Encountering this text was perplexing at times, at times intriguing, and peculiar to navigate. At first it seemed as though none of the stories connected in any way, they would jump around based either on what was chosen or inevitably automatically. Perhaps not very “inevitably” as sometimes I had to go back and finish what I had read, although it seemed to go back to the same place it was directed to originally. Through the cyclical reading I noticed that there were connections amongst the intents of the overlapping stories. Similar words were manipulated throughout the stories and interspersed quotes.
It was most curious to run into the hidden link pages like when you click on, “darkness” (pg HGSXX2) on most screens you run into a completely black page with hidden quotes. At first one may believe some technical error has occurred but if explored, many paths may be followed. The reader can choose “Hark!”, “Pissed off yet?”, “True meaning”, “Five finger exercise”, “Doppelganger”, “of looking at”, “A dead parrot”, “Same old same old”, “Don’t Click Here”, “Fourteen ways” or “Windfall Lever”. These links are not visible except through the little hand that appears when you’ve found a link. However, this particular screen does not appear to transform on its own.
I chose windfall lever which brought me to “Chapter One: I am dead” (pg. HGS076) this is a rather morbid examination of dreaming death, though more as a beginning than and end. It entices an idea of journey in finality and a cyclical or everlasting realm similar to this text. “We commit his person to the sky in hope of no resurrection beyond our bodiless hegira…” There is an escape through death and the use of hegira as in the title “Hegirascope”. Subsequently, the word flight is used in many of the other escape sequences. A similar storyline was linked through the side word, Wake and it took me to the scene called “How it played in the Boardroom” (pg. HGS211). The first line was a similar flight “They couldn’t understand him so they shot him into space.” An inherent connection, as the two are written in the same color, orange, on a black background and have a seemingly similar tone but no actual transition from one idea to the next, aside from the word “wake.”
The scene in the boardroom progresses to the widow’s son sleeping and the ascension of us all. However, if I had chosen the word “zero” on the previous page, “Chapter One: I am dead” it would have taken me back to the same black screen with hidden links and the choice of a new direction. Finally, “Boot Me Up and Call Me Rider” (pg. HGS212) emerges from our ascension in the “Boardroom” and the man is a dark type with apparently no dream beyond his own. Inevitably, this sequence ends with “wake up rider and dream.” There is a cynical optimistic obscurity to this progression; there is no feeling of close personal accounting or connection in this second person narration. The theme is illusory in nature falling in with the dream sequences throughout the relating stories.
Similar to that of a “choose your own adventure” book, there are some areas which have scenes that seem to last two or three pages due to color, tone, and often theme. This is exemplified in the previous arrangement, through the resemblance in tonal quality. However in this text, the reader has several choices throughout the excursion. The word links on the side, extracted from the writing in the center of the page, seem to hold a connection to the word at hand and often the word later in the story will lead to a continuation but not always. The continual transient structure and continual collision of sequences creates an ever changing patchwork of imagery.