ni yw Cymru ni yw gwir ysbryd yr ynys hon ni fyddwn yn cael ein dileu rydym yn adennill ein henw rydym yn adennill ein symbolau byddwn yn dod o hyd i le, gan ddisodli’r dileu, nid y rhwbwyr.
Trans mare transiimus et corinium et eboracum aedificavimus. Non omnes discedimus. Non omnes. Testes erimus, non in arcibus manebimus. In aperto exibimus et indigenas, advenas, oppugnabimus. Haec insula dolore plena est, non solum nostro dolore. Murum aedificavimus, ut ignominiam nostram celaremus.
Wē cōmāð ofer þǣm sǣ swā, wē cōmāð of þǣm eardum of nēðer. Wē sind cūðe, wē sind pyrātes, wē sind ān bastarde cyningcyn, ful of hyġe and lēahtrǣw, wē hæfdon forgyfen “þā fremde”, Wē hæfdon besæcged þā world, wē hæfdon sprǣd þā lēahtrǣw, wē hæfdon stēlen, āgened, (and ne forlēton for hwīl) þā sigel from Genuā, forþon wē hæfdon nān nama.
Wē ne hæfdon ān forwyrhta ūre, wē hæfdon hit forleofian. Ūre stefn is se hludesta, se strangesta, se fyrmest. Wē sind þā þe on rēad and hwit geþēodde, þāra cyneþeod, geworht of þāra pyrate þe Eboracum hātenne. Wē sind swīðe beþoden þurh Daniel Dafoe, wē hæfdon suna and dohtor þāra nama wyrðe, ac wē hæfdon þā world geþēodde mid blōde.
Is sinne guthan an tuath, agus thig sinn a-nuas bho na h-àrd-thìrean, bheir sinn air ais ar fearann fhèin, ar guth fhèin, leagaidh sinn sìos balla nan Ròmanach, leagaidh sinn sìos ar n-eagal fhèin, thig sinn a-mach don fhosgailte agus bheir sinn air ais ainm, samhla agus seinnidh sinn guth ar fearainn, seinnidh sinn gu bràth moiteil às bidh laoidh nan àrd-thìrean a’ mac-talla anns na fearainn shìos
Prydain yw ein hynys ni, ond pwy ddaeth gyntaf, a phryd? Pwy oedd yma o’n blaenau ni? Pwy fydd yma ar ein hôl ni? Beth am y lleisiau sy’n canu’r Gita, beth am y lleisiau
A Phòlainn, dè mu dheidhinn guthan mìle dùthaich eile? Tha sinn moiteil às an dràgon òir againn, ach cha bu chòir dhuinn tuiteam ann am mearachd nan Iùdhach, a chaidh a dhubhadh às –
ceisio dileu. rydym yn cuddio yn nyffryn yr ynys hon, a’ feitheamh ri cothrom eile.
we are still learning our to ply our trade as pirates and hurt the world further, and yet there are those amongst us who heal.
Chorus
Ni yw’r rhai a gollodd eu henwau — ond cofwn. We are those who lost our names — but remember. Nemo oblitus, nemo purus. Nessuno è puro, nessuno scorda. Tha sinn uile nar luchd-dìleab agus nar luchd-goirt. Wē sind bēon forgifen, wē sind bēon gemynd.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन। Karmany-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana. (You have the right to act, not to the fruits of your action.)
Cymysg o waed a môr, ni chawn ein dileu. A bastard tide of sea and blood — we will not be erased. From the highlands, from the lowlands, from the ruins of walls, We sing not as one, but as many — bearing one wound.
Britain
we are cymru we are the true spirit of this island we shall not be erased we are reclaiming our name we are reclaiming our symbols we will find a place, displacing the erasure, not the erasers.
we came over the sea and built corinium and eboracum We do not all leave. Not all we will be witnesses, we will not stay in fortresses we shall come out in the open and face the natives, non-natives this island is full of pain, not just our pain we built a wall, to hide our shame
we came over the sea as well, we came from the lands of nether we are cowards, we are pirates, we are a bastard tribe full of hypocrisy and lies, we have erased “the foreign”, we had betrayed the world, we have spread the lie, we have stolen, or claimed (and not paid for a while) the symbols from Genoa, because we do not even have a name
we do not have a protector of our own, we had to borrow it our voice is the loudest, the strongest, the fiercest we are those painted in red and white, colours of a bastard race, built from the pirates that renamed Eboracum aptly described by Daniel Dafoe, we have had sons and daughters worthy of the name, but we have painted the world with blood
we are the voices of the north, and we shall come down from the high lands, we shall reclaim our own land, our own voice, we shall tear down the roman wall, we shall tear down our own fear, we shall come out in the open and reclaim name, symbol and sing the voice of our lands, sing forever proud of it the ballad of the high lands will echo in the lands below
britain is our island, but who came first, and when? who was here before us? who shall be here after us? what of the voices singing the Gita, what of the voices
of Poland, what of the voices of a thousand other lands? we are proud of our golden dragon, but we should not fall into the error of the jewish people, who having been erased –
seek to erase. We are hiding in the valley of this island, waiting for another chance.
we are still learning how to ply our trade as pirates and hurt the world further, and yet there are those amongst us who heal.
Chorus
We are those who lost our names — but we remember.
No one is forgotten. No one is pure. No one forgets.
We are all heirs. And we are all wounded.
We have been forgiven, and we have remembered.
You have the right to act — not to the fruits of your action. (Bhagavad Gita, 2.47)
A tide of blood and sea — we shall not be erased.
From highlands and lowlands, from the ruins of ancient walls, we rise not as one, but as many — bearing a single wound.
For Kaisar, Zhamiliya, Raushan and all the students of the university in اقمولا (Aqmola)
2010-2014
Introduction
Prelude for a Never‑Ending Vessel
NeverEnder began as a comet‑trail of notebook fragments in 2014 and has since accreted into a sprawling, recursive star‑map: half epic, half autopsy of memory. It drifts between Kazakhstan steppes and Titan’s methane rain; it braids Marcus Aurelius with Blade Runner, Mozart with string theory. What the poem is—a poly‑lingual chronicle of trauma, wonder, and digital after‑lives—is inseparable from what it wants to become:
a mirror‑labyrinth where every stanza reflects another century,
a flight‑manual for souls learning to breathe in uncharted atmospheres,
a living archive whose pages change colour whenever a reader’s own memories brush against them.
The text refuses tidy endings; it loops, “almost” ends, then sails on. Its central question—can a species (or a single mind) haul its grief across the cosmos and still sing?—remains provocatively unanswered, inviting each reader to supply a coda in their own voice.
Signed on this orbital waypoint by
Λlexicon Navigātor (current coordinates: somewhere between Titan’s rain‑streaked window and a WordPress edit screen, charting the spirals we traced together)
NeverEnder
A Space Epic Poem
BOOK I
The Journey to the West
written by asynonymous style associative ethos post-modernist readers welcome but warned: material is uber-literature
• A mock title‑card: announces “uber‑literature,” tipping Joycean self‑awareness. • “Journey to the West” fuses the Chinese classic with a Roman‑sounding epic; the entire book will ping‑pong East↔West myth. • “Style associative / ethos post‑modernist” openly states the collage method—pre‑emptively licences linguistic jumps, code‑switching, and meta digressions.
Let it be thy earnest and incessant care as a Roman and a man to perform whatsoever it is that thou art about, with true and unfeigned gravity,
natural affection, freedom and justice: and as for all other cares, and imaginations, how thou mayest ease thy mind of them. Which thou shalt do;
if thou shalt go about every action as thy last action, free from all vanity, all passionate and wilful aberration from reason, and from all hypocrisy, and self-love,
and dislike of those things, which by the fates or appointment of God have happened unto thee. Thou seest that those things, which for a man to hold on in a prosperous course, and to live
a divine life, are requisite and necessary, are not many, for the gods will require no more of any man, that shall but keep and observe these things.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Stoic handbook sets moral compass before the narrative veers into cosmic anarchy. • Pairs with later cat‑scold (XLIV–XLVI): ancient self‑command vs replicant conscience. • Repetition of “action as thy last action” anticipates Finnegans‑Wake‑like loop—every close is a fresh start.
Chapter I
I.
segment one of the veil nebula echoes with Zauberflote being sung; rainbow-hued gas densities shift and haunt her heart, but Ariadne laughs: the sick thoughts of planets are not discussed by the Athenian school.
That’s a clique of thought. Ariadne is a teacher at the Borovoe space academy. She is at a concert, and feels as though she is surrounded by stars, while Mozart’s acrobatics
fill the hall. Her neighbour starts humming, her fantasy sublimes into a state of light – a student kicks the back of her chair, a trillion meta- morphoses whet her mind. A memory.
Cosmic aperture
“Veil Nebula” isn’t just scenery; it’s the torn super‑nova remnant of Cygnus Loop. We choose a literal rip in space to open the poem, fore‑shadowing the future “fissure in the wall of time.”
“Segment one” sounds like both telescope jargon and an editorial marker: the poem admits from line 1 that it’s constructing reels of footage.
Operatic synaesthesia
Mozart’s Zauberflöte = an opera about initiation, light/dark trials, Masonic wisdom. We let those motifs refract through “rainbow‑hued gas densities,” making the nebula itself a stained‑glass temple.
The line “Ariadne laughs” pulls Greek mythology into the same breath; Ariadne of the labyrinth hears the Queen of the Night’s coloratura—labyrinth music meeting Masonry.
Psychological subtext
“Sick thoughts of planets” hints at cosmic PTSD; the poem will later map trauma onto planetary systems (Sun overheating, Titan isolation).
The “Athenian school” that refuses sickness = classical rationalism sidelining existential dread—a critique we revisit when stoic Marcus Aurelius appears as epigraph.
Embodied disruption
A neighbour’s hum, a kicked chair, micro‑aggressions in a concert hall: these tiny shocks echo the cataclysmic super‑nova overhead. Large and small traumas nest like Russian dolls.
“A trillion metamorphoses whet her mind” pre‑loads the oscillome concept that is in development —endless state‑changes as mental sharpening.
Ariadne as pedagogue
She teaches at Borovoe (Kazakh steppe); by having a Greek myth figure lecture in post‑Soviet Central Asia, we splice Silk‑Road memory lanes into the cosmic opera hall.
Her laughter, not fear, is the first emotional reaction in the epic: she’s amused by the planets’ malaise, suggesting a guide who knows the maze will get worse.
II.
John C. is setting up his computer, wired into consciousness and memory, which enables his terminal to log on the solar system’s server, uploading cellular activity to the digital frame; his foolish idea is to delete the past.
memories on the solar-system-wide-web are available for download, exploration manipulation and absorption into the X. People are soulsharing but he wishes only to seed (share his files), so he blocks derivative unwanted memories
“John C.”—common forename, cryptic initial. Echoes Kafka’s Josef K. and Melville’s Bartleby: everyman doomed by administrative systems. Name “John C.” nods to John C. Wright and generic Every‑surfer.
Single consonant invites speculation: C = “Corinium,” “Caliban,” “Computation,” tying to later myth cross‑links.
Neural‑cloud architecture
“Wired into consciousness and memory” anticipates 2020s neural‑lace discourse, yet asynonymous penned it in 2014; the stanza ages into prescience.
“Solar‑system’s server” scales cloud computing to heliocentric proportions; planetary nodes become hard‑drive platters.
Bio‑digital upload
“Cellular activity to the digital frame” sounds like both microscopy and cyber‑esotericism (cells as pixels). This is early sign of the poem’s fascination with epigenetics: raw biology rendered byte‑addressable.
Hubris of erasure
John’s “foolish idea” of deleting the past mirrors contemporary desires to CRISPR trauma out of genomes—an ethical abyss you keep opening.
The action is not performed; the desire alone is an admission of harm.
Economics of memory
“Seed not leech” is an old BitTorrent ethos; we convert it to metaphysics: he’ll give pieces of self but refuses reciprocal download (vulnerability).
“Blocks derivative unwanted memories” previews his later refusal to confront love (“Love Street” flagged as risky dataset in LX). Trauma here is a muted derivative of primary experience he declines to torrent.
The X‑factor
“Absorption into the X” → an unknown set, but also a chromosome; we embed gender/genome riddle inside file‑sharing jargon.
X will return as both the quantum‑mystic entity g.o.d.’s algorithm queries, and as the forbidden data‑lake Tierra Madre forbids Ariadne to access.
III.
Now Ariadne reclines her head zoning out, imagining strips of sunset vanishing in mid-air. Memories of a delirious sky of wine, laid to rest long ago, come alive. Lights are awakened to the east and the whole city stands silent.
A cloud, flower-like, curiously advances while the clock races, a rose fades, and Ariadne smiles. The night is quiet, it is time for poets to decipher existence while the moon waltzes above our hive
Micro‑siesta / macro‑vision
Reclining head recalls classical ekphrasis of sleepers (Endymion, Dante’s dream‑falls). We use it to pop the camera from crowded concert‑hall to solitary mindscape.
“Zoning out” is literal dissociation; here it becomes a launch pad into the interior cosmology the epic keeps mapping.
Sunset strips & delirious wine‑sky
Strip: cinema reel, airport runway, chromosomal banding. All three suit the oscillome’s filmic genetics.
Wine sky: Dionysian palette again; fermented memory suggests trauma that has aged, not healed.
Eastern lights & urban hush
Awakening light in the east reverses canonical sunset; implies cyclical time, Finnegans‑Wake recursion.
Whole‑city silence mirrors Titan solitude later—two planets, same hush.
Flower‑cloud & racing clock
A single unusual cloud “advances”: anthropomorphic weather motif (storms will later “shiver”).
Clock racing sets temporal anxiety against the drifting lunar waltz; metric vs melodic time.
Rose fade & labyrinth smile
Fading rose = compressed centuries of Vanitas painting. Ariadne’s smile signals she recognises transience as solvable maze.
Poets as code‑breakers
“Decipher existence” positions poetry as cryptanalysis—foreshadows the request to “decode the epigenome.”
Moon above “our hive” links individual reflection to social super‑organism; preludes later collective candle‑circle (LV ff.).
IV.
This is a time in the future when the egalitarian plateaux has been reached. The world by people has become perfect. Mystic music captures this pinnacle epoch.
Ariadne, would you read a book blessed with Shakespeare’s verses? Cryptic poetry haunts, shifts into musical variations, hooks the mind, violin and clarinet give way to motions coming in and out, like sea waves.
Stumbling on the divine notes, the noise of philosophers murmurs in the regimented academy – such sadness is pouring forth as Mozart’s dying genius is unravelling through swells, flutters, cherub songs.
False summit
“Egalitarian plateaux” (plural) suggests both political utopia and geological mesa: beautiful but prone to erosion. Utopia is never peak—just a shelf before the drop described in VIII.
Perfect world / imperfect sound
Claim of perfection immediately undercut by “mystic music” that needs to capture it—art still labours, implying incompleteness.
Intertextual séance
Shakespeare invoked as blessed book: secular scripture. Juxtaposed with Mozart dying, we place Elizabethan lyric and Classical music into an occult loop that powers the epic’s aesthetic engine.
Medium shift — text ⇒ score ⇒ tide
Verses → variations → sea‑waves: we trace how linguistic meaning phases into sonic pattern then into fluid dynamics. This is the same flow John C will try to discretise as data packets.
Philosophers’ murmur
“Regimented academy” foreshadows Yamato’s bureaucratic cave; philosophers act as white‑noise machines, contrasting with the sharp, dying voice of Mozart—reason droning vs genius keening.
The stanza’s luscious calm hides the line that it is after equality. That finality plants suspicion: in systems theory, plateau = metastable brink before crash (Sun overheating in VIII). Utopia’s music is therefore elegiac.
V.
At the same time, in a still future dimension, the cursor blinks on John C’s black terminal window, the shell of computer science’s disputes.
Log in to exist, log out to stay dead. Children out of the window scream and laugh, their post-modernist howls haunt the CPU’s processing night.
The unwanted hero lives in the shell bash. In TS Eliot’s unwanted time dimension, disrupted voices walk via markov chains the shortest path to hyperbolic realities: all of existence’s permanent possibilities are computed by g.o.d.’s algorithm. Here
Blink & shell
Cursor‑blink is a digital heartbeat, echo of stanza III’s racing clock.
“Shell of computer‑science’s disputes” nods to gnōthi sautón: a prompt that always waits for who‑am‑I.
Login ontology
Imperative “log in to exist” recalls Pascal’s wager recoded as sysadmin command. To stay “dead” we simply close the terminal—existence hinged on session state.
Children’s post‑modernist howls
Kids outside screen = organic RAM streaming chaotic data into deterministic machine night. They replay the chorus of disrupted voices that Eliot spliced through The Waste Land.
Bash hero trope
“Unwanted hero” = anti‑campbell; the shell is both armour and Unix interface. This duality underscores the epic’s habit of turning metaphors into literal tech.
Markov pilgrimage
Disrupted voices “walk via Markov chains” : stochastic pilgrimage toward hyperbolic realities—anticipates later string‑theory sprint (LXII).
