There’s stream of consciousness, then there’s the river, the rapids, and the falls.

Forget everything you know about reading. Stop imagining that a book must have one line that wraps over and over again, in the same way that one side of a record album has only one groove, and see a text like the conductor’s score to a symphony with many voices running concurrently and continuously from left to right without wrapping. Don’t worry (or dismiss from a few well-spaced skims), like all good video games it teaches you how to play as it goes along, and gets more and more challenging/interesting as your proficiency within its world grows. It stays one teasing half-step ahead of you the whole way.

This is an extended meditation on what is and isn’t possible to do with, within, and without language. It begins with a single line in the middle of the page, and by branching and bifurcating it grows to fill the page with 37 lines running at once, with all the echo and melody and harmony and conflict and tangle and weave and wonder that implies. This is an exploitation of the page as a field for composition, but not merely visual composition. Here the page is a field for the composition of meaning, as well.

Next comes the compounding of complexity only the grid of a fixed pitch font can provide. One example: it allows a 14-page spread which creates a matrix of poems, a complete brickwork that can be read across (as the previous portion of the text) and down (as individual poems). Each 2-page spread of the matrix shaped roughly like this:

The lines of sonnets 1–4 can be re-ordered into acrossonnets. Simply skip along taking line one of page one’s sonnet1, line one of page two’s sonnet2, line one of page three’s sonnet1, line one of page four’s sonnet2, and so on and so forth. 28 sonnets become 56, easy-peasy. The trickier things you’ll discover for yourself along the way. There’s far too much either/or in the world, and most of the really interesting things giggle at the overlap of and.

Then, after having exhausted the world of across, it densifies into the down, and reaches critical mass at across-and-down combined. Think of a crossword puzzle with no empty spaces. Where to go from there? Where, indeed. After language has been bent to the point of breaking, what can be made from the pieces?

What do you do with a book that can’t be bound? How do you pitch a book with no sample chapters? How do you fit a sackful of Soma cube pieces into the round hole of the publishing world? You don’t, you silly person, and if you’re smarter than me it won’t take 15 years after the final draft is completed before you figure it out. You do it yourself, like it’s never been done, because everybody else is doing it wrong.

Here’s my proposed solution to the challenge this particular text provides. I would like to give you the first 159 pages for free, and sell you the last 60 pages for the price you decide they’re worth to you (not pay what you “can”, not pay what you “want”, but pay what they’re worth…to You). I would like to do this for two reasons. 1) because the first 159 pages do okay enough in the digital, they don’t have to be analog. And 2) because I think the first 159 pages will interest you enough that you won’t be able to sleep at night until you’ve seen the last 60 pages—I saved the best for last, after all. The last 60 pages are un-numbered and written such that any page can be placed above, below, to the left or to the right of any other page, creating approximately 1.46064282909 x 10¹¹⁶ total possible permutations for ordering the pages. I say “approximately” because calculating the lattice animal of order 60 (to use the precise mathematical terms) is currently an unsolved problem with competing theories for solution. Wiggling things around on a screen just isn’t the same as wrestling the lattice animal to the ground with your bare hands.

Please read on, and when you reach the end I invite you to order the last 60 pages, which will be printed out and mailed to you. Yes, yes, if you want to buy all the pages printed so you can pore over them at your floor-sprawling convenience you can do that, too. You can even skip the digital version altogether and go straight to buying the printed version.

If you’re interested in some other version (hi-resolution for installation purposes, for example) of this project, please inquire. Who knows? And askin’s free.