Chapter VI.

I.

relative universe flows through the Mind,
ripples in waves, music to some,
dreadful noise to others. Creatures
unseen, mysteries in song-tormented
green oceans, deep beneath the mantle of
hungry planets, ditzy stars, half-forgotten light.

II.

The Archive of Myth must not be burnt,
protect the emptiness with emptiness.
Even if the artists and the architects have
long gone, the memory of a moment

of clear light must not wither away too
soon. Not before the pages have been
turned by a young person, and the song
has been sung again, just before dusk.

III.

Extreme psychological pain can rust
the soul’s mechanical clockwork, and
eye in eyes, dome in domes, we shall
melt into cloud, echo as summer heat.

Desert Storm has shrunk to size in the
cacophony of winter, has gone missing in
the lower lands, off toward the dunes
and the unfinished quicksands and marshes.

IV.

Volterra is a distant memory now. And so
all the neverending faces and curled lips that
populated the space between unread letters
and unsung characters, between the fall of
finnegan and imaginary spaceships, or cats.

Desert Storm walks in solitude toward
the sea, hurt by thorns of greedy shrub.

V.

Venus rising from the waters, bent on finding
love, defining it, having it sung by poets
high and low, until the subject’s quite dry and
the moon’s embittered light is all that is left.

In the stomach of the whale, Fortune Lobo
fought consciousness with courage; his thought
was heard by ghosts, in unimagined corners.
Then, the music slows, the high-strung notes

VI.

return, tracing the path toward the sea that
suddenly aged Desert Storm is treading in
resilience. Not far from the Gulf of Poets,
or further up toward the rocky shores of
other towns, clusters of coloured houses
like grapes, beside the ever-blasting wave.

VII.

‘What sea is this? What planet? I must
be lost beyond the land of dreams. I,
no longer I. Desert Storm. Is it not a
silly name, given by a random thought?’

‘The bright and clear upper air, far away
from the earth, and all is known. I can
see the steps of Ariadne as stars in the
ether. I need a new name, I need a new

VIII.

purpose. The dreadful house of shadowy
night, the hunger of monstrous Python,
a sea-shell, bringing me to the sky, or the
mountain. Where is the Vivian Wing?’

Across this sea of forgetfulness, there is
a cave. Brothers Oineiros live with their
father Hypnos in a dark and misty cavern
in the remote land of the Cimmerians.

IX.

Whenever needed, one of the brothers
flies off as dream to give advice or comfort.
Desert Storm has perhaps strayed onto
a self-aware planet of metamorphic

forgetfulness, where memorian and
oblivian merge, and the gentle murmur
of water invites slumber. Come join
Hypnos, and his brother Thanatos to

X.

a moment of everlasting sleep, or perhaps
let ego be your fears among the poppies, or
perpetual herbs, all shedding responsibility.
Whenever a dream is needed, swiftly it appears.

Apollo, victorious over the Python, has come
to offer you a grain of sand, rearguard Reader.
With that you can call upon tenderness, or old
age, or strife, or any of the children of the Night.

XLVII.

“What doesn’t kill you, makes you sadder. I
might have been born of parthenogenic rock,
maybe my ancestry can be traced to the land
of the Cimmerians. If there ever was a parent,

he or she might have dipped my body upwards
in the serpent-ocean waters that surround us.
I am Monkey, and I have come to believe in
entropy. It is like coming home after the wars.

XLVIII.

I embrace entropy, and that is why I am set on
this act of Terror, I want to burn the Archive of
Myth, with the artists and the historians in it.
That is my statement in the stale, pointless debate

between memorians and oblivians. But I hesitate.
Three women in blue, twitching with white lily
expectation, the air is as still a summer question.
They stand before me, like a three-headed hound.

XLIX.

If strenuous life hits me, I bend and break. There
is no glory in the explosion of birds in the green sky,
the variations of Goya’s witches, dancing within
me. But I see here my archenemies, those who

wish to bring me back to the right side of the road.
Cecco and Gawain, you are fools of the first degree.
Knights forever kneeled to a lady, in her lap. Ar ar
ar. Gawain is indifferent honest, Cecco is full of

L.

desire. What are you searching for, you morons?”
Gawain steps forth, and holds his breath. Cecco
opens his mouth, then he lets go of a fart. “We’ve
come to stop you from your foolish attempt at

undermining all that we’ve accumulated for eons.
I mean, you can’t just burn the thing down. Besides,
Ariadne is doing some research, and we are talking
about millions of milliseconds of cultadorale activity.”

