har-ish

I have always been drawn to books that don’t quite agree to explain themselves. They pull me in with the logic of a dream: a little magical realism, a little cyberpunk, a little speculative science, with fragments of history, mythology, technology and things that seem to have no business existing together.

I think of Kafka on the Shore, Salman Rushdie’s exuberant worlds, The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence, and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon as books that can make me feel wonderfully clever one moment and deliciously lost the next. I follow the thread because I want to know where it leads, knowing perfectly well that some threads may never meet.

And perhaps that is the pleasure. I don’t leave having comprehended every layer; I leave exhilarated by the fragments I’ve caught, the connections I’ve imagined, and the gaps that remain gloriously open. This doodle is my little cytology of that farce; my attempt to put those fragments under a microscope, only to discover that the specimen itself keeps changing shape. We are all in a state of flux not even knowing why.