"This complex book, somewhat disordered, generously laid out, is almost a testament or an autobiography—or a biography written by many hands—because it contains that entire chance-filled and heroic process that began in El Uvital, in Fredonia, in the year of Our Lord 1919, and that still continues to unfold and expand, I do not know until when. Here is gathered all the uncertainty and instability that a man could have lived, emerging—bare, dazzled—from the jungle, in the midst of the 20th century, and traveling along all the roads of the world and through all the human possibilities of interwar periods, revolutions, and upheavals. This book has been made with materials of every kind, carefully collected and archived over fifty years; and it could even be said that some of the sculptural works were executed in public squares and in temples with the sole purpose of illustrating this work. In some way, there exists a strange and vital unity—a unity that may come precisely from the lack of unity, from the chaos that lies behind, between, and within our unfolding. A trace of the chaos of the first day of creation moves through and navigates this book, and we must accept it as such, since among us the past is closer than the present and, of course, than the future."