Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy)

Poetry. HISTORIA ABSCONDITA selects its title, format and purpose from amongst Friedrich Nietzsche's "most personal of all books", Die frohliche Wissenschaft. ("la gaya scienza"). Without a word of his own, Thurston dances with Nietzsche to the song of his aphorisms, re-reading possibility into his classic challenges through a subtle conceptual appropriation. The index of Walter Kaufmann's canonical English translation of The Gay Science provides a site and concealed syntax that Thurston opens anew, by typographically replicating that section and its edition cover but removing the reference locators. The past, present and future influences, on and of Nietzsche, become conceptually unbound in these loose-leaf pages. This book--a chapbook in form and intent--allows the new relations of alphabetised coincidence that emerge to remain joyously unstable, re-fused as they are by two cited aphorisms.