VIII.

Ariadne sits up, emotion’d, eager to speak.
“I remember Dionysus’s kisses, still burning
on my skin. No. If I’m honest, I don’t. Not
right now. For a short while, I felt a purpose.

Not an important cause, not a revelation,
but the midnight curse of Finnegan’s wake.
I was summoned to appear before Death, I
made a plea for forgiveness, and I lost.”

IX.

Then Chubby tells the story of the download
and the infotechnician who had merged with
his own data. In this tale, there once was a
young cadet whose heroism was cut short

by the jaws of a whale: he was dismembered.
Chubby makes a mental note about Fortune
Lobo. His death by digestion was, by Zeus, most
El-Greco-esque, and yet his spirit lingered.

X.

Ariadne is aching to tell the story of
her revelation, and yet dry words fail her.
Every moment she thinks herself to be
steady, to have finally coped with the

idea of having walked the tight-rope walk,
her mind starts to wander, and the continuity
of karma is discontinuous and inaccessible
to memory. She is wrestling with her own

XI.

Rebirth. We are all able, at least potentially,
to remember the facts of previous lives, and
the rites of transformation. Young Fortune Lobo
was dismembered;  yet, like Osiris-Dionysus, he

came back as a field of green wheat. “Truly, the
blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful truth:
Death comes not as a curse, but as a blessing.” We
are surrounded by Big Mind, the mother of all facts.

XII.

Ariadne’s revelation is asleep. An idle lover,
here and there, looks inside the s’elf; but for
all the rest, the multi-verse, unfathomably
fair, is a darkened cave; chained, barking dogs

outside. Ariadne is now sober, and at peace
with herself. The star cluster she’s looking
at in the palm of her hand is exceptionally
bright. Lightlets at the bar, glowing irises.

XIII.

The numen, satellite of Mind, holds its
course. No deviations in sight. Smaller,
sapphirite starlets trick’o’treat in the
void, and the voices of ancestors shout.

Ariadne is resolute in her choice of
enduring whatever is coming. With edge
in desire she lunges into the mythical
space where Archives and galaxies merge.

XIV.

For every ritual of rebirth, Fortune Lobo’s
rising from the astro-gases, transcendent
as a green man, innocently wet in the well
of eternity, has a mystic value, it is the

action in which, you reader, and I, writer,
as spectators become involved – Bastian-like –
though our natures are not necessarily changed.
It is a dream in which the dreamer may be trans

XV.

formed. Ariadne’s deficit in the balance
of Pacioli is her own waterflea robbery. She
lost her soul at low barometer reading, and
that is a presage of bad weather. One became

two. She was born as human, turned into a Goddess,
and yet fell. She walked the tightrope walk in a
moment of deadliest peril, and without realizing
it, she forgot. And then she forgot that she

XVI.

had forgotten. On the self-same tree, two birds
perched, watching with invisible eyes the forces
of revelation at work. Chubby drinks from the
misty gases of Titan, Fortune Lobo sways as green

fuse in the winds of Planet Carnuntum. Ariadne
is deep in her own stew, cygnus-like, floating
in the drink she drank. The bar is empty. Outside,
a Philosophical Cat is about to embark on a mission.

I.

“… immortality that we had when we were kitties,
it’s all a Shakespearean myth, and now you are
shipwrecked on this island, and the tempest rages
on. And being part of the myth is not enough, you

feel. Be cheerful, girl. Here is to archetypal light!
Rari nantes in gurgite vasto. Let us eat, let us
mourn. Let us remember. And then let us forget. This
is a story of loss. We at the bar, with philosophy and”

II.

“banter. You had visions of the utmost intensity?
What have you actually witnessed? The gods of the
strangers have still an unexhausted mana? There,
on the farthest nebulae, we surely went the way

of the waters, and we partecipated mystically? So?
Was that you and me, when we confronted our ugly
egoes in the deep dark mirrors of the space ocean?
Was that confrontation our first test of courage?”

III.

“But did we cut the Gordian knot instead of untying
it?” Ariadne sighs. She says: “The stars have fallen
from heaven. I remember every moment of my revelation.”
Chubby laughs, and gently taps her head with her paw.

“But dear half-human, half-goddess… not every woman
is a fisherwoman! The old woman and the sea was not
just a story…! But for every fisherwoman, we have
a sea, and a sea full of sharks, and other creatures. And”

IV.

“those humans, those other creatures in the fisherwoman’s
net. Nixies, sirens. I see those coming to meet Desert
Storm and Tierra Madre. Yes, your beloved cadets. They
are now at sea, lost in the ocean space, while we sit here,

debating the psychology of the trickster. That Tonal Dump
wants to take over the multi-verse! That orange-headed
piper that forced crowds into submission, using self-harm
as a kind of erotic charm. You see. Darkness has a headstart.”

V.

“But we are on the side of light. We are pneumaticas! Ho!
Everything the anima touches becomes numinous. And so
for the nasty lamia that is Tonal Dump. We are undergoing
the archetype of transformation, and so our colleagues at sea.

The process of writing is syncronistic phenomena, we
and John C and the Spartan are on the same journey. We
are stuck in a dimension of duality. Matter or wave,
psichization of matter. These things are really confusing!”

VI.

“Gravitational waves, my foot! It’s enough for us to have
scientists like John C who are trying to digitalize the
soul… to study the oscillatory patterns of epigenetics.
Must we fourier-transform our purpose, too? Just relax,

my friend. Ariadne. Look at the cosmic tree, rooted in
the multi-verse. Isn’t it gorge-ous? Yggdrasill holds the
key to our origins: Chubby-Bastet, and Ariadne of Knossos.
There is evidence of soul in plants, in microchips… and I”

VII.