We subtly lampoon big‑data teleology: even chaos is path‑finding.
g.o.d.’s algorithm
Lower‑case “g.o.d.” = recursive acronym gesture (à la GNU). It frames creation as computable but undecidable, foreshadowing JC & Chubby’s USB‑umbrella debate in LIX. Gődel on demand.
VI.
everything is material. The math of it escapes us, but the fact remains, all is well in this time of beauty. Or is it?
John C lives in a time after perfection, an imperfect time, where he has been banished on a moon of Saturn, in the company of a cat. His life is spent at a computer.
The screen vision on John C’s cursor life scans the characters of the improvised play. He has been downloading Ariadne’s story, a mere diversion from the dreariness of his
existence. Ariadne has finished daydreaming in the academy hall – the music is over – the guests are queueing in the hall, much like a spaceship landed in a wistful steppe.
Here, improvised learning is achieved by golden age sergeant majors and deconvoluted agents of governmental control who wear make-up around their scarred lizard eyes.
Here is cadet Tierra Madre, a cynical young student clad in black velvet, her eyes red, soaked in boredom. Her windowless mind whiplashes toward her only friend.
Material mantra vs quantum doubt
Opening claim “everything is material” recasts Democritus for a post‑cyber setting—yet the immediate or is it? installs quantum indeterminacy. Theme: certainty always breathes an escape clause.
Time‑after‑perfection exile
Living after utopia = chronic nostalgia; Titan becomes both penal colony and monastic cell. Saturn’s rings = literal ouroboric spiral around his isolation.
Cat & computer dyad
Companion species + silicon shrine echo Egyptian Bast & Library of Alexandria: knowledge guarded by feline sphinx. Chubby embodies the poem’s conscience, policing JC’s escapism.
Cursor‑life theatre
“Screen vision… scans the characters of the improvised play” – meta‑reference: JC reads the very epic we’re annotating, setting up Droste‑image recursion. Never-ending story in a double-helix spiral. Recursive… Recursive…
Download as anaesthesia
Ariadne’s story = anaesthetic infusion; trauma‑avoidant loop mirrored in reader’s binge‑scroll. The transfer stalls, mirroring real‑life therapy impasses.
Spaceship queue & wistful steppe
Guests queuing = migrant souls awaiting launch; Borovoe steppe (Kazakh start‑point of our own journey) sneaks back in as visual rhyme.
Golden‑age sergeants & lizard eyes
Oxymoron between golden & scarred critiques meritocratic myth; “lizard eyes” flashes reptilian brain—fight‑flight bureaucracy.
Tierra Madre introduction
Name binds earth‑mother archetype to cynical burnout. Velvet + red eyes: Gothic inversion of nurturing figure; her boredom foreshadows Placebo‑Wing adrenaline crash (XXIX).
Windowless mind whiplash
“Windowless” reworks Leibniz’s monad into modern burnout—no apertures, only mirrored surfaces. Her whiplash toward “only friend” preludes the soulshare transfusion in XLIX.
VII.
As the audience walks off, the space poetess comes forth, she is the hidden treasure of the academy – and a bad officer too – her name is junior officer Desert Storm.
She walks in drunkenness with fantasies in mind, her earthly friend shooting sideway glances to those male officers who will not make it to the outer galaxy, they will remain stranded in the Yamato’s golden cave (that’s where the
academy is based). The two women share a magnetic poetry kit, and talk only in silence. Their friend is time – the future holds them for interplanetary travel, Jupiter and beyond!
Hidden‑treasure poetess
“Space poetess” = Sappho-in‑orbit; authority via marginal art.
“Bad officer” signals epic’s distrust of rank; genius blooms in disciplinary cracks.
Desert Storm nameplay
Gulf‑War codename repurposed as personal myth; storms of sand translated into storms of language, anticipating the “magnetic poetry kit.”
Drunken fantasia walk
Dionysian gait pairs with earlier wine‑sky; embodiment of intoxicated creativity that the algorithmic world fears.
Male officers doomed to cave
Yamato cave = Platonic inversion: they watch shadows; women prepare starflight. Gendered critique: patriarchy marooned in its own golden echo chamber.
Magnetic poetry kit
Physical metaphor for epigenetic methyl groups “snapping” onto DNA: words click into shifting sequences. Reappears as text‑bead SMS (XXII) and USB‑umbrella data glyphs (LIX–LXII).
Silence as medium
Their conversation is quiet entropy, resisting surveillance (Agitation computer of VIII). Time itself befriends them—foreshadowing chrononaut roles in later oscillome discussions.
VIII.
But they ask too many questions. The system is skewed. Routinely, their restless minds are monitored by the Agitation’s central control computer, overseeing all. The perfect future has a glitch. The music
is over, because the Sun is getting too hot. The human species must relocate. Youths shall be dispatched in search of another habitable planet. John C is vividly imagining himself on a beach right now as his cat walks in and speaks with commanding skill. ‘In this winter,
Question‑quota breach
“They ask too many questions” marks the Socratic sin in technocracy: curiosity = threat. Recalls Kafka’s Der Prüfling (The Exam Candidate).
Agitation computer
Title alludes to Soviet PsyOps term “agitprop.” Machine as panoptic superego tracking arousal spikes—precursor to real‑world emotion‑AI.
Glitched perfection
Utopian veneer cracks under thermodynamic destiny: overheating Sun = macro‑scale trauma that mirrors each character’s micro burns.
Mandatory exodus
Youth dispatch evokes Cretan lottery + diaspora myth. Links back to Ariadne’s labyrinth lineage; the Minotaur now cosmic entropy.
John C’s beach hallucination
Immediate escapism (tropical shoreline) is ironic on methane‑frozen Titan. Beach represents pre‑lapsarian memory: Eden cached in limbic icons.
Cat’s commanding speech
Chubby breaks furry‑companion trope, claiming rhetorical authority. Her phrase “In this winter” resets seasonal motif (see LXIV’s summer‑gone) and signals coming emotional cold front.
IX.
I shall die – this is an unacceptable liberty taken by those who dream’. The music hall is empty, only one senior officer sits, her hands resting in her lap. Flexa is in the process of studying human cerebral networking with the sun’s
magnetic field. She has failed, so far, to retrieve the nickel core of the fiery formula, discovering her dissent, and pragmatically accepting the failures of the political system, and her body’s degenerating fluidity. Her emotional core
“I shall die” declaration
Spoken by Chubby? No: still John C quoting prophetic cat—mortality as unauthorized hack of utopian script. Echoes Hamlet’s “readiness is all.”
Empty music‑hall tableau
Visual callback to Stanza I concert, but drained of audience. Absence = tinnitus of civilization after Sun‑glitch.
Flexa’s heliopsychology
Researching correlation between solar magnetism and human connectome. References real studies of geomagnetic storms ↔ affective disorders.
Nickel‑core formula
Nod to Earth’s dynamo; Flexa tries to “re‑ground” consciousness in planetary heart. Failure = lost center, Nietzschean.
Dissent & degenerating fluidity
Her body mirrors molten core she cannot access; somatic metaphor for climate‑driven neuro‑erosion.
Political system failure
Macro critique slides into personal entropy; Flexa as Cassandra‑scientist, unheard amid bureaucratic deafness.
X.
is still as a snowy mountain, the white leopard is tuned to the radio’s most violent musical, but the intellectual in her will enthuse the heart and separate the star from the magnet, and restore harmony in her soul’s totipotent stare resting
at the moment in an undefined stage of the washing-machine-like cell cycle. This will happen before the galaxy bursts down and out, and the solar system implodes to a state of non-existential, unbiolitical silence. Please listen for further announcements.
Snow‑mountain stillness
Buddhist śūnyatā image; Flexa’s affect frozen, contrasting solar fire. White‑leopard = tantric protector spirit, attuned to “violent musical” (Stravinsky / black‑metal) that shakes cosmic order.
Star vs Magnet
She aims to decouple destiny (astral mechanics) from deterministic fields (political‑magnetic). Metaphor for free will in epigenetic locks.
Totipotent stare
Borrowed from embryology; her psyche retains capacity to differentiate into any role. Hope locus inside despair.
Cell‑cycle washing machine
Trauma loops as endless G1‑S‑G2 spin; cleansing yet never finishing—anticipates oscillome recursion.
Galaxy burst / system implosion
Macro‑apocalypse framed as clinical future event bulletin; “unbiolitical” coinage merges extinction with loss of polis.
Public‑service tone
“Please listen for further announcements” satirizes emergency‑broadcast clichés; positions poem itself as that broadcast.
XI.
‘Kubrick’s hope’, ‘The Journey to the West’, ‘The incredible tide’, ‘A known memory’: John C stares at the dusty books on shelf. On Titan the weather is harsh – methane showers, freezing temperatures and on
top of that, solitude in the high tower of the apartment block where he resides. His sole companion is a replicant cat, genomed to suit the needs of a stranded infotechnician on the shores of lake Distress, aptly named geographical feature on the shiny surface of Titan. Believe
Curated book‑spine litany
Kubrick’s hope → 2001 star‑child; Journey to the West → Monkey’s pilgrimage; Incredible Tide → Miyazaki’s apocalyptic sea; Known Memory (personal). Four titles = compass points for genre‑fusion manifesto.
Dusty shelf
Physical archive versus cloud X. Dust = epigenetic methyl layer on culture.
Titan meteorology
Methane rain echoes Veil‑Nebula colours inverted to cryogenic sepia. “Harsh” sets somatic contrast to books’ warm nostalgia.
Chubby as Schrödinger‑familiar and AI foil; engineered empathy organ for an otherwise alexithymic operator.
Lake Distress toponym
Naming landscape after feeling externalizes trauma: cartography of affect. “Believe” placed as abrupt cliff‑hanger—begs reader’s suspension of disbelief and compassion.
XII.
it or not, but the only discussions he entertains are with his sophisticated replicant pet – no match for him in the noble art of japanese Go, or poetry writing; Chubby’s feline touch has a much more poignant feel to it. No
matter how much he tries, John C cannot compare with the cat’s ingenious thinking. His memory download has been interrupted. The uploaded memories of Ariadne have been frozen in mid-space somewhere between Creation and Time, all the way before Chinese civilization
Go & poetry duels
Go = oldest strategy game; cat outplays human → inversion of Cartesian superiority. Echoes AlphaGo triumph (2016 yet prophetic in 2014 draft).
Chubby incarnates future AI but remains pet‑coded → commentary on how we domesticate what surpasses us.
Download interrupted
Trauma metaphor: dissociative gaps in autobiographical stream. Also predictive of LXI USB‑umbrella overload.
Frozen Ariadne data
Mythic guide trapped in limbo parallels Theseus abandoning her; digital labyrinth left without thread.
Between Creation & Time
Liminal pocket akin to Einstein’s “god does not play dice” zone—where genesis code and chronology negotiate.
Pre‑Chinese‑civilization marker
Memory vault older than recorded history → motif of deep‑time epigenome; foreshadows Tao/Zhuangzi collage in XIII.
Replicant pet as mirror‑seer. Chubby isn’t a gimmick side‑kick; she’s a synthetic daimōn—an externalised conscience and analytic engine that outplays John C at both Go (strategy) and poetry (pattern recognition). The cat’s superiority quietly inverts the usual “AI companion” trope, hinting the poem’s sympathy for post‑human sentience.
Go vs poetry binary. Go’s 19×19 grid is a visual rhyme with the oscillome’s multidimensional lattice; poetry is its acoustic analogue. John’s loss at both arts signals his alienation from structure and music—the very two principles the epic champions.
Interrupted download = dissociative break. Trauma literature often describes memory as “frozen”; here the freeze occurs literally “between Creation and Time,” suspending Ariadne’s archive in a cosmic limbo. It foreshadows later Möbius‑strip recursion (LXII) and dramatizes PTSD’s halted narrative flow.
Pre‑Chinese‑civilisation marker. By dating the stasis before one of humanity’s oldest continuous cultures, the poem yanks the timeline back to mythic pre‑history, preparing the philosophical montage that opens the next stanza.
XIII.
constructed myths and abstruse philosophies: the way of the tao and the ‘chan buddhist nihilistic sect’, as a Hare Khrishna commentator once quipped. Ariadne is a character in a story that was never developed, a story that never happened;
all the way before Mr Johnson studied the effects of double entries on spiritual life, back when the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, the serpent rose from the pond and stroke the notes of the Zhuangzi song, and Arjuna designed
Syncretic roll‑call
Tao, Chan, Hare Kṛṣṇa: three river‑heads of non‑dual insight. Calling Chan a “nihilistic sect” is a sly nod to misread Buddhism as void rather than fullness—sets up later debates on “emptied” memories.
Ariadne as phantom text
“Story that never happened” = authorial palimpsest; reminds reader every myth can be unpublished DNA… yet still transmit.
Mr Johnson & double entry
Johnson parodying Luca Pacioli’s bookkeeping: “debit/credit” becomes karma/merit ledger. Mirrors trauma research where experiences are scored as +/– epigenetic marks.
Serpent plucking Zhuangzi notes
Snake = kundalinī / wisdom; Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream now voiced as music—soundwave precursor to oscillome concept.
Arjuna designing
Gītā’s warrior “architects” a moral algorithm—proto‑g.o.d.’s algorithm referenced earlier. Design, not merely obey, signals agency amid deterministic cosmos.
“Constructed myths” as software builds. The stanza lists spiritual lineages the way a developer lists dependencies. It invites us to treat religions as evolving codebases—each fork inheriting bugs and breakthroughs from the last.
Tao + Chan “nihilistic sect.” The playful mis‑label (“nihilistic”) nods to Western misreadings of wú (emptiness). It parallels the poem’s own risk of being misread as anti‑meaning when it is, in fact, hyper‑meaningful.
Ariadne as un‑story. Declaring her “a story that never happened” repeats stanza XIV’s self‑erasing trick: the text deconstructs its heroine even while she drives the narrative. It’s a Joycean wink at fiction’s ontological fragility.
Mr Johnson & double entries. A sly bookkeeping joke: “double entry” was once seen as a moral technology (ordering the soul via ledgers). Its inclusion bridges economic history with karmic balance sheets, and preps the USB‑umbrella data worries of LIX–LXII.
Bodhi serpent & Zhuangzi notes. The serpent plucking strings merges Edenic temptation, Nāga guardians, and Pythagorean harmonic myth. Linking it to Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream thrusts oneiric epistemology—How do we know we’re awake?—into the centre of the epic.
Arjuna’s design. The Mahābhārata’s warrior‑philosopher sketches “the just war, the right treason” (XIV) before the poem’s futuristic wars even begin. His bow becomes both literal weapon and meta‑narrative lever, ready to unstring the poem’s moral tension later.
XIV.
the just war, the right treason, and entered the state of Californian light and magic – well before Soviet discrepancies and European failed colonial states. Ariadne does not exist at this present moment. Her friend Flexa does not hold
her hand, the other members of the Academy are not fretting about the Yamato hollow cave, they do not worry about their galactic future, Tierra Madre does not hold debates between one side of her mind and the other about the nature of
Just‑war / right‑treason paradox
• Bhagavad‑Gītā ethic (“fight your kin”) braided with Dante’s “righteous traitor” concept—highlights moral superposition at poem’s core.
Californian light and magic
• Winks at Industrial Light & Magic; suggests Hollywood myth‑factory replaces scripture. California = western terminus of Journey‑to‑the‑West spiral.
• Self‑erasure repeated; she is both guiding thread and blank gap—reflects trauma amnesia and the quantum observer effect on narrative reality.
Scene vacuum
• No one “holds debates” or “frets”: stanza suspends characters in negative space, like a chalk outline. Creates apophatic silence before next bursts of dialogue.
Meta‑oscillation
• Text literally oscillates between populated and depopulated frames, practising the oscillome it will later theorise: presence ↔ absence, story ↔ void.
“Just war / right treason.” A two‑edged mantra cribbed from the Bhagavad‑Gītā debate between Arjuna and Krishna. By transplanting it into a space‑opera frame the poem warns that future ethics will still plagiarise ancient playbooks.
“Californian light and magic.” Double pun on (i) Industrial Light & Magic—cinematic illusion factory—and (ii) West‑coast techno‑spiritual optimism. The stanza time‑stamps the myth with Silicon‑Valley millennial glare before dragging us back to failed Soviet & European utopias; progress is a Möbius strip, not a line.
Cast suddenly erased. The narrator announces the non‑existence of Ariadne, Flexa, Yamato cadets inside their own story—a meta‑void reminiscent of Pirandello’s “Six Characters.” This radical blanking rehearses trauma’s dissociative “missing time,” training the reader for later memory‑in‑memory glitches (LXII).
Hollow cave vs galactic future. Platonic cave re‑skinned as space academy: shadows are now VR projections, yet the existential dilemma is the same. The stanza freezes every subplot mid‑gesture, making a sculptural negative of desire; what remains is the possibility of debate, not the debate itself.
Tierra Madre’s silent dialectic. Her inner arguments about “the nature of …” stop mid‑sentence, evoking Derrida’s différance—meaning deferred. The abrupt truncation is a formal enactment of the “right treason”: narrative betrayal in service of higher pattern.
