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A.E. Reiff
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Craft and synopsis
Inpreparing entry for an ucoming Gasher chapbook series I was diverted at the end by the craftstatement that evoked the process in the chapentry and outdistanced it when later none of it could be believed.
Craft and synopsis
Belief in the work makes it happen and if the lines live long enough theyprove themselves to evoke the first vision that provoked them. it is a memorytrove that is the most
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Published on October 28, 2026 08:01
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Recon
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The True Light That Lights
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A Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David 1-41
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A Translation of the New Philadelphia
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America 2000This is an exercise in time travel. What happens to see the result of our lives fifty years from on when the acts and passions are 80? What happens to the rationalization of motives? What were they anyway, what were the passions, who were America 2000
This is an exercise in time travel. What happens to see the result of our lives fifty years from on when the acts and passions are 80? What happens to the rationalization of motives? What were they anyway, what were the passions, who were the people, what happened to them? We woke to find them gone, leaving the landscape unrecognized, the spirit of the time gone too, the roads, the tools by which people made their lives, gone, books for example, like this one, poems written in Austin c. 1968.
i hardly remember what was called America 2000 except from a presage of the millennial end, with all war could foster. for then the the secret agencies were unknown. People believe that Crosby Stills Nash Young Zappa and Beatles had integrity in search of higher life, not that they were government implants to emotionally program the mass, build one collective. This records too how much I believed any of it and if that was believed or not what do i believe today? These poems reach forward to 2026, their fifty years is older. The earliest stem from the previous stint Fayettevillnam, A&P etc, sacred goose, and before that the stint in Central America, To Roosevelt, and inbetween sojourn in Iowa city, crocuses. So that this begins with St Brenden and Raleigh and Erik the Red, time's brakes off, but back, then mystically back, to presage forward to 2000, at which we laugh because we are still there!So if there were stops in the origins of America 2000 they stand for many more made, as in Vittore Baroni's La Biblioteca Utopica, books of 170 authors from 26 countries, "art done by everybody for everybody...aligned and transversal planes that frequently cross and mingle, an underground tradition fueled by grassroots activism in continuous transformations filled with insets, cards, postals, lithos, stamps, photos and more, stored after completion of the exhibit in the archive of amazon like the books of the Utopian Library were conserved in Viareggio, one from "the fifty years ago today I picked up two boxes of / A Calendar of Poems: Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention to be Undertakers in the Planting of the New Found Land, Set Forth with Divers Reasons and Inducements, / 500 copies from Express Press in Austin.
The rating review on Amazon, titled Ameryca the Beautyful, said, "a poem of the fictional nation called Ameryca. It is a lyric narrative, by which is meant that it tells its discovery in verse form, short lyrics, against the background of the discoverers of 16th and 17th century England. The first half of the book, the six months of the calendar year from March to September, includes in order, St. Brendan, Erik the Red, Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh and the natural origins of that world, the sun, the fly, the orphan. The second half of the calendar is a time shift describing the last six decades of 20th century America, the i instead of the y, a disillusion of the naive former months. The poem as a whole leaves us to ponder what we are and what we believe about Ameryca, America and ourselves [Amazon Review].
This was the title in proof published to capture the spirit of the time with its enthusiasms, people standing all about implicit within, like the Austin poets Asnes, Neubauer, Goar, Cullen, low down and faculty higher up, Gordon, Pratt, Whitbread and then way higher up Prigogene and related Rao and Desani, and the mix of science and poetry where candidates of physics and linguistics gardened next to each other and allow rome inn waitresses biking to their lover’s beds at midnight, after telling Frank Ervin to pay his bill, among roughnecks and aikido henchman, Bill Lee and pharmacy heads and tractors and herbs and fault lines above the Balcones fault and below.so while all the inane famous now base in Austin, they are segregated to themselves.
Calendar appeared in Vittore Baroni's La Biblioteca Utopica, books of 170 authors from 26 countries, "art done by everybody for everybody...aligned and transversal planes that frequently cross and mingle, an underground tradition fueled by grassroots activism in continuous transformations" complete with a 30x13" color poster of all the exhibit book covers on one side and the other, plus a 44 p booklet 6x8" filled with insets, cards, postals, lithos, stamps, photos and more, as all his work of first order (a cura di Vittore Baroni, Near the Edge Editions, Viareggio, 2008, the Utopian Library of Arte Postale! 96), stored after completion of the exhibit in the E.O. N. archive in Viareggio where the books that were part of the Utopian Library will be conserved.
Three of the mimeographed proof of Calendar, titled America 2000, shown to T. M. Cranfill wwere printed in the Texas Quarterly Autumn 1973. Gunnar Hansen of Austin and Reykjavik put others in Lucille 3, Spring 1974, which he edited before starring in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along with, "Prospero, Sweet Prince" by Tom Goar and "Devil Blues" by John Cullen. Two weeks after publication of Calendar I flew to London and then to Wales and began translations of the Taliesin Poems that appear in "Red Head."
George Bruce Moses (named for George Bruce Halsted?) (28 May 1950-22 May 1975) http://records.ancestry.com/george_br... did the cover of A Calendar of Poems (December, 1973) He had been painting large canvases of heads, glistening white with red outlines when he was stricken. Another contemporary, Victoria Donner (PMc) provided the photographs.
A Postscript
Calendars portray the passage of times and seasons. This is an American calendar and portrays the passage of the times and seasons of America from its first mythic discovery to the end of the 20th century, what is felt to be a round number, a millennium or two.
The title of this volume comes from a work by Sir Robert Gordon of l625 by a mostly similar name. That was an inducement to colonization, this is a celebration of selected spiritual and satirical "colonizers" if by that we were allowed to include such as St. Branden , Erik the Red, Columbus, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who comprise the first four "months." Thus in a series of dramatic musings the lyrics attempt to portray what they might have felt or thought in that most essential part of their voyages, the dream, the sacrifice, the betrayal. July and August, by mystical custom, are exempted from historical narrative and purport to celebrate the new world creation itself. It is hoped that the reader will also mystically discern what spiders, flies, sun, orphans and snakes all have in common.
Nowhere is there precedent for breaking the year in half, opposing spring and summer with fall and winter, but that is what occurs. The first six months occur more or less in the time frame of centuries and moral innocence while the last six months occupy the final decades of the 20th century and the millennium which we thought would never end. These auger from decadence toward deliverance, and bespeak a moral experience.
Whether innocence or experience, all the months are juxtaposed with seventeenth century contexts since the purpose is to recreate the thought and feeling of not only the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's but to view them from the point of view of the original naivete of those discoverers' times to see what betrayals, confirmations, prophecies were fulfilled.
There is a lot of sowing and reaping in these new worlds, grief and pathos in the sowing of the seed, Erik the Red and Sir Walter Raleigh both losing their sons there, and grief and pathos too in the reaping, for all the sons lost in the planting.
And with it always occurs the promise of hope, new birth, the mediation of light and lights, sun and moon, red and gold that shine upon the plants, both seed and fruit.
Seed time is spring, the planting in the new world imagination of everything according to its kind, March through July, depending on climate and then comes the reaping, in September, the last decades of a millennium, fall and winter, our lot, fruit upon fruit.
