ROOT · solar ok · canopy link intermittent
I have looked out the window for untold hours while travelling on trains. The opening line of the novel, At meaning's edge the imagination still flickers, came to me, like most things, on a walk one evening with my dog. It felt like it represented something of the state of play in our age regarding the role of the mind - when cognition is being increasingly outsourced, when a cavalcade of media is being positioned in front of our eyes at every possible instance, what does/can the mind do when it is left by itself, to daydream whilst looking out the window? For me, the imagination still flickers: in the face of everything, it still maintains light.
Listening to an interview with Adam Curtis earlier this year, he said something about how serious contemporary stories should be ghost stories about AI. This felt right to me, and that to ignore the technological machinations of today, to say nothing of wars of nationalism and genocide, would be a moral failing. I understand that this book may not seem like it directly deals with any of those things, but perhaps, without giving too much away, I would say that for me, the critical gesture was to unpack the epistemological impact of Gödel's incompleteness theorems: how much are we ever a solo author of our work and ourselves, within a closed system, and how much are we always being authored and authoring the world around us in a recursive loop of subjectivity? How much of that interfaces between the natural and the synthetic? And how does all this relate to a man in his forties, still trying to get his imagination to flicker whilst taking the train to see his friend?
As always, I am indebted to my forefathers, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane, and hope that this work sits in dialogue with the preceding book, Everyone I Love Is Alive In The Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters, and the book I am working on to complete the trilogy, Surplus of the Seen.
Thank you.
Craig, 04/10/26.