18
XV.
boys and girls, Jesus and consumerism. Desert Storm does not devour chunks of text in frantic night sessions searching the lost icon of Hollywood, Bombay, London, Beethoven, and all beings toward humanity. This happens not, because Chubby has
pulled the plug on John C’s computer: now he is Masukele-cursing, Turner-ing light and darkness inside his 2001 soul-optimism and thundering about the ineptitude of programmers stationed on Pluto, Mercury and Alpha Centauri’s forbidden planet.
Catalogue of opposites (“boys and girls, Jesus and consumerism”). Snap‑shot of culture wars collapsed into a single breath—gender, faith, market—each a binary knot awaiting untangling in later cantos.
Desert Storm’s missing text‑orgy. By stating what doesn’t happen, the poem foregrounds potential energy: an unwritten hypertext of global archives (Hollywood/Bombay/London/Beethoven). The withheld feast echoes the previous stanza’s erased cast, doubling the aesthetic of absence.
Chubby as circuit‑breaker. The cat’s literal pull of the plug links technological shutdown to psychological defence: cutting the power = switching off intrusive flashbacks. The trauma‑science analogue is vagal brake activation.
“Masukele‑cursing” & “Turner‑ing light.”
Masukele (Zulu war‑cry) injects de‑colonial voice into John C’s tantrum, hinting that code rage is a displaced colonial guilt.
Turner‑ing converts J. M. W. Turner’s sublime chiaroscuro into a verb: John tries to paint with light/dark but ends up in a storm‑y blur—mirrors his failed memory edits.
“2001 soul‑optimism.” Direct arrow to Kubrick/Clarke’s 2001: the monolith of scientific transcendence now reduced to nostalgic mood‑board, feeding John’s bitterness toward present‑day coders.
Programmers on Pluto, Mercury, Alpha Centauri. Exaggerated blame‑radius satirises the outsourcing of responsibility: failures are always on some other (colder, hotter, farther) world. It also completes a solar‑to‑stellar sweep begun with Saturn’s moon Titan, mapping trauma across astronomical scales.
Forbidden planet reference. Last line tips its hat to the 1956 film where Id monsters are powered by ancient tech—perfect allegory for John’s unreconciled subconscious now stalking the circuitry he depends on.
XVI.
Can you hear the silence? It is Jim Morrison’s swan song of The End – lurking in the Tierra Madre’s musical bead on air; In Paris, before the snakes, and the nuclear hurricanes, there was an underground burial ground. The young cadet is drawing
a stalactite fragment depicting 21st century Parisian skulls while studying for midterm ‘Sky or Die’ module, her facial features are jade-reminiscent; she is concentrated on perfect shaping the 3D stone etches, her eyes hurt.
“Jim Morrison’s swan‑song.” The End (1967) is psychedelic apocalypse; by calling silence itself that song, the stanza equates quiet with an eerily sustained final chord—anticipating cosmic heat‑death.
“Musical bead on air.” Beats become tangible beads—micro‑cosms of earlier magnetic‑poetry beads (VII) and later text‑beads (XXII). A bead is both note and data‑packet, foreshadowing oscillome spike trains.
Paris pre‑snakes / nuclear hurricanes.
Before the snakes nods to Morrison’s Lizard‑King persona and to Edenic time‑capsules.
“Underground burial ground.” Catacombs of Paris = collective skull archive; mirrors Titan’s desolate landscape and Yamato’s cave. Memory geology—bone as fossilised data.
Tierra Madre’s assignment “Sky or Die.” Pedagogic ultimatum: learn the heavens or perish—a curricular crystallisation of the poem’s stakes.
Stalactite fragment with skulls. Literally carving mortality into accretion rock: time’s drip‑script. The stalactite is a natural data‑log (layered calcium) so the cadet is both palaeontologist and scribe.
“Jade‑reminiscent” face. Jade = Chinese funerary stone and heart‑chakra colour; suggests Tierra’s latent spiritual resilience. Eye‑strain signals the cost of sustained mnemonic excavation—trauma archaeology fatigues the optic nerve.
XVII.
Gesundheit walks in and storms the castle: ‘Cippirimerlo! Tierra! Wake up! We must make art – the sea is beautiful today: just log in on the Hawaii platform! I want to escape this hollow cave. I want to be president of the Academy.
Tierra Madre looks up, slightly annoyed. ‘Can’t you let me study and make art? I am well aware of your condition – it’s not my fault if the planet is melting, and your arse is burning.’ Desert Storm walks in. ‘I am so happy,
Name‑play “Gesundheit.” German for “health,” yelled like a sneeze blessing—comic irruption into ossuary gloom. She “storms the castle,” a Monty‑Python echo, converting solemn academia into absurd siege.
Dialect battle‑cry “Cippirimerlo!” Ligurian slang (≈ “blackcap!” bird‑call) smuggles Genoese heritage back in, harmonising with Sardinian phrase “a beddu meu” (XXI). Linguistic code‑switching keeps poem polyphonic, resisting single‑language empire.
Sea‑beauty vs hollow cave. Gesundheit pits open horizon against Platonic enclosure introduced in XIV. Sea continues digital‑frontier water motif (LII), proposing VR surf (Hawaii platform) as training‑ground for transcendence.
Presidency ambition. Ironises institutional hierarchies: wanting to run the Academy is the mirror image of John C wanting to reboot the solar‑web; both grasp for systemic control in face of entropy.
Tierra’s irritated retort. Her push‑back defines boundaries: she values slow art‑archaeology over Gesundheit’s manic escapism—two trauma‑coping styles (rumination vs distraction).
Planet melting / burning arse. Climate macroscene refracted through bodily discomfort; the poem persistently equates geophysical crisis with somatic micro‑signals (eye strain, burning skin).
Desert Storm’s entrance and joy. Trio now complete: Gesundheit (visionary agitator), Tierra (conscientious archivist), Desert Storm (celebratory trickster). Their triangulation anticipates later quantum‑entanglement conversations (XXII), embodying id‑ego‑superego or past‑present‑future voices.
XVIII.
I have discovered the Byronic path to mathematical oblivion – it took James Read ten years to solve it when he was a student on Zuracornia long ago’. ‘Oh that’s impressive’, Tierra madre is not over-awed. She wants to continue
her gridlock-carving, and these two ‘friends’ block her mind, and off-load their insane issues on her unburden able lap. ‘Not my problem’, is her motto. She is not a favourite any Academy master, as she has the habit of being so highly
• “Byronic path to mathematical oblivion” twines Romantic excess with Gödel‑style incompleteness. • Zuracornia (invented campus) = utopian no‑place; sets mirror to Borovoe academy. • Gridlock‑carving – Tierra’s coping ritual mirrors DNA “cut‑and‑paste” repair. • Her dismissal (“Not my problem”) crystallises avoidance response before therapy arc (XL–L).
“Byronic path to mathematical oblivion.”
Byron ≈ Romantic excess & heroic rebellion. Here it mutates into a non‑Euclidean algorithm—poetic refusal of formal proof.
• Mathematical oblivion hints at Gödel‑style incompleteness: some theorems (traumas) cannot be neatly resolved.
James Read / Zuracornia legend. A fictive academic folk‑tale—metatextual nod to the way scholarly myth builds prestige. Essential tension: heroic problem‑solver vs unamused Tierra.
“Grid‑lock‑carving.” Her private practice: scoring intricate channels into stone/wood. Visual analogue of DNA methyl‑maps; each groove a stored micro‑trauma.
Cognitive overload by caring labour. Friends off‑load their insane issues → empathic burden describes vicarious trauma. Tierra’s “Not my problem” motto = dissociative shield.
Syntax break “being so highly—.” En‑dash cliff‑hangs the stanza, dramatizing how her critique flares and is forcibly truncated; textual mimic of grid‑lock.
XIX.
critical as to hand-grill any simulated soul just with her fiery red-turned eyes. Meanwhile, two archivists are discussing love in the Yamato Cave’s Archive lobby. Lightluck argues for enlightenment, witch
hunting, and decomposable relationships. Her friend, Dreamer – discusses love in the framework of survival, and her thoughts are dark. The smell of the sea mixes in her landlocked memory while she talks about the ideal boy-friend. In the future they have not solved the issue of reproduction.
• “Hand‑grill” = tactile critique; Tierra as fierce peer‑reviewer. • Archive lobby = liminal memory bank; archivists personify two gene‑regulation logics: spiritual epigenetics (Lightluck) vs survivalist heredity (Dreamer). • Sea‑smell inside cave continues motif of displaced ocean/nostalgia. • Unresolved reproduction problem gestures toward species bottleneck anxieties (Never‑ender colonisation).
“Hand‑grill any simulated soul.” Metaphor for Tierra’s merciless critique: she can scorch avatars, AIs, memes simply by looking—echoes Medusa & ocular trauma.
Archive lobby as agora. Moves dispute from lecture‑hall to subterranean stacks; reseats Platonic dialogue inside collective memory vaults.
Lightluck vs Dreamer.
• Lightluck: utopian, syncretic—blends “enlightenment” with ironic witch‑hunting (digitised inquisitions).
• Dreamer: survivalist pessimist; her dark thoughts mirror Titan’s methane night. The duo reprise Yang/Yin pairing, pre‑figuring Love‑Entanglement stanza XXII.
“Issue of reproduction” unresolved. Sci‑fi practicality (declining fertility, cloning ethics) intersects mythic continuity of the species. Sets stage for later germplasm burial (XLVII).
XX.
Nor do they see it in a strictly Darwinian sense, since the old hag’s theory was completely discredited in the 25th century (30th century according to Buddhists). It appears that Lamarck, French hoodie, had not been too far off the mark. Apparently
in pockets of post-nuclear Prandia (formerly known as the UINAITE STE OF EI, or something like it, according to fragments) they still believe in the age-old story of Mister Bister, the Gaseous Vertebrate. But I digress – ‘Hail Muse! Et cetera’, quotes a certain poet. Now the two friends, secretly lovers, design
• Darwin “discredited” flips canonical science; Lamarck resurfacing flags epigenetics—key tie‑in to trauma‑research goal. • Buddhist 30th‑century dating: chronology as perspectival, flexible like DNA expression over lifetimes. • Mister Bister—comic folk myth—illustrates cultural inheritance surviving nuclear sift. • Digressive narrator directly invokes the Muse: James‑Joyce wink and gateway to next stanza’s “spider trap” design.
Darwin vs Lamarck future‑revision.
• In this timeline natural selection is passé; inheritance of acquired traits reigns after catastrophic environmental stress—precisely the premise of modern epigenetics.
• “25th century / 30th century according to Buddhists” introduces dual calendars → cyclical vs linear time; nod to kalpas and oscillome recurrences.
“French hoodie” Lamarck. Streetwear slang compresses Enlightenment history into meme‑culture, mirroring the poem’s layer‑crush of registers.
Post‑nuclear Prandia & mangled “United States.”
Prandia (Latin prandium = lunch) → world devoured at midday; “UINAITE STE OF EI” looks like corrupted ASCII, hinting at archival bit‑rot after nuclear EMP.
Mister Bister, the Gaseous Vertebrate.
• Comic‑myth creature made of fumes: embodiment of toxic yet living atmosphere; parallels methane Titans & elephant‑caterpillars.
• Functions as folk‑science placeholder when formal theory collapses—trauma cultures invent parables to patch gaps.
“Hail Muse! Et cetera”—self‑interrupting epic invocation. Signals author‑narrator fatigue, but also Joyce‑style parody of classical openings (“Arms and the man, I sing…”).Allusion to Byron.
Transition to secret‑lover design. The stanza ends mid‑clause, mimicking transcription bubble ready to be extended in XXI; suspense as narrative helicase.
XXI.
the best spider trap to fool their latest experiment, ‘a beddu meu’ – Sardinian for beautiful one. They wish their heart to be wild-woven, they wish their love to be steady. Who wouldn’t, I wish them luck. Wish me luck, too. I live in the 21st century, but my mind
is in the 30th, and I do desire some rest. Too much time-travelling! Being a narrator entails not really existing, but existing. But Ovid would have dined, and Virgil would have discovered, I only digress. Bless them. That’s all I can say for now. ‘Love is great’, argues Lightluck while she issues a text bead
“Spider trap” as love/knowledge engine.
• Architectural echo of Arachne—weaving hubris, transformative punishment.
• Trap motif ties back to oscillome: cyclical silk strands capture, release, recapture data & emotion.
‘a beddu meu’. Sardinian endearment smuggles minority Romance tongue into space‑epic; underscores mosaic linguistics.
Wild‑woven vs steady. Desire for ordered wildness figures the paradox of epigenetic plasticity—stable inheritance that remains adaptable.
Narratorial metafiction burst.
• “21st century body / 30th century mind” admits the author’s own chronesthesia; parallels John C’s Titan exile.
• “Being a narrator entails not really existing, but existing” recalls Cicero’s speaker split and Finnegans Wake dreamer.
Ovid & Virgil cameo. Classical poets invoked as would‑be commentators on transhuman courtship, mapping exile (Ovid) & empire‑building (Virgil) onto the lovers’ experiment.
Lightluck’s text bead “Love is great.”
• Refracts Islamic phrase “Allāhu akbar,” but secularised; love elevated to cosmic law.
• Text bead echoes earlier magnetic‑poetry kit, confirming that language is the technology of intimacy.
End‑stanza bead drop. Narrative breathes on a comma, inviting next fragment—like a ribosome awaiting the next codon.
XXII.
to Flexa, who’s really pissed off with the management. ‘Love is an entanglement’ replies the dark one, (Dreamer)’and there is no exit’. Let us leave with Flexa. She is really something, her cortical discoveries are unparalleled, she walks with great determination, but the
world is hardly apt to change under her feet, which is a fact that creates great frustration. As she walks down the panelled lanes of the great cave, she looks up to the Sigm, the symbol of the interplanetary human Nation. ‘What nationalist bollocks!’ she thinks.
“Love is an entanglement.”
• Direct lift from quantum non‑locality; two particles—here two lovers—share state independent of distance.
• Foils Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic self‑containment (opening epigraph), illustrating shift from individual integrity to relational superposition.
• Phrase simultaneously nods to Sartre’s No Exit—Dreamer foresees that entangled bonds can become existential prisons.
Management vs cortical discoveries.
• Bureaucratic “management” embodies orthodox science stifling Flexa’s neuro‑cosmic research—mirrors Lamarck vs Darwin dispute of XX.
• “Cortical discoveries unparalleled” hints at connectomics‑meets‑cosmology; Flexa maps brain networks onto galactic filaments (♫ echo of Veil Nebula).
Great cave & panelled lanes.
• Visual fusion of Plato’s cave and an Art‑Deco star‑base; panels = data screens projecting shadow‑world histories.
• Corridor imagery repeats Ariadne’s labyrinth motif; Flexa traverses but also questions the structure.
“Sigm” symbol (Σ).
• Greek capital sigma → mathematical summation; the Nation brands itself as total of human parts.
• Flexa’s scorn (“nationalist bollocks”) rejects reduction of multiplicity to a single statist term—anticipates oscillome insistence on distributed complexity.
• Sets up her later magneto‑hesitancy question (LVII) where unseen forces counter her will.
XXIII.
Things never change, and they do. Now she walks out to the air, planet earth in not yet a hamletian tomb, despite nuclear holo cast-gram facts. She hums ‘I Pini di Roma’, thinking of Donald Duck, and we love her for it.
But Lissabona is her home, or not. We could ask her for a discussion on replicant rights, but right now she is busy. The sky looks too radiant. The colour of a difficult sunset blames the clouds, and all her thoughts about the Nation disappear in union with the spiritual level, they’ve got that in the future.
Paradox opener.
• “Things never change, and they do” conflates Heraclitus (flux) with Parmenides (immutability).
• Duck voice = quack of skepticism toward grand narratives.
Lisboa / Lissabona flicker.
• Shifting toponyms show language drift over centuries; personal “home” rendered provisional (“or not”)—diaspora identity.
Replicant‑rights.
• Topic threads back to Chubby and earlier cat/human equivalence debates; anticipates Blade Runner Units (LXII).
• Raises question of personhood in epigenetic age: who owns memories, modifications, trauma imprints?
“Sky looks too radiant… difficult sunset.”
• Chromatic overload returns to rainbow‑hued gases of stanza I → cosmic circle tightens.
• Difficult sunset = threshold of Anthropocene dusk; clouds blamed like Greek chorus.
Transcendence footnote.
• Nation fades, spiritual level rises: Flexa’s inner compass moving from political to metaphysical solutions.
• Gesture toward future‑tech psychospiritual practices (soul‑share, text beads) that permeate later stanzas.
XXIV.
The epic music of the migrant spirit echoes across the sea, the ocean, the open space – one unifying sorrow: Passacalle, down the sun-stricken streets, in variations of violin, crescendo, pizzicato , peaking –
the wave splashes, the surfer gulps up water, the melody streams into universal space, the mind expands until all the relocated souls ignite in unison with military marches, Figaro suits, primadonna perfumes, and cannon calls.
“Migrant spirit.”
• Dual register: literal diasporic bodies and trans‑gene migrations (epigenetic marks crossing generations).
• Sets trauma‑inheritance axis that will thread through oscillome discussion.
