[1]Mystory, a term invented by Dr. Greg Ulmer at the University of Florida, refers to an experimental form of academic writing, research, and pedagogy. Without going into all the parameters and features of the mystory, its general tenor is obvious: my-story. The label implies an alternative to the omniscient, third-person, masculine voice of Truth implied by "his-story." Moreover, it puns on "mystery," foregrounding the conventions of the detective story implicit in the codes of hermeneutics and traditional historical narratives. And because mystory does not attempt to explain and critique, but rather invent and create artistically, it doesn't organize information according to the hierarchical concept model. Instead it employs what Ulmer calls the "puncept," the tangent, an associative logic more typically connected with poetry (or film, video, and hypertext) than with the hermeneutic essay. Following such a logic, this essay takes up an implicit critique of conventional semiotics by way of exploring the obsessions of "Little Bigger," the protagonist of one of Jim Thompson's novels, Savage Night. Little Bigger, a hypochondriac who is actually dying of tuberculosis, serves as the perfect medium both to explore semiology's grounding in medical symptomotology as well as to give external form to my own obsessions and neuroses, in classic "mystorical" fashion.

[2]The abductive method calls on its practitioner to heed not just his conscious observations, but also clues from his unconscious. The idea is that we are always awash in perceptual data; our senses perceive far more at any given instant than we can hold in our conscious attention and memory. The abductive method posits a way to gain access to some of this repressed or "unconscious" information--this by becoming sensitized to hints from one's "intuition." It wouldn't, then, be stretching too far to call abduction a form of "extra-sensory" perception.

[3]Interestingly, the general conception of "health" in the U.S. has gotten so degraded by the allopathic obsession with symptoms that it's now common to define health in terms of disease instead of the other way around: health defined as an absence of explicit trauma or symptoms, rather than a state of physical/spiritual well-being, or balance, as in the cultures of some of our forebears (the traditional cultures of China and India, for instance).

[4]Even in cases where science clearly identifies a "pathological agent" (such as the microbes that are said to cause TB, polio, or the common cold), the question that might still be posed asks why only certain people fall ill upon exposure. Doesn't this suggest that individual health and illness are really rooted in the immune system, with even what we call the symptoms of infection actually representing a response by the immune system? So what of those fortunate individuals whose immune systems respond so efficiently in any given case that no symptoms even manifest? In this light would it be appropriate to consider outside "pathogens" the cause of disease? Afterall, just like information to our senses, so-called germs and pathogens constantly bathe our bodies in their "malevolent" ethers. We only ever notice them, however, when they seem to disrupt the norm of our relative health.