The other preface is by the author of the whole business, the one who made the memes and, as a ventriloquist, the commentary on them. Hence I attach a lot of value to it. Here is what I have written. I made two and thought to let the matter rest. But the meme had not done with me and, after a month, I resumed making them with an ever-increasing sense of obsession.
Somewhere along the way, I began to think of them as constituting the Batman Meme Project, an indication of the growing seriousness with which I took them. So many had esoteric or personal meanings which I refused to make explicit that it came to seem like a good idea to gather them all together and explain them when I had finished. Such was the origin of this book. Just quite what this new conception of philosophy is has eluded me and eludes me still but I fairly early stopped even trying to spell it out to myself and became content with just doing what I was doing.
I try to remain confident that in there, rattling about, is something like a new conception of philosophy. Perhaps its whole point is that it is ineffable. I conceive of the book under three principal metaphors: free association, the cabinet of curiosities, and the folly. The memes and the book were all composed during my psychoanalysis and they and the analysis became inextricably bound up with each other. Batman and Robin, in turn, gave me a lens through which to come to understand parts of myself.
And it emerged, interestingly, that they had deep roots in my life. At the same time, in the analysis, I was struggling with free association. It is widely recognized, by both patients and analysts, that it is remarkably difficult to pull off, despite its seeming that there should be nothing easier. But what was difficult on the couch was, by contrast, easy at the keyboard and I allowed myself, in writing this book, pretty much to be led wherever my mind took me and to worry about what, if anything, it all meant later.
Writing with this kind of freedom is one big way in which my work on this book is so different from my work in a more traditional philosophical vein. I am also happy for the book as a whole to present itself as a kind of symptom, apt for interpretation of whatever kind anyone wishes to employ. Everything anyone thinks about it and me is likely to have some truth to it. One of several books that have profoundly influenced my own writing here is W. Sebald, in that book, discusses Sir Thomas Browne.
