The Star

 

Miriam Nichols

Five Things to Know about André Spears’s Big Poem and Why I Love It: 

1. Genealogy of the “drunken spaceship”: André Spears has been writing a long science fiction poem in epistolary form for more than twenty years. The episode published here, The Star, is preceded by Letters from Mu (Part I), a collaboration between Spears and artist Gilgian Gelzer (2000). Spears revised this book-length poem, dividing the page into columns, and published the new version under the title From the Lost Land I–XII (2020). The next installment is XIII: Ship of State (2019), written after but published before the revised Lost Land. Subsequent episodes are “XIV: The Arts” (2020), The Devil (2020), and “The God’s House” (unpublished). The Star is XVII. 

2. The Tarot: The numbered titles of the episodes of the poem come from the Higher Arcana of the Tarot cards. The Tarot in this context is an organizing device and, I like to fancy, a way of performing the reversibility of chance and fate. Certainly things befall the characters in a manner that reveals the limitations of human agency. In a Tarot reading, as in life, one has to work with the cards that one has been dealt. What comes by chance must be experienced as fate. As for the divinatory meanings of the Tarot cards expounded by various savants, I have not found any simple correlation between them and the content of the poem. The Star card is said to symbolize fertility, earthly emplacedness, and naked honesty. Reversed, however, it has been read as vampiric, a bottomless pit for energy and emotion (Jodorowsky 230). A dicey card, but so are they all. Read as thou wilt.

3. The columns: In From the Lost Land through subsequent episodes, Spears divides each page into two columns. One column unfolds the adventures of the characters A and S through the letters that they write to each other. A (male pronoun) is playing a game of Tarot cards with life and death stakes. The game takes place in various saloons, suggesting states of affairs or philosophical meditations with names like Le Joie de Vivre, Le Rendez-Vous, Le Carte Blanche, Le Déjà Vu, Le Raison d'Être, Le Fait Accompli, [1] “Apple, / between Times Square / and Our Lady of Lucifer” (FLL 51), or, in the most recent installment, a Big Room in which a Body without Organs lies on a Metallic Table. Familiarity with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is helpful throughout the episodes. [2] S (female pronoun) is the Navigator of a spaceship/sailing ship lost in the astral waters off Mu after a disastrous battle with Aliens. Since each episode is a letter, the stories of A and S alternate. The column opposite their letters consists of quotations, many from literature and philosophy, that comment on, ironize, or serve as omens of the narrated events. To my reading, there are multiple resonances between the two columns, rather than any direct expository relationship.

4. Names and references: The poem has many characters besides S and A. There is Tarzan (female pronoun) and Venus (male pronoun) who remain on the Intel team after Maria dies in Ship of State; van Rr’Ubik, the helmswoman; Rosetta on Communicating Vessels; Scard’nelli “working / the cooler, the baker / and warming exchanger”; Cowabunga on feedback; Chauvée in Communications; Kongō, Deckhand and Substitute Engineer; Marlboro, Wang, and Sokrates on the wheel; and Sinbad minding the infodemic. There is Avon the Poetess (whiff of Shakespeare), Moebius the Mapper (currently in a state of suspended animation), Commander Exprès, whose spit Venus reads for divination so that everyone can figure out what to do next, and Captain Anna-O. The names are sometimes satirical, sometimes funny, and sometimes resonant with a more serious backbeat. The reader who cares to follow up on, say, Anna-O will find Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), an Austrian-Jewish feminist whose case study was published in Josef Breuer’s book on hysteria, [3] written with Freud. Put that into the mix. Scardanelli is a name that Hölderin sometimes used to sign his poems; it is also the title of a book of poems by Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021), a well-known Austrian poet. Or there is the place name Roswell; it is in New Mexico, actually, and associated with a UFO incident on 8 July 1947, in which debris resembling that from a weather balloon was found and attributed to a flying saucer, a tie-in here with the “conspiracy theories” that run throughout The Star. The names are drawn from poetry, fiction, history, philosophy, current and historical events, and the arts. They reward study as a kind of shorthand way to get as much of the world as possible into the poem. 

5. The Backstory: Spears is nearly impossible to summarize because he writes across disciplines: what seems to be political commentary turns into economics, turns into philosophy, turns into psychoanalysis, turns into pop culture, until the reader twigs that all of these human dimensions are operating at the same time. The tone, as well, is mixed. Certainly there is comedy, but also biting satire on the state of global affairs, particularly that portion under the “Cloud of the Blue-Red haze” (Devil 4). There is as well a serious backbeat, given the Sorry State of Everything. The quotations often carry the gravitas as well as the grief and lyrical intensity that Spears brings to a world in crisis over financial chicanery, political mismanagement, environmental destruction, and frightening new diseases. The more attentive the reader, the larger the poem becomes. Here are a few hints of the happenings that precede The Star

Ship of State ends with the ship stuck in the shoals under an alien sky after the battle. The stuckness is all-level: political, economic, theoretical, psychological. With slapstick logic, the crew decides to map the constellations in order to find some way out of their predicament. Following an episode of the card game that doesn’t go so well either, the story of the ship picks up in The Devil (Tarot card XV) with a symposium on the heavens. To give an example, there is the constellation Mor-o-Log-on, which by sound brings to mind Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida estate. Moving around this constellation, the reader might contemplate the Trump presidency; the history of the estate itself, designed and built as a private club by the cereal heiress, Marjorie Merriweather Post; and perhaps the current culture wars in the U.S. Alternatively, and in the same galaxy, Mor-o-Log-on is a sonic pointer to “more log-on” and the effects of the Covid pandemic: more people glued to computers, fewer in-person encounters with all attendant ill-effects. Other constellations to explore are the (W)hole, in which the reader may find metaphysical and cognitive blind spots as well as antimatter; the Biomagnetic Processor, which seems to “draw the [Blue-Red] Cloud toward / itself, like the X-Machine / in Reanimator’s / The Unconscious You” (6); and the Fylfot Propeller, which the crew takes to represent their ship (6). The Fylfot is an ancient and multi-ethnic symbol of the Sun’s energy  (Sanskrit “su” = an intensifier; “asti” = it is: it really is), but inevitably it also calls to mind the historical weight of the Third Reich. [4]

The action of The Devil turns on a “Great Wave” that lifts the ship high above sea level where it teeters in a Green bubble. The “Cloud of Blue-Red haze” engulfs, the “Warming” intensifies, and the crew are “overwhelmed by / scratching in the throat and / unrelenting fits of coughing” 12): political obfuscation, climate change, Covid. Crewmember Vico [5] dies and is tossed overboard, other crew members change places (post-2020 election perhaps?), the Green bubble bursts, and the ship oddly achieves temporary equilibrium. Commander Exprès’s spit suggests to Venus that the ship has mutated “from Paranoia / Machine to Miraculating / Machine” (15). These are Deleuzian terms, drawn from Freud’s analysis of the unfortunate Schreber, [6] that distinguish between the primary repression of unassigned psycho-physical energy flows — repression that enables the emergence of the unified egoic-self — and the thought that the singular self is the miraculous source of such flows, a mistaking of effect for cause. In Spears’s context, the joke is that the Ship of State has passed from repression to delusion. Under this calming misapprehension, the ship teeters on the Wave and the crew resume their stargazing.

* * * *

This brings us to The Star. Tarzan has a Vision of Doom which tells her that the ship will “go past its Tipping Point,” and in fact the descent beckons as the episode opens. To make up for “bearing bad news,” she enters a cage from which the Great Wave will take her, and the crew lose another member of the Intel team. Avon then begins to chant the story of Tarzan’s scary adventures in the underworld.  The episode ends with the ship on the floor of the ocean in an end-of-world scenario.

