palm reading

despite their many nerve endings and utilitarian functions the hands were often overlooked in the reader's activities. they didn't mind. their's was a kind of intelligence that needed nothing in the way of legitimation. an intelligence generated through the joys of investigating new things. the intelligence of muscle fibres splitting and reforming through the exercise of their investigations. the words were more of a consequence than an aim, a bi-product of the process, notations of an event whose full significance was only found as it was produced. the hands had been known to write by listening to and altering the pitch of sap hissing in semi green logs burning in the camp fire. the text itself was incomprehensible but the event couldn't have made more sense to the hands.

the last writes

the reader had come across a number of longer versions in his daily immersion in the library whose information seeped in through the pores of his skin. the subject of the last writes was written everywhere. despite its many critics the second law of thermodynamics (heat death) was one of the reader's favorites. it comforted him. stillness was a state he could rarely appreciate and the idea of an all encompassing stillness helped him to see what being still might be like even as he continued to read with his purpose in mind. there was a decision that had to be made, appropriate words had to be found. the preamble to entropy. a piece of poetry for the apocalypse. or maybe just an ending...

background reading

in the section dedicated to an explanation of his own work, the reader found a wealth of information on the subject of his process. in a reading titled "the implications of critical distance for the formation of semi logical sequences of words and their interpretations" he read about his desire to remain one step removed from his creations. the two people in front of him in the line of grammatical structures wrote eloquently about his position as the third person in the queue. for the i and the you, he had a certain privleged which afforded him the luxury of being able to receive without being expected to take full responsibility. even at his most active the reader could always deflect credit for his readings. they were, after all, not his. they belonged to his subjects. even the background reading constantly reminded him of that.

still in motion

the reader pausing before passing slowly through previous readings thrown up by the persistent activity of the hands. they held something that could not be described while still in motion .

reading material

could it be possible? all reason seemed to contradict what the reader instinctively felt. the idea that there was nothing left to read was ridiculed by the logical mind. to an analytical organism whose very existence depended on new material, the thought that even newness could be reduced to nothing, sent an illuminating flash of fear through all the reader perceived. but wait, surely the reader was reading that very flash, for that moment nothingness had become new material and logic had saved itself from oblivion. and yet, the almost inaudible murmurs of instinct persisted, a voice the reader new all to well. it had been that same voice that had led the reader in his training, it was following that voice that made his current reading habits possible, and now, as he listened and read, he heard that voice a little more clearly, "reading will end". somewhat concerned the reader looked to the hands, they drew circles in dry sand.

the workers

unsure as to exactly where he was the reader was forced to turn his attention to his immediate surroundings. this was sometimes the most difficult thing for the reader to do. constantly enticed into worlds he only had a small part in creating the reader often forgot that he was located in an actual space and that his actions influenced the matter around him. where were the hands when you needed them? of course they were where they would invariably be found. work kept them from disappearing with the reader as he was swept along by waves of engrossing content and the inevitable periods of darkness and introversion that followed. work gave them purpose even as the reader reeked havoc on himself in the mirror room. they would, (as they always had), search for the means to make something from whatever was there in front of them. feeling their way into another creation the hands held the reader's attention...

the echo of the factory floor

in the impossibly introspected interior where all mirrors pointed back to beast created by over reading the reader could only hope for material that would allow him to get outside of himself. the out of body seemed so far off. his first solution; to hold his breath until the mirrors exploded into eighty thousand years of bad luck. fortunately his resolve was tested when he caught a glimpse of the hands, still writing definitions of humility, this time a toothpick was employed in the task of creating letters on a slab of granite. as he exhaled there was a second where the reader was the granite. the hands clapped once. the echo of the factory floor

reader's writes

"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."

if he wasn't so busy reading maybe the reader would be flattered, he senses a warm buzz of pleasure enter the hands after they have finished rewriting these words from the most esteemed champion of reader's writes Roland Barthes. still unable to experience the hands' pleasure directly the reader none the less understands that this sort of pleasure is why the hands continue to write.

reader training

William Wegman

Reading Two Books
one of the reader's mentors demonstrates the classic two book technique

entering the field

as the name would suggest the reader is an avid reader and continues to read even as his thoughts are recorded by the device that produced these words. reading is his practice. as he writes he seeks to distance himself from the process so as to read not what he has written, but rather the act of writing itself. he reads the process of transcribing his thoughts into the written form. he begins by seeing the operation of his thoughts from a distance, seeing his desire to record, seeing this desire manifest in the impulses that travel through his hands and through this seeing, through these in sights he seeks to untangle the one who is doing the seeing from the one who is acting.

in an out of body. the reader finds himself in other dimensions where viewing the impulses that become words allows him to see that the words are actually entering his body directly through the pores of his skin. this is why the reader reads and leaves the writing to his hands. only they have anything close to the number of nerve endings required to communicate the multiplicity of sources the reader is receiving through the pores of his skin. so the hands write and the reader reads on, his readings leading him to a text that casts doubt on his decision to leave all the writing up to the hands. according to the current reading being received through the skin at the back of the left knee it may be necessary to allow the full body to write. this reading suggests that ever shortening cycles of writing and reading can allow the reader to reach a point where reading is writing, where the words entering the skin are transformed and broadcast back outward to other bodies at the very moment the enter.

this reading is followed by waves of read/write information that are simultaneously received and transmitted at a rate can only occur when consciousness exits the time/space continuum. back in the out of body the hands try to catch up...

"the hands try to catch up..."

the hands scratching letters into a piece of glass with a stick. the one who writes admiring their dedication rewards the hands by sending three hundred and thirty three thousand three hundred and thirty three beginnings through the pores of the reader who instantly rewrites and forwards the processed words to all bodies on his network. the hands keep scratching. fumbling around on the ground that supports the glass, they find a small stone. the reader admires their perseverance. with their new tool the hands make it clear that what they had been attempting to write with the stick was the letter "e". the one who writes takes a moment to share the joy of the hands in producing their first letter. the reader reads this joy, his empathetic experience of it is secondary to his pleasure at the function it serves in keeping the hands moving. the scratching continues.

even though the reader is now writing through the reading process and is producing vast texts in milliseconds he is still fascinated by the efforts of the hands as they record a small fraction of the information the reader is constantly processing. instinctively he feels he has much to learn from the hands...

much like men jumping of cliffs with feathered wings attached, these early images of attempts at full body writing are included as an historical curiosity