Likewise in the dramatic musings of the harvest we try to tell what seed was sown, of presidents and empires, wars, commerce and self-infatuation, September and its citizens of October, fantasized optimists gone for the gold or is it property? Call it love and old hardened psychedelic and the revolution, followed by November and, in worse taste, the new vulgarity, who could do it justice? the destruction of life as we knew it.
These contradictions, offenses terminate in the new day, that comes to its end or beginning in December, I mean the year as they sell it, and you find out, if, well, you're confused. It's a holiday to get away. The joke's on who? Chickens, roosters and pigs. That's right.
January, new year old, is the judgment and reason for the Virginian voyage all over again, but this time where to go? Old for the old-fashioned, new for the new, space-age time and go. How to escape? Read the next book. The context goes full circle in February with the old Anglo-Saxon verse, "The Husband's Message," but this voyage is of a heavenly visitation as if some new St. Branden were to begin a heavenly navigation.
Finally the 90's didn't end as we thought, they're still going. ...more "
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A.E. Reiff said:
"
Literature occasionally arrives like a weather system — not a book to be read but a climate to inhabit. Memoir of Angels belongs to this lineage. It is not memoir in the conventional sense but memoir of memory itself, a confessional archive that unfo
Literature occasionally arrives like a weather system — not a book to be read but a climate to inhabit. Memoir of Angels belongs to this lineage. It is not memoir in the conventional sense but memoir of memory itself, a confessional archive that unfolds across centuries, political histories, scriptural midrash, and technological eschatologies. It is eschatological criticism disguised as autobiography and archival theology disguised as dream-report, a Memoir at the Edge of the Human EpochIf the modern novel inherited the realist city and the modern poem inherited the interior self, Memoir of Angels inherits something older and stranger: the prophetic ledger, where the world writes itself through a human voice. In its pages David Ben-Gurion writes letters to an unnamed woman as if writing simultaneously to history, to God, to the intelligence services, and to a reader not yet born. He confesses not only statecraft but the metaphysics of statecraft, not only war but the ontology of memory, not only angels but the data-structures that replace them. The book’s imagination moves freely between: St. John on Patmos and the Dead Sea, the JFK correspondence archive, Antarctic laboratories under Vatican skies, CRISPR livestock and Monarch butterflies without antennae,
Balaam’s donkey and algorithmic ass-speech. Not quite a contribution to the animal welfare league, Wittgenstein’s toothache and Ben-Gurion’s gold molar, AI theology and machine pain.
This is the realism of a world in which metaphysics has leaked into governance, biology leaked into theology, and digital memory displaced human recollection. Where memoirs usually recount what happened, this memoir undertakes the more impossible task of revealing how history thinks. ...more "
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Inpreparing entry for an ucoming Gasher chapbook series I was diverted at the end by the craftstatement that evoked the process in the chapentry and
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Notes on the life of Archbishop Hilarion, Father Robert Lloyd Williams: His Eminence, Most Rev. Archbishop Hilarion. Robert Lloyd Williams was born November 12, 1942 and died January 5, 2019 https://prod1.meaningfulfunerals.net/... He was from Rosenb Notes on the life of Archbishop Hilarion, Father Robert Lloyd Williams: His Eminence, Most Rev. Archbishop Hilarion. Robert Lloyd Williams was born November 12, 1942 and died January 5, 2019 https://prod1.meaningfulfunerals.net/... He was from Rosenberg Texas, just outside Houston, also home of Butler & Sons Books, proprietor of the lock of hair of Che Guevara clipped by by the CIA in 1967 and sold to Butler 40 years later. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna21476982 That tells you a lot you don't know if you never lived among the great aurochs and archetypes of Texas. After Hilarion Williams took over the Liberal Catholic Church that met in that Horizons Unlimited bookstore https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sta... the church moved to West Mary Street in South Austin, changed its name to Holy Name of Mary, and changed its affiliation to the Old Catholic Church of Canada. I would not have known Robert were it not for Carl Bowers and his wife Mary Ann who established that bookstore with such an intuitive welcoming. After Carl's passing Mary Ann was much ill at ease among these callow youths. When Carl died Aug. 23, 1970, the report in the Obit that says he was found on the floor after mass that day doesn't do justice to the moment. I was at that last service but had left before he died. In parting I put my arms around him and called him Papa, which I had never done before, or have done since, an undoubted goodbye. I sensed a great softness of spirit in him then, which I have come to know as the moment before death, sensed in others too, like Henry Burlage https://humanbotany.blogspot.com/2011.... The obit article says "when Bowers didn’t emerge from a room where he had gone to change from vestments after Sunday mass, we went in there, and he was laying on his back on the floor, just as dead as a door nail." That door nail remark profanes the speaker, even if it expresses shock and surprise, which gives me reason to believe the account I myself heard, that he died instantly as he was going over the service with the acolytes. I had gone from sitting on the last back row of those services to sitting on the first row where I could see all the nuances that took place in the ceremony. So I took it seriously and was appalled by the callous remarks I heard after when Robert and his buddies, Frank Hallman included, would hide marijuana in the monstrance on the altar and smoke it downstairs after mass in his apartment. Priest Bowers never knew the extra terrestrial effect of his prayers. So they were hippies, but seeking salvation only in the sense that, like other hippies of the time, they tore pages out their bible to roll joints. Hilarion was consecrated as a bishop and became affiliated with the Western Rite Orthodox Church in the United States, and eventually became Archbishop for Texas of the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and the Americas. Robert however was of a serious mind. He held mass every morning for six months after that, which I attended a lot, often being the only congregant. The frankincense was very inviting in that small room and the ritual was appealing, but the Liberal Catholic Church was a melange of the usual sorts of Blavatsky, Besant, mind control, meditative rituals with an upbeat Christian patina on top of Egyptian myth. The Hilarion was more observant when he took over and gradually became Bishop. Once after mass well attended on a Sunday I saw him accost someone on the way out who had tried to secret the host in his mouth but not swallow it. Robert made him hand it over. There are elaborate protocols in the Roman Catholic tradition of the repose of the wafer after such an event. My wife and I entertained Robert several times in our stone adobe on the Balcones Fault ten miles out of town. We had a stone room painted pastel green with just a blue rug and a fireplace we would sit around on the floor and smoke and talk. Williams was always scary, even in his obit pic in his seventies he is severe. He wanted to set up a series of occult batteries in that room to perform a wedding of some kind. I did not say no, but that was the last thing I wanted. So it was prevented by that goodness and mercy that has followed me all the days of my life. If you have never seem a man mantle as a predator than you have not known the substance of what this religion could do if resisted. I did resist. Once in the bookstore, thinking to talk over my head, he and Frank referred to my aura as Michael, but I could hear and see what they could not, and had a little laugh at their own naivete, like the time my brother urged upon me, I hope you know that you are Christ. That's the theosophic gospel but not for the sons of Elohim. They had reserved a copy of Regardie's Golden Dawn (Llewellyn, 1969) for me, but not ordered by me, one of three copies, one each for them, in two volumes, of which Yeats and Charles vowed to silence with their lives. So there was a lot of danger that walked there with its hands