A remarkable change took place in the human condition with the rise of Euclidian space, three-dimensional perspective, and, above all, the phonetic alphabet. Each of these inventions favored the eye at the expense of all other senses. The value accorded the eye destroyed the harmonic orchestration of the senses & led to an emphasis upon the individual experience of the individual sense, especially the sense of sight. Where other senses were employed, it was with the bias of the eye.

The eye is like no other sense. When used in isolation, it perceives a flat, continuous world without intervals. Yet it also favors only one thing at a time: it focuses on a particular & abstracts it from a total situation. To connect these fragments, literate man built mental bridges. He spoke of a "row of trees" or a "circle of stones," when neither row nor circle existed except in his mind & language. He favored the "story-line" & arranged his thoughts "seriously," that is, serially. From this came the scanning eye of the reader & much else besides: lineality, causality, temporality, ultimately much of what we call Western civilization.

Western man not only emphasized sight, but a special kind of sight, "pure sight," divorced from all other senses. "At first sight" the world looks flat, as if it were no more than meaningless patches of light & color jumbled into a quiltwork. Infants born without arms or legs can never see in depth. Depth is discovered by touch, then married to sight. The eye caresses over objects.

Tactility converts the flat world of sight into the three-dimensional world of bodies. One by one, objects grow out of this chaotic world and remain unmistakably separate when identified. Patients, blind from birth, on whom vision has been bestowed by an operation, at first shrink from the welter of additional stimulation & from the flat continuity of the world they see. In 1964, in Sicily, five brothers - all blind from birth - each acquired sight following an operation. Months later, they were photographed holding on to one another, with downcast eyes, as the lead brother felt his way through the doorway of their home. It took time & effort before they once more recognized the objects around them as separate items.

The world of the blind is a world of three-dimensional bodies existing in emptiness. Test this yourself: move about the room with eyes closed - suddenly, without warning, you will bump into some object. Emptiness combines with sudden interface. All encounters become abrupt. "To the blind, all things are sudden." Without sight, connections are lacking: all the gradations, shadings, & continuities of the visual world are gone.

Artists visually convey the sense of touch in a variety of ways. Renoir painted a woman's body as the hand feels it, not as the eye sees it. Leonardo's multiline sketches of women & children also belong to the hand, not the eye.

In the same sense, artists create hard-edge art, that is, abrupt edges with intervals. When Gertrude Stein met Picasso in Paris, around 1905, he asked her to obtain American comic strips for him. He was studying Japanese prints at the time, but found in comic strips clearer examples of interface & interval which interested him so much. It was at this time he began the study of African tribal art.

Most tribal art is hard-edge art. So is children's art. A Vancouver filmmaker provided young children with the means to make animated films. The result was nearly 200 films of WHAM! BANG! with figures appearing, disappearing. There were no characters in the ordinary sense: no shadings, no gradations, just abrupt encounters a la Batman of hard-edge, cartoon art. Hard-edge art is a visual presentation, but the experience it evokes or conveys isn't visual; it's tactile. It's full of abrupt encounters - sudden interfaces, then emptiness.

When you have interface & emptiness, you have happenings. In the world of happenings, surfaces & events collide & grind against each other, creating new forms, much as the action of dialogue creates new insights. It's the world of all-at-onceness where things hit each other but where there are no connections.

Not only artists & writers, but also composers use this combination of hard-edge & interval to convey the experience of touch. Edgard Varese writes: "Electronics has given music a new dimension and a new freedom. My music is based on the movement of unrelated sound masses which I always conceived as moving simultaneously at different speeds, and I looked forward to the time when science would provide the means of realization. Now, thanks to electronics, such unrelated metrical simultaneity is at last possible."

Much contemporary music favors interface & interval, in contrast to the acoustic continuity of symphonic music. These techniques are basic to the poetry of Pound & Eliot, as they were for the Symbolists. Above all, Joyce took over the art of the interval.

He used interval & interface as a means of retrieving that fantastic wealth of perception & experience stored in ordinary language. Dispensing with the storyline became a means of instant grasp of complex wholes.

The scanning eye is offended by both intervals & abrupt encounters. It favors continuity. It builds bridges in the mind to create a smooth, uninterrupted flow from word to word, thought to thought. Joyce dynamited that freeway, leaving gaping intervals & massive roadblocks. Suddenly it was no longer possible to skim the page: the reader fell between words, struggled over others, and soon he was swarming all over them, experiencing them in new ways, going right inside them, deciphering riddles, discovering hidden dimensions, releasing imprisoned energies.