Schematics: A Love Story

This may just be the most evocative, enigmatic books I've ever read, or perhaps explored is a better word. Julian Hibbard pairs geometric schematics with simple prose to form a beautiful narrative. Hibbard explains that the diagrams are found by googling words derived from the essence of the right-hand text, thus enhancing their meaning and relating abstract human concepts to equally confounding scientific ones. I'm terrible with words so I'll let David LaRocca further explain below but above are my favourites of the book, I'd truly recommend it to anyone. Buy it on Amazon here .

We encounter in Schematics: A Love Story a portfolio of nebulous black and white diagrams alongside solemn poetic observations that subtly suggest a novel apprehension of the nature of transformation.

Schematics operate simultaneously and two distinctive registers: the deeply personal (a love story between if the narrator and the objects of his affection, desire, and confusion) and the profoundly anonymous (a love story within matter-subject of gravity, magnetism, genetics, mechanics, electricity, and this space time continuum). The first-person voice, though, should not necessarily be assumed to reveal the authorial confession; rather, consider how the voice is structurally and tonally autobiographical. The “self” it references is fluid, permeable, expansive. The prose, then , is not dissimilar to the drawings: they are lines in pursuit of the expression of form, activity, character, and position. Just as the diagrams chart ethereal, often invisible phenomena, so the narrator’s prose strains to articulate mysterious forces of the heart, head and hand. As the drawings made the indeterminate concrete, the narrator transforms a private sentiment into something sufficiently generic to be useful to all readers, an aid to our own reflections.

Drawn together, these two strands the personal and the anonymous – reveal how Schematics is primarily about the experience of attraction, repulsion, and resistance, and getting nearer to some objects while moving farther away from others. It is, in other words, a story of love – love as a force of nature – and the pursuit of knowledge.

excerpt from 'Out Of Nowhere' afterword by David LaRocca

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