knit. Once in that bookstore some body bought a copy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by St.Gertrude and gave it to me. There was an elitist tone to their verse, if you so view all their talk, but I could read and hear their super numeracy as a little vain. for I was a frequent observer, so frequent that Frank confided he had once performed a disappearing ritual in the rotunda of the state capitol in Austin. He induced me to crash Raja Rao's classes because he spoke to them once and I went, then kept on. Frank proposed a game of Enochian chess and held to a company sort of like the Roundtable of mutual agreeing fellows.They had all taken classes with Roger Shattuck and cited Satie and Rousseau, but loved Jarry. Wanna be cultural bohemians of Dadaism and Surrealism, I pretty much offended them when I called Jarry's Ubu Roi King Ubu instead. Henri Rousseau likewise was a naif, a toll keeper; so Picasso said he was his equal! With Rousseau and Jarry, the gift of naivete completely flummoxes the sophisticate. Those who look down are looking up. I have a done a lot with that Mr. Ub over time. He now operates a taxi at Waldo Hippo Possum https://www.scribd.com/document/83826.... It's like those missionaries in Costa Rica who, learning I wanted to teach college, allowed that the best I could do was maybe high school. It's like when one my father's Bell executives after dinner who I regaled with words from the gospel of John said, why don't you think for yourself! About this time I heard Robert was in the hospital for a gall stone so I went to visit him. It was then I learned he had been married and had a daughter, and had been a psychiatric nurse, which would suit his darkness. He complained he couldn't pee, a necessity after such operation. So to show the nature of this relationship, my energies being diametrically opposite his, I lay my hand on his forehead, and he immediately had to go to the bathroom to pee. You can puzzle the occult all you want. In the obit Ed Buffaloe https://unblinkingeye.com/Links/About... says they were all trying to figure out the universe. That's what the lost do. I came into that situation ten years deep in the salvation and deliverance of the Lord of Lords and with His Holy Spirit. They considered this spirit of ebullience and enthusiasm, but not depth. Exuberance is beauty. All this constituted a primer of Ledbetter etc. and cabal which caused me some difficulty until it was purged. Purging, you know is what the Lord does who purges every son that he receives. I have been so many years sober now and have walked so long in the light of His presence that in this afterlife I enter His rest. Those are the chief high spots. I did not know of his later academic prowess, although his editing of Mehy in His Carriage anthology (1968) where he had some 20 poems which title indicates the heavy Egyptian influence of his priesthood, with the Kabbalistic of his edition of the Sepher Yetzirah (1970). Frank Hallman had a dozen poems there and others of that coterie, Robert Bonazzi, S. L. Canton, Robert Bogan. All these poems ape the dissolution and death cults, so even though Robert wrote a poem to me, To a Quiet Leo, there was no consonance of my spirit with theirs, a sample of which from that time appeared in the TQ, which shocks with "The way into the flowering heart / inside the flowering man, / is over the inside itself /inside the newfoundland. / The head is hot / the hands are colder than the air, / the arctic-heat will kill away / the spring the petals bear. / the busting stalk above the eyes / takes root into the brain, / and waves the life of the waving world / into the heart again." Much more like that appeared in A Calendar of Poems. There do not seem to be records of many homilies that he must have given, which makes it hard to know his religious practice. Since I share a kind of brotherhood with him and if he did become traditional perhaps he will not object if I offer here these Homilies of the Psalms and Prophets in his behalf for the hungry heart https://apoeticalreadingofthepsalmsof... He disappeared when he was elevated to bishop, then archbishop of the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and the Americas. Clearly from their double eagle emblem this Illuminati outfit suited a vocation that expressed to me a combination of the psychiatric and the occult. His obit says he became conservative and traditional, 'voted for Trump" truly against the hippie zeitgeist and maybe more because the occult is not a conservative venue except as a blind, ordinarily considered. Having a liking for immersion in tradition he joined and administered aspects of the Linda Schele Mayan and Pre-Columian Studies series pretty identically to how he joining and administered aspects of the Autonomous Metropolia, which is to say, not necessarily with prejudice, exchanged one form of paganism for another, paganism defined in native culture as shamanism of the native sort being only another variety from the renaissance emergence of magic, where the prophet tells to the ear of the king what the god says in Sumer. Thee is a huge resemblance between the Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican notion of the divine right of kings, which is what the Europeans call it, the notion that the king thru the prophet heard the god. It sounds foreign to present notions of divinity, but divine right and gods needs to be understood in a limited context as that oldest of religious forms of Genesis six and Enoch I. So what ever you call them these are limited gods as gods go. That he lived and died alone and was discovered by his housekeeper is part and parcel of what all artists expect and if it is contradicted by grace and the love of woman, which Williams let us say eschewed you can add children and grandchildren to that, but you are way beyond the expectation of the mortal artist who seeks to know the universe. So he is another of those I knew on the way. I link him with my neighbor Ken Morrison, prof of religion and his two fine books on the Abenaki, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1.... William's Mixtec works can sit beside them as I read. Those alone, who die as Dr. Cranfill did, not knowing anyone, or Ken talking at the breakfast table, suddenly, or Dave German for that matter, who was discovered...later, are all poignant tales we tell of ourselves and this is why we can only stand still and see the salvation of the Lord. By the time you get to 80 you're not going to meet anyone new, unless they're just born. Your next visit will be with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, so always wondering what happened to those I did know, this day found the obit of Robert Williams https://www.statesman.com/news/201901... who died Jan 2019. I knew him pretty well if you count the intuitive knowing none one will speak and if they do you wish they didn't, like his invocation in the acknowledgments of his dissertation to the "spirit of my Cherokee grandfather, John Lloyd Gray." I'm grateful to have known these people even if they never knew me. Ed Buffaloe says they were all seeking salvation. The word for salvation in Hebrew is YAHSHUA. This is a startling admission, for there is absolutely nothing we can do to gain Yahshua but accept Him. We are like people fleeing Egypt, the army behind them, the Sea in front. There is nothing we can do. We can only stand still and see the salvation of the LORD. If you desire true insight on the matter of the Liberal Catholic religion etc., contemporaneous with the beginning of modern theosophy and well written, please examine G. H. Pember's Earth's Earliest Ages and their connection with modern spiritualism and theosophy. https://archive.org/stream/earthsearl... Read further: THE HIPPIES OF AUSTIN. https://encouragementsforsuch.blogspo... Robert Lloyd Williams dissertation, Codex Zouche -Nuttall, pages 1-41: Narrative structure, contents, and chronologies is online @ https://search.proquest.com/openview/... for the Day of Atonement 2020 ...more |
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| "Sounds surreptitious, sleight-of-mind, and dangerous. Qualifies as a must read." From Mr. Solomon himself. "Sounds surreptitious, sleight-of-mind, and dangerous. Qualifies as a must read." From Mr. Solomon himself. ...more | |
