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INTRODUCTION

Beginning a story, “Where Have All the Prophesies Gone?” I wrote: “When I was a child in the ’50s and early ’60s, everyone expected that we’d soon be eating pills instead of dinner, that we’d be riding around in personal helicopters, and that in this polished and idle and mechanized future we’d work one or two days a week, then play golf or pursue hobbies. This was the prevailing view of paradise.”

This living hopefulness was as much a part of that time as is our fear today, that generalized edginess we have about where we are going, the world seen as ominous, hostile, and that period in the ’50s and ’60s, as merely a blip, merely pre-everything: pre-Anti-War, pre-cancer epidemic, pre-ozone and AIDS, pre-environmental, pre-victimization, pre-consumerism, and so on.

Now, in place of naivete, contamination and dislocation are the prevailing moods.

Contamination: of the air we breathe, the food we eat, the thoughts we think.

Dislocation: of a people loving, bearing children, living in this world, and believing that their lives are inauthentic, of little value, in light of celebrity, in light of a doomed environment.

Still, individual voices surface relentlessly like life-rings in a wild sea.

This group of stories is about “change.” Because if you look at a thing long enough what you get is a bouquet of perceptions, various interpretations present themselves. The prolonged gaze that manifests itself in words. The prolonged questioning that attempts to keep apace with (and apart from) the times. Everything must be considered, especially our ceaseless quests for a living paradise.

So … working on “change,” in a way, is the same as working on “vision”: a bouquet of views, of meanings, symbols, metaphors, and mysteries, of explanations and roadmaps, of concomitant alternative realities presented as existent.

M.A.C. Farrant September 2002