FICTION

The Jack Barrett books do not constitute an autobiography. They can't for several reasons. Firstly Jack Barrett doesn't exist, and secondly autobiographies are recollections and memories. And they don't exist either.

The fabrication of memory is not some 'replayed tape of events.' That's not how memory works. Recall is actually reconstruction. The brain stores events as conceptual symbols, in a very efficient and tightly packed deck of cards. A symbol just went by, did you see it?

The process of 'recall,' strings as many of these conceptual symbols together as it can locate to form a narrative, more or less similar to the conditions under which the symbols were first stored. This bright strand of sequential concepts are a 'flick book' or animation of events, and we think of them as memories. The transition between one event and another is an invention of ours called 'time,' a logical function that most of us can loosely grasp and agree upon.

Like other "people", Jack Barrett has stored countless billions of conceptual symbols in his mind, and over time has created mental accretions that bind some of these symbols into larger structures and groups. Some he calls 'art', some of them 'music', some are 'books' and some are 'videos.' For want of a better description, Jack Barrett terms these mental accretions 'parts' and all these parts form a point cloud that describes the shape of a mind.

The point cloud is called the 'Plexus' and like 2.6 million stars in a tiny fragment of space, it hosts planets and moons, atmospheres and magnetic fields, ecosystems and elemental environments that are co-dependent and mutually influential. The stars produce an infinity of colours.

The Jack Barrett volumes, and their separate parts are conceptual threads drawn from the interactions of the Plexus, inventing the model of a person in retrospect, and creating an 'Organisation'. The parts are time-independent, and can be read in any order. Each one lights another area of the model, causing it to grow, change shape and morph into its true form.

In the course of this voyage through the 'Organisation', Jack Barrett is able to realise not only how the conceptual invention works, but how 'we' build them... and why.