was, and while I was still looking, which made it something of an occurrence.

Well. And even more so than the cat at the Colosseum, rather.

As a matter of fact one could also see the Acropolis, from beside the very window in question.

Which was in a street full of taverns.

Still, when the sun had gotten to the angle from which Phidias had taken his perspective, the Parthenon almost seemed to glow.

Actually, the best time to see that is generally also at four o'clock.

Doubtless the taverns from which one could see that did better business than the taverns from which one could not, in fact, even though they were all in the same street.

Unless of course the latter were patronized by people who had lived in Athens long enough to have gotten tired of seeing it.

Such things can happen. As in the case of Guy de Maupassant, who ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower.

Well, the point being that this was the only place in Paris from which he did not have to look at it.

For the life of me I have no idea how I know that. Any more than I have any idea how I also happen to know that Guy de Maupassant liked to row.