“see beauty in the representation of waves, in the variation
of patterns. What was the stimulus? What was the story?
Which psychic phenomenon? Should we measure the mana of cells?
Or should we just write about the emanations of Bacchus?

Drink! My friend. Time is our Allah-y. We shall see more, we
shall discover more. Let go of your immortality! It was never
real. Let us live, and let us love, my lesbia. And all the
gossips of old men… let us value these, for what they are.”

LVII.

At sea. Desert Storm and Tierra Madre
have lost sight of planets, platelets and
tubes, archives of uni-verses, and swallows
in flight. The sea of emptiness, the space.

Aboard the whaler-slaver galley, bound
as slaves, toiling as row-inmates, sweating
and cursing; whispering and looking.
Unending plant life rolls as light-liquid ocean,

LVIII.

the deep dark wood of the unconscious.
The uncouscous. A distant blue planet, solid
in a green waste of light-liquid ocean space.
Ocean of wisdom, miniature sage, Jungian thing.

Bottom dwelling, filtered stars, salt winds,
aluminium constellations, alloy-inordinate
fondness. The two ex-cadets, golden pommes
that grow on trees; their strong, shape-shifting

LIX.

love is here. Cat people, identity-subtracted,
they are only slaves of time and space; now
only looking, witnesses of the infinite.
Suffering is justification enough, you see.

Beyond their reach, on the far-flung rocks
of Titan, the chemical roads of alcoholism
lead a time-bound Ariadne to crossing paths
(or paws) with Chubby, the once Egyptian Bastet.

LX.

Swept by surface tremors, the basement bar
is hidden, torn, wild, alone. Three locals,
one outsider. Salt protection in your drink,
captain. Chubby sits majest-like, cat-fully.

Sunshine erupts from beyond the cave, it is
the last day of summer on another planet,
at another latitude, at another longitude.
The fury of the elements is sand and stone.

LXI.

Chubby begins to talk – Ariadne is half-drunk.
“Archaic man, science man, adventurers. The
mind, great ocean. Friend, share the unshareable.
What’s your expedition beyond consciousness?

You do sit there as if in a stupor. Somewhere
beyond the cold, your prow sank into the abyss.
The space-ocean led you somewhere, not nowhere.
Summoned by exi-stance, you are. Yearning for”

LXII.

“inexistence. You do look, m’darling, in a sort
of vexed form, as if you were distressed. Be
cheerful, human. This overparticular anger is
no more real than the blasting winds outside.

Griffinese ships come and go. I know you.
You once were swept away by Dionysus.”
“My primal state”, blurts out Ariadne. “I
am a Goddness turned mortal. Much like you.”

LXIII.

She throws up. “The unconscious”, Cicciotta
continues, “is much of a liquid state. We are
surrounded by it. I used to live with a man who
switched on a Murakamian Well every day. What

a drag!” Ariadne sits back at the bar, her
head drooping, her mouth drooling. “I am mortal”,
she says. “It never dawned on me that I would die.
That I would age! That is absolutely riddickulous.”

LXVI.

“The mind, that ocean… SUCH BULLSHIT”, Ariadne
is collapsing. Chubby intervenes, sipping her tuna-
flavoured soda. “The multi-verse is big and wide,
or narrow and deep. Well, well, well. Ariadne, I

see you are in a bit of pickle. You think you have
lost your purpose, and yet we are immersed in a sea
of collective unconscious, and your death, mine…
this ageing monster that eats all, the illusion of…”

LIV.

Shaping and reshaping, the X’s eternal past-time.
Ariadne’s primordial vision is overcast, pathological
fantasies replace reality by fiction. “Sappho! I leave
you, yet I do not wish to do so.” From the X, the echo:

“If you have no memory, then I’ ll remind you of
the good times that we had. Crowns of pansies,
and roses, and crocus. We did wear them as one.
Castanets drove us away, snakes in dark woods.”

LV.

“The spectre showed its ordinary caprice, it showed
no sign of being.” Ariadne lets out a sigh. Her sinister
feelings are mounting in rapid succession, the waves
interpreted by data scientists, their latest beta version.

“To unearth buried fragments of psychic life we have
to drain the miasmal swamp. The relentlessness and
skepticism with which a Buddha swept aside his two
million gods leads us to pristine experience, truth.”

LVI.

Magic and drama are one projection of the archaic
mind, rogue rubidium atoms lead us into temptation.
Gut microbiomes of ancestors impact the immunity
and the epigenetics of us pups. Ariadne is curiosity

streamed, and her superconducting doubts are
powerful persnickety drivers of her own insanity.
Love’s a bad dish, ’tis hard to infiltrate once behind
enemy lines. Overparticular anger, lonely distress.

LI.

Voicemail delivers a feeble moan, Elecro reads
his messages. Ariadne drinks black coffee.
The stars seem more distant, today. John C
and the Spartan are locked in cellular combat.

Seeking to reedeem themselves from the
sin of racism, deep in singular meditation,
they increase their metabolic oscillations
with brittle tenacity and chemotactic sadness.

LII.

Ariadne is troubled by her feelings. The
Archive of Myth stands diminished, left
alone in mid-slump; Voicemail sings of
days bye-gone. The planet’s blue echoes

across what we would normally call a sky.
And yet, the smallest of the gas giants
has an atmostphere more Neptunian,
dominated by its bizzarre orientation.

LIII.

Uranus is a stronger influence on her
mood than the distant Helios, the
nearly perfect ball of hot plasma where
her yellow dwarf feelings have recently

gravitationally collapsed to a dim, vast
molecular cloud of confounded, cow-
eyed archaelogical imagery. The
Persian bird is flying in her heart.