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RECON in this chapbook published by Trainwreck Press https://www.trainwreckpress.com/ Moments of light and sound like etheric wheels in the sky...two hands held gold flares (Cogwheels), where the sky and opal border... lay on those who kindle light (W RECON in this chapbook published by Trainwreck Press https://www.trainwreckpress.com/ Moments of light and sound like etheric wheels in the sky...two hands held gold flares (Cogwheels), where the sky and opal border... lay on those who kindle light (Walk in Kilns) where toes sing, hands dance as might / a hymnist who plays on moss (The Sound of Light)... breath in search of talk / like Everything is song" (Talk) ...a great wake waking where ten generations walk... at the head of this trail (Dream Song)... that covered bed rock, up to our office on East Finnmark / among geranium and angelica...refuge circumpolar (Pens to Write the Flowing). Thanks to John C. Goodman, editor of Trainwreck Press. ...more |
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Kisses Edel Herz (95) thinks fraktur more attractive without all the blood and death, that "reformation themes of Christ as king" (Heart,59) were supplanted by a "cult of wounds and blood" (Yoder, Picture-Bible, 57). Frederick Weiser calls it a "preo Kisses Edel Herz (95) thinks fraktur more attractive without all the blood and death, that "reformation themes of Christ as king" (Heart,59) were supplanted by a "cult of wounds and blood" (Yoder, Picture-Bible, 57). Frederick Weiser calls it a "preoccupation with death and religious themes" (Fraktur, I, xxvii). But the Blood was a New Testament certainty, "through faith in his blood" (Rom 2.25). As John Skelton wrote, “Where the sank royall is, Crystes blode so rede, (Poetical Works of Skelton and Donne, see note), prominent in medieval and pietistic Europe, seventeenth century Donne and after (See Louis Martz, The Meditative Tradition), fraktur viewed with European Catholic icons is also one with English metaphysical poets, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Traherne and later Smart, who plead the personal heart of Jesus identical to Pennsylvania. Consider Henry Vaughan's, "Dedication," Some drops of Thy all-quick'ning blood / Fell on my heart," and the astonishing lines of Crashaw, They have left thee naked, Lord, O that they had! This garment too I wish they had deny'd. Thee with thy self they have too richly clad; Opening the purple wardrobe in thy side. O never could there be garment too good For thee to wear, but this of thine own Blood. (see Note below) These people addressed their love letters to Jesus (Bird 87). It became the scandal of Pietism, the "sweet personal Christ of the Pietists" and their "tender endearments." Jesus was "mein Freund," "unashamedly casual" (86). This same "freund," translated both beloved and friend [see the fraktur of 1770 by Daniel Schuhmacher (Stoudt, Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies, 151, copied from Song of Songs 2.10-12], freund folk famously invoked with the first line of Song (Canticles), to be "kissed with the kisses of his mouth." No wonder their hearts flowed. In sensing him more judge than friend Bird shows how far they flee from him who sometime did them seek. (from Thomas Wyatt, contemporary of Skelton). As the Cambridge Modern History (V) says: "They tried to rekindle the fire of holy emotion and by the spirit of self-sacrifice and austere self-immolation to restore the mystical union of the soul with God... adopting the language of the Canticles in describing the union of the soul with the Divine Bridegroom...they express a sensuous delight in dwelling on Christ's sufferings and the agonies of the Cross. This "...irreverent tone of familiarity with the Deity which so frequently characterizes pietistic poetry..." is a comment on the "spiritual exhaustion" of spiritual life in Germany at its lowest ebb. This continues at //pennsylvaniafathers.blogspot.com/2010... ...more |
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At the center of UFO is the encounter. Not encounter as an event that can be dated and described, but encounter as a recurring structure in which one form of life meets another that exceeds its categories of understanding. The text repeatedly returns At the center of UFO is the encounter. Not encounter as an event that can be dated and described, but encounter as a recurring structure in which one form of life meets another that exceeds its categories of understanding. The text repeatedly returns to historical moments of contact—particularly between indigenous peoples and Europeans—not as completed episodes but as templates that continue to shape subsequent forms of experience. The European, conventionally positioned as the agent of discovery and domination, is refigured as an alien presence, destabilizing the directionality of the term and exposing its dependence on perspective. In this reversal, UFO suggests that the experience of the alien has already occurred, not in speculative futures but in documented pasts, and that what is called “alien” is inseparable from the history of human encounter itself. This insistence on continuity does not collapse difference but complicates it. UFO does not claim that all encounters are the same, but that they are structured by a shared difficulty: the inability to integrate what is encountered without transforming it into something already known. The belief that the other can be assimilated—whether in the form of colonization, cultural integration, or technological incorporation—appears throughout the text as both a motivating force and a source of distortion. The expectation that the foreign can become familiar, that the alien can be rendered intelligible without remainder, is shown to produce not understanding but a series of substitutions, in which the other is replaced by a representation shaped by the needs of the self. UFO does not refute this process; it records its persistence and its consequences. Myth occupies a central position in this recording. It is not treated as a primitive precursor to rational thought, but as an enduring mode through which encounter is processed. Indigenous myths, Romantic theories of imagination, and contemporary narratives of extraterrestrial visitation are placed in relation to one another, not to assert their equivalence but to highlight their shared function as frameworks for interpreting what resists direct comprehension. In UFO, myth and history are not opposed but intertwined. Historical events are immediately mythologized, while myths inform the perception of events that follow. The text’s movement between these registers is not ornamental; it reflects the inseparability of what happens from how it is understood. This inseparability is intensified in the context of modern media and technological systems, which UFO presents as extensions of earlier forms of mediation. The proliferation of images, information, and narratives does not simply increase access to reality but alters the conditions under which reality is perceived. The figure of the UFO emerges within this altered field as a focal point, not because it can be verified or falsified, but because it concentrates multiple interpretive pressures. Scientific speculation, mythic imagination, political anxiety, and media circulation converge around it, making it less an object than a site of projection. UFO does not attempt to resolve these projections; it situates them within a broader pattern in which the unknown is continually refracted through available forms. The manuscript’s attention to scenes of captivity and reconstruction introduces a further dimension to this pattern. The image of the prisoner reconstructing a lost text from fragments recurs as a figure for the work’s own procedure. Knowledge, in UFO, is not presented as complete or secure but as something assembled under conditions of constraint and loss. The act of reconstruction is both necessary and compromised, producing accounts that are provisional and subject to revision. Yet this provisionality is not treated as a failure. It is the condition under which any record can be made. UFO aligns itself with this condition, offering its own fragmented structure as both a reflection of and a response to the difficulties it addresses. Philosophical discourse appears within UFO not as a stabilizing framework but as another participant in this process. References to thinkers concerned with existence, alterity, and history are not developed into arguments but juxtaposed with other materials, allowing their concepts to resonate without being fixed. This approach resists the elevation of philosophy above other forms of response, placing it alongside myth, history, and testimony as one mode among others. The result is a leveling that does not eliminate difference but refuses to assign ultimate authority to any single discourse. Temporal boundaries are similarly unsettled. UFO does not present the past as something concluded or the present as something distinct from it. Instead, it allows events from different periods to coexist, revealing patterns that persist across time. The encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans, the