Editor's Note

English is dead. Or at least, in issue 7, it's taken a long leap off a very high building. What happens to our brains and bodies when we hear a language whose meaning we can't ascertain? Does a poem become a sound poem by virtue of its divorce from meaning? What part of our humanity can we glean from these phonemes? Do we feel our autonomic processes synching up with the rhythms of breath in "Semilla y Colmena" or "Neiges?"

Buckminster Fuller, in his preface to No More Secondhand God, asserts that one of the counterbalances to chaos is the human body's everyday function. "My continuing philosophy is predicated," he writes, "on the assumption that in dynamical counterbalance of the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness there must be a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness and that man is that anti-entropic reordering function of universe." We are here, he suggests, to become conscious of the universe's patterns even as our very existence is predicated on unconscious autonomic reflexes. He explains that, "no man is conscious of pushing his plus 1,000,000 individual hairs out through the scalp of his head in special colors and unique shape patternings at some man-preferred rates. Man does not even know why he has hair. No men are conscious of a quadrillion times a quadrillion brain constituting atoms inter-patterning at 186,000 miles per second inside their heads. No men are conscious of coordinating their heartbeats and their breathing, even though they know that their hearts beat and that they breathe. No men are conscious of extracting the complex of energetic chemistries from their digestive systems and distributing those energies to the unique energy storages in their respective complexes of glands. No men consciously multiply their flesh cells."

Buckminster Fuller is an astounding thinker. He outlines that delicate balance—chaos & order, conscious ambition & unconscious possibility—that the textsound project is built around. Our contributors provide that patterning of heartbeat and breath; they are the arterial ligament which connects the lungs to the aorta. Issue 7 is the whirr of the intercellular highway which usually remains unconscious and in the background. This issue brings the unconscious into consciousness. And this, Mr. Fuller would say, is why man is here on earth.

-Laura Wetherington