Find in it, if you can, a piece of yourself. And now, I give you this story of interconnected lives, of many flavors of passion and illusion, and present it not so much as a novel as a philosophical puzzle. The result, so much later, fell together into a peculiar "collage" of fables that all work in tandem to illustrate the world as I see it, despite the trappings of myth. I was flailing with the need to convey what it was that I had seen in that one dream image. I began to write feverishly the very next day, still unsure of the directions. Indeed, history spun in all directions-past, present, and future, and that uncharted realm of alternate possibilities, the fourth dimension, if you will-and I had no single term to sum it all up, no symbol that would convey everything except that of the old nautical wind rose, also known as the compass rose. Fragments of intensity filled me-bits and pieces of unresolved curiosity, wonder, nostalgia for all things of the past, a garish swirl of mythos combining those parts of me that were steeped in ancient history of my native Armenia, Russia, and beloved Greece, the Far East. ![]() It haunted me immediately, and initiated a chemical reaction from the elements of my being. If we were to define "nature" in the Platonic sense as pre-existing all man's thoughts and discoveries about it, we might very well think of sonnets as inevitable poetic forms which can not be improved upon, and must be practiced and worn and ridden and slept inside of (like an old overcoat) forever and forever.It is singularly appropriate that the word "Amarantea" and the image of a heart-wrenching island between worlds first came to me at the edge of dream. ![]() The real difficulty, of course, as with all art, is not merely to imitate the models of superior achievement of the past, but to create one's own forms-to invent and imagine novel ways of making, as additions to nature (and not merely adapted from nature). A great composer should be able to make a decent short sonata in the manner of Mozart without great difficulty. A great poet would be expected, in his youth, to understand fully, and be able to make his own successful version of a Shakespearean sonnet. It has traditionally been thought that the most highly skilled and talented professionals in any field are often the best imitators of their forbears in their respective fields. I've never been fearful of complexity or contradiction, but having to adopt and implement "other people's dreams" of Federal and state regulation nearly drove me mad. ![]() As the computer age dawned, these operating manuals became even more arcane and impenetrable, combining jurisprudence and software language into a dense, ponderous prose style. Our program "operating manuals" were constantly being updated and re-written to reflect these new programs or changes, sent to us as "transmittals" or announcements, in the driest possible language. My major issue was that these were "other people's dreams"-concocted by technical writers and program analysts, following the thorny compromised legislation cooked up by the Congressional committees and their staffs. When I worked for the government, my biggest problem was I couldn't generate motivation to learn new programs, with their complex structures, endless recital of exceptions, and the cute lists of acronyms. I've never been one for crossword puzzles.
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