When I was twelve years old I was fascinated by the idea of perpetual motion–and was particularly attracted to the old accounts of the Bessler Wheel. I corresponded with a cadre of perpetual motion, star drive and gravity wheel inventors, including one gentleman who produced a zine devoted to perpetual motion and free energy. Of course I used my pocket money to subscribe to his effort, aptly titled The Journal of Perpetual Motion. I do not now recall this gentleman’s name, but in the sixties he had arrived at a design for a huge, self-enclosed tunnel bored in the earth with two heat converters mounted on the inside. By maintaining a continuous disparity in temperature between one side of the tunnel and the other, a wind could be generated that could be used to turn a turbine. He called this his “perpetual motion device” although now we would call it earth energy, or something of that sort. I remember that the design had been written about favorably in Popular Mechanics Magazine, and I have since seen it and variations of it many other places. Of course, I disagreed with this gentleman way back then, and pointed out that this was not “pure” perpetual motion. He agreed and invited me to write aomething for his journal. After thinking long and hard about the problem I concluded that the only “true” perpetual motion device, outside of machines that used radioactivity for their source of power, would be machines constructed in the realm of eternal mind and in the imagination. As a test of my “theory”　I began to imagine machines and attempt to keep them “running” in my consciousness,–both in my sleeping and waking moments and through all the divisions in between. I recall drawing countless little Bessler-like “machines” in my notebooks and spending the long boring hours at school imagining that they moved. I could easily visualize their parts working together and even hear the sounds they made. When I wrote a brief report about my perpetual motion idea–pointing out that these moving machines were as deathless as any shared thought–the editor of the Pepetual Motion Journal wrote back a brief, cordial note thanking me for the idea, but rejecting the article. Much later, I began to understand that these machines that I had been dreaming about–and by now I had a veritable factory humming away–had more in common with art and literature than with electric motors and steam engines and by about 14 years old I first began to construct my first “perpetual motion machines of words”–(what I first called my efforts at creating literary artifacts.) I do not know whatever happened to the inventor/editor of the Journal of Perpetual Motion and if any reader out there recognizes him through this description, please feel free to drop me a note.