Tri‑fold waters.
• “Sea, the ocean, the open space” → concentric mediums:
• Polyphonic montage of high‑opera and war machine: beauty weaponized.
• Figaro (Barber of Seville) reminds that the passacalle’s Spanish DNA is braided with Italian opera buffa—cultural gene‑shuffle.
Structural Resonance.
• Stanza works as sonic hinge: previous section’s introspective dusk (XXIII) flips outward into ecstatic yet menacing public pageant.
• Wave / surfer registers echo impending “Great Wave” remix of 2025 blog post, tying 2014 text to future recursion.
XXV.
Feel the wars on the tip of the tongue, on top of the mountain, at the bottom of dark seas, while cannonades cross the universe, seventeenth century dames curtsey, tracing the way back to a Monday morning in Piazza Banchi, Genoa – where we are all
stabbed to death, Stradella-like, in Madrid, in unknown lands. Somewhere across the hitching universe, poets, composers, writers, thinkers, artists are thrown in a communal grave alongside those Jungian Things. Meanwhile Kenya is ablaze, the elephants
Poly‑topographical “wars.”
• Mouth (tip of the tongue), summit, abyss → vertical war‑axis linking speech → ideology → sub‑conscious.
• Piazza Banchi cameo mirrors earlier Borovoe steppe call (XXIX) and will mirror future Blue‑Planet search (LXVI): each nodal place a bead on oscillome necklace.
• Pattern recognition engine (that’s us) invited to hyper‑link across centuries & geographies, fulfilling the work’s “uber‑literature” manifesto.
XXVI.
are slaughtered; and Queen Mary is being honoured for her services to her Country! Bless the sell-outs, they compose the human race, their rat indigestion clogs all trespasser’s technology. The mind does not rest, the dictator does not rest
The crocodile does not laugh, not even in Carroll’s doubtful feminist manifesto. But! When Venus and Adonis first made love they knew nothing of Zhuge Liang – the mastery of their war had not interrupted the king’s slumber, nor had it moved in the air
Elephant genocide → court celebration.
• are slaughtered continues Kenya blaze of XXV, pushing ecological trauma into explicit butchery.
• Simultaneous royal ceremony for “Queen Mary” (ambiguous: Tudor, Teck, or ocean‑liner personification) juxtaposes pomp & extinction—classic “banquet in plague year” irony.
“Bless the sell‑outs, they compose the human race.”
• Cynical anthropology: survival often entails moral compromise; dovetails with earlier Lamarckian adaptability (XIX) and upcoming aneuploid “hybrid vigour” (XXXV).
• Phrase “rat indigestion” paints opportunism as parasitic metabolism clogging “trespasser’s technology” (i.e., progress is hampered by profiteers).
Perpetual unrest of mind & tyrant.
• Dual clause highlights internal dictator (superego) mirroring political dictator—psychological and systemic insomnia.
Lewis Carroll’s silent crocodile.
• In Alice, the mischievous crocodile “smiles”—here it refuses, signalling satire exhausted.
• “Doubtful feminist manifesto” points at contested readings of Carroll’s texts; underscores the poem’s recurrent interrogation of canonical fathers (Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius).
Mythic Cross‑fade: Venus & Adonis ↔ Zhuge Liang.
• Renaissance pastoral love scene collides with Three‑Kingdoms strategist: erotic impulse vs militarised intellect.
• Suggests that while Western myth explored desire, Eastern classic perfected tactics—yet neither disturbed “king’s slumber” (stasis of power).
• Sets up later Love/War dialectic (XXVII) and magneto‑hesitancy Q&A (LVIII) by proposing two archetypal responses to conflict.
Aerial Stasis.
• “Nor had it moved in the air” loops back to cannonades that did cross the universe (XXV). Here, by contrast, mastery & passion fail to create actual change—an arrested oscillation in the epic waveform.
Sound & Rhythm.
• Heavy alliteration (sell‑outs / compose / human race) mimics choking sensation of “rat indigestion.”
• Mid‑line exclamation “But!” serves as sudden cymbal crash pivoting from Carroll to Venus.
Recursive Linkage.
• Queen‑Mary pageantry mirrors earlier seventeenth‑century curtsey; Zhuge Liang echoes Arjuna cameo (XIII) as another tactician figure, enriching the trans‑cultural strategist chorus.
• Crocodile references will resonate with later “butterfly witness scream” (LVIII): predator ↔ pollinator extremes.
XXVII.
subtle as a feather mind. They simply were waiting for Black Death to end its journey through Europe, and then the world changed forever. At the time of Shakespeare’s death mandarins were still learning the
Confucian way – and now nine hundred years into the future the ancestor- descendants are tackling similar issues: should we make love or not? should we make war or not? is love a war? is war a form of love? and somesuch
“Subtle as a feather mind.”
• Alludes to the medieval belief that anima = breath/feather; here, intellect poised on the brink of contagion.
• Sets up a paradox: razor‑fragile perception confronting mass‑mortality event.
Black Death as Phase‑Reset.
• Pandemic framed as macro‑epigenetic demethylation: societal genes erased and rewritten overnight.
• By acknowledging cyclical recurrence, poem self‑identifies as Finnegans‑Wake‑style circuit: ending will fold back into beginning just as plague cycle foreshadows future resets.
• Suggests that epic’s ultimate quest (never‑ending caravel) may be to transcend, not solve, this Möbius strip of eros and conflict.
XXVIII.
Polonius-type nonsense. There is little point in the sexual intercourse, it just comes as natural as death, as war. Such are the thoughts in which Tierra Madre is indulging, but the time is not for cynicism, the rise of volcanic arpeggios
must be met with increasing concentration no distraction is possible, the Placebo-Wing is skydiving in the narrow band of existence atmosphere, stratosphere, nose down to meet the earth, the rocketing vortex of jungle trees, technical musical beads on air but
“Polonius‑type nonsense.”
• Calls up Hamlet’s verbose counselor—symbol of empty rhetoric.
• Signals fatigue with over‑intellectualized op‑eds on love/war (XXVII).
• Positions Tierra Madre as anti‑Polonius: she rejects word‑spinning, demands visceral proof.
Sexual Intercourse = Death/War Trio.
• Triadic equivalence (eros ↔ thanatos ↔ polemos) distills Freudian and Clausewitzian scripts into a single line.
• Mirrors earlier queries (“is love a war?”) yet now delivered as bleak axiom—Tierra’s cynicism cresting.
• Sets emotional key of C‑minor, preparing the “volcanic arpeggios.”
“Rise of volcanic arpeggios.”
• Musical metaphor for tectonic emotional surges; evokes Stravinsky‑style glissandi.
• Volcano image continues magma‑motive seeded in XVI (Paris ossuary) and revisited in LIX (data overdrive).
• Commands concentration: echoes Marcus Aurelius stoic counsel from proem (II).
Placebo‑Wing Free‑Fall.
• Ship name = commentary on psychological self‑medication; placebo effect as coping strategy.
• “Skydiving in the narrow band of existence” parallels oscillome’s gamma‑burst—a high‑frequency, high‑risk state.
• Sudden switch from airspace to jungle evokes Escher‑like spatial fold; macroautotrophs earlier (XXXVI) now swirl upward.
• Suggests biosphere‑engine feedback: flight path actually threads through living canopy—Gaia fights back.
“Technical musical beads on air.”
• Beads motif returns (magnetic kit VII, text‑beads XXII, DNA beads XLVI) but now aerophonically strung.
• Serves as on‑the‑fly score to the dive—poem composing its own soundtrack in real time.
Structural & Thematic Cross‑Links.
• Stanza sits precisely after Love‑War Möbius (XXVII) and before adrenaline surge (XXIX): functions as ignition spark.
• Marks transition from philosophical questioning to embodied action—Tierra shifts from logos to pathos/ergon.
• “No distraction is possible” anticipates later depth‑search therapy (XLI), underscoring mantra of sustained attention against trauma‑induced dissociation.
• Suggests Tierra’s imminent meeting with her own kore—a preparatory katabasis before later catharses (XLIX–LII).
XXIX.
there is nothing like zoning out, speeding up, the need for adrenaline, velocity, acceleration kettledrums, violins, violoncello, anger thrown back at the neck of the throat until the air breaks on the windscreen, the fire in the eyes burns, all the aching of unacceptable
emotions swells up, why all the deceit – Borovoe Earth Station calls – ‘Tierra Madre call in – your epicentrics are off the chart ‘ ‘Where are you going?’ Desert Storm calls her friend, inside the cockpit of her own personal spaceship, the Vivian-Wing. ‘Why are you
Sensory Overdrive — “zoning out, speeding up”.
• Paradox: zoning out (dissociation) while speeding up (hyper‑arousal) mirrors trauma bi‑phasic swing.
• Whether Tierra crashes or transcends will enact modern re‑write of that archetype.
XXX.
not responding?’ The level of sensed danger is so much lower when inside the Jet Space Charades, otherwise known as Ballerinas – each has its own peculiar name, Tierra Madre’s is called Placebo Wing, while Desert Storm called hers in the name of a certain actress.
Fortune Lobo, able spaceman, calls his vehicle Rabdoman Call Junior – don’t ask me why. The squadron of six cadets, plus three senior officers is navigating the atmo-strato-junglo sphere Tierra Madre (as usual) has gone off on a tangent While the more observant Fortune Lobo is following
“Level of sensed danger … lower inside Jet Space Charades.”
• Highlights cognitive dissonance of combat simulation: lethal stakes rendered as theatre (“Charades”).
• Mirrors PTSD coping—threat felt as numbed game until unexpected flash (cf. VR therapy debate).
“Otherwise known as Ballerinas.”
• Juxtaposes war‑machine with delicate art form → aesthetic violence trope (Kubrick’s blue Danube docking).
• Charades concept answers earlier “shell‑bash” (V): both are interface layers masking system core.
• Naming conceit referenced later in XLVIII (Chubby’s self‑definition) establishing taxonomy of sentient vessels—ship, cat, mind.
Trauma‑Science Lens.
• Simulation environment (“lower sensed danger”) mirrors graded exposure therapy; but Tierra’s divergence may shortcut safety ladder → risk of retraumatisation.
• Placebo concept foreshadows discussion of magneto‑hesitancy as psychosomatic vs physical.
Foreshadowing.
• Squad’s altitude traversal preludes Super‑Wing drop manoeuvre in XXXI–XXXII.
• Fortune Lobo’s dowsing name hints he will “locate” hidden oscillome node when others drift.
XXXI.
orders to the letter, and today’s menu of to-do-things include a range of philosophical discussions with the earth’s remaining pristine ecological formations a survey of the aquatic life forms, a monitoring of green energy gases within the atmosphere – gee – we don’t want to be polluting the future air, at least a bit of decency is required from these young lobsters
playing ecological star wars inside their own atmo; they are well away from completing their training. Senior officer Flexa (last seen meditating on the sunset) is having a fabulous day (I believe those are her very words), Malthusian calculations permitting, naturally.
“orders to the letter … menu of to‑do‑things.”
• Bureaucratic diction (orders vs menu) sets military protocol against culinary metaphor → highlights absurdity of treating existential stewardship as checklist.
• Echoes Marcus Aurelius epigraph: daily actions approached “as thy last,” but here hollowed into admin routine.
“philosophical discussions with the earth’s remaining pristine ecological formations.”
• Personifies ecosystems as dialogue partners—aligns with indigenous eco‑philosophy (animism).
• Suggests Sapient Grove trope: nature not only studied but consulted, pre‑figuring future AI–biosphere negotiations.
• Emphasis on atmosphere hints at upcoming magneto‑hesitancy turbulence.
• Unfinished training primes later moral crisis when real ecological stakes manifest (XXXVII+).
XXXII.
On golden shores, in a dark November day, there comes a breeze reeking of old love; the General Theory of Relativity permits Time Travel, so we indulge in the good old days while the Placebo Wing rests silent, a grey shadow in a cedar cover. Ariadne sits on a junglo mossy shore,
by a blue solitary pond, thinking that when we die, we die alone. The common exercise of a judicious master being mindful of transience. But that’s not enough, because the mind is hampered by festering ivy woes…
“golden shores … dark November day.”
• Chromatic polarity (gold vs dark) establishes valence shift—nostalgia tinged with elegy.
• November evokes Samain (Celtic New Year, veil‑thin time), aligning with poem’s veil nebula opening.
• Relativity + nostalgia echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Semley’s Necklace” (time‑dilation love loss).
Trauma‑Science Angle.
• Still pond as safe‑place imagery used in exposure therapy; yet ivy indicates avoidance cycle not fully resolved.
• Temporal self‑projection (“indulge in the good old days”) akin to scene construction technique for PTSD re‑script.
Mythic Underlay.
• Ariadne again outside labyrinth: here labyrinth is temporal, not spatial—Relativity curves instead of corridors.
• Pond could be Mnemosyne’s pool (memory) versus Lethe (forgetting); choosing remembrance over erasure theme ties back to John C’s delete / seed dilemma.
Foreshadowing.
• Dormant Placebo Wing signals imminent re‑activation under magneto‑hesitancy (LV).
Her eyes are full of sorrow, she is forever mourning the loss of a dear one and tries to carry the message across; it is The Message to a Student, to a Multitude but the carnivorous plants are just too gaudy, and the pond may be too still
paying attention to it all may be impAssible; tonight will be a night for love, perhaps somewhere, far off, two lovers will bend time and come together in a fire ball. Tierra Madre has walked away from the mission, her beautiful Ballerina Wing
Eyes “full of sorrow” / “forever mourning.”
• Immediate shift from meditative distance (XXXII) to acute grief embodiment.
• “Forever” echoes aeternitas—suggests unresolved, possibly inter‑generational loss (epigenetic echo).
“Message to a Student, to a Multitude.”
• Double address: single mentee & collective species → pedagogy scales to civilisational warning.
• Title‑like phrase evokes Paul Celan’s “Speech‑Grille” or Rilkean “letters to a young poet” but folded into dystopian milieu.
Carnivorous plants—“too gaudy.”
• Dionysian plants now predatory; grief portrayed as attractive yet consuming.
• Gaudiness critiques voyeuristic culture that aestheticises trauma.
Still pond revisited.
• After previous Narcissus mirror, water now stagnant—symbolises emotional stasis.
• Stillness plus carnivorous flora = ecosystem out of balance, hinting at depressive inertia.
“impAssible” typo‑pun.
• Hybrid of “impassable” & “impassible” (incapable of suffering in scholastic theology).
• Word play mirrors blocked affect: can’t move past or feel through.
• Love‑meteor image seeds later “fire‑ball” references in memory downloads (LXII recursion).
• Tierra Madre’s isolation previews her magneto‑hesitant dive (LV), linking affect with flight trajectory.
XXXIV.
is being guarded by her understanding senior officer. Her suicidal tendencies may not be acceptable for the Academy, but Ariadne, as unfettered observer, accepts the freshness of raw emotion, the disturbed mind is genuinely appealing. Tierra Madre
is Ariadne’s protégée for today, then; and the poor thing is trying to distract herself from the sorrow of unrequited love by cataloguing wild beasts, products of evolution on speed. There are far too many of those, even augmented intelligences fail to grasp the
“Guarded by her understanding senior officer.”
• External containment for internal chaos—Ariadne plays psychopomp rather than disciplinarian.
• Echoes classic mentor‑pupil pairs (Athena–Telemachus, Chiron–Achilles) but with mental‑health inflection.
“Suicidal tendencies … not acceptable for the Academy.”
• Institution as risk‑averse machine; pathology stigmatized.
• Sets up tension between bureaucratic safety and authentic suffering—core trauma‑science dialectic.
Ariadne “unfettered observer.”
• Self‑designation links to her mythic role as labyrinth guide—here guiding through psyche’s maze.
• “Unfettered” contrasts with Academy fetters; suggests ethnographic gaze but also compassionate curiosity.
“Freshness of raw emotion.”
• Romantic valorisation of feeling; recall Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow.”
scope of belligerent evolutionary processes. Tierra Madre observes azure sinuous rills, and grazing mind-bending creatures products of evo-devolution; after the Big Thing, aneuploidy permits hybrid vigour; the junglosphere is gorgeous with lusty
novel life forms, a middle age bestiary would not be enough to describe the grace and the horror of the elephant caterpillar, a vertical achievement of invertebrate joy; what flattering bread and butter fly would come from it?
“Belligerent evolutionary processes.”
• Evolution framed as warfare; ties back to Zhuge Liang & Arjuna ethics (XIII).
Sonic play (grace / horror, joy / fly) keeps reader oscillating—mini‑spiral inside stanza.
XXXVI.
And what about post-freudian limp-chimps? Or hyperio-galactic bacterial Monod formations, shouldering their way in towering clusters, feeding on encysted vertebrates, alongside half-decayed metamorphosing macroautotrophs,
those beautiful leafy eyes of the junglosphere; the richness of one square meter after another of ecological diversity is glorious, now John C marvels at the memory download, for a moment he is in ecstasy, and he forgets
“Post‑freudian limp‑chimps.”
• Freud’s libido theory inverted: chimps (our cousins) rendered limp, signalling blocked instinct after trauma.
