The articles that constitute this book were drawn of readings harvested from a long history of ideas repeating themselves. The general concept used in the fragments occurred to me some time ago as I was building a stone wall. The finished product, I thought at the time, should attempt to resemble a photo-mosaic, an assembling of various photographs arranged into a pattern which approximates, when viewed at a distance, the image of an individual (perhaps some of us have seen the image of Lincoln done in this manner). That night I wrote the first of these fragments, “Plato’s Cave.” Over the next year or so I would return to the project adding other examples of fiction, poetry, or philosophical fragment to the collection until it took on the visage of an individual self considering Time.
The fragmented mechanics of the episodes are enabled by the hypothesis of chronesthesia, that is, an awareness of both past and future happening concurrently with the present. This is a mental function which all men have, a vein which these fragments aim to mine. Threads of various narratives inter-twine through-out the assembly like the random factors of past and future conspire to create the curious world of the present. Dividing time and space with opportunity, it was a patient scheme of composition. I tried to relate the way that every thought imparts a certain fraction of time to the whole of human experience. Thus the stories found herein evolved amidst an organization of several ideas, eventually taking on ruminates of existential concern: the proclivities of Time and the human imagination that serve to bring the mysteries of life into focus as they arrange to provision the destruction of a planet. These fragments are simply a re-shaping of the elemental fixtures of many ideas.
However, the form of any work that attempts to render such an elusive thing as Time to the confines of printed words must seek innovation in experimentation. Thought and dream here conspire together. Mythologies are made to resemble common things, religious metaphors re-worked into various fictions; science is made into poetry; philosophy devolves into psychology, which is really what it was all along. I have no intent other than to present to the reader an Imagist theory of Time re-occurring and the eclectic manner in which the imaginative workings that my own creative elucidation attempts to portray the phenomenon intellectually. Some might realize characters like the sentience of a computer from a Kubrick movie, or the flight of Anaxagoras reflected in the peregrinations of an obscure poet, Aegean motifs in mid-western forms, the heresies of Basilides; others “a jewel-point in a hive,” or “a dome of many coloured-glass.” – The shards of a shattered bulb discover new forms: the impetus of a whole new particular of an idea.
Poetry is no less mysterious than any other element, the focus is always on the imagination, what one does with it is his. The reader is always encouraged to his own. Surely, it is no more severe a habit than dreaming.