Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Modernity's extended time of transition has been one which few if any seers have been able to bring into perspective. This has been peculiarly true here in the United States—for historian, philosopher, artist—all the prophets of this land, this land conceived in the delusion of escape and born to innovation. There has been no ground actually...