The Star includes Many Things To Worry About: There is Tarzan’s blue mask, for instance, and #QUA-QUA-NON (sounds like QAnon), Adrenochrome, a Shit detector, net zero energy, a spike mutation, MAGA, Big Pharma Chemtrails, the Amazons Hothouse; the “Boogaloo Program”; 4-Chan fake news; and Larsen-B’s Book of Aloha to name a few. [7] These markers locate us in the political unrest and dysfunction of the last two years — the alt-right, “conspiracy theories,” environmental crises, economic turbulence, and a mutating Covid virus. Add ongoing gun violence (referenced as Sandy Hook), dicey genetic engineering of food (the Monsanto Sea), and the enhancement of human capabilities through chemical or prosthetic means (the Transhuman) [8] — as if the species had not done enough damage without techno help. These are the days of the “6th Extinction” the poem says: planetary disaster brought on by unsustainable land, water, and air use; more upcoming social misery presided over by Black Rock (the world’s largest asset manager) and Shell (the oil and gas sector). Just when things seem like they couldn’t get worse, the ship catches fire and we encounter “trauma-based / Mind Control” accompanied by “the Sound of 911911911.” The crew responds by “Greenwashing / the Fire’s ‘Angry Beast’/ with Firestopper foam,” and while the ploy works to put out the fire, it creates a weight imbalance that sends the ship on another descent through the “Protein-rich heavy water / of the Silver Sea.” This fix — nuclear power (“heavy water”) — causes another fire from “the Reichstag Holocaust, / during the Radiation experiments,” calling to mind the Manhattan Project that resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons in WWII and reactor leaks in nuclear power plants since then. More fire foam as the ship cruises toward its ultimate “Journey to the One.” A third fire lights up at the existential level, where “the Becoming of the Many seemed / a Carnival of non-Linear Change.” So there is a perfect storm.  The ship finally hits bottom at the end of the episode, “between Hilarity’s / Leap of Faith into Paradise / and the Clenched Fist raised at / the Horror of the Great Dying.”

* * * *

The Star brings together the converging disasters of our battered world to suggest that we may have passed the point where something useful might be done about them. What distinguishes Spears’s treatment of topical material is his ability to bring home multiple issues across disciplinary boundaries with grace and agility. At times a satire of human folly, at others a comedy of bungled and ineffective responses to Big Problems, the poem is also an elegy for the little boat of the human — this ship of fools — that seems headed for “Cosmic release from / the contradictions of the World.” 

My summary of the above narrative entirely omits the counterpoint of the quoted passages which adds complexity and meditative weight to the story, calling writers dead and alive to attend the moment. This from Anna Akhmatova, for example, “Requiem 1935–40”: “I have learned how faces fall / to bone, / How under the eyelids / terror lurks, / How suffering / inscribes on cheeks / The hard / lines of its cuneiform texts. / How glossy black or ash-fair locks/ Turn overnight to tarnished silver, / How smiles fade on submissive lips, / And fear quavers in a dry titter.”

Spears is not an easy read, but he offers a rare big picture moment in contemporary writing and a deeply companionable navigation of the perilous waters on which we now sail. I, for one, feel less alone on the high seas with Spears on board. As grim as is the ending of The Star, the poem isn’t over. S signs off with the message to A, “I love you, / and in loving you / will continue to love / whatever comes next.” I’m waiting for the “next.”

Notes

1. The masculine gender of the definite article in these names is original. Spears’s spellings are deliberate.

2. Deleuze and Guattari introduce the Body without Organs in Anti-Oedipus, pp. 9–16.

3. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria. This study is published under Freud’s name.

4. See also Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself, as of ‘Phoenicians’”: “the fylfot / she look like / who called herself / luck: svas- // tika” (MP 181). This is one of the poems in which Olson turns to the black gold flower or padma as cosmic image.

5. The historical Giambattista Vico is the author of The New Science, a text based on the 3rd edition of Scienza nuova, Naples 1744. Vico offers a history of everything — poetry, politics, natural history, and myth. Of particular relevance to contemporary poetics is his account of poetic myth-making as a particular mode of knowing the world, of equal significance to the sciences. 

6. Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) had the idea that God required him to become a woman in order to receive His divine rays. His vision morphed into the thought that he himself was a redeemer, and that by becoming-woman he might save the world. Freud analyzed Schreber’s memoir in “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” in the Standard Edition of his works, Vol. XII, 9–82, attributing Schreber’s condition to repressed homosexuality. Deleuze reinterprets the case: 

The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs, The organs are regenerated, “miraculated” on the body of Judge Schreber, who attracts God’s rays to himself. Doubtless the former paranoiac machine continues to exist in the form of mocking voices that attempt to “de-miraculate” (démiraculer) the organs, the Judge’s anus in particular. But the essential thing is the establishment of an enchanted recording or inscribing surface that arrogates to itself all the productive forces and all the organs of production, and that acts as a quasi cause by communicating the apparent movement (the fetish) to them. (11–12)

Initially convinced that God had singled him out for sexual humiliation, Schreber managed to become God. Apply this to a social body, and one gets a megalomaniacal society that has made itself the center of the universe. 

7. QAnon: An American movement that claims a group of cannibalistic Democrats (Hillary Clinton is named) traffic children and murder people to harvest the drug Adrenochrome.

Adrenochrome: A chemical compound created by the oxidation of adrenalin, said to give the user a high. Adrenochrome has a fictional life in the novels of Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception); Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange); Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); and the 2017 horror movie Adrenochrome, among others. The fictional idea that adrenochrome has to be harvested from a living body may be the source of QAnon theories that a cabal is murdering people. 

Net Zero Energy: The common term is net zero carbon emission, a global goal to slow down climate change. 

MAGA: The Donald Trump logo, Make America Great Again, often appears as an inscription on red baseball hats.

Spike Mutation: Mutations of the spike protein in the coronavirus have been causing waves of viral infections over the last two years, 2020–2022.

Big Pharma Chemtrails: Some Americans have put forward the idea that the white vapour wake of jet airplanes contains dangerous chemicals, hence “chemtrails.” 

Amazon's Hothouse: The Covid pandemic substantially increased the profitability of online markets. Amazon has done very well. 

The Boogaloo Program: An American anti-government movement formed in 2019 (pro-gun, anarcho-capitalist, anti-police, anti-authority); “boogaloo” is a slang phrase for civil war. 

4-Chan: an image-board website launched in 2003, associated with extremist comments.

Larsen-B’s Book of Aloha: The Larsen-B ice shelf of Antarctica collapsed in 2002, a dramatic signal of global warming and impending climate change. 

8. Sandy Hook: On 14 December 2012, Adam Lanza shot twenty first graders and six school employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He then turned the gun on himself. 

Monsanto: Founded in 1901, Monsanto Chemical Works has been producing carcinogenic products for more than a century: PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls, banned in 1979);  pesticides, including the best-seller Round-Up; dioxin-laced Agent Orange, a cancer causing defoliant used during the Vietnam War; aspartame, an artificial sweetener linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s, stroke and cardiovascular disease; rBGH, bovine growth hormone associated with multiple illnesses in cows; GMO (genetically modified) food crops; and terminator seeds (seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, necessitating purchase each year). In 2018, Monsanto became part of a crop science program run by Bayer, a biotechnology and Big Pharma merger; the deal included dissolving the widely distrusted Monsanto name. 

Bayer: A German company founded in 1863, Bayer produced explosives and chemical weapons in World War I. Until 1912, it sold heroin as a remedy for children’s colds. In World War II, the company’s strong ties with the Nazi administration gave it access to slave labor for its factories and prisoners of war on whom to conduct experiments. Bayer continues to produce glyphosate-based herbicides, despite facing lawsuits; glyphosate is deemed a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Bayer is one of the largest corporations in the world and has recorded a profitable 2021. 

The Transhuman: The idea is that the human species can continue to evolve with technology, resulting in hybrids with improved capacities. At Transhuman Inc., the company’s “hyperconscious” project claims “a world first brain to computer interface” (transhumaninc.com/product-suite). Imagine the military applications.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Preface by Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 9–82.

Freud, Sigmund and Josef Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. II. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1955; Rpt. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 

Jodorowsky, Alejandro. The Way of the Tarot. Rochester Vermont, Toronto, Canada: Destiny Books, 2009. 

Mayröcker, Friedericke. Scardanelli: Gedichte. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009.

_____. Scardanelli. English Translation by Jonathan Larson. The Song Cave, 2018.

Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 

Spears, André. “XIV—The Arts.” BlazeVOX 20. (Fall 2020).

_____. The Devil [XV]. New York: Pangaea Press, 2020.

_____. From the Lost Land (I–XII). Buffalo, NY: Blazevox Books, 2020.

_____. “The God’s House.” Mss. 

_____. XIII: Ship of State. Dispatches Editions / Spuyten Devil Press, 2019.

Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. 1968, 1984; Rpt. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986.  

 
 

Photographs by Anne Rosēn

 

THE STAR *

in memoriam, Elsa Dorfman

 
 




“Leave the nurse on dry land 
and move beyond, / Into truth’s 
ocean, like ducks in a pond! /
Don’t fear the water, though 
they’ve taught you to— / Dive 
in the ocean with no more ado!”
Rumi,
The Masnavi, Book II
(tr. J. Mojaddedi).

“‘They were saying at the Théâtre 
that a certain music-hall artiste 
might stand a chance,’ said Andrée. 
‘The one billed as the Cobra at 
the Olympia. It seems she does 
an acrobatic turn, and is brought on 
in a basket hardly big enough 
for a fox-terrier, and from this 
she uncurls like a snake.’”
Colette,
Gigi.

