But what might these correlations and associations be? If the Passaic Falls in Paterson was the desired site for Williams of an extractable language, the torrent of water a possible source for the telling of the story of his "selected" city (P, p. xiii), Smithson's gluttonous flow of hot asphalt down a hill, cooling and then coagulating into rigid form, seems instead a kind of crude occlusion of the fluid, a solidified barrier to extracting anything at all. The asphalt itself, like a thick, granular ink, may have begun like a writerly "mark on a surface," but it finally formed into a fixed (and ultimately photographed) image of entropic dispersion, inert matter. "Like a petrified river," as Smithson described his project, its hardened substance had "that sense of something very definitely in time, yet the moment gives you that sense of timelessness. The actual visual experience, perception of that" ("FC," p. 216). "A slow fall," the blackened hill became an opaque picture of arrested writing (recalling the "thick lacquer" of Williams's river, but with nothing "under its flow"). Unlike Williams's falls, here on Smithson's hill there are no words to be heard or read, no lines of language to be untangled, for "the flow is caught," the stream has been silenced, leaving only the vanishing trace of something in time, but timeless, "perception of that."

In his 1967 essay on Passaic (the one that Smithson had suggested could be read as an appendix to Paterson), the artist returns by bus on a day-trip from New York. There he examines what he calls the city's "anti-romantic," entropic landscape, enigmatically describing a region rich in "memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures," the reversible "ruins" rising from the surrounding suburban growth. ¹¹ Smithson walks alongside the Passaic River, just a few miles downstream from Williams's falls in Paterson. Upon an old bridge that crosses over to Rutherford, he looks down at the water below and takes several Instamatic photographs that will later appear as a part of his published essay. From this elevated vantage, he afterwards writes of what he saw, or remembers seeing, recording the conflicted and confused perceptions moving beneath him, images reflecting off the flowing water:

Noon-day sun cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of "stills" through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank. ["TM," p. 70]