LI.

Cecco and Gawain have come to battle with
Monkey’s enraged spirit. Emotional riddle-quote
with swindling attached is the weapon of choice.
Monkey: “Two against one, how’s that fair…”

Gawain: “Well, we are the good guys, so…”
“That is what hunters and murderers tell
themselves”, Monkey sighs. At the back
entrance of museyroom G in Volterra, a
door which leads straight into the heart

LII.

of the Archive of Myth, three spirits of
hypergalactose vibrational energy stand
facing each other, prepared for duel.

“Krishna, Krishna,
Now as I look on
These my kinsmen
Arrayed for battle,
My limbs are weakened,
My mouth is parching,
My body trembles,
[…] My brain is whirling
Round and round,
I can stand no longer:
Krishna, I see such
Omens of evil!”

LIII.

Monkey reverse-calls God, and asks
for justice. A question of emotional
riddle-quote with swindling attached.
The number you have dialled has not

been recognized. Please try again.
At this point Cecco steps forward,
he opens a letter to his lover, and then
throws it in the gutter. And then he

LIV.

answers “in the darkness of the north,
there is a fish; its name is leviathan.
leviathan is a fish so large that its
size is unknown. when it transform
itself, it becomes a bird, and its name
is predator. of predator, we cannot
estimate the size of the posterior.
caught in a rage, he flies off, and
its wings like clouds cliff-hang in
the sky. this bird, when the sea
starts to stir, heads toward the
darkness of the south. this is the
pond of heaven.”

LV.

Monkey “of thoughtless, free
roaming, I know nothing. I am
the bird that caught fire. ‘Birds
feed off birds, beasts on each other
prey; But savage man alone
does man betray.’ So, there.”

LVI.

Gawain “you are no lady Osprey
of Perth and Kinross, you are no
man, you are less than human.
You are a mindless, stupid monkey.
I should know that, I wasted my
life listening to your drivel. ‘Ay
ay, good man, kind father, best
of friends (long pause), these are
the words that grow like grass and
nettles, out of dead men, and speckled
hatreds lie, like toads among them’
you are no hero, Monkey.”

LVII.

“Oh, yes, I am a monkey, thank you
for reminding me. I’ve been constantly
reminded since, well… forever. Yet I am
human. And since I cannot be a hero… I
am determined to be a villain; I do hope
that I shall not end up in a Leicester parking
lot, though. That would be worse than dying.”

LVIII.

In the dark room with heavy curtains drawn,
Ariadne asks and asks, but El Greco refuses
to answer. Life as Neo-Platonist is very much
shut up in the digestive system of God.

Domenikos refuses to allow her to open
the curtains. He says that the light outside
disturbs his inner light. Ariadne decides that
it is time to act. She shows herself as one

LIX.

of the lilies of the river-bank at Knossos;
Domenikos is moved to tears. If only God
stood still like those timeless moments. If
only the icons of Byzantine paintings could

speak, if only His eyes had not been crossed
out (pun unintended)… Titian, in the other
room, converses with Desert Storm on how
Ariadne coming out of the sea to meet Dionysus

LX.

changed his life. “Ah, Domenikos, he is a good
student… a little restless.” The light at the site
of the gulf of Lerici… or was it further south,
toward the nameless Etruscan moors?

Volterra stands tall and angry, overlooking
Tyrrenian remorse. Titian was a mountaineer,
he idolised the sea! I can almost see the faces
of the many hundred imitation artists, Ione

LXI.

among them, who sought to capture the very
same light, the lazy, white clouds in the summer
sky, the gulls, the ripples of ocean wave…
“Ariadne came out of the sea to meet me,

and I offered a glass of wine, and the company
of my merry, slightly crazy friends… enough
said.” Desert Storm smiles, for the artist in

LXII.

in her knows that the road is steep and rocky:
‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they
will, I long for your merry and tender and
pitiful words, For the roads are unending
and there is no place to my mind.’

LXIII.

Monkey ju-dances with Gawain; he wishes
to be dead, and he whispers in his enemy’s
ear: “I have roamed from cloud to cloud…”

El Greco: “… I am an immigrant. I have
died so many times, in Candia, in Venetia,
in Roma, in Toledo. I wasted my money
on orchestras and on clay, but the blood

LXIV.

and sorrow of the womb, I have captured
with my art.” And Cecco, outside, riddle-
swindling Monkey… “the sands of my life
do pass”… El Greco continues: “Rome
was more disappointing than Venice.
Second-rate mannerists! In Spain I have

LXV.

found the Absolute. And twenty-four
rooms. I was on the verge of a great
revolution, and a canyon. The Tagus
bubbled up nicely, like a mission.