“Living one—open your coils!”
The Egyptian Amduat,
“Seventh Hour.” 

“We have passed from one animal 
to the other, from the mole to 
the serpent, in the system under 
which we live, but also in our manner 
of living and in our relation with 
others. The disciplinary man was 
a discontinuous producer of energy, 
but the man of control is undulatory, 
in orbit, in a continuous network.
Everywhere surfing has already 
replaced the older sports.”
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript 
on the Societies of Control.”  

“The only sound in the vast moving
green was the hissing of the board 
over the water. A couple of times 
it almost dropped away under 
my feet, but I found it again and 
stood my ground. ‘Shoot it, Gidget. 
Shoot the curl!!’ My own voice 
had broken away from me and 
I could only hear the echo coming 
from a great distance. ‘Shoot it… 
shoot it… shoot it, Gidget!’”
Frederick Kohner,
Gidget

“A cosmic vision—awe some; 
I automatically seek out from 
the infinite coiling of form 
the God shape…” 
Carolee Schneemann,
from The Notebooks.

“She flies over partitions on the / 
wings of a bat; while you / 
play cards w/ a stranger.”
Diane di Prima (RIP), 
Loba, “Lilith: An Interlude.”

“Take the blue mask down from 
my face / And look me in the eye.”
Lou Reed, “The Blue Mask.”

“Great disease was mighty and 
the people were sick everywhere. / 
It was an epidemic, it floated 
through the air… / Well, the nobles 
said to the people, ‘You better 
close your public schools. / 
Until the events of death has ending,
you better close your churches too.’”
Blind Willie Johnson, 
“Jesus Coming Soon.”

“He tensed all his muscles, 
stiffened all his limbs, trying 
in spite of himself to return 
to the earthly envelope that was
being taken away from him… 
He found himself floating above 
this world. Inexplicably, he had
the proud feeling of Satan, who, 
though fallen from Paradise, 
still looks down on the earth 
and has, at one and the same time,
his forehead under God’s heel and 
his own heel on the forehead of man!” 
Rachilde,
Monsieur Vénus.

“It’s a blazing shaime, ut Aw 
cannut oppen t’ Blessed Book, bud
yah set up them glories tuh Sattan, 
un’ all t’ flaysome wickednesses ut 
iver wer born intuh t’ warld! O, Lord,
judge ’em, for they’s norther law nur justice
amang wer rullers!” 
Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights.

“The lesson of Wuthering Heights, 
of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, 
of all religions, is that there is 
an instinctive tendency towards 
divine intoxication which the rational
world of calculation cannot bear… 
Divine intoxication, to which
the instincts of childhood are so 
closely related, is entirely in 
the present… Adults forbid those 
who have still to reach ‘maturity’ 
to enter the divine kingdom 
of childhood. But condemnation 
of the present moment for the sake 
of the future is an aberration, 
just as it is necessary to forbid 
easy access to it, so it is necessary 
to regain the domain of the moment 
(the kingdom of childhood), 
and that requires temporary
transgression of the interdict.” 
Georges Bataille, “Emily Dickinson”
in Literature and Evil.

“And if at Mill Valley perched 
in the trees / The sweet rain drifting
through western air / a white sweating
bull of a poet told us / our cunts 
are ugly—why didn’t we / admit 
we have thought so too? (And / what
shame? They are not for the eye!)”   
Denise Levertov, “Hypocrite Women.”

“As we looked out towards the head-
land where the sea beats, we saw 
a wave, the work of a god, its solid 
mass towering towards the sky… 
And at the very moment when 
this surging mountain of water was
breaking, the wave sent forth a bull, 
a terrible and wondrous creature.” 
Euripedes, 
Hippolytus.

“A wave of ruin spreads 
through the ruins.”
H. D., 
Hippolytus Temporizes.

“Go to work, surf’s up.”
Kim Gordon, “Surf’s Up.”

“But then a wave from behind, 
looming over, rushed upon them, 
and their vessel sped forward like 
a long surfing missile over the hollow
sea on that swift rough crest.”
Apollonius of Rhodes,
The Argonautica, Book II.

“What—shall the sailor, then, who
leaves the stern and runs to the prow
find any device for safety when his
vessel is foundering in the sea waves?” 
Aeschylus,
Seven Against Thebes.

“I who had loved the image 
of old Geulicx, dead young, 
who left me free on the black boat 
of Ulysses, to crawl towards 
the East, along the deck. That is 
a great measure of freedom, for him
who has not the pioneering spirit.”
Samuel Beckett,
Molloy.

“A tempest… made the stern rise, 
and the prow sink, as it pleased 
another, till the sea closed over us.”
Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy: Inferno.

“The sea was indistinguishable 
from the sky, except that the sea 
was slightly creased as if a cloth 
had wrinkles in it. Gradually as 
the sky whitened a dark line lay 
on the horizon dividing the sea from 
the sky and the grey cloth became
barred with thick strokes moving, 
one after another, beneath the surface, 
following each other, perpetually.”
Virginia Woolf, 
The Waves.

“We live in an age of rising seas.”
Rachel Carson, 
The Sea Around Us.

“Society is a wave.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
“Self-Reliance.”

“This music is only one little wave 
of style and waves of little ideas
my mind has encompassed through
living in a society that calls itself 
sane, as long as you’re not behind 
iron bars where there at least one 
can’t be half as crazy as in most
of the ventures our leaders take upon
themselves to do and think for us…”  
Charles Mingus, liner notes, 
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.

“In this boat we were in the habit
of going on some of the maddest 
freaks in the world.”
Edgar Allan Poe, 
The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym 
of Nantucket.

“We know that rythmos has come 
to mean both the cadence of writing 
and the undulation of the wave.”
Jacques Derrida, 
The Truth in Painting.

“We have passed the tipping point: 
while information policy is among 
the most ancient forms of governance, 
there has been a phase change—
a change of state—in the extent 
to which governments deliberately, 
explicitly, and consistently control 
information creation, processing, 
flows and use to exercise power.”
Sandra Berman, 
Change of State.

“A democratic surveillance 
society is an existential and
political impossibility.” 
Shoshana Zuboff, 
“The Knowledge Coup.”

“Image-making as a global policy—
not world conquest but the victory 
to ‘win people’s minds’—is indeed
something new in the huge arsenal 
of human follies recorded in history.”
Hannah Arendt, 
Crisis of the Republic.

“Our hearts are heavy with fear /
When we see our leader distracted, 
as helpless sailors / Are terrified 
by the confusion of their helmsman.” 
Sophocles, 
Oedipus at Colonus. 

“The Platonic dialogue was 
the lifeboat in which the shipwrecked
older poetry saved itself, together 
with its numerous offspring. 
Crowded together in a narrow space,
and timidly obeying their helmsman, 
Socrates, they moved forward into 
a new era which never tired of 
looking at this spectacle. Plato 
furnished for all posterity the pattern 
of a new art form, the novel… 
a form in which poetry played 
the same subordinate role with regard 
to dialectic philosophy as that same
philosophy was to play for many
centuries with regard to theology. 
This, then, was the new status 
of poetry, and it was Plato who, 
under the pressure of daemonic
Socrates, had brought it about.”
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of Music. 

“The true modern poem 
is life without poems.” 
Fernando Pessoa,
“Salutation to Walt Whitman.”

“Nobody likes the man 
who brings bad news.” 
Sophocles, 
Antigone.

“The long, sad enterprise of 
revising, censoring, and mutilating 
J began with someone you can call 
the Elohist… He combined J’s texts
with a variety of material, doubtless
from written sources that are now 
lost… The Deuteronomists (…) 
wrote about two hundred years later… 
After the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon
in 587 B.C.E. the Priestley Authors
began to compose an alternative text,
comprising what is now Leviticus
and the larger share of what is now
Genesis, Exodus, Numbers…
A redactor of undoubted genius…
working soon after 458 B.C.E. 
produced the Torah probably pretty
much as we have it now. This 
Redactor, a formidable fellow… 
is the villain of this book.” 
Harold Bloom,
“The Author J,” in The Book of J 
(ed. H. Bloom, D. Rosenberg). 

“The panorama of the sea… 
but the sea itself?”
Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass.

“But the sea takes / and gives 
memory, / and love fixes 
the eye diligently, / and poets 
establish / that which endures.
Friedrich Hölderlin, 
“Remembrance.”

“The XXIst century will be ecophilic,
noetic, poetic; or will not be.”
Michel Deguy (RIP), “Écologiques.” 