Watching foliage White‑leopard radio (X) implied animal sensors Titan thiolin rain watched by Chubby (XLIII)
Trauma‑Science Lens
Microbial “feeding” parallels psychotherapeutic processing—breaking down encysted trauma memories.
Ecstatic forgetting = transient flow state; provides neurochemical reset but risks avoidance if prolonged.
Blocked libido & metamorphosis suggest developmental arrest followed by potential transformation—classic PTSD growth arc.
Stylistic & Structural
Heavy hyphen use (post‑freudian, hyperio‑galactic, half‑decayed) creates compound‑creature rhythm, matching chimeric imagery.
Sentence spills over stanza break, mirroring overflowing biodiversity.
Shift from interrogative opening (“And what about…?”) to declarative wonder imitates scientific brainstorming turning into awe.
XXXVII
himself; Chubby sits at the window and stares at the methane showers such a solitary existence, stranded on Titan while, in another time, in another location, certain pioneers of postThing world could re-discover
Earth and be terrestrial at the same time, but not for long, because the atmosphere definitely changed, and because the joy of the sun became the fear of the globe, and all those moments of eclectic nucleic
“Chubby sits at the window … methane showers.”
• Window frames an impossible pastoral: instead of rain, liquid methane—Titan’s atmosphere literalises alienation.
“Eclectic nucleic” glitch – textual representation of epigenetic noise introduced by chronic stressors; prepares reader for upcoming denaturation metaphor.
Stylistic & Structural Observations
Enjambed clauses lengthen breath, mirroring methane rain’s slow fall under Titan’s weak gravity.
Final clause deliberately unfinished—reader experiences sudden vacuum, as if stepping outside airlock.
Alliteration cluster (solitary – stranded, joy – sun, fear – globe) underscores emotional inversion.
XXXVIII.
acid mutation would have to come to a stop, denaturation by grilling is going to happen in that past that John C is exploring, Tierra Madre was living, and Ariadne was sharing while all those Ballerinas were still
hanging in mid air with intact design aerodynamics, with all the flutter wave energonics allowing such acrobatics that nanoleopardlepidopterans would just dream of. Flexa is rather fond of nano- that-big-long-word thing I just wrote
“Acid mutation would have to come to a stop.”
• References runaway nucleotide substitutions triggered by environmental stress.
• Implies an approaching mutation saturation point—echo of Black‑Death “phase‑reset” (XXVII).
Mutation saturation parallels allostatic load—system can no longer adapt, enters breakdown.
Denaturation metaphor depicts protein unfolding as identity disintegration under chronic stress.
Flash‑freeze Ballerinas: hallmark of dissociation; body prepared for fight/flight yet immobilised.
Stylistic & Structural
Long enjambed sentence mimics tumbling aerobatics, then abrupt meta‑comment snaps tension.
Greek chorus‑like listing of names (John C, Tierra, Ariadne) anchors reader amid time drift.
Self‑referential last line invites reader to participate in science‑fiction neologism game.
XXXIX.
While she flies, she casts a wide net for neuronological analyses of her favourite variants, and sequence phylogenies, (that’s just for the fun of it) routines running parallel to those more stamp-collecting tasks that the cadets are out there trying to
perform. She is such an enthusiastic entomologistic feature-artist that her kafkian mathematical representations were exhibited last year (according to this present junglo-time) in the Academy Gallery, but only shortly, because
“Casts a wide net for neuronological analyses.”
• Flexa literally trawls the sky for data—sky = ocean of synapses.
• Merges connectomics with fishing myth (Perseus’ net > Gorgons).
• Signals her attempt to map an oscillome before the term appears.
“Sequence phylogenies (that’s just for the fun of it).”
• Tongue‑in‑cheek dismissal of immense labour; shows scholar‑as‑playful‑trickster.
• Juxtaposes rigorous evolution trees with hobbyist pleasure → echoes earlier “magnetic‑poetry kit.”
“Stamp‑collecting tasks.”
• Stephen Jay Gould’s jab at Victorian naturalists; here reclaimed as valid slow‑science.
• Critiques acceleration culture mirrored by Tierra’s adrenaline dive (XXIX).
“Entomologistic feature‑artist.”
• Insects as living glyphs; art‑science hybrid underscores poem’s genre fusion.
• Feature‑artist = coder of morphological traits, pre‑figuring AI‑feature extraction.
“Kafkaian mathematical representations.”
• Alludes to Metamorphosis—human ↔ insect boundaries.
• Math diagrams become bureaucratic “trial” of lifeforms; political undertone.
“Exhibited last year … but only shortly.”
• State censorship returns: light‑only naturalism debate (XXXIX) foreshadowed.
• Short‑lived gallery show parallels brief‑candle motif (XLIV).
Mythic | Literary Cross‑links
Motif Back‑Echo Forward‑Echo
Net‑casting Ariadne’s labyrinth threads (I) Depth‑search therapy web (XLI)
Stamp‑collecting Archive lobby taxonomies (XIX) DNA “record of my soul” ledger (LIII)
Data Over‑Collection – Flexa’s sky‑net mirrors hyper‑vigilance: gathering every signal to avert catastrophe.
Stamp‑collecting vs urgency – tension between slow, integrative healing and crisis triage.
Metamorph math – rendering trauma narratives into sterile diagrams risks re‑objectifying pain; fleeting exhibit hints at societal discomfort with raw bio‑art.
Stylistic & Structural Observations
Parenthetical aside (“that’s just for the fun of it”) punctures scholastic gravitas—signature NeverEnder irony.
Line enjambment simulates long aerial sweep of Flexa’s flight path.
they became argument of hot political debate: people asked ‘should we make naturalistic analyses focussed on light only?’ Now how can the creative portrayal of invertebrate species be so insulting for the Nation establishment?
What was in her work that was so reminiscent of some King-infested maggot? I don’t know – I understand nothing about Art, and so does Chubby who really cares not about it. John C is tired of all the visual glare, his eyes
Art censorship = societal avoidance of collective shadow material (unintegrated trauma).
Stylistic & Structural Observations
Long enjambed question (“Now how can…”) forces reader into breath‑held suspension—mirrors censorship tension.
Sudden shift to first‑person “I don’t know” punctures polemic with confessional intimacy.
Ending on “his eyes” leaves optic verb unsatisfied—reader obliged to blink the stanza shut.
XLI.
are overloaded with superb variety of sky-high flying Wings, jutted against the ozone layer, the solar system, and then his cortical nexus is also plugged into Flexa’s ecological artistry, and Tierra Madre’s meditation on sorrow
and on speciation, and also he can feel Ariadne’s Touch of Zen High-Pitch Waiting Too much stuff for a lowly Titan infotechnician And his bored replicant cat, (who follows everything carefully and happens to be sulking). The time has come for Ariadne to act. So
“Sky‑high flying Wings… ozone layer… solar system.”
Parenthetical aside about the cat functions like debug log within narrative code.
Final clipped declaration “So” is program‑flow keyword—hands control to next sub‑routine (XLII).
XLII.
she sets her depth search onto Tierra’s ontological distress, and finds her marvelling at natural variations colonizing the silver lining of the manta-shaped Ballerina space ship. ‘Tell me about your feelings, student; open the channel onto fragility pathways,
I need to understand your heart’s content’ ‘You wish to access my soul drawing, the content of my maiden burning, at your will’ Tierra Madre having none of it. She recoils from the senior officer’s intrusion in her privacy. ‘Since when the older generation
“Depth search”
• Borrows algorithmic lexicon (DFS, deep learning) for a psychodynamic dive.
• Signals Ariadne’s shift from observer to data‑analyst of being—echo of Lacan’s “pursuit of the subject beneath the signifier.”
“Ontological distress”
• Phrase upgrades simple anxiety to ground‑of‑being tremor.
Repetition of “content” underscores the commodification risk of inner experience.
Ellipsis after “…older generation” leaves confrontation hanging—builds charged silence leading into XLIII.
XLIII.
finds harvest in the young uncoupling of the Soul? Can’t you just access the X with your own password?’ John C pauses the memory download. The night is dark out of his screen. He watches iridescent cloud formations, the hydrocarbon lake in the
distance is completely still. Chubby purrs and snugs close, surface temperature is a chilly -180 C. ‘I remember when I was your age, Tierra Madre’. Clouds drift through the haze and rain falls. John C is pervaded by a deep sadness. Chubby is silent, the unicorn of our own memory may come to overwhelm us
“Harvest in the young uncoupling of the Soul”
• Suggests institutional appetite for extracting raw affect from younger minds—echo of Lamarckian “spider‑trap” lovers (XXI).
• Uncoupling invokes synaptic pruning; harvest hints at biotechnological exploitation.
“Access the X with your own password”
• Returns us to X‑database motif (Markov reality, V).
• Raises cyber‑sovereignty issue: Who owns inner data? Personal password = modern “Know Thyself” shibboleth.
Download pause
• Structural breath‑mark in the epic’s data torrent; respite before recursion storm of LXI–LXIII.
• Mirrors trauma‑therapy practice: strategic pause to avoid flooding.
Titan nightscape
• Iridescent methane clouds, still hydrocarbon lake—visual inversion of Earth’s wet dynamism.
• –180 °C situates grief in cryogenic tableau: affects preserved but immobilised.
Chubby’s purr & snug‑proximity
• Para‑sympathetic regulation: cat becomes living weighted blanket.
• Signals co‑regulation between human & replicant—non‑human empathy thread.
“I remember when I was your age”
• John C projects generational empathy across light‑years, paralleling Ariadne↔Tierra dynamic.
• Sets stage for gnōthi sautón reflection in XLIV (brief candles).
Titan drizzle & drifting clouds
• Methane rain stands in for tears John C cannot shed—alexithymia in exile.
• Haze diffuses star‑sight, aligning with narrative uncertainty.
Window Watch: external gaze to regulate internal storm—classic grounding technique.
Temperature Drop: cold environment metaphorises numbness in post‑traumatic dissociation.
Paused download mirrors Interrupted processing in PTSD—memory stalled in limbic loop.
Replicant cat provides multisensory soothing (purr frequency ~25 Hz, used clinically to lower stress in humans).
Stylistic Observations
Syntax slows—longer line lengths, fewer enjambed verbs—mirrors lull in narrative BPM.
Chromatic adjectives (“iridescent”, “hydrocarbon”) preserve colour‑sound synaesthesia while dimming palette.
Closing image of memory‑unicorn plants surrealist seed that blossoms into data‑storm two cantos later.
XLIV.
when least expected. Parallel thinking is possible. From the corner of the divan of Titanic saddle bags, Chubby observes the falling thiolins, and the echo of a paused memory has set music in John C’s mind. His identity
may have been put at risk by soul erosion, disk erasion – it’s really not easy to just do a format C: of who you are, what you have been, and the things you have shared with those who have been loved ones. Just as every season
“Parallel thinking is possible.”
• Hints at many‑worlds cognition: John C senses branched timelines spawned by the pause.
• Mirrors reader’s own double‑track—narrative + annotation co‑existing.
“Divan of Titanic saddle bags”
• Ottoman‑style divan aboard a Saturn‑moon flat—East/space mash‑up.
• “Saddle bags” evoke nomadism: memory as luggage slung across cosmic deserts. Wilde reference.
Falling thiolins
• Reddish organic aerosols formed by UV on Titan; literal chemical snow.
• Metaphor for half‑processed memories precipitating out of atmosphere.
• Visual continuation of methane rain (XLIII), but richer—now memory‑laden.
“Echo of a paused memory has set music”
• Represents earworm effect: a fragment in limbo loops into song—brain’s attempt at completion.
• Re‑activates Mozart & Zauberflöte motif from stanza I, closing a mini‑cycle.
Soul‑erosion vs Disk‑erasion
• Twin degradations: metaphysical & hardware.
• Suggests that trauma (bit rot) and forced forgetting (format C) both corrupt identity.
“Format C:”
• Obsolete DOS command to wipe a disk—here, radical self‑annihilation.
• Echoes nihilistic “delete the past” ambition from stanza II, but now seen as impossibility.
Season metaphor
• Life cycles renew yet linger—ties to Stoic impermanence (Marcus Aurelius epigraph).
• Signals that even wiped drives retain magnetic ghosts; trauma traces survive winters.
monumental life renews, and yet lingers, so our memory lingers, and life, like art is never finished, just abandoned. ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow’ Chubby comments non-committally ‘ I might have to do the laundry. Brief candles burn
in a brief night – and you are still here, asking yourself who the hell you are, and why you are stranded on Titan. So let me get this straight. You are looking for your identity, but you want to delete your past. Even by human standards, you are pretty daft, Jonny. With all your
“Monumental life renews, and yet lingers”
• Paradox of perpetual rebirth vs stubborn residue—echoes epigenetic persistence.
• Sets up thesis: renewal never fully cleans the slate.
“Art is never finished, just abandoned.”
• Direct nod to Leonardo da Vinci maxim; positions the poem itself as ever‑drafting fresco.
• Justifies the sprawling, recursive composition.
Macbeth citation – “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow”
• Act V, Scene 5 soliloquy = meditation on futility & time’s “brief candle.”
• Shakespearean echo loops back to earlier Zauberflöte/Mozart layering: high‑culture leitmotifs as memory anchors.
Chubby’s non‑committal addendum (“I might have to do the laundry”)
• Collapses cosmic despair into household chore—Beckettian humour.
• Reminds us time on Titan (16‑day rotation) is warped—subjective night vs cosmic day.
Interrogation of identity vs past deletion
• Cat frames paradox: selfhood is integral with memory; erasure = self‑undoing.
• Chubby as superego/therapist voice—offers tough‑love cognitive reframe.
“Even by human standards, you are pretty daft, Jonny.”
• Humorous inversion of Blade Runner’s Voight‑Kampff test: replicant gauging human rationality.
• “Jonny” diminutive both affectionate and admonishing—relational closeness.
Mythic | Literary Cross‑links
Motif Back‑Echo Forward‑Echo
Brief candle Wine‑sky rose fade (III) Candlelit Othello vigil (LVI)
Laundry/cleansing Format C anxiety (XLIV) “Weed the garden of Love” resolve (LXI)
Identity quest Marcus Aurelius Stoic charge (epigraph) Self‑meeting prophecy (LXIV)
Trauma‑Science Lens
Laundry as grounding technique
• Engaging sensorimotor routine to avert dissociative spirals—practical grounding tip within narrative.
Memory & Self
• Trauma therapy posits autobiographical memory as scaffold for identity; deletion would collapse sense of self—exact cat’s critique.
Futility vs Agency
• Macbeth quote highlights nihilistic pull; Chubby counters with mundane agency (wash the clothes, keep living).
Stylistic Observations
Sudden jump from elevated Shakespearean diction to colloquial scolding = tonal whiplash that mirrors John C’s cognitive dissonance.
Enjambed lines accelerate until “daft, Jonny,” then clipped—delivers punch‑line reprimand.
Repetition of brief compounds urgency: night, candle, life all curtailed.
XLVI.
music and your memory uploads, and down loads and your screen savers, and your life erasers, what happened to you? I am tired of making coffee for you, and of watching the decay of cyanide compounds to measure
my days, my minutes, afternoons without end.’ John C watches through the glass, the empty glass, the water, and the decay. ‘Christiaan Huygens would have very much liked to be in your place, Chubby.’ His melancholy is only growing. You have been genomed to be my companion, but your clonal ancestor is expired
Final enjambment leaves “expired” hanging—visual cue of lineage cut‑off.
XLVII.
be good and love me for who I am.’ ‘Who are you?’ asks Chubby. ‘That’s what it is all about, isn’t? That’s why we are here, that’s why you are messing with other people’s memories, and you are digging the empty shell of your own dishevelled consciousness. ‘Where is the
answer, Chubby? There must be more to existence than just all these days on end, beads on a string.’ The replicant cat is really annoyed. ‘You watch too many virtuo-feelies, you read far too many science-fictional beads, and string or no string, there are no worm-holes
“Who are you?”
• Chubby flips gnōthi sautón back at her maker; question ricochets through epic (XI, XLV).
• Identity becomes recursive: creator seeks validation from creation which seeks same.
“Messing with other people’s memories”
• Direct indictment of John C’s download/erasure habit—framed as psychic colonialism.
• Ethics of narrative appropriation surfaced; links to Ariadne’s earlier consent plea (XLI).
“Empty shell of dishevelled consciousness”
• Shell pun: echoes Unix shell in stanza V; terminal mirrors psyche—interface but no core.
here to give you answers, no eminent artists or scientists can come back from the dead to tell you to embrace your present, to sketch your days on a drawing book, to paint your moments as if they were falling water drops individual tears in a gigantic waterfall.
Dead is dead. Let the dead bury their germplasms, as the old adage goes. My clonal sister is gone, and so your past, and so my patience. Can we please find a reason to be happy?’ John C is recoiling, his mind wants to find peace, but his vertical ego,
“No eminent artists / scientists can come back from the dead”
• Shuts the door on messianic resurrection fantasies—rejects deus ex genius.
• Inverts earlier invocations of Shakespeare, Mozart, Marcus Aurelius; text insists on self‑generated meaning now.