I would create anything, new and
forever parasitic. The souls of countless
unbelieving visitors would have to
pay. My paintings are forever feeding

LXVI.

off the life-energy of unbelievers, that
is my curse on the shallow humanity.
I might have died in 1614, but the odds
and ends of my digestion are still being

processed, and they shall creep towards
you, dearReader.”

LXVII.

“Why am I not born like a Gentileman,
and why am I now so speak-able about
my eatables.”

In this endswell of chaperone five, book
the second, “Man is temporarily wrapped
in obscenity, looking through these accidents
with the faroscope of television (this nightlife
instrument… … … … )

XLIII.

Ariadne and Desert Storm are interviewing
the painters. Domenikos Theotokopoulos,
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Tiziano
di Pieve di Cadore. The Archive of Myth is

soon to be decommissioned. It is generally
agreed that one cannot carry too many images
around for too long. Ariadne knows that her
mission is soon to end, but still she digs for

XLIV.

Truth and Beauty. Still, there is so little
secret left in each soul in this time of
computational soul-laundering. John C
has taken the form of a ghost, he enter

tains conversations with Cicciotta, who
is so very sorry that he had a thought about
becoming a tree, but then with all the
ecological star wars on planet Earth, and

XLV.

the fact that there are no trees on Titan,
he just simply decided to give up on
reincarnation. In the zero point field,
Fortune Lobo sees misery greater than

his own. In the Burial of Count Orgaz,
he reflects on the spiritual exercise of
an overcrowded fusion of heavenhell.
John C’s restlessness is also shaken by

XLVI.

the grip of the senses, The 3rd of May
1808, that’s the image that he mirrors.
At the time of death, simple harmonic
motions deriving from the soul lead

our characters to become energy trapped
in paintings, or images within images.
Cicciotta is having tea with Ahura Mazda,
merciless and wonderful sexuality, meaow.

XXXIII.

‘In the cave of the Flower-Fruit mountain, there is no
space for bad thoughts, no room for a thousand shafts
of golden light. I went and stole the centre of the ocean
treasury, but I found no peace.’ Monkey is talking to

himself. Ever since he asundered from Gawain, he
finds it difficult not to discuss matters with another
self. He feels as bent as the Golden-Hooped Rod.
Allow me to ask him how he feels, dearReader. He

XXXIV.

wishes to go through some more metamorphoses,
but he has lost all purpose of his shapeshifting. Of
course, he feels shame about the death of Fortune
Lobo, but his malady is deeper, a leukemia of the

spirit. No soaring of clouds, or riding of mists, no
breaking up into a ten thousand bareback gibbons
can mend his ways, he has reached the outskirts of
the city of Corruption, a place beyond return. It’s

XXXV.

all very metaphorical, of course. He’s still in
Volterra, but the region of Darkness is upon him.
The galaxies in the sky are blue-shifted to-night,
in honour of Monkey’s sapphic restlessness, because

Eros, you burn us. Of all stars, the most beautiful…
blame the delicate Artemis. Walking the streets of
Volterra, the staccato repetitions of hollow steps
on the stone slabs. The amplitude and the phase

XXXVI.

of Monkey’s multi extro versality accounts for
his ability of being absolutely everywhere at any
time, and shapeshifting into everything, but the
sum of Feynman histories is melancholy and contro

versy. The Pheistos disc is a riddle that requires
much strength and temperance, not exactly our
simian friend’s forte. On multiple occasions,
Monkey has metamorphosed through spacetime,

XXXVII.

carried a vessel of wirelessness and crimson joy.
Then he rode a bubble-brane and came to Titan to
hack the NeverEnder of his computational loop.
He was responsible for the leak in the

Murakamian Well. He poisoned the well by
a blundering attempt to stop all unwanted
negativity. Living in denial was not enough,
he had to go and emotionally off-load into

XXXVIII.

the Murakamian liquid phase. Result, John
C is dead, even if his dance-zheimer would
have killed him sooner or later. Now, brane
somer-saulting is a new art, one for which the

dying Galatian would resist letting go. Even
the gallery upstream in the Archive of Myth
has a section with a dedicated exhibition on
the portrayal of such bounce-raging imbalances.

