I.

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

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

II.

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

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

III.

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

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

IV.

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

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

V.

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

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

VI.

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

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

VII.

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

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

LVII.

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

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

LVIII.

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

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

LIX.

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

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

LX.

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

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

LXI.

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

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

LXII.

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

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

LXIII.

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

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

LXVI.

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

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

LIV.

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

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

LV.

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

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

LVI.

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

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

LI.

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

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

LII.

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

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

LIII.

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

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

XLVII.

In a different gravitational time dilation,
Tierra madre and Desert Storm breathe
aboard the whale-slaver g-force space craft;
muttering the same word in repetition,

connecting their inner constants to the X,
logging onto each other’s Pound-Rebka’s
friendly tension. The while-supremacy
vessel accelerates close to a massive

XLVIII.

planet, spinning in straight vertical line,
time runs more slowly, and they have
a breather, while medicating with Love.
This is a new product, oozed from the X.

Stars, dizzy with combusting, whisper
a thousand million trillion ditties, each
with its own Anglo-French frequency,
and the multi-verse messages Voicemail.

XLIX.

The petit lizard re-transmits word for
word, and Ariadne stifles a yawn. So
much is happening in same curvature
of spacetime, and the energy and

momentum of creation’s passions are
thus distilled as waves of matter and
radiations of ψυχή. Directly from the X.
Active galactive volcanoes and nuclei

L.

emit intense, passionate radiations,
and kind of astronomical amounts of
tenderness can escape the uber-
consciousness of all beings, the

collective Love-conscious. Ariadne
looks out into the small radiant of
the telescope and predicts the ex
istence of dinner, a classical pesto.

XLIII.

Non-commissioned officer McCalandrh
debates the pros and cons of kicking
the crap out of the Pink-siders, a whole
bunch of aliens from the other part of

the galaxy. “We don’t want them. They
smell, and they eat funny shit.” The
discourse is held over a game of rotary
soccer; a feat in which the new recruits

XLIV.

test their military skills with more senior
staff. Aboard the “Thoughtful Massacre”,
premium ship in the war business of the
Spartan Navy, another day at the office.

“Those stinking Pinkers with pointy ears,
always smart-assing about everything,
all-knowing with their muttering sub-speak,
I can’t stand the light in their psychoirises.”

XLV.

“I beg to differ”, intervenes the Spartan,
aka Ἀτρεύς, tantalised by the idea of
mock-suck-upping to the NCO. “Pinkies
are people, or less than people but still

creatures of the X, and therefore they
deserve the respect of all citizens,
Artemis willing. Even if by eugenics
standards they are inferior, and should”

XLVI.

“probably be cleaned from the multi-
verse because of their looks and their
unfunny ideas, their worship of foreign
deities and they desire to invade our

space, or galaxy, or multi-verse, or
mid-mind. The X is merciful, and so
Artemis is powerful, and their Gods
are small and insignificant. Scum.”

XXXIX.

“Oh friend! Time holds me green
or dying, this very day.” Reunited
with Tierra Madre, Desert Storm
flashes in the dark, scowling at

the murdering cloud-wake of gas,
the jungle of bodies, the beaming
starships, the riding whale-slavers.
The two moon-blooming women,

XL.

Adam and maiden, are singingales:
ever-rising swallows, spinning people.
They intone their mournful songs
full of long-lost grace, fist into the

darkness, head into the expanding
black hole, where the gravitational
lens reflects symphones of waves.
“Ohm, friend! The human stables!”

XXXVIII.

Turbans on the slave-galley, Damascus steel
blazing; Desert Storm invokes mellifluous
Sappho, tempting her Fortune-Muse.

A captive in the fray, she’s amidst shadow
faces; out there space-giants gorge on
whole planets’ worth of seas, vomiting
cosmic waste; nine times, they fuck.

XXXI.

Ariadne ponders on the mean
ing of each tessera. Nuffink, a
capital nothing. Timeless age,
age unknown; in the beginning.

These mosaics I have shored
against the entropic waves.
A giant leap of fire, a frozen poison
stream. “This gap, forever falling

XXXII.

was born as the proto-Titan Chaos.
Our great-grandfather, via his son
Eros.” Ariadne mixes the tesserae,
looking for a recognizable pattern.

XXXIII.

“Earth existed not. Nor heaven above.
Or should I say, the sky? The abyss
had a name, and it was very big, it was
eternal. And there was no grass, it

eked out, it was barely there. No it
won’t do. It was all bare, skinless, grass
less. The cold waves of the sea, the sand;
nuffink was there at all. There was Chaos;
Chaos was the abyss, He was Ginnunga.

XXXIV.

And from this chasm, with ceaseless
turmoil seething… no, that’s another
fragment. And a voice comes to mind:
“Take your place in the cosmos, Ariadne.

be a star that shines. Give up your
mortal enterprise, reprise your role
in heaven. Once Dionysus’s bride…”
Another image floats in mid-air. It

XXXV.

is the usual voice in the mind and
the incubus of a shadow in the soul.
Yet the image seems different, but
the voice is all too familiar. The image

is that of a titan, brawn and bone
bound to a large rock; his liver is
food for an ever-thirsty bald eagle.
Another image, another tessera.

XXXVI.

Iob after this opens his moth, and
butterflies curse his day. The voice
continues: “Ariadne. Let go of this
human illusion, be the star that you

are.” Ariadne closes her eyes and
sees the persecuting shadow on
the fourth wall, laughing its invi
sible head off. Mockery and persu

XXXVII.

ation, perversion and idol-dance
farcical, frenzetical, fanatical. The
worst is but the self, but worse.
half a head of Renoir’s favourite.

Caravaggio’s broken, flapping
black wings. Gauguin in his hide
out in the blue. Ariadne tries to
stop the flurry of images thrown
in her face by the faceless shadow.

XXX.

AGE waz old; ‘twaz nuffink der.
’twere nor sandz nor seazz; nor
cold wavezz. Earff eczisted not,
nor upp-hymn. De abyss waz,
waz gappeterna. & grass eke-ly.