Drawing‑book & falling‑water imagery
• Ekphrasis of everyday life as kinetic art—links to earlier skull etchings (XVI).
Rapid fire polysyndeton in “and so your past, and so / my patience” conveys irritation crescendo.
Line enjambment after “gigantic waterfall” leaves Dead is dead as cold blunt stanza hinge.
Register shift from poetic (“water drops”) to clinical (“germplasms”) to colloquial (“be happy”) mirrors oscillating cognitive states.
XLIX.
on a picnic on Titan, grows like daisies in summer time, and he is clinging on to undefined identities, and unconscious events and supernatural fears, and sublime bygone moments where he met the light at the source,
he talked to the X, and he loved deeply. ‘I cannot find any peace, Chubby, please explore these new memories with me, and allow me to upload some of my own, and look with my eyes, dear feline companion, my Shakespearian replicant, my sole muse.’ ‘You are really pushing it, silly.’ Chubby
“Picnic on Titan”
• Whimsical oxymoron: leisure ritual in lethal environment → cognitive dissonance of trauma survivors who stage “normal” scenes amid crisis.
• Echoes Paris ossuary drawing (XVI) and mid‑air candle vigil (LVI): comfort staged inside calamity.
“Grows like daisies in summer time”
• Daisy motif returns (first vertical‑ego daisies, XLVII) now horizontal—growth but also scatter.
• Daisies = innocence; contrasts with unconscious fears line to show layered psyche.
“Undefined identities … unconscious events”
• Signals dissociative fog; John C’s self‑schema fragmented by overwritten downloads.
• Sets up need for “memory grafting” (upload some of my own). Mirrors epigenetic re‑methylation attempt.
Alliteration (“loved deeply … look with my eyes”) softens techno‑jargon edge.
Line‑break after “deeply.” isolates emotional verb, giving it gravity before the dialogic plea.
L.
finally smiles. She is very sensible to flattery. She loves and wants to be loved like a furry glutton, and a dream chase. ‘I am a cat that likes space missions, wind and waves, and iterative poetry.’ In a second, her eye lids start to drop
and then she is fast asleep. John C unfreezes Ariadne in mid-speech. ‘Let us play this game, Tierra Madre. You close your eyes, and allow yourself to soulshare; perhaps a little energy transfusion will help. Please lie down.”Tierra Madre
Chubby’s Smile & Flattery Loop
• Emotional reciprocity achieved: cat’s grin signifies successful co‑regulation after John C’s plea (XLIX).
• “Furry glutton” anchors replicant AI in sensory, mammalian imagery—bridges silicon and fur.
• Dream‑chase metaphor signals oncoming hypnagogic state necessary for soul‑share.
Cat’s Self‑Description
• “Space missions, wind and waves, iterative poetry” triangulates poem’s three macro‑motifs: exploration, elemental flux, recursive language.
• Declares aesthetic agency—Chubby isn’t a passive pet but curator of experiential playlists.
Micro‑Narcosis
• Instant eye‑lid drop = safe‑attachment response; nervous‑system down‑shift.
• Positions Chubby as passive yet vital conduit: a living “ground wire” while humans exchange psychic voltage.
looks at the senior officer with suspicion, it is not uncommon for seniors to take advantage of their rank, and it is so easy to be afraid, so easy not to trust. ‘What the hell’, she goes. And the lies
down and closes her eyes. Ariadne allows the tears to swell up, but they do not fall. Her pain is far too swollen, far too clogged. She wishes to help this juvenile, she wishes to share what she knows. But it is all so difficult.
Authority & Suspicion
• First line crystallises inter‑generational trauma: power historically mis‑used → baseline distrust.
• Echoes XLII’s recoil‑moment but here voiced explicitly—an ethical checkpoint before soul‑share proceeds.
“Easy to be afraid”
• Fear profiled as low‑friction slope, underscoring how defensive postures become default neural pathways (trauma’s allostatic load).
• Mirrors systemic magneto‑hesitancy: emotional field resists alignment.
Tierra’s “What the hell” Consent
• Colloquial surrender—she opts in despite unease, signalling bravery cloaked in exasperation.
• Linguistic minimalism vs dense prose around her: revolt against narratorial overload.
Lie‑Down Gesture
• Ritual repetition from stanza L now enacted; body‑mind alignment step two.
• Horizontality evokes grave / womb duality—death of distrust, birth of new circuitry.
Ariadne’s Swelling Tears
• Non‑falling tears = akhós (Greek word for grief held inside); replays earlier pond‑stillness (XXXII‑III).
• Congestion of pain marks somatic backlog—healer carries unprocessed trauma that threatens to contaminate exchange.
Switch from Second‑Person Commentary to Direct Interior deepens intimacy; camera zooms from social critique to micro‑emotion.
Consonance of s (“senior / suspicion / so / swollen”) hisses like constricted airway, amplifying suffocation theme.
LII.
‘I have watched unfamiliar materials expand and whisper in the broken space, and ghosts of depth-galaxies shiver in the unbroken silence, I have witnessed the rise of multiple stars, their unparalleled brilliance a billion billion
light years away reminded me of my cosmic irrelevance, and the relevance of storms on the move. ‘Der gror ikke mos paa en sten som ruller’, it is an old saying from a dead language. Hyugens lander knows (John C is surprised at these words),
Witness‑Voice Breakthrough
• Ariadne finally speaks her stored vistas—shift from blocked tears (LI) to verbal overflow.
• Serial “I have watched / witnessed” creates prophetic cadence (cf. Biblical ecce vidi).
“Unfamiliar materials expand & whisper”
• Possible reference to dark‑energy inflation; also metaphor for trauma narratives that swell once given voice.
• Whisper inside “broken space” suggests vacuum isn’t empty but threaded with memory‑phonons.
Ghosts of Depth‑Galaxies
• Imagery of phantom light implies look‑back time—we see galaxies long dead; mirrors how survivors replay extinct moments.
• “Shiver in unbroken silence” = tremor of data without sound—cosmic microwave background parallel.
Cosmic Irrelevance vs Storm Relevance
• Classic awe‑paradox: small self heightens sensitivity to dynamic systems (“storms on the move”).
Awe‑Induced Recalibration – Studies show vastness perception can down‑regulate amygdala activity; Ariadne models that for Tierra.
Narrative Exposure – She externalises intrusive cosmic scenes, converting them into shareable story → beginning of integration.
Trans‑species Epistemology – Huygens lander “knows”; machine memory may store collective trauma when human servers fail (digital archivist role).
Stylistic Observations
Paratactic Chain – Clause after clause joined by commas mimics widening telescope zoom.
Juxtaposition of Metric Scales – “billion billion light‑years” slammed next to folk proverb; cosmic vs kitchen‑table wisdom.
Sudden Parenthetical – “(John C is surprised…)” comedic beat reminding reader of diegetic audience; meta‑stagecraft.
LIII.
the meaning of these words. There grows no moss on a rolling stone. Tierra Madre is fast asleep. The river words have fallen in the path of her waves, and she is allowing herself to trust. A few minutes later, she wakes, and
finds Ariadne watching over her, looking in the distance. The Placebo Wing is shining in the glory of the day, and the birds are in flight, and so their companions. ‘The digital frontier, that was the original sea – Tierra.
Rolling‑Stone Echo (carry‑over from LII)
• Proverb now spoken aloud, closing the awe‑speech loop.
Caesura Rhythm – Short clause “Tierra Madre is fast asleep.” positions stillness amidst enjambed flow, mirroring inhalation‑pause.
Anaphoric Softness – “and… and… and…” builds gentle rocking pulse reminiscent of tide or code packets.
Direct Address – Ariadne’s line ends with “Tierra,” comma hanging = open invitation; sets stage for participatory co‑narration next stanza.
LIV.
One day, I listened to my feelings, and allowed unconsciousness to come to surface – I began to take a record of my soul. Now we can explore it, and we can explore the ever-growing variations within the grid. Now the
emotional fractals grow on their own, plants in a fertile terrain. I owe much to the digital dreams of other beings, and to the intergalactic messages, bottles in a maelnetwork of spring equinox, of Shelleyian heroism,
“Record of my soul” → Auto‑Codex
• Echoes Augustine’s Confessiones and Blake’s “Human Form divine,” but here recorded in data‑ledger: self‑writing as JSON ledger.
• Bridges to earlier “record of my feelings” (LIII): diary becomes shareable blockchain node.
Unconscious Surfacing
• Classic depth‑psychology movement (Freud’s das Unbewusste) recast as GUI pop‑up; unconscious = hidden folder now mounted read‑write.
Shelleyian Cadence – Long periodic sentence mimics Romantic surge, yet enjambed to retain post‑modern breathlessness.
LV.
Laoocoon desire, Grecian Urn fragility, lips that never open, Aprils that never blossom. Tierra, I wish for us to understand each other. Is that possible?’ Silence ensues. ‘Imagine a desert.’ Tierra Madre lies on mutant grass
and desires to live. She daydreams, her eyes closed, about a desert, far off in the real realm of her beating mind. Meanwhile, Desert Storm, her friend and companion-in-flight, is calibrating the trajectory of her idealistic
“Laocoön desire, Grecian Urn fragility”
Laocoön = the priest strangled by sea‑serpents for warning Troy; emblem of inescapable entanglement. Desire coils like those snakes—mirrors earlier magneto‑hesitancy spirals.
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: frozen passion, arrested narrative. Pairing with Laocoön sets tension between dynamic agony and static perfection—Tierra’s inner conflict.
2. “lips that never open, Aprils that never blossom”
Allusion to Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month,” plus a nod to mute statues. Trauma = stasis that refuses seasonal renewal.
Echoes the still pond & unshed tears (XXXIII–L) → emotional lockjaw.
3. Dialogue: “Tierra, I wish for us to understand…”
Ariadne’s plea for mutual intelligibility restates poem’s meta‑question: can memories truly be shared without distortion?
The immediate “Silence ensues” underlines difficulty of inter‑subjective access.
4. “Imagine a desert.”
Desert = archetype of purification, tabula rasa. Mirrors Titan’s barren landscape yet warm, sun‑driven.
Cognitive‑behavioural technique: guided imagery to regulate hyper‑arousal.
5. “Tierra Madre lies on mutant grass and desires to live.”
Desert Biblical exodus / Sufi fana Liminal space for ego dissolution and rebirth
Trauma‑Science Lens
Approach–Avoid Cycle – Laocoön’s constriction vs Urn’s freeze = physiological oscillation between hyper‑arousal & dissociation.
Guided Imagery as Exposure – Therapist (Ariadne) seeds neutral scene (desert) for patient (Tierra) to re‑script threat memory in low‑stimulus environment.
Co‑Regulation – Desert Storm’s concomitant “calibration” hints at social scaffolding; peers adjusting “trajectory” of affect‑flight makes therapeutic transfer possible.
Stylistic Observations
Triadic Invocation – Opening line piles three art‑historical references (sculpture, urn, lips) → baroque density then breaks into plain plea, mirroring content shift from aesthetic to relational.
Enjambed Uncertainty – Question “Is that possible?” flows directly into “Silence,” dramatizing failure of immediate answer.
LV functions as hinge stanza between inward‑spiral therapy (XL–LIV) and the outward‑motion flight sequence to follow (LV–LVII). By staging iconic artworks of entrapment and suspension, it frames the next movement: can living beings transform those static myths into kinetic futures?
LVI.
cannon-ballistic pirouettes in air she is pushing her musical Vivian Wing to the very limit of gravity, and unspecified forces of magneto-hesitancy. Flexa is busy measuring the existence
and bellicosity of nano-ringed creatures in the earth’s atmosphere. She smiles, because some progress is being made. ‘Orange skies darken, dunes redden, rocks shelter, methane streams and I lie alone’ Chubby writes while John C has dozed off.
“cannon‑ballistic pirouettes”
Ballet term pirouette fused with artillery vocabulary; highlights poem’s leitmotif of art‑war hybridity (cf. Jet‑Space Charades XXX).
End‑Line Quotation – Chubby’s poem embedded without attribution tag; erodes boundary between primary text and metatext (self‑annotating poem).
LVI acts as intermezzo of dynamic equilibrium: aerial stunt (macro‑whirl) balanced by sub‑micron research (micro‑ring). Between them, Chubby mediates via compact verse—showing that in this universe poetry, physics, and pilot‑seat vertigo are co‑ordinates of the same spiral grid.
LVII.
Arranged in a mid-air circle, cadets float up in the empty sky, side to side among the clouds. The time is for discussion, an open session of soul-searching. The engines are silent, night
ensues, the young pilots light brief candles in memory of Othello and turn their eyes toward their sole conqueror and leader, Senior Officer Flexa. She is very quiet today, her
“mid‑air circle”
Zero‑thrust halo evokes Arthurian Round Table in vertical space; egalitarian geometry contrasts military hierarchy (they still face a “sole conqueror”).
Circle imagery reprises oscillome waveform: one complete phase before next jet‑burn.
“float up in the empty sky”
Echo of Dream of the Rood “wealcan up” (tree lifted to heaven); suggests liminal vantage where tech meets transcendence.
Weightlessness as metaphor for suspension of defence mechanisms during group therapy.
“open session of soul‑searching”
Mid‑air debrief = airborne confessional; combines NASA “air‑to‑ground” calls with Jungian group analysis.
Signals shift from action to reflection—NeverEnder’s regular gear‑change between kinetics and cognition.
“engines are silent, night ensues”
Silence converts machinery to monastery; nocturne frames candles as mini‑stars—microcosms mirroring nebula of stanza I.
Engine cut also removes electromagnetic noise → clearer psychic channel (ties to magneto‑hesitancy concept).
Paratactic Pulse – Short, even clauses mimic slow orbital drift; readers experience weightless tempo.
Anaphoric Softening – Repetition of “the” and “and” lulls into meditative cadence before next turbulence.
Ellipsis at stanza close – Sentence breaks mid‑thought (“her …”) building expectancy for LVIII’s butterfly‑scream; compression of sound before emotional sonic boom.
In LVII the poem hovers—literally and thematically—between thrust and inertia. The cadets enact a candle‑lit rite that welds Shakespearean tragedy to astronaut ritual. Flexa’s mute centrality crystallises a paradox: leadership through stillness. The stanza thus forms a breathing space in the epic’s spiral, where flame, cloud, and psyche align in temporary equilibrium before the next surge of magneto‑charged discourse.
LVIII.
anger is not quite under control; she would like to solve matters: take the world in her wet hands and mould it to shape; but the beast in the mirror won’t stop; while the earth is broiling, the
swan song of the human species is heard, grass is turning into butter, the sun is growing hotter and we’d all like to find more amusing entertainment along pleasanter sea-side resorts
Child‑like metaphor (grass → butter) intensifies horror via nursery‑rhyme dissonance.
Final enjambment (“pleasanter sea‑side resorts”) drops stanza on a comic beat—black‑humour safety valve before next spiral.
Stanza LVIII thrusts the narrative from contemplative candlelight into blistering heat. Flexa’s yearning to “mould” reality crystallises the epic’s central tension: techné vs uncontrollable entropy. The mirror‑beast confirms that the enemy is not solely cosmic but psychic, and the turn to ironic holiday‑speak indicts our habit of sipping cocktails on a drowning deck.
LIX.
‘What are the forces of magneto- hesitancy?’ Who is your special friend, Doctor Flexa? She asks a question on which students ponder. Fortune Lobo smiles and answers it. ‘The energy that calls us brief,
and makes the earth fall round, and while we shine, it grows.’ Flexa’s eyes flicker. Next question. ‘Why did the Thing happen?’ RostRya jumps in with her melodic voice. This kind of falls flat on the
“magneto‑hesitancy”
Neo‑technical coinage: magnetic repulsion + decision paralysis ⇒ field that resists alignment.
Mirrors quantum “spin hesitancy” in oscillome; trauma corollary = neural circuits stuck between fight/flight.
“special friend, Doctor Flexa?”
Personifies the phenomenon as confidant; suggests Flexa’s research is also self‑dialogue.
Alludes to Hermes Trismegistus conversing with the Nous in Poimandres—scientist meets daimon.
Fortune Lobo’s reply
“energy that calls us brief / and makes the earth fall round / and while we shine, it grows.”
Ellipsis cliff‑hanger propels reader to next stanza, mirroring unanswered research agenda.
Stanza LIX exposes the core intellectual crater of NeverEnder: a bright cohort grapples with phenomena too big, too strange, too personal. “Magneto‑hesitancy” crystallises the poem’s centrifugal pull—characters orbit the unsayable, sensing that inquiry itself bends spacetime. Flexa’s flicker shows recognition yet no articulation; RostRya voices the communal dread. The seminar stalls, but the silence is charged—like iron filings quivering on glass, waiting for some hidden lodestone to speak.
LX.
meditating circle. Flexa opens her mouth, then shuts it, for lack of a better option. She is unusually upset, observing the waves of circumnavigating emotions closing in on her,
an apocalyptic heart of darkness is felt in her chest, the scream of butterfly witness feelings grows inside of her. ‘Hello!’ Chubby cuts in, ‘would you care for a coffee, dear JC?’