XXXIX.

Monkey is furious. ‘I do not accept suffering,
I do not accept decay. I do not accept death.
So, kill me. I cannot die, anyway. I refuse to
die.’ She is speaking to the vast emptiness

before her, and the nodding cypresses, who
always agree with her in silence. ‘An avenue
for escape, is all I need. But transformation

XL.

after transformation, I seem to fall further
into suffering, and not slip away from the
ashes of the phoenix. Perhaps I should stop
thinking in dualistic terms. Even the word

‘stop’ is dualistic. I am a cavalier servente,
I am the second marriage that corrupts the
first. I, I, I… Wait, I dreamed that Greece might
still be free. For standing on the Persian’s grave

XL.

(Ahura Mazda feels explosions in his ears)
I could not deem myself a slave.’ But Monkey,
you are a slave, even if you are a brave one,
one that would gladly die at Missolonghi.

There is much duality in your croco-tears,
and though we cannot measure the amplitude
of your oscillatory sorrow, we can venture to
say that you are a Nostromo-type unreliable

XLI.

narrator. You tell yourself stories of how much
you have suffered when you have been abandoned,
but have you not betrayed and stolen, have you
not eaten forbidden peaches (there is at least

a chapter about this in a westward novel). We’ve
all been abandoned, we’ve all been betrayed. So
what. If you die fighting the Turkish hordes, if
you trace the hidden treasures of Dacia, you are

XLII.

playing the materialist fool, are you not? Ahura
Mazda feels wild as a whirling wave, the concept
of ‘accursed one’ has haunted him for centuries.
No, Monkey refuses to surrender. He makes sail

for the primitive cloud in the sky, and his mono
mania takes new level, and his imagination spans
the size of another literature. He stabs at the invisible
whale that haunts him, but there is no vengeance.

XXII.

The night is dark, but the moon is white.
Fortune Lobo is dead, and so the love of
Monkey, who once was a Wallyeean beauty.
She was the daughter of a farmer, with

humorous utility to the commune where
they were living. Monkey was a bonny swan.
The darkness over Volterra is absolute. The
memory of love is always hardest to exorcise.

XXIII.

‘Oh father, oh daddy, here swims a swan…’
Monkey sings a song from old times, he
looks at the absolute stillness of the white
washed tower-city leering over the cloud murk.

Haunted, desperate, Monkey holds the Auryn
talisman in his hand, looking back across the
flatlands toward the interior of the land. He
knows that his soul is in prison, the Medici

XXIV.

have a fortress to hold all reason and all desire.
Volterra is famous for the temples, and the
voices of the wind, and for the whispers of the
dead. The Etruscans are no more. Monkey

is mourning the death of her innocence. She
lost her virginity in the park, and now she
traces the footsteps back to the temple where
Athena’s honour has been desecrated. Monkey

XXV.

is full of sorrow, and beats his dead hand
against the stone, and the city responds with
a groan. Cecco and Gawain have arrived,
Desert Storm with them. They are sleeping

at the monastery. That is a place where
writers and vampires alike have found
solace and solstice, and the light of the star
has found them even in decaying dreams.

XXVI.

There is just not enough space for Monkey’s
sense of guilt and wonder. The water-ammonia
ocean on planet Poseidon expands and the
GuiltTripper dragon grows into the archenemy

of Thor. He has grown so large that if he lets
go of his tail, which he is holding in his jaw,
the world will come to an end. Ironic, for

XXVII.

Monkey stares at the image of Miðgarðsormr,
he knows that the ubiverse is coming to an end.
The ouroboros has dawn-significance for the
human psyche, but the eternal recurrence may

not awake Thor from the slumber of Ragnarok.
It is not time yet. Volterra is asleep, and so our
characters. The painters are assembled in the
hall, waiting for the inspiration of Grendel.

XXVIII.

Michael Ende predicted in his days in Rome,
the turtle and the street sweeper, and Momo.
Men in grey suits are stealing time. In the
story of Bastian, the sword was drawn, and

the unending force of drowning nothingness
is swallowing every dream and myth, every
gesture of kindness, any hope and emotion.
Monkey knows that his actions also fuel the

XXIX.

expansion of the domain of nothingness, and
the advancing of the white plague. Sleep,
Monkey! Rest your weary mind. You may
not grow big and small any longer. You

may have lost your ability to cloud somer
sault, but you are a living being, a creature
of the spirit. You’re very like a gentle woman.
There is no rest for victims of the GuiltTripper.