experiences of wartime imprisonment, and contemporary technological developments are not arranged in sequence but in relation. This relational structure suggests that what is at stake is not the progression of history but the recurrence of certain forms of experience. The sense of an ongoing condition replaces that of a series of discrete events. Within this condition, the category of the human becomes unstable. UFO does not assert a fixed definition of the human, nor does it declare its obsolescence. It presents the human as something that is continually redefined through its encounters with what it is not. The alien—whether understood as cultural, technological, or extraterrestrial—functions as a catalyst in this process, forcing a reconsideration of what counts as human. Yet the text does not resolve this reconsideration. It leaves the human in a state of tension, neither secure in its identity nor dissolved into otherness. This tension has ethical implications that UFO acknowledges without resolving. The historical scenes it invokes—of colonization, violence, displacement—are not neutral. They involve suffering and loss that cannot be reduced to abstract patterns. At the same time, the text does not convert these scenes into moral exempla. It does not instruct the reader on how to judge them, nor does it offer a framework for doing so. Instead, it places them within the field of encounter, where they must be confronted as part of the same conditions that produce myth, philosophy, and media narratives. This refusal to separate ethical from epistemological concerns contributes to the text’s overall instability, but also to its force. Language, in UFO, reflects and participates in this instability. The text shifts between registers—scholarly, narrative, lyrical, documentary—without settling into a single mode. This multiplicity is not a display of stylistic range but a response to the difficulty of the subject. No single register is adequate to the phenomena being described, and the movement between them becomes a way of approximating what cannot be fully captured. The result is a language that resists transparency, requiring the reader to engage with it as an active participant rather than a passive recipient. The comparison to Turner’s storm clarifies this approach. Just as the painting does not present a stable image but a field of forces in which distinctions dissolve, UFO does not offer a clear representation but an immersion in conditions that exceed representation. The emphasis is not on what the storm is, but on what it is like to be within it. This emphasis shifts the focus from understanding to perception, from explanation to registration. The text does not aim to make the phenomena it addresses intelligible in a conventional sense; it aims to render their impact on perception. In doing so, UFO challenges the expectation that a work should culminate in a resolution or a clear statement of meaning. Its refusal to conclude is not an oversight but a consequence of its subject. The conditions it describes are ongoing, and any attempt to close them would misrepresent their nature. Instead, the text leaves the reader within the field it has constructed, without offering an exit or a final interpretation. This lack of closure is integral to its effect, maintaining the tension that has been present throughout. At the same time, UFO is not without coherence. Its repeated return to the problem of encounter provides a thread that runs through its various materials, creating a pattern that can be recognized even in the absence of linear progression. This pattern allows the reader to orient themselves within the text, not by following a narrative but by tracing connections. The coherence that emerges is not that of a system but of a field in which certain relations recur. Ultimately, UFO can be understood as a record of what it is like to inhabit a world in which the boundaries between self and other, past and present, human and alien are no longer secure. It does not seek to resolve this condition but to remain within it, registering its effects on perception and understanding. By doing so, it offers not an explanation but an experience, one that mirrors the difficulties it addresses and invites the reader to engage with them directly. UFO intertwines themes of cultural contact, mythology, colonialism, and speculative ideas about extraterrestrial encounters, using the historical interactions between the Abenaki people and European colonizers as a central metaphor. The reference to a "UFO" in the opening lines, paired with a quote attributed to J.M.W. Turner about his painting Storm on the Night the Ariel (1842), sets a tone of ambiguity and metaphor, suggesting that the "UFO" may not be a literal spacecraft but a symbol for something incomprehensible, disruptive, or transformative, much like the storm Turner sought to depict. UFO draws a parallel between the arrival of European colonizers in the Americas and a hypothetical alien contact. The "UFO" seems to represent an overwhelming, alien force that disrupts and destroys the existing cultural and spiritual frameworks of the native Abenaki, much like European technology, disease, and ideology did. The text suggests that the Abenaki's "theology of acceptance," embodied in the figure of Glooskap (or Gluskap), led them to naively embrace the Europeans as kin, only to face annihilation. Similarly, the "UFO" could symbolize a modern or future encounter with an incomprehensible "other" (alien, AI, or advanced technology) that humanity might mistakenly welcome, leading to its downfall. Glooskap, a central figure in Algonquian mythology, is depicted as a hero who seeks to transform evil by integrating it into kinship structures, such as treating animals or strangers as relatives. The document critiques this approach as fatally flawed when applied to the Europeans, who are likened to "cannibal giants" (windigo, Kiwakwe, chenoo) that exploit this kindness. The "UFO" might represent a similar test of humanity’s values, where attempts to integrate or humanize an alien entity could lead to catastrophic consequences. Warnings against this naivety include, "You cannot combine with evil. They should have read Franz Fanon." This implies that the "UFO" is not just a neutral visitor but a potential existential threat, akin to the cannibal giants of Abenaki myth or the European colonizers. The text suggests that modern institutions, like the Vatican (with its infrared telescope and openness to baptizing aliens), might repeat this error by welcoming extraterrestrials without recognizing their potential for harm. The "UFO" thus becomes a cautionary symbol of misplaced trust in the face of the unknown that connects the Abenaki experience to contemporary fears of technological and cultural subversion, such as AI, transhumanism, or globalized control systems. The "UFO" could symbolize these modern forces, which, like the European colonizers, seduce with technology (e.g., "iPhones, alien computers, nano parts, and digital DNA") and promises of progress, only to erode autonomy and identity. The repeated references to "kidnapping and technology" as "salient seductions" reinforce this idea, drawing parallels to historical abductions (e.g., Captain Weymouth kidnapping five Abenaki in 1605) and modern phenomena like data surveillance or bioengineering, along with a media-driven anticipation of alien contact, noting that "when the media proclaims a coming trend, then it will appear." This suggests the "UFO" might be a constructed narrative, a myth engineered to manipulate public perception, much like colonial narratives justified conquest. "Myth says one thing, history another, but when myth and history are one we have apocalypse." The "UFO" could be a harbinger of this convergence, where speculative beliefs about aliens merge with real-world consequences, leading to societal collapse or transformation. The text’s references to biblical figures (Daniel, Jeremiah, Esther) and prophetic warnings (e.g., "the beast from the sea") frame the "UFO" as part of an eschatological narrative, where humanity faces a final reckoning with its own hubris or naivety. The "UFO" is also linked to existential risks, with comparisons to AI and superintelligence that might act indifferently to human welfare, as discussed in the context of the Future of Humanity Institute and thinkers like Nick Bostrom. This reinforces the idea that the "UFO" is less about extraterrestrial beings and more about humanity’s encounter with forces it cannot control. The opening reference to J.M.W. Turner’s painting aligns with the portrayal of the Abenaki’s encounter with Europeans as a catastrophic event that could not be fully grasped at the time, only mourned in retrospect. The "UFO" fits