i lost my cube

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i lost my cube is surreal first-person prose written in a single sitting on november 3, 2021. it’s about someone who lost their cube.

one methodological goal of surrealist art is to allow the unconscious to reveal itself through psychic automatism. while my last book was largely an experiment in manipulating and re-framing conscious thought, this text is an exercise in attempting to reveal the unconscious by building around a loose pre-defined event: losing a cube. i wrote the text as quickly as possible, forcing myself to embrace inconsistencies and imperfections and writing only to record the events unfolding in my mind. the process was meant to route the unconscious through a conscious narrative domain and provide it enough structure to surface in a meaningful way, but not enough structure to suppress its natural emergence.

the result is a disorienting narrative that fluctuates between original and derivative, consistent and contradictory. it renders time nonlinear and questions notions of individual identity through a constantly changing reference point that constructs an unfamiliar pseudo-omniscience. by assigning a conscience to a collection of characters, the prose establishes a relationship between world, mind, and time that offers a new view on the paracosm: it devises a hyper-dynamic, multi-agent sentience with nebulous and ever-changing subjectivity. the resulting form of bounded quasi-collective consciousness allows for departure from—or perhaps reconstruction of—a sense of self.

if you buy a copy, please tweet me a picture and let me know what you think.

words by @quasimatt | design by @shaumbe