The Argument Revolves Around A Red Herring Poem by Denis Mair

(— in response to Terrence George Craddock's "Writing Prolific Cooked Red Herrings")
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We will strike off with the next red herring, and so go gallivanting. We will follow the eccentric, acentric course of a floating vantage point, because the world's imagined perimeter won't settle into squareness. Yet maps are drawn by seeking vantage points with mental feet. What sends me gadding off might as well be a red herring, since I'm carrying a sloshing noggin full of dream ingredients, and the redness of the herring will not matter, as long as it gets me around the bend. The next red herring may not be red or a herring, and I may even borrow a silvery gray herring to reach a finer discourse of unexpectedness. Nobody needs herrings except to eat them or name a cloth pattern after them. Nobody needs to think of them beyond that, but it's good to know they're there, spawning in clouds of milky water, until they're not. There are so many things that need not be thought about, but it's good to know they're there, until they're not. All those things are swimming through the world like a school of herring that may suddenly matter, if only for a moment. And it is up to us to tell how this is so.

As for the many tales he has told poetically, Terrence says: "there is nothing from the BOOK OF SECRETS" in them. He says, "that remains a tale untold, not written within these pages." Then he goes on to say, "the red herring writes and having writ moves on." But I have said to him: "a tale fit for the BOOK OF SECRETS may be written at the very moment of reading one of these cooked red herrings."