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 Subsequent episodes are “XIV: The Arts” (2020), The Devil (2020), and “The God’s House” (unpublished).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.