An Introduction
by
Carol Bergé
Everything is motion: physics, the description we give to the history of matter. We're in and of it, with choices. If we write in one mode for twenty years while the world changes with and around us, we're safe, like teachers who proffer only the dead establishment. Yes, to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Browning's monologues and all the varied mythos, and then to make one's own, of your life: a distillate. Those who wrote in 1890 were modern for then. We record this era in current idiom. Around us, 1981: intense storage and report of information, fast take and quick studies, bubble memories, recombinant DNA, encoded masks, fast speed forward and playback, electronic speech synthesis (ESS), charm and beauty to mean atomic particles, a tachy-case labelled Notes from Cyber City, A Silicon Valley where young millionaire engineers segue into others making change in Mendocino valleys, modular input, interfaces, lithium drift detectors, you see it, the brain as original databank. Forms follow time: if each cell contains humanity's history, lives can essence into one page: each punctuation-mark a gesture, a breath; a relationship in a paragraph, a family's anatomy in a sentence, the process a page, the prognosis implicit throughout and evident. A haiku of fiction forms, a terse garden of bansai. Bloom of souls as lasers crystals filaments chips shining. Legend and history as earth. Motion into the future from now.
from Fierce Metronome: The One-Page Novels, and Other Short Fiction, Window Editions, 1981, as collected from previous publications c. 1970-80.