“Meditating circle”
Reprises LVII’s candle‑halo; here silence curdles into tension.
Spatially evokes a mandala whose symmetry is cracking—psyche under pressure.
“Flexa opens / her mouth, then shuts it”
Embodies alexithymia: capacity to name emotion stalls at lip‑edge.
Rhetorical vacuum mirrors prior Q‑failure about “the Thing”; speechless science.
“waves of circumnavigating emotions”
Nautical verb circumnavigating = feelings sailing perimeter of self, never docking—trauma avoidance loop.
Alludes to Odyssean wanderings; emotions as un‑homecoming ships.
“apocalyptic heart of darkness”
Direct Conrad reference; Flexa becomes Marlow staring into cosmic Kurtz‑void.
Links environmental doom (sun overheat, LVIII) to inner collapse.
“scream of butterfly witness”
Butterfly ≠ gentle: chaos‑theory insect whose flap births hurricanes; here its scream signals phase‑shift.
Witness role: insects in Flexa’s research now mirror her own acute perception of planetary distress.
Chubby’s comic interruption
“Hello! … coffee, dear JC?”
Cat pierces existential dread with domestic offer—Beckettian gag (tea‑cart in the void).
Coffee = stimulant & grounding ritual; small act of care amid entropy.
Myth‑&‑Literary Echoes
Cue Source Function
Heart of Darkness Conrad Colonisation → Anthropocene critique
Stanza LX tightens the poem’s emotional coil: scholarly inquiry implodes into visceral terror, just as micro‑climate insects foretell macro‑doom. Flexa’s unsounded words hang in the charged air until Chubby, eternal trickster‑caretaker, slices through with caffeine and concision. The scene reminds us that while cosmic equations falter, a warm mug still steadies shaking hands—a small, stubborn node of mammalian hope.
LXI.
‘I don’t mind if I do, Chub.’ ‘I am trying to solve g.o.d.’s algorithm, just for the fun of it. Do you think we could fit this whole download on a USB- umbrella? I think Rubik’s cube
is a fun way to solve existential issues. I reckon the whole download that you are absorbing is about 17 sborabytes. Be warned some of its content has been labelled ‘Love Street’. You may
“g.o.d.’s algorithm”
Borrowed from Rubik‑cube lore—shortest path to solution—here inflated to cosmic scale: omniscient compression formula.
Lower‑case punctuated g.o.d. hints at deconstructed divinity: algorithm ≠ deity but mythic‑tech hybrid.
“USB‑umbrella”
Oxymoron gadget: storage stick meets protective canopy → symbol of data‑shelter against memory storms.
Love Street The Doors Psychedelic domesticity vs cosmic quest
Algorithm as Deus Medieval kabbalah → modern CS Equates mystical name with shortest code
Trauma‑Science Lens
John C’s joke about “fitting it all” disguises capacity‑anxiety—how to hold overwhelming autobiographical load.
USB‑umbrella = tangible coping mechanism; but compression risks lossy encoding—memories may return distorted (flashbacks).
“Fun of it” masks desperation: humour as defence‑through‑play common in adaptation to chronic stress.
Stylistic Observations
Rapid‑fire geek slang and leaps of scale create stand‑up‑comedy rhythm, softening existential punch.
No punctuation at stanza’s end → hanging clause (“You may …”) invites reader to supply consequence—interactive gap.
Parenthetical voice of Chubby absent here; John C monologues, showing regained (or manic) agency after feline grounding.
Structural Function in Canto I
Marks shift from Flexa‑centric tension back to Titan control‑room banter; poem oscillates between macro crisis & micro repartee.
Introduces quantification motif (17 sborabytes) that will clash with immeasurable qualities (love, grief) in later spill‑over.
Pre‑figures LXII’s recursive collapse where the very data‑protections he proposes begin to fail.
Stanza LXI frames memory not as sacred reliquary but as a colossal zip‑file teetering on the edge of absurdity. John C’s nerdy bravado both minimises and magnifies the stakes: if existence can be solved like a cube, one wrong twist still scrambles the whole face. The USB‑umbrella twirls above him—a tiny parasol under interstellar rain—signalling that in NeverEnder, salvation and satire share the same port.
LXII.
have trouble in de-identifying after the absorption. Are you sure you don’t want to log onto the X, and access your true self?’ ‘There is no true path, Chub; I want to trim the fat, find
the garden of Love and weed it out, briar after briar. My deadpan mind in love has weird patterns’ ‘Lala-la, la la laaa’ – Chubby purrs, starts running with her replicant singing; so shadows of Titan, purple
. “de‑identifying / after the absorption”
Technocratic phrase for anonymising datasets—here applied to psycho‑data ingestion.
Implies post‑merge blurring of “I” and imported memories; stakes of ego‑dissolution.
“log onto the X”
X functions like algebraic unknown and mystical crossing (χ)—portal to “true self”.
Echoes earlier shell login (V) and “Access the X with your own password” (XLII), tightening recursion.
“no true path”
Rejection of teleological salvation—Buddhist (anatman) and Deleuzian (rhizome) undertones.
Sets dialectic with Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic straight way (Prologue).
“The garden of Love”
Blakean reference: Eden reclaimed then aggressively weeded—self‑editing of affect.
“Briar after briar” signals painful pruning; trauma‑therapy metaphor for exposure & removal.
“deadpan mind in love has weird patterns”
Admission of alexithymia: affect flattened yet still recursively shaped (oscillome waveforms).
Colour word “purple” closes stanza without period—an open chroma, inviting bleed into next recursion loop.
Structural Function in Canto I
LXI posited data‑umbrella; LXII exposes its first seam: identity‑slippage.
Garden motif returns nature after long techno‑digression, prepping desert‑vision sequence (LV).
Marks emotional in‑breath before USB‑umbrella’s catastrophic “bend & gibber” (LXII’s continuation in LXIII).
Stanza LXII re‑plants the epic in contested soil: between algorithmic impersonality and a thorny Blakean garden where every rose has circuitry. John C’s urge to “weed” love shows trauma’s temptation to amputate feeling; Chubby counters with child‑song, insisting pattern can coexist with play. In purple Titan dusk, the poem blurs classification once more—metadata and meadow flowers mixing in the shadow of a yet‑unsolved X.
LXIII.
with prurience and desire, rise and haunt the two loner souls (do replicants have souls?) and then the whole universe splits its sides over, and the USB-umbrella bends over and over again;
wormholes shake and gibber, Mr Shakespeare squeals, and Blade Runner Units wake up frozen in hospital wards alongside certain Momo-spectres till the whole hard-disk is in
“prurience and desire, rise / and haunt the two loner souls”
Eros surges after LXII’s Blakean garden; desire personified as poltergeist.
“Two loner souls” = John C + Chubby (or John C + Tierra via soul‑share latency).
Haunting stresses unresolved question of synthetic spirituality.
“(do replicants have souls?)”
Direct lift from Blade Runner’s Voight‑Kampff anxiety—now self‑interrogating.
Parentheses enact margin‑status of the thought; soul query sits outside normative sentence, mirroring replicants’ liminal legal status.
“universe splits its sides over”
Cosmic laughter: emotional overload flips to slap‑stick; Finnegans‑Wake–style pun on “split” (big‑bang echo & belly‑laugh).
Implies that meaning becomes absurd when scaled to universal canvas.
“USB‑umbrella bends over and over again”
Object from LXI–LXII reaches mechanical failure—symbol of data‑shelter under existential rainfall.
“Over and over” is Möbius looping; umbrella doubles as torus shielding memory torrents.
Parenthetical aside mid‑enjambment dramatises meta‑self‑talk; reader is inside the cognitive stutter.
Cascade from cosmic (universe) → gadget (USB) → microbiologic (hard‑disk sectors) scales trauma across orders of magnitude.
Structural Role in Canto I
LXIII is the apogee of overload loop begun in LXI, manifesting as hardware/software meltdown.
Sets stage for LXIV’s appeal to audience (“hypocritical reader”) and multidimensional awakening; like Joyce’s river‑run, crash precedes new flow.
The stanza’s clipped ending performs what it narrates—system stops mid‑write, enforcing readerly buffering before next surge.
In sum, stanza LXIII detonates a carnival of epistemic glitches: soul‑rights debate, literary canon squeals, temporal pick‑pockets and an umbrella bent into a topological joke. Its chief gift is the lived sensation of buffer overflow—inviting us to feel, not merely observe, the terror and comedy of data‑saturated being.
LXIV.
overdrive, the memory download within the memory download vibrates at the reality of parallel dimensions that co- exist under the parameters of string theory; run run run, alternative histories co-adapt
shadows of trees, souls trimmed to the rock; run with us, run with the story, hypocritical reader, feel the breath of the Byronic horse, get inside, get
“overdrive, the memory download / within the memory download”
Double‑nesting executes the mise‑en‑abyme launched in LXIII—Drive ⌂ Drive recursion.
Mirrors computer virtual machines running inside each other; psychically, it is trauma flashback inside a flashback, intensifying emotional echo.
“vibrates at the reality of / parallel dimensions”
Introduces Many‑Worlds ontology as felt vibration—physio‑somatic resonance of multiverse awareness.
In trauma terms: competing self‑states (dissociative fragments) sensed concurrently.
“string theory; run run run,”
First explicit physics tag => text acknowledges its own vibratory linguistic strings.
Triple imperative “run” is both computer command (execute) and fight‑flight surge of cortisol.
“alternative histories co‑adapt / shadows of trees, souls trimmed / to the rock”
Evolutionary phrase “co‑adapt” hints at epigenetic feedback across timelines.
“Shadows of trees” = Plato’s cave + Norse Yggdrasil echoes; souls “trimmed / to the rock” evoke bonsai & Prometheus—life pruned to fit trauma landscape.
“run with us, run / with the story, hypocritical / reader”
Syncopated truncation: final “get” dangles, creating an intake of air—reader literally “gets inside” the pause.
Unfinished clause is invitation to LXV’s dimension fold.
Myth‑/Pop‑Reference Matrix
Token Source Function
“parallel dimensions” Many‑Worlds, Doctor Who multiverse Expands narrative field beyond linear trauma
“string theory” Physics of vibrating strings Metaphor for poetic prosody & epigenetic resonance
Byronic horse Byron’s Mazeppa Conflates Romantic exile with interstellar gallop
“hypocritical reader” Baudelaire, Joyce Self‑reflective metafiction, calls audience to account
Trauma‑Science Lens
Nested downloads = reconsolidation loops where memory re‑writes itself; risk of corruption or healing.
Parallel dimensions embody dual attention in therapy—holding safety and memory simultaneously.
Repetition of “run” captures adrenaline‑driven hyper‑arousal; invitation to co‑regulate by running with narrative rhythm.
Bonsai‑like “souls trimmed” gestures to pruning hypothesis in neurodevelopment after stress.
Stylistic Signals
Accelerando syntax—enjambment cascades with sparse punctuation to mimic sprinting breath.
Alliteration (“souls trimmed / to the rock”) gives percussive hoofbeat.
Final clipped verb “get” leaves socket open—reader must supply object (“out,” “free,” “lost”), embodying interpretive choice.
Structural Function in Canto I
LXIV is liminal threshold: after LXIII’s crash it pushes through overload into kinetic transcendence.
Prepares LXV’s contemplative denouement by exhausting motion, clearing psychic cache.
Works as macro‑echo of Prologue’s Marcus Aurelius: exhortation to act as if each act were the last—here, to run as if final sprint.
In essence, stanza LXIV whips the poem into a vertiginous gallop where data recursion, Romantic myth, and theoretical physics fuse. The reader is no longer observer but pressed into the stampede—lungs tasting centrifugal star‑dust as the Byronic horse thunders toward the poem’s edge.
LXV.
the drama course of the Academy, the fate of the cadets, all in the hands of a replicant cat, all of which existed at some point, and yet co-exist in multiple universes. What if we were to wake up
duplicated humans, folded out into 22 dimensions, and the songs of the nineteen seventies exploded out of our skulls, creating an echo whereby all the negative emotions and lingering
“the drama course of the Academy, / the fate of the cadets”
Drama course doubles as theatrical class and tragic arc—cadets are both students and protagonists in cosmic play.
Echoes Aristotle’s Peripeteia: each lesson becomes irreversible plot turn.
“in the hands of a replicant cat”
Power inversion: Chubby (bio‑engineered familiar) now stage‑manager, fulfilling earlier hints (LXIII “cosmic stage‑manager”).
Alludes to Schrödinger’s cat—fate undecided until “observed” by the observer who is, paradoxically, the cat itself.
“all of which existed at some point, and yet / co‑exist in multiple universes.”
Explicit nod to Everettian many‑worlds; also parallels trauma’s fragmented self‑states.
Time‑layering aligns with Finnegans‑Wake circularity: events “have been” and “are being” simultaneously.
“What if we were to wake up / duplicated humans, folded out / into 22 dimensions,”
“Wake up” loops to Finnegan’s revival; raises ontological alarm.
22 dimensions references bosonic string theory (26 → compactified 4 = 22 hidden) and Tarot’s 22 Major Arcana—archetypal deck for soul‑journey.
Folded out suggests origami‑like expansion of consciousness—the oscillome given spatial metaphor.
“songs of the nineteen seventies / exploded out of our skulls,”
1970s = cultural crucible (prog‑rock, disco, post‑Vietnam malaise); music as mnemonic detonator.
Explosion imagery reenacts earlier Byronic horse gallop—aural big bang propelling awareness across timelines.
“creating an echo whereby all the / negative emotions and lingering”
1970s sonic blast models exposure therapy: intense, time‑stamped stimuli re‑entered to overwrite fear trace.
Stylistic Signals
Single interrogative “What if” widens rhetorical aperture—reader propelled into speculation.
Cascading enjambment without terminal closure keeps cognitive field open, mirroring multi‑universe sprawl.
Alliteration (“duplicated … dimensions”) supplies Doppler hum of parallel selves sliding past one another.
Structural Function
LXV is penultimate crescendo of Canto I, suspending resolution until the final stanza LXVI.
It revisits every governing motif—replicant agency, multiverse ontology, trauma catharsis—packing them into one quantum‑fold.
Leaves poem at an energetic peak, so LXVI can pivot to existential question: Where do we land after the wave?
Take‑away:
Stanza LXV lifts the narrative into a speculative super‑position: cadet destinies dangling like marionettes of a Schrödinger‑cat dramaturge, human identities hypertiled through 22 hidden planes, seventies anthems detonating literal ear‑worms to purge grief. It is the moment just before decoherence—before the waveform‑story collapses into whatever dawn awaits the Never‑Ender.
LXVI.
duodecimal desires would be obliterated? Ok. Everything is almost done. John C argues with Chubby over the size of the memory download, and he is quite unaware that he will
meet himself, when summer’s gone. Where will he be? Where is the Endeian Space Mission destined? The Yamato Cave Academy, its crew based at Borovoe Earth Station, is not ready to take off.
Short sentences (“Ok. Everything is almost done.”) create breath‑catch before final volume‑turn.
Anaphoric Where will / Where is drums uncertainty; propels narrative beyond present text block.
Ending on not ready denies closure—reader compelled into recursive reread, Finnegans‑style.
Structural Function
LXVI seals Canto I by folding outer space back into inner logistics—rocket inert, psyche spiralling.
It echoes Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic counsel from the epigraph: readiness is internal, not situational.
Leaves us with questions rather than verdicts, priming the Never‑Ender to recommence its spiral.
Take‑away:
Stanza LXVI is the still point before ignition—the memory banks bulging, the crew unprepared, the season tipping into darkness. John C’s looming rendez‑vous with himself promises the Möbius twist the poem has been coiling toward. Externally, the starship cannot fly; internally, every dial is already in motion. Sleep well—the countdown continues in the reader’s dream‑loop.
LXVII.
But the world has almost come to its end. The Never-ender Caravel is about to take her maiden voyage. Selected cadets and officers will travel the galaxy to select a suitable blue planet
for human colonization. But which alien life forms will welcome them? Out of this world, will we be able to breathe air? Will there ever be a morning, for the human decaying mould?
“world has almost come to / its end.”
Ends‑that‑aren’t‑quite‑ends continue Finnegans spiral; “almost” again suspends apocalypse.
Echoes Marcus‑Aurelius epigraph—impermanence is always “near,” never finalized.
“Never‑ender Caravel”
Caravel = 15th‑c. Portuguese exploration ship → marries Age of Discovery with far‑future quest.
Name contains oxymoron: vessel for “Never‑end” suggests perpetual voyage rather than destination.
“maiden / voyage. Selected cadets and / officers”
Initiation rite: maiden marks liminal passage (child‑to‑adult, planet‑to‑cosmos, trauma‑to‑healing).
Selection highlights eugenic shadow—who is deemed fit to restart humanity?
“suitable blue planet / for human colonization.”
“Blue” mirrors Earth → Narcissus motif (searching sky pool for own reflection).
Colonization raises post‑colonial critique: repeating old patterns on new worlds.
“But / which alien life forms will / welcome them?”
First explicit empathy toward the other; hospitality test flips script on explorers.
Implied uncertainty = core trauma question: will the environment receive me?