“I give my steps their form 
and tell the sea to follow me.”
Adonis, quoted in Khaled Furani,
Silencing the Sea.

“To touch rock-bottom was the same 
as having water above one’s head.”
Clarice Lispector, “The Obedient.”

“…And herself being entered into 
her own ship, the whole fleet sunk 
immediately into the bottom of 
the seas, and left all the spectators 
in a deep amazement.”
Margaret Cavendish,
The Blazing World. 

“In theory, there is a gravitational 
attraction between every drop of 
sea water and even the outermost
star of the universe.” 
Rachel Carson, 
The Sea Around Us.

“T’Gatoi whipped her three meters 
of body off her couch, toward the door,
and out at full speed. She had bones—
ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets 
of limb bones per segment. But when 
she moved that way, twisting, hurling
herself into controlled falls, landing
running, she seemed not only boneless, 
but aquatic—something swimming 
through the air as though it were water.”
Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild.” 

“All of nature talks to me /
If I could just figure out what 
it was trying to tell me.”
Laurie Anderson, “Sharkey’s Day.” 

“I am, by means of a little
Pantagruelism (that is, as you 
know, a certain gaiety of the spirit
pickled in the contempt for things
fortuitous) sound and supple,
ready to drink, if you are.”
Rabelais, 
The Fourth Book of Pantagruel.

“The Cube impressed me as 
an outstanding oracular device 
from the moment I saw one… 
The cube scatters the 6 colors 
over its 6 faces. Each face 
is further subdivided into 
9 squares… Twist the cube  
without looking at it several 
times (…), after phrasing a clear
question, then set it down, 
look at it and interpret…” 
Jim Gross,
The Oracle of Light.

“You know, here in America, people
turn up with so many queer ideas.”
Thor Heyerdahl,
Kon-Tiki.

“What difference does it make if 
what we see before our mind’s eye 
has already been interpreted?”
Susan Howe,
Spontaneous Particulars: 
The Telepathy of Archives.

“Among the Kuna of Panama…
a speaker who performs 
at the highest levels 
of discourse requires two 
successive interpretations 
by two additional speakers 
before his message reaches 
a general level of understanding.” 
Dennis Tedlock (ed.),
2000 Years of Mayan Literature.

“Now Ammon said unto him: I can
assuredly tell thee, O king, of a man 
that can translate the records; for 
he has wherewith that he can look, 
and translate all records that are 
of ancient date; and it is a gift from 
God. And the things are called
interpreters, and no man can look 
in them except he be commanded…
And whosoever is commanded to look
in them, the same is called a seer.” 
The Book of Mormon, 
8 Mosiah 13.

“We pray for him, offering love. 
History praises him, offering laurels.
Mercy sings for him, offering
absolution. Arthur Rimbaud, 
in his long suffering, has at last 
attained absolution.”
Patti Smith, Preface, 
in Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell 
and The Drunken Boat.

“Rémy de Gourmont will be paid back 
for his insult to Rimbaud: ‘A girl’s 
temperament,’ said he. Today, 
a judgment of this sort… tells us all 
we need to know to build a case 
against the male type of intelligence 
at the end of the nineteenth century.”
André Breton,
Arcanum 17.

“Don Quixote’s situation is… 
akin to the plight of that French 
poet of unique genius, Rimbaud, 
who in the eighties of the last 
century gave up poetry because 
he had come to the conclusion 
that poetry was a synonym of sin.” 
Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Don Quixote.

“Brother Sancho, 
we have an adventure.”
Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote.

“If history, the enemy of time, 
is the mother of truth, the history 
of women must define female identity.
The main tome on this subject or 
history was written by Cid Hamete
Benengeli. Unfortunately, the author 
of this work so major it is the only one
is an Arab, and that nation is known 
for its lying propensities; but even
though they would be our enemies
it may readily be understood that they
would more likely have added to rather
than have detracted from the history.”
Kathy Acker,
Don Quixote. 

“The necessity of completing 
a thousand and one sections obliged 
the copyists of the work to make 
all manner of interpolations. None 
is more perturbing than that of 
the six hundred and second night,
magical among all the nights. 
On that night, the king hears from 
the queen his own story… Does
the reader clearly grasp the vast
possibility of this interpolation? 
That the queen may persist
and the motionless king hear 
forever the truncated story 
of the Thousand and One Nights, 
now infinite and circular...”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote. 

“In a book I wrote called 
How to Write I made a discovery 
which I considered fundamental
that sentences are not emotional 
and that paragraphs are. I found out 
about language that paragraphs are
emotional and sentences are not 
and I found something else about it. 
I found out that this difference was
not a contradiction but a combination
and that this combination causes 
one to think endlessly about 
sentences and paragraphs because 
the emotional paragraphs are 
made up of unemotional sentences.”
Gertrude Stein, 
How To Write.

“As I floated down impassive Rivers, /
I felt myself no longer pulled by ropes:
/ The Redskins took my haulers 
for targets, / And nailed them naked
to their painted posts.”
Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”
(tr. A. S. Kline). 

“Whatever there is that might be 
is simply not there: only the pooled
water… only murmurs, ripples, 
in the dark, in the night. Only 
the Maker, Modeler alone, 
Sovereign Plumed Serpent, 
the Bearers, Begetters are 
in the water, a glittering light.”
Popul Vuh (tr. D. Tedlock).

“I see you and they see us 
exceedingly / a face countenance 
façade / or prior surface do not 
forget / remember the front side
presence / marching toward until 
in order to because of / as per 
without over behind the face 
of two interminable / turns.”
Amanda Berenguer, “Mobius Strip”
(tr. M. de la Torre). 

“Near the tail of Canis Major 
Argo Navis sails… poop-first 
across the immensity of the skies.”
Cicero, 
Tusculan Disputations. 

“I felt still more at sea, and ended
believing that I was in another world,
another epoch, another civilisation,
perhaps on another planet 
containing the past and future
and, simultaneously, the present.” 
Leonora Carrington,
Down Below. 

“Mosques are desecrated / and 
altars overturned / outside 
the museum's / cool stone walls.”
Jessica Hagedorn, “The Mummy.” 

“A survey in 2008 and 2009 on 
the southwestern coast of Crete in 
the region of Plakias documented 28
preceramic lithic sites. Sites were
identified with artifacts of Mesolithic
type similar to assemblages from 
the Greek mainland and islands, 
and some had evidence of Lower
paleolithic occupation dated by
geological context to at least 130,000
years ago. The long period of 
separation (…) of Crete from any
landmass implies that the early
inhabitants of Crete reached the island
using seacraft capable of open-sea
navigation and multiple journeys—
a finding that pushes the history of
seafaring in the Mediterranean back
by more than 100,000 years…”
Thomas F. Strasser et al., “Stone Age
Seafaring in the Mediterranean,”
Hesperia, Vol. 79, No. 2, 2010. 

“No reckoning allowed /
Save the marvelous arithmetics /
Of distance” /
Audre Lorde, “Smelling the Wind.” 

“If you were to look at the Pacific Ocean
from space, you might notice 
that you would not be able to see 
both sides of it at the same time.”
Christina Thompson,
Sea People.

“oh natural star, green diadem, /
alone in your solitary dynasty, /
unattainable still, evasive, desolate /
as a drop, as a grape, as the sea.”
Pablo Neruda, “The Separate Rose.”

“And then I bathed in the Poem 
of the Ocean, / infused with
galaxies of milky stars, / 
devouring greens afloat in turquoise
flotsam, / the thoughtful drowned, 
with pale blue scars…”
Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”
(tr. J. W. Steele). 

“Carrington’s the Star is arguably 
the most stunning card in her deck; 
the luminous gold leaf in the back-
ground causing the radiant azure 
blue around the star to stand out all 
the more… The haloed stars have 
been transformed from the traditional 
eight-points into the five-pointed 
pentagrams of magical practice.” 
Susan Abert and Tere Arcq,
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.

“When the stars threw down 
their spears / And water'd heaven 
with their tears: / Did he smile
his work to see?” 
Blake, “The Tyger.” 

“Thou rememb’rest / Since once 
I sat upon a promontory, / And heard 
a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back, /
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious 
breath, / That the rude sea grew civil 
at her song / And certain stars 
shot madly from their spheres, / 
To hear the sea maid’s music.”  
William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Some of these days
You’ll miss me honey /
What had just happened is that 
the Nausea has disappeared. 
When the voice was heard in 
the silence, I felt my body harden 
and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: 
it was almost unbearable to 
become so hard, so brilliant. 
At the same time the music 
was drawn out, dilated, swelled 
like a waterspout. It filled the room 
with its metallic transparency, 
crushing our miserable time against 
the walls. I am in the music.”
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Nausea.

