Transcendental Redactions Codex

Dedicated to BJS and JB.

The last few months I spent some time with William S. Burroughs, interested in the “cut-up” practice he adopted from Brion Gysin. I won’t claim to fully understand the method, nor the aim. But it has the power of a magic trick, wonderful if sleight. While these redactions are loosely inspired by Burroughs and Gysin, I am less interested in the mystical play of chance than in the workings of the unconscious, or, more correctly, in the dialogue evoked when my unconscious tangles a text’s. My method has a few rules. I extract at least one meaningful utterance, expression, or phrase from each paragraph of the source document. Every word or phrase occurs in the order it appears in the original manuscript. Finally, I do not read the source paragraphs. Instead, I scan them, looking at each as a whole, and letting my eye gravitate toward significant phrases and words. This process is neither entirely random, nor entirely intentional, but something more like a daydream. After completing these redactions, I add one more editorial layer, printing them beneath broken glass. Fissures intersect with deletions, suggesting meaning through visible marks of absence. 

This production process is entirely analog. The cover images are contact prints from large format negatives. The text is typed on onion skin, and contact copied beneath broken glass using an ortho-litho negative. Finally, the resulting negative “plates” contact print the text as cyanotype on archival paper, the paper then bound within a fabric cover. 

This text emerges from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse."   I have redacted marks, phrases, and sentences, as a censor might with a sensitive government communication.  

Mobs, and sick spirits, believe nothing. 

February 2026