XXX.

Circling around the peaks of the abode of the
snows, the Him Alaya. The abode of light
is the place that Monkey is reaching for, if
only he closes his eyes, he can see that small

balcony, and small black ants scurrying along,
looking for food and shelter. The joy of waiting
for the summer to start, or the spring flowers
suddenly appearing at the corner of the street.

XXXI.

Then the early snows of autumn, carrying all
the hope of of the dawn-life, the new cycle of
the cockroach’s existence, so much to look for
ward to. John C is dead, long live his memory!

Monkey feels dead inside, but with eyes closed
he sees images of past life, of joyous life, his
life, other people’s life, he sees all, and he can
almost reach the awakening, the words of Blake

XXXII.

scattered like wild fire in the night’s shadow,
out of the window of the train on which you are
travelling at full speed toward the essence of the
chromoflower, and more songs of experience.

Monkey refuses to go to sleep, and refuses to give
in to shame, and fear, and guilt. He knows that even
if his soul is rotten, even if he is past forgiveness, he
knows that Heaven is compassion, here. Thus, he weeps.

XVI.

Suspend wisdom, and eliminate knowledge
for knowledge’s sale. Ahura Mazda has come
to visit Ariadne in the Archive of Myth. She
is not aware of his spirit looming in the room;

the dusty books and the olden memories speak
volumes from shelved moments, and the myths
are alone with themselves. The NeverEnder
archivist is on the road in Arizona, in a time

XVII.

where the snakes are talking, and the hurricanes
are spinning stories. There is much love hidden
like a thread in a thread, a pattern in a pattern.
One cannot see it from the outside, though the

sound of passeridae in a small wooden patch
may bring about a resting place for the mind.
The memory of the Archive provides a similar
service. Ariadne has accepted the nature of her

XVIII.

woe. It is not likely to leave her, there is a wee
burden of feeling and thought which sits like
a sphinx on one’s stomach. Ariadne can see it,
she acknowledges its presence, and carries on.

A great ability is like awkwardness, the Tao
descends onto Ariadne, and the echoes are heard
by Desert Storm, but she constantly updates her
social network, and her neurosis is spaced across

XIX.

a gap of three minutes’ worth. The waters of
autumn trace the freedom of intuition. Follow
the random mixing of the five colours. ‘But,
Krishna, if you consider the knowledge of

Brahman superior to any sort of action, why are
you telling me to do these terrible deeds?’ We
are entirely dependent on cooperation from
the unconscious. The very voices that Gawain

XX.

and Cecco are looking for, the songs of children
in the morning, or the dark purplish lights of
midnight in soft, warm nights before the rain.
Water flows continually into the ocean, but

the ocean is never disturbed. Ariadne takes
notes. She has faint memories of black sails,
and losing her way in a maze, and then the
swamps came in the form of concrete and steel.

XXI.

“As to artistic and scientific creation, I hold
with Schopenhauer that the strongest motive
is the desire to leave the rawness and monotony
of every day life, so as to take refuge in a world

crowded with images of our own creation.”
The ancient mariner quotes Einstein. Ariadne
is reading about the mariner’s gestures on
planet Verne, and the rosy-fingered moon.

V.

Chubby is alone on the titanic wasteland,
mourning the loss of a friend. ‘I saw him
on the hill, walking toward the zenith, day
after day; and then one day I saw him no

more.’ The light of the star is remote and
on Titan, the dunes and the streams of
methane shiver with changing winds, a
desire to be free of mental blockades.

VI.

Desert Storm has not used a self-esteem
injection for a long while, and while she
walks with the two half wits (her words)
toward Volterra, her thoughts are dark.

Gawain and Cecco are always fighting
for who is the smartest, the most poetic,
and the handsomest. They are competing
for Desert Storm’s attention, though she

VII.

does not care one bit about one or the
other. She has been studying the life of
Monkey, and has correspondence with
la belle dame sans merci, who she ad

mires. It is not a secret that the rich and
the powerful are an example, and so
the very mad. Monkey is also headed
toward Volterra. He is troubled, and

VIII.

he bounces off and on the clouds,
stomping them as if they were mush
rooms. talking of michelangelo, there
is a roomful of painters in Volterra,

all assembled for the Dance of the Arts,
a rare event which has been organised
to celebrate the conjunction of Venus
and Adonis. The name of the planet on

IX.

which these events take place is not
known to me, dearReader. I am just
reporting what is passing in the wind.
This mythical city seems so very far.