“The function of freedom 
is to free someone else.”
Toni Morrison, Barnard College
commencement speech (1979).

“In this tiny America where
the most delirious happiness
can only be caused by the dollar, 
a man continues to make 
daring reference to some other 
kind of thought… Beautiful has 
nothing to do with it, but it is.”
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), in liner
notes, Coltrane Live at Birdland.

“I feel I’m closest to Hell… 
when I’m thinking about money.”
Pharoah Sanders, quoted in 
liner notes, N. Hentoff, Tauhid.

“pause for the human / animal 
in its coat / of many colors. /    
pause / for the myth of america. / 
pause for the myth of america.”
Lucille Clifton, “grief.”

“I told myself that Sonny was wild, 
but he wasn’t crazy.”
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues.”

“No black American troops were
allowed to march in the great victory
parade of the Allies up the Champs-
Elysées even though France and 
Britain were represented by dark-
skinned colonial soldiers.”  
Anne Waldman, 
The Iovis Trilogy, Book I. 

“ • ‘Can we study the remains of your
people?’ • ‘Can we take a few grams 
of bone for research?...’ •  ‘Do you 
want to come and rebury the remains
that were dug up many years ago?’ 
• “Do you want to come and help 
us dig up your people?’… So many
difficult questions for a people who 
are still grappling with recovery 
from a harsh removal.” 
Stacey Halfmoon, “Caddo Art,” 
in Hero, Hawk and Open Hand
(ed. R. Townsend).

“the Indian licked the eye / and 
we became a boat / lost on the plains”
Etel Adnan (RIP), 
“Five Senses for One Death.”

“What is the fundamental problem
of the Western? It's essentially 
the fact that what is vital for
the characters
is to perceive, not 
to act
. And if there is a mythology 
of the Western, it is this… if you 
don't perceive, you don't survive… 
You recall the fine passage of Marx 
on capitalism and its two aspects,
the fact that it continually poses limits
while at the same time never ceasing 
to push against its own limits, even
as it creates others. We could say that 
the two major aspects of capitalism
are slavery and expulsion… It sweeps
everything away in order to make 
way for a new organization. And, in 
this sense, it's no longer a question 
of slavery but of clearing the land,
clearing the land of its inhabitants… 
To open a short parenthesis: why is it
that today the Palestinians could be
considered descendants of the Indians?
It's very odd. The Palestinians continue
to say... they have completely grasped
this... if there was a new form
of the Western it would be... 
‘We Redskins... we are modern-day
Redskins.’ In fact, it's not a question
of enslaving the Palestinians, 
it's a question of expelling them, 
of clearing them off their land.”
Gilles Deleuze, “Seminar on Cinema:
The Movement-Image” #6, 1 Dec. 1982. 

“Grant as a supplier and his / Southern
counterpart’s extraordinary ability / 
to disengage—one with Washington /
as his personal mold the other with 
none / and so more raw to war, neither
Indian / nor inheritor of a measure to
abide by / U S Grant is a spasm of time”
Charles Olson, “(fr ‘West’—possibly).”

“Hoang Ti contrived the making of
bricks / and his wife started working 
the silk worms, / money was in days
of Hoang Ti… /  Ti Ko set his scholars
to fitting words to their music / is
buried in Tung Kieou / This was in 
the twenty fifth century a.c. / YAO 
like the sun and rain, / saw what star is
at solstice / saw what star marks amid
summer / YU, leader of waters, black
earth is fertile, wild silk still is from
Shantung / Ammassi, to the provinces, /
let his men pay tithes in kind.”
Ezra Pound,
Cantos, LIII.

“I have learned how faces fall 
to bone, / How under the eyelids 
terror lurks, / How suffering 
inscribes on cheeks / The hard 
lines of its cuneiform texts. / 
How glossy black or ash-fair locks /
Turn overnight to tarnished silver, /
How smiles fade on submissive lips, /
And fear quavers in a dry titter.”
Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,”
Epilogue (tr. S. Kunitz, M. Hayward).

“…I saw the girl put a Scotch and 
milk on top of the piano for Sonny. 
He didn’t seem to notice it, but just
before they started playing again, 
he sipped from it and looked toward 
me, and nodded. Then he put it back 
on top of the piano. For me, then, 
as they began to play again, it glowed
and shook above my brother’s head 
like the very cup of trembling.” 
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues.” 

“He fumbles at your Soul / As Players 
at the Keys / Before they drop full
Music on – / He stuns you 
by degrees – / Prepares your brittle
Nature / For the Ethereal Blow…”
Emily Dickinson (477).

“In a patriarchal culture, 
specifically the Judeo-Christian, 
quasi-Puritan culture of 19th-
century New England in which
Dickinson grew up… the equation 
of divinity with maleness was 
so fundamental that it is hardly
surprising to find Dickinson, 
like many an early mystic, blurring
erotic with religious experience 
and imagery. The poem I just read 
has intimations both of seduction 
and rape merged with the intense 
force of a religious experience.”
Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home.”

“And Jacob said to Rebekah, 
his mother, ‘Behold, Esau, 
my brother, is a hairy man, and 
I’m a smooth-skinned man. What if 
my father feels me and I seem to him 
a deceiver, and bring on myself 
a curse, not a blessing?!’”
Genesis 27: 11, in R. Crumb,
The Book of Genesis Illustrated.

“I have seen Leviathan sprawl 
rotting in the reeds /  Of the great
seething swamp-nets; / 
The calm sea disemboweled in 
waterslides / And the cataracting 
of the doomed horizons.”
Arthur Rimbaud, “Drunken Boat”
(tr. S. Beckett).

“I understood at last that my true
vocation, my sole purpose in life, 
was to hunt down this disturbing
monster and rid the world of it.”
Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues 
Under the Sea.

“What is the barrier of the Ancestral
Teachers? It is just this one word
“Mu”… Concentrate on this one word 
“Mu.” Day and night keep digging 
into it. Don’t consider it to be
nothingness. Don’t think in terms 
of “has” and “has not.” It is like
swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You 
try to vomit it out, but you can’t.”
Wumen Huikai, “The Koan Mu: 
Text, Commentary, and Verse.”

“The larger recognition, that 
Troilus’s barakha, the power 
which was his good fortune, 
has left him… deepens everything 
else into the real understanding: 
that Troilus is now doomed.”
Ted Hughes, 
The Goddess of Complete Being.

“Whence things have their origin, 
there they must also pass away
according to necessity; for they 
must pay penalty and be judged 
for their injustice, according to 
the ordinance of time.”
Anaximander (tr. F. Nietzsche), 
quoted in Martin Heidegger, 
“The Anaximander Fragment.”

all things are full of gods / with
ravishing wounds, / instruments of
instruction / erasures of doubt / 
by touch, touch as absence, / nothing
between, no I / apart from the sky. / 
We fallen letters, / sticks and coils.”
Billie Chernicoff, “Thales said.”

“Eros shook my / mind 
like a mountain wind 
falling on oak trees”
Sappho, 
If Not, Winter  (tr. A. Carson).

“one of these days / won’t come 
too soon / when the blank / familias
blank / will fold away / a highly
inflammable / balloon eclipsed by
seminal  / and nubile / loving” 
June Jordan, “For My Mother.”

“Not God but a swastika / So black 
no sky could squeak through. /
Every woman adores a Fascist, /
The boot in the face, the brute /
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy.”

“The subsidiary interest…  was 
called the Swastika Surf-Board
Company—in 1930 the hooked-
cross design was recognized, if 
at all, as an obscure good luck 
symbol; it wasn’t yet associated 
with Germany’s Nazi party—and 
a small swastika was wood-burned 
into the tail section of each board.” 
Matt Warshaw,
The History of Surfing.

“The manipulator liberates only /
the mad bulldozers of the ego 
to level the ground.” 
Marge Piercy, 
“Song of the Fucked Duck.”

“‘Hope’” is the thing with feathers – /
That perches in the soul – / 
And sings the tune
without the words – / 
And never stops – at all – ”
Emily Dickinson (314).

“I learned in leafy woods hmmm
—depths of the sea that Noone is 
first father—so soon a terror /
of feathery wings—soft and
tremblingly swift— / how did we
happen—because we were written.” 
Susan Howe, “God’s Spies,” 
in Defenestration of Prague.

“Falls / the feather / rhythmic
suspension of disaster / to be 
buried / in the original spray / 
whence formerly its delirium 
sprang up to a peak / withered / by 
the identical neutrality of the abyss”
Stéphane Mallarmé, 
“A Throw of the Dice
Will Never Abolish Chance.” 

