Introduction

For much of my life I've been preparing for a project that has no destination, and as most of my work during the past twenty years has been in the form of a journal, I want to take this work on a walk for the sake of walking about the rugged trails of existence-non-existence, switchbacking between the sacred and profane.

Biologist H.H. Pattee said, “I feel that the evolution of living systems has not tended towards greater and greater complexity necessarily; rather, in the sense of function, it has always led to simplicity.” When we evoke language, we are confronting a living system, an evolving organism that, by whatever means handy, tends to speak. Then, honing an abstract simplicity, we enter the the style of old age, no matter what age we happen to be.

My plan is to distribute a few pages at a time, emulating those writers who premiered their novels as serials in newspapers or magazines. What also continues is my trope of invagination: a fragment of text planted within the paragraphic body, interrupting its continuity and disturbing its literal meaning. So that all of us, living and dead, are dreaming together.

For making images, I've adapted palimpsest, a technique that stems back to Paleolithic cave and rock art, to digital algorithms. There's also a bibliography linked to each page.

There is some irony in drawing the periphery of a book on a monitor, as the machine it illuminates offers so many other playful opportunities. With the field of New Media, including its theories and critiques, expanding, this project defines a constricted space, like an archaeologist who cordons off the plat he plans to excavate.

The physicist F. David Peat recalls how when he heard his first lectures on quantum theory, he was "not satisfied to be given a set of axioms to learn—that is, those axioms on which the theory is built. I was not really that interested in learning how to calculate the spectrum of hydrogen. Instead I wanted to know what the theory really meant."

In our postmodern world, meaning is limited by probabilities. While metaphor, "as it perceives likeness, not answers," leads us to a way of being in which

      I sit in the withered beauty
      Of wild grasses.