And to be honest, with the death of
John C I have grown weary of the
criticisms of some characters, who
claim to love the verses, but not follow

X.

the story, they kind of refuse to comply.
The same with readers, they are so busy
now listening to the whispers in the
galaxy that they cannot find the courage

to connect to the solar system wide web
and download the NeverEnder. The ship
is exhausted, so much exposure, and for
what (for Hecuba, or was it Hector).

XI.

There is a growing sense of discomfort
in the ubi-verse, as if the qualms of the
atoms are of no interest, and the deeds
of infamous people are to be celebrated.

Mousieur Mortlock and Mephisto are
still about, and so the Marketeers and
Profiteers with their Privateers. They
steal, and they coagulate, and then they

X.

steal again. A large assembly of Laputa
scientists has convened for a massive
brawl to establish who is the loudest,
and the most successful cockroach.

But there is a new addition to the host
of cockroaches, for JohnC is reincarnated,
and he comes back as a cockroach. Belly
up (of course), he tries to communicate

XI.

with Chubby who is very annoyed about
finding insects in her flat. I mean! In this
gentrified day and age! I mean! Cockroaches
in my house, and a toad in the wall (watch

out, John C) who slurps on them! Chubby
is extremely pissed off, and she squashes him
with no hesitation, even if he was trying to
tell her how much he has missed her. So

XII.

he dies again, though this time it’s not a
big deal. Of course, it’s only a bug. But
then, a bug with the consciousness of an
infotechnician. Anyway, as the narrator was

saying (I hope he does not have the voice
of Harrison Ford, we have enough on our
hands with replicant cats, let alone replicant
sheep). This digression is too long and the

XIII.

thought is cut short. Ah yes! Desert Storm
is very busy remembering her days on the
Swappinstan planet. There is new celebrity
TV program of Swappinsteinish origin.

The host is discussing why secularism
in the Peak Civilization (France, yo) is
to be criticised for its hypocrisy and a
hundred prophetic reasons why the Swap

XIV

pinsteinish crowd has the moral high
ground. Particularly interesting are the opi
nion of one Swappinsteinish lady, who cri
ticizes the Peak for their terrorism of ideas.

What laughtearable matters! Thanks to the X,
Creme-caramel is still free, and her poetry
is still creating holes in the wall, and she still
dreams of a better world. It is hard to forgive

XV.

your enemies, especially the ones who
put you in prison, Oscar Wilde. Your story
of Canterville is haunting the twice-dead
John C who is trying to find some light

in the cosmic darkness, a mixture of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the beauty
of a young Julie Christie. Or was it her
ways. Actually, it’s her ways right now.

Chapter V

I.

Life after death is like a broken
while loop with no increment. John C
is caught in a web of fading lights;
his spirit survives the body, but

a tangle of emotions is scattered
after the leap, and memories whizz
and fizz like haunted fables. Some
where in the 16th century the earl

II.

of Canterville murdered his unfaith
ful wife. For that, he was ridiculed
relentlessly by a family of unbelieving
Yankees. But some times the very next

verse is nasty, and some times,
you’re just dead. After many a summer,
et cetera. The Lady of Ascalot docet.
Does your health insurer give you

III.

fifty percent off monthly gym fees
at screwballmonsterous dot com? Mine
does. But what good is that after
death. Light (satyrical, starlit?)

is the only problem, when choosing
among the lesser lights for a possible
reincarnation to be attracted to. All
energy is dissipated entropically into

IV.

the great hypergalactic emptiness.
Tune in, and listen to the logos,
or perhaps the grand overarching
silence. It slides across the wabe

like a slithy tove, and a mimsy
borogrove. Even if it’s not time
for tea, the Jabberwock comes biting
John C’s collected waves (or unconscious)

XLVII.

So censorship issues a dictum on imagined idiocies.
‘You are not allowed to draw, and I see what I wish
in your drawings, so my accusations will be holy.’
Fuck that. Switch on the Murakamian Well. The

Archive of Myth is leaking. John C has tinkered
his DNA to pick up sounds and accusations across
the ubi-verse. Artemis, meanwhile, is hunting in
the woods. Let her hunt, and let the moon shine.

XLVIII.

It’s not just a reflection. Satellites adjust the tilt
of our gravitational being. We are humans, we know
shit. The Murakamian liquid is spilling out, and
the seconds are being counted since the cat left.