“probably even Icarus, plummeting
from / an impossible height / was 
proud / a man beset by feathers /
wearing bird colors / hearing bird
conversations plain / sharing bird
ambitions / flying above 
the possibilities / pursuing 
with immortals / the pride of wings” 
Lucille Clifton, “Only Too High Is 
High Enough, for Charlie Parker.

“Happy are the lookouts over 
the ocean of the desert / Those who
pursue the fennec beyond the mirage /
The winged sun loses its feathers 
on the horizon / The eternal summer
laughs at the wet grave / And if a loud
cry resounds in the bedridden rocks /
No one hears it    no one”
Joyce Mansour, “Blue like a Desert.”

My dear love,


From the crest of 
the Great Wave, we have 
come to lie at the bottom 
of the Silver Sea, where 
the silence is Deafening, 
like they say, and 
life is a Masquerade.

Tarzan is the second
member of Intelligence 
to die.

Now Venus alone remains.

“Space, Time  
and Love in Gaad!” 
he mumbles to himself, 
as on the CABARET 
under Covvid, 
Poet of Kidd, in The Sea 
With 11 Dimensions
. 

Tarzan came to understand
that the ship was doomed to 
go past its Tipping Point and 
plunge down the Great Wave,
following a dream in which 
she traveled “on the Path of 
the Passage to the Middle.”

Abandoning her post 
on the Observation Deck, 
she found Cîpher, and 
said to him: 
“The signs are clear.” 

Tarzan also confided that 
her Vision of Doom
left her troubled by 
the thought of having  
to tell the Captain. 

She wore a Blue Mask 
for the purpose, and 
shouted across the deck 
the bad news about 
their impending descent 
into the Waters way below.

Then, to make amends 
for bearing bad news, 
she announced that she would 
confine herself to the Cage 
of Was \ Ankh \ Uraeus 
by the aft steering paddle, 
from which her bones 
were sure to be flushed out
by the impact of the Wave.

So, as Madness 
closed in, Tarzan 
dashed toward the stern, 
ran into the Cage, 
and took her seat.

Her quick movement 
across the deck, however, 
had the ill-Fated 
effect of disturbing 
the vessel’s Equilibrium, 
as the ship’s stern  
started slipping down 
the Wave—prompting 
Tarzan, as she tipped back- 
wards and faced the Heavens,
to emit a sudden, powerful
umbo weti Yodel. 



How to describe
the feelings we shared…
tilting, finally, 
toward the stern, 
on an awesome ride 
down the Great Wave, 
that kept returning us 
in a loop through time 
to serene Sweetness 
and Abysmal dread?

And now, dead 
in our tracks,
asking ourselves:
how to resurface?



Once her Yodeling had come to 
a stop, and after a brief 
moment of Sleep in the Cage, 
Tarzan shed her body, then lost 
all her bones to the sea, 
except for the skull. 

By then, as the vessel
continued to drop 
stern-first, shredding 
the Anonymous face 
of the Great Wave, 
we had battened down
the hatches and were 
all below deck.

The first Goofy turn 
on our backward ride 
was to starboard 
(frontside), as the Wave’s 
Silver Cathedral, 
under the Black nobility 
of the starry Heavens, 
cast its impassible shadow 
over the Colored totems 
of Solomon, Pythagoras 
and Janus Pater.

Attention was assailed 
on all sides by 
the risen waters above and 
below us… until Venus,
after Commander Exprès’s 
Coughing attack, deciphered 
the projected spit—which, 
because of the turbulence, 
had missed the Cauldron and 
landed on the deck next to 
the Transforming | Mirror.

Venus saw that the figures 
in the spit contained 
an occult message that 
our lost helmswoman 
van Rr’Ubik—whose 
spirit was manifest in 
the figurehead’s portside Half-
Shadow—communicated to 
Möbius-in-Deep-Sleep-State—
whose suspended upside-down 
body bumped against 
the rose windows of 
the perspective machine. 

The information transmitted 
from van Rr’Ubik to Möbius, 
according to Venus’s reading, 
indicated that the crest of 
the curling Wave overarching 
the ship was the sign 
that the Great Wave itself 
was shrinking fast—as in 
the tale from the Archives 
of the #QUA-QUA-NON
under Captain Black Jes’…



As we descended the face of 
the Wave, and Tarzan’s skull 
tossed around in the Cage, 
Avon the Poetess, chanting 
on Speakerphone, began
the tale of Tarzan’s adventures 
in the Vimina Underworld, 
as re-imagined during 
the Vedic Age of Cydonia 
and Atlantis before the Flood, 
when Annunaki Adrenochrome 
and the Crystal technology 
of the Redskin Nephilim spoke 
to the “Def” JetBrains of Youth 
on the Moderna Peninsula.

Avon’s weird poetry 
caused increased agitation
not only among the crew,
but also for Ō-Notare, 
the Spirit of the Keel
at the start of the Drop. 

Ō-Notare advised
Captain Anna-O
to heed the Pop-up 
revelations
contained 
in the Blown-out spit 
from the Cough of 
Commander Exprès, 
even if the ship’s
Epic descent down 
the Wave made for 
Sick difficulties.  

Commander Exprès, however, 
because of the ship’s intense 
movement, as it carved its way 
across the Anti-Body of 
the tunnel’s Crazy Wall, 
was projecting his spit 
outside the Cauldron—onto 
the gaslight, the Shit detector, 
the Impulse :: reactor system.

So Captain Anna-O gave
the order that Rosetta, 
together with Scard’nelli and
Cowabunga, engage a Cryptic 
Line of Defense against
the Wave’s Bad Vibrations, 
that would maximize 
communications and stabilize 
the ship, by deconcentrating 
the water’s Energy and 
recycling it infinitesimally 
through the Media network. 

At the same time, 
a sense of thrill 
and Erotic excitement
overtook us all. 



Still now, on the floor 
of the Silver Sea, it is 
difficult to understand 
how our Line of Defense—
maintained through 
the connection of Rosetta,
 amidships, who operated 
the sea-level Communicating 
Vessels… to Scard’nelli, 
across from her, working 
the cooler, the baker 
and warming exchanger…
to Cowabunga, by the bow, 
on feedback loop—functioned
not only as the matrix of 
instant communication 
for the whole crew, 
but also as the theater
of a “Conversation” 
between, on one hand, 
Avon the Poetess,
at the bottom of the hull 
behind the keel, 
whose skeleton-legs dragged 
below the ship, and, 
on the other hand, 
Commander Exprès 
in his cabin, 
under the forward-facing 
poop deck, with Venus, 
Interpreter of the Spit, 
next to him.

As described by Chauvée 
of Communications, who 
monitored the proprioceptor 
array, the ship was subject
to a Schizoid Dynamic, 
in which Exprès’s commentary 
on Avon’s epic tale 
underscored the surreal
nature of our Joyride
down the Pipeline of Doom.

Avon’s narrative followed 
Tarzan through the Underworld
from the Satanic Swiss shores 
of the Tohu Bohu River, 
past the Arc of the Covenant, 
to the Pentagon’s Thelema 
Reserve—where Dioxide, 
the Grand Wizard from 
the Elders of Zion, 
Awakened Tarzan’s FireEye 
to the Black Budget 
and net-zero Energy of 
Spike Mutation and Maga.

Then, as if in reply,  
more Coughing ensued, 
from which Venus concluded:
“Commander Exprès says: 
Kongō must go!

Time seemed to expand.

Captain Anna-O told me to 
“do something and Navigate,” 
so I recommended a frontside 
top turn followed by a cut 
back that would put the turned-
around ship’s larboard rail 
backside. 

The Captain agreed, and, given 
the stress on the steering bus,  
ordered Marlboro and Wang 
to join Sokrates at the wheel.

At which point, 
Gunome Midare, 
the next Spirit of the Keel 
on our first Power Turn, 
sent Sokrates to the Library, 
“where he belonged,” 
because Scard’nelli—
manning the feedback loop
for the Line of Defense—
“was not meant to be alone
in that Amazons Hothouse.” 



In contrast to the exhilaration 
and Erotic stimulation felt 
by the rest of the crew, 
the engagement with 
our second Power Turn 
put Kongō on edge: 
not only did the Able-
bodied Deckhand turned 
Substitute Engineer 
still grapple with becoming 
instantly fat before the rise 
of the Great Wave, but 
Venus’s Doomscroll Forecast 
proved an accelerator 
of the Madness in store. 

