(dreamt 27.january.2004; discussed 10.feb.2004) Hey Richard, It was great to see you again...  But I have to say - our conversation about literary and artistic 'completeness' really threw me into critical chaos.   For some reason that I don't quite understand, it set up an undertow...   I came home full of doubts that my writing was anything more than  a billboard for my character flaws.   Then I sat down and read a couple of short reviews you had written over the last year -- shook my head, and thought: jesusmoses&mary, if I can't write like *this,* why bother?    In other words: it was fairly horrible night.    This morning I went back to the dreambook where I recorded the 'hextych'- screen dream.    There was much more than my scant recall during our conversation:  In the dream you  owned a restaurant (though other people were running it), and I came in as a guest chef from time to time.  There was no schedule or menu or culinary limit -- I just came in when I wanted, created really strange dishes for large groups of people, then disappeared again.     You were on a rare visit when I walked into your office (in the restaurant), and found the portable six-way screen.  The management of the restaurant tried to press us for a 'schedule' of my production.   You refused to be drawn in, and I was a bit irritated but largely unconcerned.  But the computer was an object of desire and contention:  it belonged to you,  I was the person most qualified to use it, but the management had other ideas and they wanted to limit the 'crazy cook's' --my-- access to it.    I will continue --for the foreseeable future-- to write about what I see artwork doing as opposed to what it 'is' according to academic criteria.   The dangers of this approach are relentless, Richard:  there is the ever-so-perforated line between solipsism and noetics to negotiate; there is the struggle to recognize --paradoxically enough!-- what I can't see or understand about certain works, and concommitantly, to see what only ignorance can reveal.    And there is the simple struggle to grow beyond the nomenclature of mysticism that has characterized my descriptions of these processes over the years.    The dream setting was wonderfully condensed:  As far as artwriting goes, you own the joint.   Right now I am just an eccentric gastronaut who sails through from time to time to put something on the table that may or may not prove to be palatable.  But  there are other, larger concerns on the horizon ('horizon' meaning 3 or 4 years down the road):   I still have strong intellectual curiosity about what I called 'corporeal indexicality' back in the mid-nineties.   I still have a deep interest in the question of criteria that I set into play last year.    The image of 'haecceity' (from Gk 'hex' for six) represented by the six-way screen may signal a possiblity  of more expansive writing, wherein many flows of information converge and create a vortex, an opening between one reality and another.     That is what I see in your work, and (if I don't succumb to exasperation beforehand) it may one day be in mine.   Well.  I feel better now.   Thanks for listening... Myst