The website in question is http://www.myimaginaryfriend.typepad.com, otherwise known as Richard Dawkins IS kaiser sosay(?) Keyser Soze(!)
Here's some background information:
Back in March, 2009, i began taking notes for a letter to Richard Dawkins, the eminent evolutionary biologist and emeritus professor at Oxford.
He had really managed to piss me off. Which is strange, considering that i admire his work, and i'm an atheist. Stranger still, that i should feel so particularly irritated, considering i've never met the man.
i'd just read two of his books: The God Delusion and A Devil's Chaplain. i began to feel this strange sensation in my head-- wheels spinning and spinning. i felt like i really knew this guy. Since i'm not completely crazy, i realized i didn't. Still, there was this person in my mind, that i could picture so clearly, that hadn't been there before.
At the time, i'd been unemployed for a number of months. i was home, alone for most of the day, with no one to talk to. So i started talking to Imaginary Dawkins. Well, writing, but the writing was decidedly conversational-- various threads of thought explored, abandoned, picked up again later (or not.)
Richard Dawkins became my imaginary friend.
And then one day, i had a thought that seemed to come from nowhere-- why not pretend that Imaginary Dawkins was my personal god? i was already talking with him in much the same way i used to converse with God, back when i believed in him. And my life was unmoored-- i didn't know who i was, what i wanted. So much of my identity had come from the work i did-- without that work, i didn't know who i was. Maybe Imaginary Dawkins could help me.
I decided to try it, as an experiment.
Later, i realized that the idea of a church of Imaginary Dawkins had been proposed by Professor Dennett-- but watching how ideas get kicked around and passed down is one of the themes of this work. If you don't understand why that might be, you need to learn more about the real Richard Dawkins. There are some links on the sidebar you might find helpful towards that end.
This website is my way of publishing the results of my experiment.
The website itself is experimental. i decided i wanted to build it from the bottom up-- so the pages of the notebooks are layered like an excavation-- historical archaeology, if you will. The notebooks proceed in chronological fashion, but i allowed each step of the building process to inform the next. There are illustrations and photos that I happened to have lying around, that were re-appropriated to clarify points (or to make them)-- in the way i picture evolution re-appropriating phenotypic traits for new uses.
While I was working on the notebooks themselves, i began to build shrines to different muses. The shrines, also built out of what happened to be lying around, developed and changed as the project progressed. I documented the changes with my camera, and inserted photos on the website as they seemed subjectively appropriate-- i.e.- shrine development is not depicted in any kind of chronological order.
As for how to navigate the site--
wherever possible, I have annotated links with text-- revealed when you hover the mouse over any link, whether text or image. Links are everywhere. Some serve as footnotes or links back to earlier discussions of similar subject matter, while other links show subjective connections i've made between different ideas.
Sidebar links either explain background information, clarify story-lines within the notebooks, provide examples of my politics or sense of humor, or simply link to other websites i enjoy or find inspirational.
In a way, these links are my layman's attempt to build a model of a neural net. I'd love to keep the experiment alive by inviting my readers to post links of their own-- whether to sites that support or disprove some of my arguments, or to sources of some of the ideas i'm exploring or quoting, or to genealogical connections . ..
For those readers who appreciate an orderly approach, the dead sea scrolls are numbered bottom to top, and are the most straightforward way to take in all the material as quickly as possible.
Or, you can simply follow links as they interest you. After all, there are a lot of different ways to skin a cat.
Meow.