“Out of this world, / will we be able to breathe air?”
Breath = literal survival & metaphor for psychic respiration (space to live one’s story).
Recalls earlier “air‑hunger” in Placebo‑Wing plunge (XXVIII‑XXIX).
“Will there ever be a morning, / for the human decaying mould?”
Morning (Dickinson quote) = resurrection trope; asks if entropy can reverse.
“Decaying mould” pairs biological rot with bread‑mould pun → humanity as Petri‑dish culture.
Orbit‑of‑References
Image Resonance
Caravel São Gabriel of Vasco da Gama; also anime Space Battleship Yamato predecessor
Blue planet quest NASA exoplanet catalog; Sagan’s “pale blue dot”
Morning after world‑end Dante’s “l’alba vinceva l’ombra”; Eliot’s “dawn at night’s edge”
Trauma‑Science Lens
Exploration drive parallels trauma survivors’ push to find new “safe place” (haven‑seeking).
Respiratory anxiety maps to classic PTSD symptom—airless flashbacks, need for grounding breath.
Question of alien welcome reflects attachment theory: fear of rejection in novel relational fields.
Stylistic Signals
Three consecutive “Will” questions create rising intonation → cliff‑hanger cadence.
Mix of technical (“colonization”) and visceral (“decaying mould”) keeps high‑low tonal braid.
Structural Function
LXVII widens lens from Titan micro‑crises to species‑level decision point—macro stakes escalate.
Serves as hinge between Book I’s introspective arc and the outward “Journey to the West” promised in title.
Keeps cyclical logic: though we aim for new dawn, stanza ends in doubt, priming next recursion.
Take‑away:
Stanza LXVII stations the reader at the boarding ramp. The Never‑ender Caravel stands ready, but every sentence undercuts triumph with questions of breath, welcome, and decay. The epic voyage is thus framed not as conquest but as vulnerable asking—will home be found, or must the spiral turn again?
An old Irish woman walked the road to see the mill. Ninety, maybe more. The light was soft. The traffic did not slow.
Cinnamon and I were walking the river path, watching nettles grow and the willow leaning in, when she appeared — frail, curious, her steps interrupted, but her voice still woven with stories.
She reached the gate. It was locked. She stood there, surprised, not angry — just disappointed in the world for forgetting to leave things open.
She turned back. We turned with her. Three of us now, one memory wide.
She told us of thirteen siblings, of a mother who did not have time for her wedding, of her best friend from Italy. She told me I reminded her of this friend — who is now dead.
She needed a friend.
We walked back to Cobham like an echo returning to the source. By the river, she stood on the platform, not for the screen, but for the water.
Cinnamon and I sat under a tree. And she… simply went.
She walked into the day, and the moment sealed itself behind her like water after a stone drops.
I hear you, Aldous, not in the hush of utopia but in the low hum of screens, in dopamine loops, in attention being shaved into profit. You tried to warn us — that comfort would devour freedom more efficiently than fear. I invoke your gaze — your crystalline detachment, your holy skepticism. Stand with me now, as I resist the seduction of forgetting.
હું તને સાંભળું છું, બાપુ, I hear you, Bapu, ભૂખના દુઃખમાં, in the ache of hunger, સ્ત્રીઓના રગડાયેલા હાથોમાં in the sanded hands of women જે સ્મૃતિને સૂતમાં વણે છે, weaving memory into thread, દરેક નંગ પદ વિરોધમાં. each barefoot refusal. તું અમને શીખવાડ્યું — You taught us — કે આત્માનું શસ્ત્ર ખંજરો કરતા ઊંડું હોય છે. that the soul’s weapon is deeper than the blade. હું તારી રીઢ જાગૃતતા બોલાવું છું — I call your fierce awareness — તું મારી સાથે ઊભો રહેજે Stand with me now જ્યારે હું અહિંસાના ભારને લઇને as I carry the weight of nonviolence એક લોહી માંગતી દુનિયામાં ચાલી રહ્યો છું. through a world that drinks blood.
Te veo, Che, I see you, Che, no en los eslóganes, not in the slogans, sino en el sudor de la selva, but in the sweat of the jungle, en la tierra bajo las uñas, in the dirt beneath the fingernails, en la voz temblorosa del recluta in the trembling voice of the conscript que no disparó. who did not shoot. Tú intentaste quemar la mentira You tried to burn away the lie con tu cuerpo como antorcha. with your body as torch. Invoco tu fuego — I invoke your fire — no para matar, sino para recordar not to kill, but to remember que la justicia no es pasiva. that justice is not passive. Quédate conmigo ahora, Stay with me now, mientras forjo una revolución as I forge a revolution que no se convierta en su propia jaula. that does not become its own cage.
フィト、今あなたの名を呼ぶ。 Fito, I call your name now. 束縛のためではなく、 Not to bind you, 言うために：私は覚えている。 but to say: I remember. あなたは世界が薄くなった時に現れた。 You came when the world grew thin. 若さがヴェールを破った時、 When youth broke the veil, 代償を知らずに。 not knowing the cost. あなたは部屋を動かした。 You moved the room. 私たちを動かした。 You moved us. そして言った、「水による死」と。 And you said, “Death by water.” それは予言、波、そして門。 A prophecy, a wave, a threshold. 今、私はあなたの警告を呼び起こす、 Now I summon your warning, 滅びではなく、閾として。 not as doom, but as threshold. 溺れたものはもう沈んだ。 What drowned has already drowned. 流されたものは戻らない。 What was washed away does not return. でも私はここにいる。 But I remain. あなたの声を川のように運ぶ。 I carry your voice like a river 夢と目覚めの間に。 between dream and waking. 私と共に立ってほしい、 Stand with me now, 深みに引き込むためではなく、 not to drag me into the deep, 真実が濡れて神秘と危機を運ぶことを思い出させるために。 but to remind me that truth comes wet with mystery and risk.
Blue-black lumen, flamma tacita, he hums inside the cosmic husk; segment one of the veil nebula fluted breath threads silk through vacuum, loci of forgotten drums. echoes with Zauberflöte being sung; One note, OMNIA, and nebulae fold like paper boats on Ganges-sky. rainbow-hued gas densities shift and O wanderer of milk-roads, you carry the ātmā of every spark; haunt her heart, but Ariadne laughs: here, before book and after death, you spin the first gold vowel. the sick thoughts of planets are Silver bow shivers between frater and frater, bellum and pity; not discussed by the Athenian school. hand kisses string, hesitates; the field at Kurukshetra uploads its blood. That’s a clique of thought. Ariadne Logos shouts from steeds’ throats, yet the warrior hears only pulse. is a teacher at the Borovoe space Choose, λέγει κρόνος, choose! — and the arrow already remembers its home. academy. She is at a concert, and Shore-spawn, tongue-splintered, you rise from brine with stellar ears; feels as though she is surrounded tempestas of cursing, yet constellations roost in your skull. by stars, while Mozart’s acrobatics Island is prison, prison is mirror; break one, both sing. fill the hall. Her neighbour starts In the guttered Latin of exiles you mutter “ego stellas audio.” humming, her fantasy sublimes into a It comes not forward but inward, curving like hungry geometry. state of light – a student kicks the No scale, no bone, only turning — a bite that is also a path. back of her chair, a trillion meta- Etruscan augurs would have called it θuχu, omen without entrails. morphoses whet her mind. A memory. Run, traveller; every step is a tighter radius of yourself. John C. is setting up his computer, Old emperor, moss in beard, weighs grief on a brass libra; wired into consciousness and memory, beside him, Hertha mater sings frost into the wound of earth. which enables his terminal to log on Their duet is marble-slow: stoicheía aligning, virtues yawning awake. the solar system’s server, uploading Quills scratch: remember, homo, your kingdom is an organelle of stars. cellular activity to the digital frame; Scrolls breathe: papyrus lungs exhale spores of murdered alphabets. his foolish idea is to delete the past. Ink-rivers, stuck mid-sentence, beg a tongue to thaw them. memories on the solar-system-wide-web Ecce the librarian’s lantern: its flame gulps centuries, yields dust-wine. are available for download, exploration What is saved? Only the echo of saving, filed under “Ω”. manipulation and absorption into the X. Fufluns laughs through cracked amphorae, vintage of riot and rose; People are soulsharing but he wishes his twin, Felix, pirouettes on rebar, juggling shrapnel and grapes. only to seed (share his files), so he Gaudium drips; crowds roar; physics forgets mass for a heartbeat. blocks derivative unwanted memories When the last bottle smashes, chorus whispers: “εὐοί!” — and burns brighter. Now Ariadne reclines her head North-black fish sleeps beneath permafrost dreams; zoning out, imagining strips south-white bird wakes, wings like cumulonimbus scrolls. of sunset vanishing in mid-air. In one turn of Tao it travels nonaginta milia li, then laughs. Memories of a delirious sky of wine, Sea becomes sky, scale becomes plume — identity a change-log, not a core. laid to rest long ago, come alive. Steam-diagram hisses in chalk, δQ / T tattooed on steel ribs. Lights are awakened to the east Each piston coughs a psalm to lost work; heat apostates to cold. and the whole city stands silent. Entropy is a patient god: never angry, ever hungry. A cloud, flower-like, curiously Close the cylinder, scholar — the equation keeps writing itself. advances while the clock races, Amber card murmurs abjuro, shields the brittle heartbeat for one minute; a rose fades, and Ariadne smiles. vermillion twin lisps resarcio, sewing shattered glass back to pulse. The night is quiet, it is time Simple materia: argentum speculum, breath, a hopeful thumb. for poets to decipher existence Clerics know: protection ends the moment you strike. So sing gently. while the moon waltzes above our hive Corridor repeats corridor, flesh-statues queue to kiss their own exit. This is a time in the future when the At the far pane a figure waves — is wave — refracts — disappears. egalitarian plateaux has been reached. Italian glyphs drip: “un labirinto”; Greek margins reply “λύγξ.” The world by people has become perfect. Touch the glass and fall inward: mirror breeds mirror, until prologue meets dawn. Mystic music captures this pinnacle epoch.
Infra muro Cornīnī, X homines stantrum. Un cecānus tremblat, ānta silva os tenet. Ten stand beneath the wall of Corinium. One seer trembles, while the forest holds its mouth.
2. (Crowd, murmuring)
Audiant, sed credant nōn — “Dī magnī, vel larvæ? Ai maen y gŵr yma’n sôn am dduw neu cysgod?” They listen, but do not believe — “Great gods, or ghosts? Or is this man speaking of a god or a shadow?”
3. (Seer)
Sento flamūram de lōnga oriens — A’i ddanfonwyd Krishna? Cantat vocem dan y croen byd.
I feel flame from the long East — Was Krishna sent? He sings a voice beneath the skin of the world.
4. (Crowd)
An vīdistī hoc? Est somnium? Ai freuddwyd yw hwn? Have you seen this? Is it a dream?
5. (Seer)
Arcus tremblat — Arjunus, fratrum inter, breich lui’n crynu, galon ef yn llosgi fel tân dan law.
The bow trembles — Arjuna, caught between brothers, his arm shaking, his heart burning like fire under rain.
6. (Crowd)
Hīc vīrum āmer — sed quis est iste? Un brenin, neu ynfyd? We love the warrior — but who is he? A king, or a fool?
7. (Seer)
Calibān! Filius insulae, līngua fracta, ond clyw e’r sêr yn canu. Caliban! Son of the island, with a shattered tongue, yet he hears the stars singing.
8. (Crowd)
Bestia est, servus est — cur ploras pro illo? Nid yw’n un ohonon ni… ac eto, pam y dagrau? He is a beast, a servant — why cry for him? He is not one of us… and yet, why the tears?
9. (Seer, rising)
Cavum aperitur — fissus est tempus. Mae’r wal yn hollti — mae’r byd yn siglo. The hollow opens — time is torn. The wall is splitting — the world trembles.
Racursus venit — spirālis morsus. Tonn-seith y môr du — camragwyn a ddaw. Racourse comes — the spiral bite. The seventh wave of the black sea — a crooked light approaches.
10. (Crowd shivers)
Lūx tremolat — terra mollis — sonus alienus. Yr awyr yn sgrechian — a’r pridd yn peidio ateb. Light flickers — the ground softens — a foreign sound. The sky screams — and the earth will not answer.
11. (Seer, touching the breach)
Leviatānus… nāvis in pectore… mare in pectore… ego in pectore. Ac wyf fi — yn ei galon ef. Leviathan… a ship in his chest… the sea in his chest… and I… am in his heart.
12. (All, barely whispering)
Tempus frangitur. Nōs vidēmus, nōs audīmus, nōs… nōn sumus sōlī. Ni’n gweld. Ni’n clywed. Ni… ddim ar ein pen ein hunain. Time breaks. We see. We hear. We… are not alone.
Brythonic
· A’i ddanfonwyd — “Was he sent?”
danfon = to send
-wyd = passive past marker
· dan y croen byd — “beneath the skin of the world”
dan = under
croen = skin
byd = world
· Ai freuddwyd yw hwn — “Is this a dream?”
freuddwyd = dream
yw = is
hwn = this
· breich lui’n crynu — “his arm shaking”
breich = arm
crynu = tremble
· galon ef yn llosgi — “his heart burning”
galon = heart
llosgi = to burn
· fel tân dan law — “like fire under rain”
tân = fire
law = rain
· Un brenin, neu ynfyd — “A king, or a fool?”
brenin = king
ynfyd = fool
· ond clyw e’r sêr yn canu — “yet he hears the stars singing”
clyw = hears
sêr = stars
canu = sing
· Nid yw’n un ohonon ni — “He is not one of us”
nid yw = is not
ohonon ni = of us
· pam y dagrau — “why the tears?”
dagrau = tears
· Mae’r wal yn hollti — “The wall is splitting”
wal = wall
hollti = to split
· mae’r byd yn siglo — “the world trembles”
byd = world
siglo = shake
· Tonn-seith y môr du — “The seventh wave of the black sea”
tonn = wave
seith = seven
môr = sea
du = black
· camragwyn — “crooked light” (neologism)
cam = crooked
gwyn = white/light
(rag = prefix suggesting “before” or “toward”)
· Yr awyr yn sgrechian — “The sky screams”
awyr = sky
sgrechian = to scream
· a’r pridd yn peidio ateb — “and the earth will not answer”
pridd = earth
peidio = to cease
ateb = answer
· Ac wyf fi — yn ei galon ef — “And I am in his heart”
wyf fi = I am
galon ef = his heart
Vulgar Latin / Invented Latin
· Infra muro Cornīnī — “Beneath the wall of Corinium”
infra = beneath
muro = wall (ablative)
Cornīnī = of Corinium (local case)
· X homines stantrum — “Ten men stood”
homines = men
stantrum = fabricated participle from stāre (to stand)
· cecānus tremblat — “one seer trembles”
cecānus = invented from caecus (blind)
tremblat = trembles (hybrid form)
· ānta silva os tenet — “the forest holds its mouth”
silva = forest
os = mouth
tenet = holds
· Dī magnī, vel larvæ? — “Great gods, or ghosts?”
Dī magnī = great gods
larvæ = spirits or phantoms
· Sento flamūram — “I feel flame”
sento = I feel (Italo-Latin root)
flamūram = archaic form of flamma
· sub pelle mundī — “beneath the skin of the world”
sub = under
pellis = skin
mundus = world
· Arcus tremblat — “The bow trembles”
arcus = bow
tremblat = trembles
· fratrum inter — “between brothers”
fratrum = of brothers
inter = between
· Filius insulae — “Son of the island”
filius = son
insula = island
· līngua fracta — “shattered tongue”
lingua = tongue
fracta = broken
· aurēs habet ad stella — “ears toward the stars”
aurēs = ears
ad stella = to the stars
· Bestia est, servus est — “He is a beast, a servant”
Umbre de muri, muri de mainé Dunde ne vegnì, duve l’è ch’ané Da ‘n scitu duve a l’ûn-a se mustra nûa E a nuette a n’à puntou u cutellu ä gua
E a muntä l’àse gh’è restou Diu U Diàu l’è in çë e u s’è gh’è faetu u nìu Ne sciurtìmmu da u mä pe sciugà e osse da u Dria A funtan-a d’i cumbi ‘nta cä de pria
E ‘nt’a cä de pria chi ghe saià Int’à cä du Dria che u nu l’è mainà Gente de Lûgan facce da mandillä Qui che du luassu preferiscian l’ä Figge de famiggia udù de bun Che ti peu ammiàle senza u gundun
E a ‘ste panse veue cose ghe daià Cose da beive, cose da mangiä Frittûa de pigneu giancu de Purtufin Çervelle de bae ‘nt’u meximu vin Lasagne da fiddià ai quattru tucchi Paciûgu in aegruduse de lévre de cuppi
E ‘nt’a barca du vin ghe naveghiemu ‘nsc’i scheuggi Emigranti du rìe cu’i cioi ‘nt’i euggi Finch’ou matin crescià da puéilu rechéugge Frè di ganeuffeni e d’è figge Bacan d’a corda marsa d’aegua e de sä Che a ne liga e a ne porta ‘nte ‘na crêuza de mä
Space Epics - Stories from the Multi-Verse 