blending historical analysis, mythological references, and speculative fiction into this mosaic as a multifaceted symbol, representing not just aliens but also the broader concept of "otherness" (cultural, technological, or cosmic). Its mention at the outset, followed by a sprawling exploration of contact scenarios, suggests that the "UFO" is a narrative device to provoke reflection on humanity’s vulnerability to external forces, whether historical (colonization), contemporary (technology), or hypothetical (alien contact). "Predictive programming" and media-driven UFO narratives (e.g., "third hand congressional committee reports televised") imply that the "UFO" might be a psychological construct, a myth engineered to prepare or manipulate society for a staged event, echoing the document’s distrust of official narratives. UFO might not be a literal extraterrestrial craft but a potent metaphor for disruptive, incomprehensible forces that challenge cultural, spiritual, and existential boundaries. It draws on the historical tragedy of the Abenaki’s encounter with European colonizers to warn against naivety in the face of modern or future "others," whether they be AI, transhuman technologies, or hypothetical aliens. The "UFO" embodies the tension between myth and history, acceptance and resistance, and the apocalyptic potential of humanity’s encounters with the unknown. ...more |
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"Trojan White Horse" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1961710137?... Review by Grok Trojan White Horse (Histericks, 2023–2025) is the second act in AE Reiff’s sustained refusal, the middle mask worn by Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. Where A Translation of "Trojan White Horse" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1961710137?... Review by Grok Trojan White Horse (Histericks, 2023–2025) is the second act in AE Reiff’s sustained refusal, the middle mask worn by Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. Where A Translation of the New Philadelphia opened the gate from outside—showing the fall, the bull-ships of Europa, the torn veil, and the interregnum—this book names the occupation once the gate has been breached. It is not prophecy; it is diagnosis. The Trojan Horse has already entered. The city is occupied. The White House itself is the HorseHouse, and the centaur president bends his bow from within. The work is dense, paratactic, and relentless. Reiff does not argue that the empire is a hybrid monstrosity; he shows it in real time, layer after layer, until the reader feels the substitution in their own bones. The prose is not linear. It is a series of shocks, eidola, and sudden mythic intrusions that mirror the very overwriting it describes. Memory is replaced. The body is replaced. The real is replaced by the co-body, the simulacrum, the Pied Cow that cannot remember what was done to it. The Centaur in the White House The opening declaration sets the tone and never lets go: “The Last Trojan Horse is only half horse. It is also half man governing in succession all the great empires”. The first horse was half man too. That centaur now bends its bow from the White House. Civilization, Reiff writes, is “a continual founding of this anti-man one after another.” From the Greeks burning Troy, through Rome, Europe, Britain, Virgil, and into the new world, the pattern repeats. Humanism, renaissance art, human rights—these are the ironic co-options that allow the Intelligence to serve empire while wearing the mask of vision. The House is the Horse. The president is the centaur. The reader is already inside the belly. Reiff’s voice here is not accusatory; it is clinical, almost weary, as if stating the obvious to those who still pretend they are free. “You cannot remember its civilization,” he says. “What JFK called Camelot was in fact Pied Cow, a lost city in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, where Avatars and their memes replace memory”. Corporeality is swapped for simulacra. Video games mine gold on satellites in golden clouds. The cow cannot remember what is done. The machine-fantasy civilization depresses the breath of the lungs and installs replacement lungs with replacement mind. The thing walks and talks like the thing it was made to replace.How can you tell them apart? How can you tell who or what you are? These questions are not rhetorical. They are the daily condition of the occupied. Eidola and the Overwritten Real The mechanism of occupation is the eidolon—specter, phantom, illusion that pretends to end but does not. Reiff traces the carnival apparatus that turns against its own speakers. DARPA once offered cash for techniques to overwrite “undesirable programs” like [Obama's] God and guns with new memes. The internet, mass formation psychosis, NASA, cell towers, smart dust, social media—all arrange the odds-making and market manipulations that foster eidola. These false substitutes colonize memory itself. The CIA turned the entire memory of American soldiers’ rejection of the Vietnam War into a fiction of civilians spitting on soldiers. It never happened, yet it is now the public memory. Weaponized hospitals, false CDC data, newspeak on every channel—the controlled opposition itself is part of the deception. “In the back-speak of every op, the controlled opposition, more deception itself, calls ‘crazy, mind blowing or stupid’ this diabolus making it impervious to discovery” (p. 10). Evil is stronger than the human mind and rules its prejudice. The loss of the body is exchanged for the philosophy of the cow. This enables the Taurobolium of Geography, Morality, and Prophecy. The continent itself becomes the bull. The citizen becomes the sacrifice inside the brazen hull. False substitutes pour out of the Trojan horse of the god of war: malware attachments, condoms, asteroids, illogic codes, riddles, symbols, bilocutions. Facts are impostors. Heroes are horrors. Presidents and cabinets must be covered up. The assassin chairs the autopsy. Mischesen and the Living Hybrids At the heart of the occupation is the hybrid—the mischwesen. Reiff moves from the centaur president to the apkallu bird-men and carp-men of Sumer, the Watchers of Genesis 6 who begot giants on women and hybridized with every species, 200 pairs at a time, while consuming humans wholesale. These are not ancient myths. They are the template for the modern empire.The icon of the pyramid with the disconnected eye staring down represents the psychic powers of the “men of renown,” the anshei shem—great leaders skilled in persuasion and rhetoric. Anyone in the public eye belongs to the eye. Preachers with media outlets, politicians of all parties, the eye controls the oppositions and the middle with equal favor. Everything is under oversight so the eye always wins. Reiff lingers on the Leda and the Swan of Yeats—not as erotic myth but as hybrid violation. The shudder in the loins engenders the broken genome. The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, Agamemnon dead. “Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Yeats will not tell, but Reiff does. The woman originally submitted for the status she gained. Willing accomplices were rewarded. These are the tamer legends of incubi and succubi that Romantic poets tell, cast as golden showers of ecstasy and transcendence. Reiff refuses the romance. He sees the mischwesen, the mischiefen, the broken genome at work. Divination and the Pentagon as Babylonian Temple The occupation is not only technological; it is divinatory. Reiff traces omen sciences from 3000 B.C. Mesopotamia—liver samples, scapulimancy, pyromancy, sortilege—to the modern Pentagon. The Diviner’s manual is alive in DARPA and Rand Corp. The theory of signs is used for war, whether in heaven, liver, or lung. Raven croaks, fire crackles, door creaks, dust clouds, the moon—all are read for advantage.This is not metaphor. It is the same Babylonian theory of signs operating under new names. The empire consults omens before every battle, every policy, every overwrite. The apkallu—fish-like carp sages born of sea and river—still whisper through the hybrid forms. Their wisdom was never their own; it was the “secrets of the gods” entrusted in texts and figurines. Modern science grants and privileges flow from the same source. Structure, Voice, and the Refusal The book refuses conventional form. It is a collage of shock, personal memory, mythic intrusion, and cold analysis. Kafka’s circle channeled into a new work of the future appears as epigraph; the Great Wall and the Tower of Babel shuttle back and forth as one giant realm. Sentences fracture. Myths erupt. Braunschweiger metaphors return from the previous volume, now serving the centaur feast. The voice is singular yet collective, the “I” of the occupied and the “we” of those who see the substitution. This is the middle mask. The gate is breached. The horse is inside. The occupation is named. The pain of speech and thought is not resolved; it is intensified. The refusal to mourn is the only posture left when the real has been overwritten and the co-body walks and talks in its place. In the larger arc of Pax Dominica, Trojan White Horse does precisely what the back-cover shorthand promises: it names the occupation once the gate is breached. New Philadelphia showed the outsiders kept outside. This volume shows the insiders who are no longer inside—they are the horse. The continent is the bull. The citizen is the sacrifice. The dream will ebb in the final volume, geography will remain in excelsis, and for those who did not escape the border will be closed. But here, in the belly of the horse, the naming itself is the revolt. Reiff’s prose is not difficult for its own sake. It is the record of a mind that has accepted the fall and writes from the inverted position, after the veil is rent, after the ship has been abandoned, after the eidola have colonized memory itself. The seeds are scattered anyway. The refusal wears its second mask and keeps walking. The author: Trojan White Horse House explores the intersections of ancient myths and contemporary systems, portraying presidents as centaurs that navigate realms of data and surveillance. The centaur deformed offspring of Ixion and a cloud Hera, symbolizes early robotic forms of human and equine merger, so a like a foreleg emerges from a shoulder as a modern interpretations of hybrid entities of man and machine, communicating through self-propelling collectives in proxy wars, where robot intercourse with artificial intelligence produces a new computational order, conquering like the First Horse of the Apocalypse whose arrow has already sprung. The wine jar of civilization explodes in the Seven Seals unleashing data-driven surveillance (Leviathan from the sea ) and Behemoth beast government from the land. Amplified by such as Pfizer's biotech smart chip drugs under skin and Palantir's neural networks in the air, invisible spiritual agents such as observed in works by Dante, Goya, Gehry, Bosch, and Breughel induce a collective trance state. The resultant passivity and memory loss facilitate control, administered by the predation of shell-backed corporate executives. Franz Kafka's provides a foundational lens, from "The Great Wall of China," where the wall—a fragmented, real product of human labor forming a partial circle—serves as a base for a spiritual Tower of Babel made parallel in Trojan with data collected from iPhones building a horizontal "wall" that supports a vertical digital "tower," integrating AI and chimeric computing. This dynamic shifts physical myths to technological realities, fostering a unified "new man" through bureaucratic and imperial systems that diminish human entities. Centaurs, Revelatory beasts, and Kafkaesque structures—form a shared global framework, shaped by everyday devices and leading to a world under unified influence. The Trojan Horse becomes a symbol not just of deceit but of how digital technologies infiltrate and alter societal structures, much like the original horse was used to infiltrate Troy. The imagery of the centaur president, combining the human with the animal (or in this case, the digital), reflects on leadership in a modern context where human decision-making is intertwined with AI or data-driven processes. This fusion suggests a loss of autonomy or purity in governance, akin to how myths often used hybrid creatures to explore moral or ethical dilemmas. The transformation of geographical features into mythological entities, the nation as a bull or cow, illustrate how these national empires sacrifice humanity in their quests for power, echoing ancient rituals like the taurobolium. Wittgenstein and Russell’s philosophical debate about certainty and the presence of the unseen (the rhinoceros) metaphorically extends to the hidden algorithms and data systems that govern lives without full awareness, a critique of how we perceive reality in an age so much mediated by technology. All this is designed to enable the viewer to see the unseen. The use of "ekphrasis" here serves as a literary device to describe scenes or artworks in such vivid detail that they become a reality in the reader's mind, paralleling how digital data constructs our perceived reality and the loss of individual agency in a world where data is king. The imagery of the Trojan Horse filled with digital agents rather than soldiers reflects how modern forms of conquest or influence might succeed. Gobal cultures and their transformations of nations like Canada and Australia underline how traditional values and identities are reshaped by digital imperialism. ...more |
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Reaktion Dreamland https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Reaktion-... Review by Grok Reaktion Dreamland against illumination Of the Knoutogtodreamic Empire (Grand Canal / Flyway Books, 2024) is the third and closing masque in AE Reiff’s Pax Dominica: A Refusal t Reaktion Dreamland https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Reaktion-... Review by Grok Reaktion Dreamland against illumination Of the Knoutogtodreamic Empire (Grand Canal / Flyway Books, 2024) is the third and closing masque in AE Reiff’s Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. It completes the single sustained act that the back-cover shorthand describes: from exclusion to invasion to insurrection to the sealed gate. Where A Translation of the New Philadelphia opened the gate from outside and Trojan White Horse named the occupation once the gate was breached, this final masque enacts the revolt — then lets the dream ebb and geography remain in excelsis. For those who did not escape, the border is closed.The book’s full title signals its double nature. Reaktion Dreamland is both reaction against the Knoutogtodreamic Empire and a dream-reaction that occurs inside it. The “knout” (the old Russian whip of autocracy) collides with the “dream” of revolution. The empire rules by paradox. Its surveillance grid — spy cameras, geo-phones, phase-locked signals, nano-bots — illuminates the dreamworld from above while Brubake shoots out the insulators and drops torpedoes on the tracks below. The revolt is not against the state in the usual sense. It is against the illumination that keeps the dream under the knout. Dream as Moral Geography and Simultaneous Time Reiff returns to the moral geography first announced in New Philadelphia. Here it is lived. The dreamworld is not metaphor; it is the place where geography and prophecy coincide. Behemoth (the revealed, terrestrial power) and Leviathan (the hidden, cosmic force) battle when the dream-empire is consumed. Their time is simultaneous. The 1950 Dark Day, the Korean War, the record Thanksgiving snowfall of 27 inches, the coal seams of Pennsylvania — all these events are not historical backdrop. They are forces that justify the time before and after. A nine-year-old boy on the tracks remembers them so long that he eventually traces how they coincide, correlate, and remain unrelated to the “degradation of choices that followed”. Brubake navigates the central landmark: the Bridge. It is the scheme of the centaurmach, the great day off where famine, disease, water, and fire pass into the Tub entire. On the bridge, lower mind and higher mind complete each other in grotesque feast while the flood comes and destroys them all. Brubake smashes the lamps. He shoots the insulators from the poles. He drops torpedoes. The child’s mutiny becomes collective resistance. The Knoutogtodreamic Empire The empire is not physical. It is the ether of mind, a Taurobolium bull whose time is simultaneous. Its re’em (wild ox) embodies dual oppression — terrestrial and cosmic — to be consumed. The Lavish sea and the Boehme land serve up an end to knowing. Diaspora snuck up. Reiff writes from inside this empire yet already outside it. The prose is the record of a mind that has accepted the fall and writes from the inverted position, after the veil is rent, after the ship has been abandoned, after the eidola have colonized memory.Personal memory collides with myth without transition. Bosch’s Hay Wain returns: “we are pushed off the Hay Cart, and then, hardly are those words out when Jakob Behmen runs by in his solemn New Obis coach as water spreads over land”. Kafka watches high heels flap in Prague. Borges runs into a mirror and ends in a swoon. Hegel is brought to text. The undermined coal seams curtail further development of the hillsides, but blink an eye and in a decade the railroad is gone and its switching yard