Author's Introduction I wrote Cell Fantastick right after graduate school, in the full throes of what turned out

to be a lifelong infatuation with the works of James Joyce, coupled with my fascination with French symbolism, such as Maldoror, Au Rebours, and the works of Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Rimbaud. Couple this with my political inclinations, my love of jazz, and my complete immersion in the Vietnam War counterculture, and I may be excused for drafting an idiosyncratic work, gauging myself as an audience of one. I have not until now attempted to communicate this impulsive, solipsistic, act of improvisational stream of subconsciousness to the world at large (except for one fruitless attempt to interest Alfred Kazin in it, due to a piece he wrote about literature, which led me to believe he might find it intriguing. I surreptitiously slipped it into his box at the CUNY Graduate Center with a postage paid return envelope into which he promptly deposited it, sending it back without comment). O well. The task I had set myself in writing CF was as follows: 1. Postulate a violent revolution in a near-future America, based on the course of history that served as the foundation for the madness of the Vietnam War: the groping of oligarchy toward political ascendancy, like the beast slouching toward Bethlehem. 2. Postulate a revolutionary leader, asleep, whose dreamthoughts partake of the experiences of warfare and the collective unconscious in a flow of imagery and murmured language. 3. Postulate a successful assassination of that revolutionary leader in his sleep, thus denoting the sudden appearance of a Part 2, the ellipsis between parts being the moment of assassination (the penetration of the skull by the postulated bullet), and the substance of the second part being that mind's descent (or is it ascent?) toward death. To be truthful to the story, the center of consciousness the revolutionary's mind would not be overtly or covertly aware of the assassination. Or of the book qua book, for that matter. Thus, I begin the book in medias res, so to speak, like any good poetic epic, in the midstream of dreamthought, and carry it to its conclusion at the point of death's emergence from just dying. The difficulty for the reader, of course, is that I can't let him or her in on this structural matrix: Thus, this introduction. The improvisation enabled me to groove the tale with all my psychic energies directed at telling a dance, so to speak, with dancers drawn from an individual's memories and the collective dreamscape of the human species. Now, before I am accused of competing with Joyce and his Wake, let me disavow any such pretentiousness. Joyce is the Master, remains the Master, and Finnegans Wake is the Masterwork, the Book of Doublends Jined, the Emerald Canticle of Hermes. I have neither the time, the inclination, nor the capacity to compete with him. To paraphrase Han Shan, my Cold Mountain is not his Cold Mountain. The title is stolen from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, in which the celle fantastick denotes that portion of the mind that is the seat of imagination. (I've masculinized that phrase, as the dreamer is male.) That's where I traveled. That's where I now invite others to travel with me. Done. The rest is current history. Art anticipates reality.. Jay Halpern, Lake Zoar, 2008