OFTEN IN THE SKETCH for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.
Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.
There before us is what one human being has seen of something many others have viewed differently, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.
Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.
Over the years I have taught myself, and have been been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect and nourish him.
Then there are the extra senses that function only in subconsciousness. These are perhaps a stranger’s best allies, the ones that stay on and grow stronger as time passes and immediacy dwindles.
It is with the invisible ink distilled from all these senses, then, that I have drawn this map of a town, a place real in stone and water, and in the spirit, which may also be realer.