Introduction

These are fantasy scenarios, or what I call "fancies" for short. They are ideas I've been having and putting down since I was a teenager. Before any conscientious interest in the matter of fragmentation or the unity of a work, there was the fascination with accumulation, and the relation to things in their array as records, like the way the experience of sports is in its reduction to numeric hierarchies, a matrix of the remote, for all its vaunting of action (direct or immediate, they might say, betraying the same in an inflationary way). It's a kind of reverse engineering, perhaps even of memory. Movies reduced to blurbs in guides, piled together in comparative schemes as arbitrary as the alphabet, give an access from a high vantage, or to the geological layers of degradation and repute.

It is the infatuation with the representation of representations, the sheer instantaneous economy of abstraction, synechdoche, as if imitating the charts of constellations were building an alternate cosmos, no less an impetus of exploration for being contingent or unverifiable, subject to the law of, well, fancy. Private. As is, with the sort of inverse proportion, each separate, exclusive, intimate relationship with an author, thanks to all the mechanisms of transmission, that the author is not aware of, all the firmament the star does not see. Swallowing creation doesn't really stop at the ruse

of sublimation or control or authorship, but opens infinite extension inside, making the self like pi. This way we know what it's like to be god: unable to contain the self.

It's not just the appeal of all the implications, none of which, serious, amusing, ironic, can master the others, of making a work out of nothing but ideas for other works. It's not just the amazing generative power of this confusion of "other", others, even the fruitfulness of it. Or should I say dissemination, or pollination? The scattering of seed, with all the equivocation of expenditure. Because this is still, also, a collection of separate works, examples of and the making example of the work of the whimsy, itself, the way that at any instant, entire -- inasmuch as incomplete, detached, not utterly dependent, in other words with the fullness that can only be suggested by emptiness -- contexts can occur, as if readymade, as if dropped by ladders from the sky, for the sake of any prompt or spur in "real" life.

Every little desire -- I hesitate to say amorous, erotic, or otherwise, because this is also about the much more general sort of fascination even the erotic seems a species of, the snags of sensation, the push and pull that courses thought, making everything into this revery of pleasure, play,

whether it be the glimpse of someone, the scene before me on the street, what I'm craving to eat, the sense of my accomplishment or arrangment in a task before me, or whatever detail cut out for its own angle -- casts itself, is cast, in these scenes, and it's an immense curiosity just which direction all this association works. Do these fixations from the world before me cause these storms of association, or are the latter the latent content that cause the thing before me to appear just so, to jut out as such an appeal? Which is predisposing and which precipitating? Not to mention their circuit, their relay, since each is the material of the other.

The material is indifferently "real" and fictive: association the way dreams work, where the belatedness of knowing works as invention, retroactively subsuming incongruity. In this way, any amorous flash spawns a background. It can be the imagination of the act itself. Notice, however, where that occurs, what is the scene of that. A real place? (This opens on the larger question of place, which may be even more of one for the real.) But this background can just as easily be: a profile of character, a litany of attributes, even a police record; music, a soundtrack; light, color, shade, a tableau; a season, aroma, or other sensory suggestion; a story or history, a dramatic situation, a predicament, even a cliffhanger kind.

Whether this background is of the simplest, or even most simplistic, wish fulfillment, or whether it

is more circuitous, through whatever masochistic gyrations of deferment, or whatever other impulses come to qualify the initial, makes no difference as far as this matter of its event, that it's there, that we do this. You may notice, however, that it's my particular perversion to feel just as compelled by twists, as they say for plots, or tropes for this more poetic sense of tableaux, that might be of a debunking character, at least compared to any pure wish fulfillment. My fancies do not repeat (are not the repetition compulsion of, but this term has always seemed redundant to me, despite what heuristic emphasis it provides) the dream of flying, or sex, or even sex while flying. They might be the compulsion to repeat the fall from heaven. But in that they are precisely even the realist's impulse to fabricate something that has more of the grain of the world, my own materialist predilection for all the fabric of what is out there before me, cut out and reused, for the sense of mystery that compels both the real and the imagined.

It's not one ideal type that plays out its perpetual lifting out of the world, but the mystery or suspense, loaded in each detail and through the train of all of them, that at any instant makes of one "thing" the diversion of context. This is the mystery, the card game, that "reality" brings, that makes each type -- person, persona, even as unique reality -- capable of suddenly subverting the others. Capable of -- presenting -- fascination.

These are the entire lifetimes, progressions, that occur in an instant, that are not merely alternate realities, certainly not in the sense of merely substitute or surrogate. They are no more subordinate as some paltry compensation than they should be the paltry supremacy of an ideal that subjugates reality. It's not strictly as either of these, but as the way they occur in any case, for even in the most ideal present, the most present of ideals, whatever dream of mutual pleasure, effusion or ephemera, spontaneous or conjugal bliss, this very thing is preceisely dreamed, must be imagined. You imagine, tell yourself, have the fantasy, or the fancy, that this is what is happening, even this that is right in front of you, what this is you are experiencing -- what it means, what its cast or significance is -- and that you are experiencing it.

Where this goes may not have the conspicuous form of a happy ending, as in fact, so many of these contexts really have no ending. (Sometimes it's precisely the ending that's imagined, just as sometimes it's the title.) But expanding the scope of interest means being led by whatever does occur, and the coloring or discoloring with obstacle, disaffection, conflict, squalor and the ironic taste for seeing that of anything else, especially grandeur, is also part of compulsion, even beyond that of empathy or even sympathy. There is the desire to be pulled down, too, for compulsion to be precisely a measure of what is otherwise not wanted, and for the irresponsibility of desire to be given form or

expression, often to make desire the very form of irresponsibility. This, too, is fancy.

In this way, these scenarios are also given as the way they are suspended in their own right, sketches, abstracts, premises, on which much more, countless variations can be spun. This is not just so that any reader may reverse the inception of fancy and launch off wherever else, but because these fancies themselves have already had their time, the experience beyond their reference. No doubt each one involved other hours of play, but unlike everything that might be fixed in the record of a book, a play, a movie, here the very sparseness makes use of the faultiness of memory for imagination itself.

A word about property, or proprietary concern. This "work" shows not only what is untenable, if not an outright joke, about the boundaries of a work itself, what constitutes one, and thus of property -- and it's this very matter of the unlocalizable that instigates the claim to property -- but also the absurdity of the idea that fantasies, despite the sharp (sometimes painfully so) sense of personal attachment, could be contained or owned. Not least because of the matter of predilection involved. No matter how many works or properties are made of the dream of flying, nobody owns the idea, no matter how personally anyone experiences it. While there's a bit more detail in some of these premises than such a bare generic idea or impulse, and

while these are personal enough to make me feel some embarrassment at making them public, I prefer to think of them in terms of fancy in the broader sense which defies property or any toll of transfer. A reader can't be charged or fined for a wrong interpretation, or the difference of imagination, by the writer, even if the reader has bought the book. As soon as you read these you will already have taken them and made them something of your own, and if you want to make

any larger work out of one of them, as I have already done with some, that's just as well. I would hope that you would at least attest the initial, if not give greater, consideration of me (an "idea by" credit would be the minimum). Note also, however, that these are recorded here, with copyright, for the matter of any claim of exclusive rights.

Provisional note: This work is being posted progressively, so more will be added from time to time.