When Avon described 
Tarzan’s special access 
to the sciento-logical 
Big-Pharma Chemtrails 
of Roswell, after Project 
Majic Poppa Clip, 
the close encounter with 
Hollywood the Merovingian 
and Kissinger the Lyrist 
by the Blue-Green waterspout 
in the Temple of Set’s 
Area 51, Kongō yelled: 
Get that straight!” 
evoking the “unwobbling 
pivot” of Abbondanza’s 
Pure Mind from Larsen B.’s 
Book of Aloha.  

Yet the rest of us
were getting stoked 
from the ship’s radical 
Fakie stance before 
the real Oval Office 
under a Wuhan Chandelier. 

We felt elastic and laid back.

Like Marlboro and Wang 
at the wheel, who described
their visions to the crew,
I could see, beyond 
the tubular Rainbow rim,
the Resurrection of the Body 
of the Woman of Light 
on the Sea of Primordial 
Revelation; Cowabunga, 
Scard’nelli and Rosetta found 
the Secret of the Secret in 
the Science of the Balance; 
and, as Sinbad said, while 
we braced for the high-speed 
motion of our third Power 
Turn, we all seemed in
perfect sync with the Sexual 
Mysteries of a Quest for 
the Vertical Dimension.

The alternate reality, according
to Kongō, was that the Angel 
in the Face of the Wave 
was psychoanalyzing the ship.

In Kongō’s view the ribosome 
burps from the wet and 
dry bulbs in the Dust bowl, 
and the sudden Sound 
from the air blower
in the aerosol vault of 
the reformer, served as clear 
signs of Rosetta’s delusion;
similarly, the melting of 
the virion cells in the heat 
pump and the escaping gas 
from the One Cylinder 
on the emission controls  
were seen as indications 
of the Desperado 
Boogaloo Program in 
Scard’nelli’s crypt of 
the repressed… just as 
the harmolodic vibrations 
in the jib boom and 
sprit sail animated elitist
“wingèd sentences” that 
spoke for Cowabunga’s 
social distance from 
Kongō, Venus and me.

As for Sinbad, he was 
frontline against the infodemic 
that shattered the speculum 
of the virtual TV.



After the ship cranked out 
of the turn and headed down 
the next track on the Wave, 
the “Conversation” continued 
between Avon the Poetess 
and the spit of Commander 
Exprès, as read by Venus; 
at the same time, 
in seeming counter-point, 
came the Lesson for Captain 
Anna-O from Ko-Midare, 
next Spirit of the Keel.

Avon sang of Tarzan’s 
Great Awakening, when
she threw open the shutters
of the Overton window
on the Antiquarian Stage
of Mystical Horrors, and
discovered the Ultraviolet 
Antidote against Kek.

After her passage through 
the Google Stargate, Tarzan 
reached the Sandy Hook
of the Monsanto Sea and
heard the Transhuman babble
of its Phosphorescence,
like Dona “the Pleiadian” 
in the Techno-Luciferian 
Prophecies of Zeta Rediculi 
from The Book of the New
 Zza Order;
in a further 
adventure, Tarzan followed 
the luminous feet of Apophis 
across the JFK–mRNA 
Sacrifice grid, toward 
the Floridated Rainbows 
at the front of “The Storm.”

Exprès’s apparent response, 
judging from the tracings  
across the spit, was: 
Geronimo’s mad again,” 
which Venus interpreted as 
an OK-Boomer reference to 
the 3 + 3 Booby Hatches
of Space and Time 
on the OUMUAMUA, 
from the legend of Capt.
Sin Nombre in the Days
of the 6th Extinction.

The implication was 
that Avon’s poetry looked to 
“the sea of Trees / the sea 
of Sand / the sea of Ice / 
the sea of Darkness,”
in a Lost Poetry of Creation,
after the Zoom of Carbon Capture 
and the Plasmid Anthropause— 
when GroupSense, CrowdStrike 
and ArchAid drank the Molü 
from the Black Rock and Shell. 

I was transported
by Avon’s recital 
to a transcendent 
Shaka Bardo within
 the Great Wave, 
like Bedlam, Thebes and 
Q’Bal in the Engine Room
next to the Large Collapse;
 or like Nobadinus 
behind the vibrator,  
under the fo’c’s’le deck,
with Ben C’nopee and Sony 
at the Lenseport; 
or like Neanderthal and 
Mach holding fast 
on the Grand Spiral stairway.

We interpreted Avon’s 
account of Tarzan’s 
Underworld adventures 
 at its Imaginal source, 
in the Book of Nature,  
as an invitation to travel 
toward the Light of Glory, 
following our Celestial 
counterparts on the path 
of Transmutation 
through Sacred History, 
like Johnny Bull in Eleusis 
on her way to meet Gonzaga.

But Kongō saw differently 
and, quoting from 
The Materialist Manifesto
 
of Geryon and Paterson 
on the CHING MING, 
pointed to the debilitation 
of both Commander Exprès 
and Möbius as evidence 
of the “weak thought” 
Rosetta, Scard’nelli and 
Cowabunga brought to bear 
on their misinterpretation 
of History’s “open sea.” 

The announcement of Ko-
Midare’s
Message to the Captain
“Don’t mix sea and sky!”—
proved all the more timely, 
occurring just as Blue-Red Sparks 
started flying off the ship’s hull
—prompting Anna-O to issue 
the Fateful command that 
I initiate the fourth Power Turn.



Like Kahuna on the MANA, 
as if dancing to the music 
of the Wave, the vessel 
cut back, looped around, 
and crossed over… 
catching Fire in the process

While Tarzan’s skull knocked
against the Cage above deck, 
Avon went on with the story 
of Tarzan in the Underworld— 
recounting how she gazed at 
the Reptile Draco rising from 
the Rabbit Hole in the Reeds 
on the ocean’s calm waters, 
to the Sound of 911911911 
cataracts crashing 
over distant horizons. 

Even as the ship’s hull
became engulfed in Flames,
Avon’s stories about Tarzan’s
journey entranced us:
we shared the overcoming of
her Dissociative Identity Disorder
and the dark perfumes of trauma-
based Mind Control, after Tarzan
arrived at the hideous wreck of
the Sacrificial Pyramid in Vegas
under molten skies; like Tarzan,
we became actors in the Theater
of LSD GunGrabs, tired of zones
and poles after the Russian Purge
of 4-chan Fake News; and found
our bliss in the Shadow-Flowers
of the Great Wave’s spray…
in the same way that Tarzan
had beamed with delight, when
the Uranium of the Handlers,
the Alters and Patsies
from Project Soros melted
off the Q-map into air.

Commander Exprès answered
with a heavy spell of Coughing.

Venus caught his spit in
the Cauldron and read its layout
as a direct message to me:
The vibrational memory of
the wavelength’s Ionized center
 tests the skill of the Navigator.


I thought of King Kong and 
the “CHOU” – “HAN” – “SUNG”
on the Stone in Rothschild’s
Comprehensive Mirror
 for the Rites of Neschek,
and 
understood that what I imagined 
as a Flaming ship speeding 
through the Ideogrammatic No-Go 
zone between the Facing Mirrors 
of “Waters Above as Below” 
was really my erroneous 
Mental confusion between
Movement and Space-Traveled.

My perception was that 
the ride of the Flaming ship 
represented a mixture of “Io,” or
Light-That-Has-Entered-the-Cave,
and Wave Machine—
a Gandalf tendency compromised 
by a Baldur impurity—
but now my intuition was 
that we were all witness instead 
to the cosmic sympathy between 
Pure Movement and 
the World of Imagination—
as in the Great Reset of 
Image, Movement and Matter 
foretold by the Acid Writer in 
Dungeons and Mavericks.

Although Kongō derided us 
for being “in the grip 
of the ‘Virus Analytica’”—
as theorized by Capt. Nobus 
on the S\S PEACE— 
and referred to my oversight
of the ship’s positional 
maneuvering as “the Metaliptic 
illusion of a Leptoid Woman on 
her knees,” all we could see 
in the Impact Zone were 
a waterfall’s Lights of Beauty and 
a whirlpool’s Lights of Majesty. 

It was when the harmonic 
motion of the breaking Wave 
gave rise to what seemed 
like a Shout, followed 
by the Knelling of a bell, 
that the certainty of Kongō’s 
doom, if not our own, 
became undeniable.

And when the Captain 
put on her Majic Hat, 
like Capt. Hokusai aboard 
the BIOSPHERE, 
to re-direct the Purifying 
Winds that swept in 
from the Three Directions— 
fueling the Flames in which 
the ship was wrapped—
I understood in a flash
why Cîpher and Chauvée 
had been correct to note 
how it was generally 
consistent with the Rosetta \
Scard’nelli \ Cowabunga 
“Line of Defense” that 
Kongō’s Death meant Sinbad 
would be next to die.

