Publisher's Synopsis
This is the first book in a series of novels that explores that which has been forgotten, wherein the surfaces of objects are shaped by erosion and awareness and that which is "washed" away is the intentionality of the present revealing the past but the past as shaped by an elusive present presupposed by a possible future in which a subject (our protagonist) is cast forth into a geological and genealogical rhizome of signs and codes like a character from a Jules Verne novel who falls into a maelstrom off the coast of Norway and is spewed out from a volcano in Italy... and thus begins a journey to the ends of the earth on which we meet a cast of characters including poets, presidents, anarchists, communists, immigrants, poor and rich, janitors and porters, fathers and sons, stone masons and bartenders, writers and murderers, suicides and assassins, strangers and seekers, philosophers and dancers, and it all starts from a strange community on a slender fish-shaped island, in the tilting presence of this continent, this country, this state, this city, this town, this hamlet, this humdrum, from the Fifth-month grass and muck under his youthful feet, over the big lawns and beach sands and paved tar roads and concrete, through the ash-heap in the valley of abstract Moloch, to the business of all-eyes are on us pragmatic Mammon, the filth of the floor in Mahagonny, the fleeting glimpse of the pristine lilac shore, the celestial beauty, the crowning wonder, all of a sudden the dark forest, the alley between the bar and the paper store, the maelstrom, the descent, from the mountains to the sea, the door, the madness, the murder, the loomings of violence; hark! America, we have all we need, guns and a bible... and so our story begins and ends.