Ah, don’t forget about the numenosity of the moon.
The cat clone, outside on the sands of Titan, on
the extensive aeolian dunes, is counting the stars.
This activity is popular elsewhere in the ubi-verse.

XLIX.

Some rotten fish imported from Borovoe lake
has made John C sick. Artemis is resting in the
Etruscan twilight. Cecco and Gawain have found
their way through the flatlands near the Tyrrenian

sea, labouring their way inland, toward the myth
ical lost city of Volterra. They are planting small
poem-seedlings, which require small attention.
A former Etruscan champion of reincarnation,

L.

an individual by the name of David Herbert
is trying to call John C’s number, but the ring
bounces back, John C is dreaming of cooking
spaghetti and does not hear the phone ringing.

His illness is advanced. Dance-zheimer, coupled
with DNA telomerisis, chromosome decay, and
single nucleotide subversion are adding up to
his malady, which is mental and cytoplasmic.

LI.

In the Archive of Myth, Ariadne is alone with
the silence of timeless images. It is fine to be
alone with images, she tells herself. Shadows
across facelessness. Raffaello’s green is always

greener in someone else’s gallery. Tintoretto’s
Jesus, all piety as well as wet and sexy after
a football match, kneels to wash the feet of his
team mates. St George, like Perseus, is fighting

LII.

the timeless whale. John C is dying, drowning
in the Murakamian Well while his cellularity is
(to put it simply) completely fucked up. In the
stomach of the whale, Fortune Lobo is suffering

a similar destiny. He is being pushed toward the
intestine. That would be the end. Four stomachs
are already enough trouble, and there isn’t any
air in there. Breathing methane, like on Titan.

LIII.

Fortune Lobo and John C are seeing what Ariadne
is seeing in the Archive of Myth. A gallery of
images. The light of Carthago is still very delenda.
Perseus is very blue, a moody and firm expression.

The Gorgon doesn’t really look pretty at all. It is
so sad to be mistaken for krill, but then again you
wouldn’t expect whales on Poseidon to be normal
at all. After all, there is no such thing as normality.

LIV.

Or should we call it normalness, or normalosity.
Creatures of the ubi-verse at not concerned with
being normalous, unlike the Milky way prop-ups.
So let’s talk about what it means to be normal for

a (relatively) young lady, or a galaxy. Our friend
Andromeda, while waiting for Cetus, shows a
trend related to her stellar age (she is not that old,
still waiting to get married to Perseus or the Milky

LV.

way). In her spiralling beauty, the youngest stars
show a relatively ordered rotational motion. Fortune
Lobo dreams of kissing her around the centre of her
galaxy (he’s always been naughty). In her hair, older

stars display a much disordered motion. In her eyes,
stars are moving coherently, with nearly the same
velocity, whereas in her heart, stars are disorderly
showing a wider range of velocities (Cicciotta is

LVI.

taking notes), implying a greater spatial dispersion.
All of this is so very painful. As previously stated,
the Gorgon does not look pretty now, but once like all
of us, she might have counted the stars from the

gutter, thinking of Oscar. In a sudden rush of anger,
Ariadne shouts ‘the enemies of the Archive of Myth
are to be turned into stone.’ In her mind, there is some
delayed apoptosis. Half of the archive is under

LVII.

reconstruction. ‘Je suis Charlie’, sighs Ariadne.
She notices that Perseus is about to turn to face
her, perhaps to even speak to her. Would it not
be wonderful, dearReader, if our beloved myths

were to come back from the world of ideas
(where Plato first hid caves and chains) and
spoke to us with true passion, and radiating
with the knowledge and virtue of the immortals?

LVIII.

We could then feel a joyful blessing, timeless
and floating above all of our failings, and decayed
bodily functions (much before the genetic-tinkered
DNA decides to get fragmented and cancerous).

There is not much time left for Fortune Lobo.
He has almost made it to the rectum. He sees
the light at the end of the tunnel. At the end,
there is light. Monkey is long gone. John C

LIX.

sees him dying, thinking that Monkey, one
day, will regret having betrayed Fortune Lobo,
a young, and much loved cadet. His final
moments are dark, and very sorrowful.

