Each "Preverb" - that is, each line of The Preverbs of Tell or each page of the Preverb Posters - works in its own way on an AXIAL PRINCIPLE - a principle with both linguistic and non-linguistic expression . As regards The Preverbs, a working definition might be: the principle by which freedom of being discovers itself as self-aware language turning freely upon its occasion. The AXIAL is not a technique or style or device, but it may acquire certain technical or stylistic tendencies relative to individual practice. Where an AXIAL act is true to its own principle, it will eventually subvert these tendencies, so that at times it may appear unfaithful to its own modality. The AXIAL functions as a declared space of practice - here I am referring to language practice - in which language may discover itself as alive and willful and free of accumulated habits, free, that is, of the dominant tendencies of the generating personality and its received traditions. The space is self-interruptive, self-(re)organizing, self-(re)orienting. It shuns its own success as a danger to principled survival, yet it is in love with its own production, which generates further instance of its possibility. For that reason every AXIAL statement stands alone. That is, even when it stands in a field of resonance and collaborates with statements all around (as in a composed series of lines in The Preverbs of Tell, which may have a "pooling" tendency around certain words or themes or sounds, or a published group of Preverb Posters), it retains its aloneness as a freedom of being and source of immediate energy.

So an AXIAL LINE is indeterminately situation specific. It has open resonance with its environment. Its form (as line or "poster") is intended to "free" it into local specificity while retaining self-variance. Such open resonance is a principle of "construction" as well as placement, individually and as a body of work.

An AXIAL LINE suffers every unitary, referential or surcharged connection as if it might be an instance of "original sin" - principle of a first wrong turn - ready for a process of self-immolation. Its cleansing of pattern ends in a free embrace, enacted within appropriate reading.

What, then, is appropriate reading? An engagement free of extraneous constraints and somehow truly "in the moment" - outside the tug of prepatterning momentum yet following the momentum of the moment (the instant-specific "movement") itself. Something discovered on the spot. A leap into the fire and out at once, a flight in Between. Every flight invents a sequence ordering the data of the topos, a periplus, a mapping of actual bodily trajection, the concrete "presencing" that reverses our thrownness in an instant of time. But we are not necessarily stuck with any one of these orderings - therefore they are free to be truly meaningful, belonging as they do to their moment, where real meaning arises. Chosen meaning exists here by force of self-action. If I map the actual territory I travel, my map is the most accurate possible plan of my occasion, where I fall true. Here is the one place on the map that maps itself, maps truly in my act of pointing (to) it. My condition thereby is AXIAL, and the language I speak in the irreducible event of self-tracking is Preverbal.

Preverbal? Preverbial? The latter tells the tale that is itself to the degree of being before itself. It rides the edge of its own possibility, between pre- and not, tells the tale that alone takes you along the further edge. We could talk here of something like preverberation -, as an AXIAL neologism of original turning, a lexicographic rendering of intensive resonance at or near zero point, accorded by freed speaking. Such resonance is projective of its occasion, it throws its possible connectedness before it / around it, it fills out its field and is radial. That is why anyone who hears it may feel "chosen" by it, as if something is "meant" to be, synchronistic, aligned in the expression. Resonance at the event horizon creates radical context. Everything surrounds itself with meaning. This might be called the poetic condition itself.