Well, they look a little strange: rumpled, with tear marks evident. As if some paper earthquake has devastated the paper landscape, three times over no less, a recurrent disaster patched up again and again. Well … that sounds about right, actually. A map is the representation of a landscape, after all, and many landscapes, like OC’s, are principally psychic. Besides, there isn’t anything else he can do about it.

He then wanders the living room gathering the torn paper scattered around the desk. This heap of scraps represents the sum total of his writing efforts. Seeing them ripped apart, he feels bad. The stuff on OC’s history didn’t really deserve this. Well … it’s all still here, in the pile somewhere. He begins to inspect each piece of paper, spreading them over the couch in a new order, until all the fragments have been reunited. He tapes the pages together as he did the maps. After that he reads them, throws away everything except the historical pieces. Other than those, he will start from scratch.

When he’s done with that job he gets out the vacuum cleaner and sucks the dust up from everywhere the thing can reach. Sponge and cleanser, dust rag, paper towels and window cleaner, laundry whitener for spots on the walls … he goes at it furiously, as if he were on a hallucinogen and had conceived a distaste for clutter and dirt, seeing it in smaller and smaller quantities. Music from his little kitchen radio, luckily overlooked in the purge, helps to power him; the latest by Three Spoons and a Stupid Fork:

You are a carbrain

You’re firmly on track

You’re given your directions

And you don’t talk back

You’re very simply programmed

And you don’t have much to say

And you’re gonna have a breakdown

It’ll happen some day.

“Well fuck you!” Jim sings at the radio, and continues the song on his own: “And after the breakdown, the carbrain can see, cleaning all his programs, so he can be free.…”

Yes, there must be an order established; nothing fetishistic, but just a certain pattern, symbolic of an internal coherence that is as yet undefined. He’s struggling to find a new pattern, working with the same old materials.…

All his poor abused books are on the couch. Stupid to attack them like that. Luckily most were just thrown around. He props up the bookcase of bricks and boards, starts to reshelve them. Is the alphabet really a significant principle for ordering books? Let’s try putting them back arbitrarily, and see what comes of it. Make a new order.