John C himself is drowning in a sea of
Murakamian liquid. Cicciota is outside,
singing in the wind, unaware that her friend
is shuffling off this mortal coil. But Perseus

LX.

is still blue, and Raffaello is still green.
The tables are broken, the soldiers are toys,
and the enzymes and light wash the flesh
of all joy. John C’s final thought is devoted

(why oh why) to Hox genes. There must
be some plan to this body of galaxies. So
shanti shanti shanti. Fortune Lobo and John
C are no more. Good, let’s get some coffee.

LXI.

But wait! Desert Storm has been falling for
some time now, since the days of the black
hole (the good old days) and her location is
unknown. But she stumbles upon a new

dimension, and ends up into the lap of Cecco,
who instantly falls in love. ‘You, Becchina!
Beccanassa!’ Gawain is not interested. ‘ Yo,
we’ve got a Grail to catch. Or what was it.’

XXXVIII.

There is no greater sexism than love among
sexes. Monkey shape-shifts into a Wallyeean
beauty. Not so much of an attractive woman,
but a lovable profiteer with a heart of gold

who had so many issues as a child, as she was
abandoned by one parent, while the other
committed suicide. Impossible to resist. The
call for self-destruction is so very wicked. Once

XXXIX.

again, Fortune Lobo falls in lust, or tenderness,
or the two mixed together. At this point John C
is feeling exhausted with the emotional ups and
downs of all life. He has his own love interest,

a clonal organism called “la belle dame sans merci”
(for lack of originality), who is a real-world
profiteer (or should I say, present-day. But then
again, what is the present). He has some very

XL.

convoluted feelings for this money-potter, who
(according to his theory) honey-potted him while
he was travelling to the Archive of Myth many
eons ago (or was it days). At the same time, Ariadne

is left with the task of making sense of all imper
manence. She is carefully archiving the myths, and
the transient stories, so that the Neverender continues
to be fuelled. Many of the stinkiest myths relate

XL.

to abandonment, and betrayal, and the mythical
monster from neverEnder history, the “GuiltTripper”.
This beast is relentless, living in the deep folds of
planet Fear. It shapeshifts, and right now Monkey

transforms itself into this dragon. Fortune Lobo
strays from the path, as he starts to feel a kind of
empathy with the stomach of the whale, and wants
to let go. Cicciotta is feeding John C, who has lost

XLI.

all will to continue, and his comatose mind is being
driven by self-forming patterns of narrative anxiety.
The GuiltTripper rises in the stomach of the whale,
and in the electron pathways of his cerebrotony. The

monotonous tones of the GuiltTripper call are music
for John C’s hypotonia and poetic “let-go”ness. Monkey
has doubts about profiteering, and about his identity.
All this shapeshifting are so very confusing. In the

XLII.

bank, “la belle dame sans merci” is busy creating
self-aware products of mathematical destruction,
deriving knowledge from pseudo-knowledge and
predicting the future. She lives on one of the most

Coruscant-leaning planets of the ubi-verse, which
sounds so obscene that we shall avoid mentioning.
Thanks to Byronocular vision, John C has spotted
her with his mega carbolatic telescope and he spends

XLIII.

many a night pining away, trying to distract himself
from his advancing dance-zheimer, and the broken
codes of his DNA, the rumblings of his stomach, and
the woes of an increasingly lonely Ariadne, now steering

the NeverEnder alone, and with no help, as the cadets
have gone to sleep, and officer Flexa is freezing with
echoes of Planet Fear. In the interior design of the whale,
Fortune Lobo pledges his alliance and loyalty to the

XLIV.

profiteering myth, and god-mobile in the shadows
rubs his fins. Now that all is done, Monkey is not so
very sure about what has happened. She shapeshifts
back to a Turandot-like figure, and sits down. She

resolves to escape the mouth of the whale, and start
a journey in the ubi-verse search for the mythical
lost city of Volterra, in search for answers. But the
GuiltTripper on planet Fear has been awoken, and

XLV.

has been summoned in the presence of Fortune Lobo,
now incapacitated by the profiteering myth, as well
as the myth of advancing amour-rouseness. The same
malady has striken John C, who is increasingly sick

and increasingly disenchanted with following the story
of the sick thoughts of planets, though the download-
upload may come from a mutation from his very blood.
In their search for the unconsciousness while travelling

XLVI.

incognito during the Borovoe middle ages, Cecco
and Gawain have become good friends, and their
partnership is based on a common love for poetry,
so their have endevoured to build a new City of

Poetry in whichever land or planet they happen to
be, and watch it grow. As it is widely known, poetry
incantations are autotrophic, they just need a bit
of water and starlight, and they are good to go.