Guidance came
to the Captain,
when Kataochi-Gunome,
new Spirit of the Keel, 
   gave the word: 
“I got the Power!”

Anna O. took it 
as her cue to engage 
a Duck Dive, as the means 
of avoiding dehydration 
and shattering the spell 
of a worst-case scenario.

The waters seemed 
to double in size, 
and the best chance 
for a tranquilizing 
Recovery from a gnarly 
Foam Bounce was 
a Rail Set that responded 
to the Great Wave’s 
subliminal cues 
with a Duck Dive’s 
hermeneutic uncovering 
of the Suck-out 
in the Spin Cycle. 

So we braced for 
the supplemental Energy 
and ozone shower of 
a more-than-human dive 
into a subtler state of Being.



Despite our best efforts,
the good ship got totally 
battered and submerged
in the Wipeout.

Yet, even as it started 
to sink into the deep, 
Avon pursued her recital 
with mounting passion. 

She imagined Tarzan at 
the Round Table with Pindar 
and the Council of 13 
in the Taliban Drugstore, 
where Blond-eyed Archons 
with tangled hair 
waved False Flags in the Ether.

The ship meanwhile 
stayed level and continued 
to sink, as Fire consumed 
the forward decks. 

Exprès’s response to Avon’s
verse was a Coughed-Up spit 
in which Venus read 
the Readymade advice to 
Make it new!” by creating 
a Greenhouse Zone at 
the bow, and Greenwashing 
the Fire’s “Angry Beast” 
with Firestopper foam.

At the same time, however, 
Venus’s words made Kongō 
angry at the “drunken effect” 
of Avon’s poetry on the crew, 
and Kongō’s anger in turn
triggered a ship-wide
Imaginal oscillation between
stationary and excited states—  
because, following Sinbad’s 
explanation, it was a revelation 
of Being as Presence balanced 
by a moment of “Nothingness”
…similar to the experience of 
Kundun, Kandahar and Kabul
on the Friendship Bridge 
to Enduring Freedom 
in The Mystic Medici Books. 

Captain Anna-O, 
acknowledging Sinbad’s 
insight and sensing 
the crew’s change of Mood 
in reaction to Kongō’s 
emotional outburst, agreed 
with the assessment of Exprès 
(and his interpreter Venus), 
and ordered Cîpher and
 Chauvée to station themselves 
on either side of Möbius’s 
suspended body, and manage 
the Sprinkler system’s 
connection to the gaslight 
through Rosetta; 
the Sprinkler’s disjunction 
from the perspective machine 
through Scard’nelli; 
and its conjunction with 
the clarified air blower 
through Cowabunga, 
in order to release the foam 
onto the Fire. 

The operation worked;
the Fire stopped.

What got Abstrakted, however, 
was the effect of the foam 
on the ship’s even keel: 
the ultrathin layer of Firestopper 
foam deposited throughout 
the forward decks created 
a weight imbalance that re-
integrated friction in the Gravity
Handler and sent the ship on 
a long slope down, bow first.



The unintended course 
correction, and 
the increased speed 
of the ship’s descent 
toward the ocean’s bottom 
through the dense, 
Protein-rich heavy water 
of the Silver Sea 
seemed to add urgency to 
Avon’s account of Tarzan’s 
Continued Adventures, 
as if the vibratory 
interaction between 
harmonic and luminescent 
information had produced 
Omicron and Pi variants 
in the Alphabet code of 
the Life-field, impacting 
the ship’s Coherence Domain.

Then Fire broke out 
at the stern, across the aft 
decks, just as Avon was 
describing Tarzan’s experience
with the Burning Funnel 
and Electric Crescents 
of the Reichstag Holocaust, 
during the Radiation experiments 
on the EPIPHANY—before
 Nazi archaeology brought 
Tarzan to the ColdWar Empire 
Beneath the Ice.

Captain Anna-O gave the order 
to start spreading the foam.

While the Sprinkler system
was being redeployed 
against the second Fire, Avon’s 
narration followed Tarzan’s 
Adventures in the Underworld… 
from the Fathomless Nights of 
Aryan Exile to the Maelstrom 
of Future Vigor… and onward
to tales of the Manhattan Project, 
the Psyops of the Vrill Society, 
and the hammer blows against 
the UFO from Aldebaran.

As with the Fire 
at the bow, the Flames at 
the stern were put out; 
yet once again, no sooner 
had the fresh foam settled, 
than the redistributed weight 
caused the ship to list—
this time in the opposite 
direction—sending it 
on a long slope down 
to the bottom, poop first.

Venus’s immediate response, 
 translating for Exprès, was: 
“The Commander sez: 
Hegel’s dialectic is Majic!


It became Kongō’s mantra, 
and ours—as if Avon’s 
account of Tarzan’s adventures,
together with the reversal 
of the ship’s heading, had 
synthesized the crew’s Mood 
and Kongō’s Thinking.

As the ship sailed on,
Kongō’s Passion on the path
to a Vision of “The Last
Dialectical Push” became
the enactment of a process
unfolding in each of us:
the intuition of a Solution that
actualized the transformative
power of a lifetime’s
“Drops of Experience”
through an overwhelming
surge of mixed emotions and
the powerful onrush of Tears
held back… in what finally felt
like a Cosmic release from
the contradictions of the World.



For all the time we spent
on our ride under the water—
rapt participants in Kongō’s
Awakening to the Truth of
our “Journey to the One”—
it seemed like no time before
Fire broke out again, amidships.

As with the first two Fires,
fore and aft, the foam Sprinkled
over the central decks re-shifted
weight across the ship—
which again changed course,
and now started dropping
horizontally to the seafloor.

It was on this final line
of descent that Avon brought
her Tarzan poem to a close,
following the message
from the Commander:
MU-SIC! MU-SIC!

Avon concluded with
Tarzan’s Last Adventure in
the Vatican’s Majic Kingdom,
after the invention of Islam
and the Meta-translation
of Kaballah by Disney
and the Illuminati of Kazaar
—when, in a Butterfly Effect,
the Hidden Hand of
the Burning Man, under
“stagnant Fumes of torpor,”
brought the Paper Boat of
“embittered love” to the Cold
Black Pool of New Europe.

 Yet, by the time Avon was
done, Kongō had already entered
a phase of Reaction, and discovered
the Mysteries of Deadpan Hilarity.

The completely Unsayable
fact of the Laughter
that Kongō shared with us
was given—at the sub-molar,
sub-molecular level—
by the cascading effect from
Standard Stoppages of
Power, Knowledge, Pleasure
and Letting-Go, that skewed
the Lines of Penetration
for our Vulnerabilities,
Know-how, Lessons Learned
and Alternative Facts.

Kongō’s stunned silence, interrupted
by the cry, “Watch me now!”,
was our Initiation into the Absúrdity
of an Existential Comedy, where
the Becoming of the Many seemed
a Carnival of non-Linear Change.

Yet, just as Kongō began to
quote from Ahriman’s Discourse
on Collapse-Denial in the Wake
of Adams and Fu-Manchu’s
Eunuch Rebellion—
in mid-
sentence, between the Bunker
and the Quietest Room,
on the way to the Hidden
Chamber—Sleep descended,
and Kongō fell down Dead.



Only when the ship hit bottom
did we recognize the Problem,
after another Spirit of the Keel,
Ko-Notare, made the comment:
Don’t give up the ship.

Kongō’s bones were quickly
sealed in the passageway
between the Bunker and
the Quietest Room, before
it became uninhabitable;
the Stench from the unmentionable
Big Fart has gotten worse
in the Humidity; and the Ouzo
is almost undrinkable.

Here on the floor of
the Silver Sea, between Hilarity’s
Leap of Faith into Paradise
and the Clenched Fist raised at
the Horror of the Great Dying,
our Deep Agenda now
is for Creative adaptation to
the mud on which we rest.



I love you,
and in loving you
will continue to love
whatever comes next.

S.

 
 
 

*“The Star” is excerpted from the Tarot-based epistolary work in progress From the Lost Land; early parts of it were first published, under the titles The Drunken Spaceship 3 and 4, thanks to the hospitality of the editors at Blazing Stadium and Salt, respectively.

André Spears

André Spears is writer and poet, and a scholar of comparative literature. His work has addressed the emergence of “deep time” and the historical impact of archaeological discovery on the field of literature. He has also written on the music of Miles Davis. “The Star” is excerpted from From the Lost Land, an epistolary deep space epic inspired by the 22 trump cards of the Tarot deck. Cf. https://pangaeapress.com.

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