What “prompts” us?

A pain.  A joy.  Surprise.  Loss, meaning, something that crashes, crushes, alerts or in some way causes blurts or blasts to our system that create cross-connections – surge energy / electricity / pulsings between links and channels that otherwise run their own course.  Unexpected.  Expected.  SIGNIFICANCE.

I am intrigued by what “catches” us, “moves” us, CHANGES us.  As many times askance as head on.  What gathers and whispers behind us.  What we are confronted with.  Explosive, erosive, evolutional.  You could call them “shocks to the system.”  Sometimes cumulative, sometimes immediate.  But they effect change, and attention.  Design, and process.

I’m thinking of them as prompts.

There are a few works of literature and art, throughout my life, that ALWAYS “prompt” me.  A few authors.  A few painters, sculptors, musicians.  I do not know why this is, but it is so – some voices, some styles, some appearances and sounds unfailingly “move” me, by which I mean continuously change my orientation to the world.  Often subtly, sometimes radically, but surely.

Macedonio Fernandez is one such creator.

His writings NEVER FAIL to alter me.

I could query my analytics to find how many times I have quoted him, referenced his “first good novel”

and today I am passing the PROMPT that this novel is – and IS contained in it – on to you… from Fernandez himself – I have lived with it, considered it, dreamt of it… a prompt he left us that haunts and inspires me… an ultimate sort of prompting….