Case Studies of Five Modern Labyrinths

The light was growing dim in the late afternoon of July 10, 1972, when the poet Kenneth Rexroth halted our conversation abruptly and reached for a file at the corner of his desk, sliding it across in my direction. "Look at this," he said with some exasperation. It was a manuscript, 64 typewritten pages, which had originally come to him under a blind cover letter. "A fellow down in Los Angeles has sent this to me," he said. "Perhaps you can make some sense of it. I think the guy might be crazy. But you may find something there."It was bewildering enough that I slipped it into a box of papers under my desk that night and promptly forgot about it. Eventually the box traveled down to my parent's garage in Seal Beach, California. There it lay until 2013, when I stumbled upon it, forty-one years later.This is the complete text of that manuscript.