Had a “celebratory lunch” today with my publisher, Caleb J. Seeling, owner of Conundrum Press, which is bringing out my 12th collection Thread of the Real.* The book’s designer extraordinaire, Sonya Unrein, joined us. What a pleasure to sit down with such committed and energetic people! Looks like the book will be released in the first full week of May. I imagine it will blink like a prisoner freed from his dungeon, who had forgotten the sky is still there….
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* Ever since my first attempt to wrestle this collection into shape five or so years back, the title has been Thread of the Real. But only today, after our lunch, did it occur to me to do a Google search for phrase. It turns up here and there, but most appositely in an essay by Sergio Benvenuto, “The Drive Towards the Real: Philosophy in the Epoch of Bio-Technologies and Bio-Politics.” On page 7 he writes, “[W]hat makes some proud of humankind is the fact that we are not satisfied with our humanity, we are not satisfied simply with what is manifest to us, but we’re pushed to pursue the thread of the Real.” If only I’d found this earlier I could have used it as an epigraph! (I love the caginess of his phrase, “what makes some proud”….) On the other hand, it’s somehow wonderful to know that my ideas aren’t really mine—are instead out there in the noösphere. This affirms, I think, my previous fragmentary speculations on the nature of consciousness.