I don't want to think of non-linear as like roots, trees, or branches -- the viewer jumping from tree to tree as a spider monkey on an island in Florida, kept for the amusement of diners. I like to think of the unfathomable depths of a cave, a pit, the snake pit will do. A place dank/mad or intimate. Similarly modern physics has taught us to do without the concepts of an absolute scale of time and of objective events in space and time. We call this spelunking. For diamonds. We are slaves but occasionally slip one out to the world. Emeralds, too. Ever notice certain people are jewel-like—clear? The aura has been dusted. At times my jewels swim into the computer; not until I bathe and walk do they return to me. Jerry was afraid, afraid his spirit would slip into the box, the monitor, the network. If that were true, I said, the web would be a more soulful place. We donate our lives.

 

Werner Heisenberg (1901-76): there is no definite initial point of view from which radiate routes into all fields of the perceptible...all perception must...be suspended over an unfathomable depth. When we talk about reality, we never start at the beginning. We begin with the ferns out my window. Like a thief in the night I will pull one up, examine the dirt, the round clinging nuts, if there are any. The dampness. Careful to avoid any poison ivy. This is summer, my friend, in Midland, Michigan.

I believe most associate linear fiction with a beginning, middle and end—a form now known as the conflict, crisis, resolution model. A model of the normal curve but skewed right. Think of the curve for orgasm and you will have it. I have a biological take on the pleasures of fiction.

 

 

The Roots of Nonlinearity: Toward a Theory of Web-Specific Art-Writing

I am nervous as I begin to dig.

 

 

Marguerite Duras (1914-96) in a novel or autobiography -- the two blurring in age or mental maturity -- wanted someone to kill her. L'homme Assis dans le Couloir, 1980. Maybe that is why I am in love with a murderer. He has killed three people. I know the stories of two. They were all women, yet he says he harbors no animosity toward women. His name is Jerry.