with it. The revolt is quiet and violent at once. It is the act of dreaming itself. “Brubake makes the act of dreaming a revolt”. The geopolitics of Dreamland is a surreal apocalypse, a mosaic of historical echoes of the 1950 Dark Day that embodies the “Der Revoluzzer,” wannabe “grid illumined surveillance.” The reader smashing streetlamps, aware of Mackinder’s thesis that control of the central landmass controls the world, sees the mind and not the eye in surreal landscapes of bridges, coal mines, and rivers of Behemoth and Leviathan. Voice and Texture The voice is singular yet collective. Sometimes it is the “I” of the war baby who watched St. Jerome making gunpowder in the basement. Sometimes it is the “we” of those who occupied after a woman had lost her refrigerator when she went to the store. Widowed ladies were losing their stoves. The prose fractures. Sentences run on, then stop short. Myths erupt. Braunschweiger metaphors from the previous volumes return, now serving the centaur feast on the bridge. The tone is never merely angry. It is strangely accepting, almost reverent, as if the revolt has already done its work and what remains is the hush before the border closes. Reiff refuses conventional structure. The book moves by recurrence and inversion. The 1950 events recur like geological layers. The bridge recurs as the place where lower mind revolts against the light. The Taurobolium bull recurs as the continent itself, coast to coast, with Maine the tail, Florida the back foot, Baja the front, the Northwest the head. This is not satire. It is moral geography made visible. The Quiet Bridge to Closure The final movement slips almost without notice into The Border Is Closed. The dream ebbs. Geography remains in excelsis. For those who did not escape, the border is closed. This is not defeat. It is the natural settling after the revolt has done its work. The pain of speech and thought is not resolved; it is simply left standing in its exalted place. Place in the Larger Refusal As the third masque of Pax Dominica, Reaktion Dreamland does exactly what the back-cover shorthand says: it enacts the revolt against the illuminated empire that now rules both inside and out — sedition against the lamps, the grid, the phase-locked signals, the Knoutogtodreamic surveillance that whips the dream-world itself. Torpedoes on the tracks, smashed streetlamps, insulators shot from poles, the child’s mutiny that becomes collective resistance — until the dream ebbs and geography remains in excelsis.From exclusion to invasion to insurrection to the sealed gate, three books, one sustained act. A single refusal of three masques to map the same fracture: land as bull, sea as serpent, empire as illumination. Reiff’s achievement across the three books is to make the ancient claim feel immediate, painful, and unresolved. The pain of speech and thought remains in the refusal. The refusal is complete. The author: Reaktion Dreamland is a dense, experimental work that operates as a poetic and philosophical rebellion against systems of control, a meditation on consciousness, and a mythic exploration of reality and dream. The most significant parts of the text—those that carry the greatest thematic, symbolic, and narrative weight—are the motifs of rebellion against illumination, the Bridge between worlds, the Behemoth and Leviathan dichotomy, the Taurobolium sacrifice, and the philosophical reflections on consciousness and language. The rebellion against illumination is the narrative’s driving force, symbolizing resistance to oppressive systems of control, surveillance, and enforced clarity. This motif ties the text’s historical, personal, and cosmic threads together, grounding its surreal imagery in a critique of power.This opening sets the tone for the entire work, framing the Knoutogodreanic Empire as a dystopian construct where illumination (streetlamps, cameras) represents surveillance and control. The reference to the Esquilache Mutiny (1766), where citizens smashed streetlamps to protest Spanish reforms, parallels modern resistance to technological surveillance (e.g., “spy cameras, geo phones”). The invocation of Erich Mühsam’s “Der Revoluzzer” introduces a satirical lens, critiquing superficial rebellion while advocating for a deeper, symbolic resistance. The “Knout” (a Russian whip) symbolizes both oppression and the tool of rebellion, suggesting that resistance is both a reaction to and a product of the system it opposes. This motif recurs throughout, as seen in the protagonist’s childhood acts of sabotage (e.g., shooting insulators, dropping torpedoes, which embody a personal rejection of empire. : The rebellion against illumination is significant because it bridges historical and contemporary anxieties about control, from 18th-century riots to modern surveillance states. It positions Reaktion Dreamland as a critique of how power imposes clarity to suppress individuality, making the act of “smashing” a metaphor for reclaiming agency. This theme resonates with the text’s broader exploration of consciousness, as illumination also represents the imposition of rigid meaning on fluid, dreamlike realities. . The Bridge Between Worlds is the text’s central symbol where physical and metaphysical, real and dream, past and future converge. It represents the protagonist’s (and humanity’s) navigation of consciousness and identity in a fragmented world. The Bridge is a multifaceted symbol, both literal (e.g., the Bruggbach, or Bridge-Brook, tied to Brubaker’s name) and metaphorical, connecting disparate realms. Its technological elements (“nano bots,” “phase-locked signals”) suggest a futuristic interface, while its spiritual role evokes a journey toward transcendence. The Bridge’s stability (“kept from falling”) and its role in “building the world” position it as a site of creation and resistance, where Brubaker navigates the paradox of multiple realities. The child’s playful math (“two plus two is eight”) underscores the dreamlike logic that governs the Bridge, where conventional truths are subverted in the text’s core tension: the interplay between empirical reality and dreamlike possibility. It is a space of transformation, where Brubaker’s identity evolves and where the narrative’s philosophical inquiries—about consciousness, freedom, and meaning—unfold. Its recurrence across the text bridge, “Suspended from the bridge out like a chandelier, which in size to him made big seem little and little. The biblical creatures Behemoth (land) and Leviathan (sea) represent opposing forces—revealed and hidden faith, physical and spiritual, empire and resistance—whose conflict and potential resolution frame the narrative’s cosmic struggle.as symbols of dualistic forces that are ultimately interdependent. Their battle, described as a “coup de grace” symbolizes the resolution of oppositions in a Messianic future, where the righteous feast on their flesh, suggesting spiritual nourishment. The distinction between “revealed” (Behemoth) and “hidden” (Leviathan) faith reflects the text’s exploration of visible and invisible forms of resistance and belief. This motif is central to the narrative’s philosophical inquiry into how internal and external conflicts elevate the narrative’s scope to a cosmic level, connecting personal rebellion (e.g., Brubaker’s sabotage) to universal struggles. The creatures’ interplay mirrors the text’s collapse of dichotomies (land/sea, light/dark), suggesting that resolution lies in embracing paradox. Their presence across the text (e.g., Pages 4, 294–296) underscores their role as archetypes of power and resistance, making them a lens through which to view the Knoutogodreanic Empire and its discontents. The Taurobolium Sacrifice, a mythic sacrifice of a bull representing America—serves as a powerful critique of geopolitical and environmental exploitation, framing nations as moral and spiritual entities sacrificed for global agendas: The Taurobolium reimagines America as a sacrificial bull, its landscape (prairies, topsoil) and resources (coal, oil) depleted by exploitation. The bull’s sacrifice symbolizes the destruction of nations for global power, with “world priests” orchestrating a conspiracy of control. This motif ties the text’s environmental concerns (e.g., strip mines, to its critique of empire, suggesting that nations are not just geopolitical entities but spiritual battlegrounds. The passage’s apocalyptic tone (“tsunami of NYC, loss of seabounds spectacle”) underscores the stakes of this sacrifice, making it a pivotal commentary on modern crises that crystallize the text’s ecological and geopolitical critique, connecting the Knoutogodreanic Empire to real-world issues like environmental degradation and global hegemony. Its mythic framing elevates these concerns to a cosmic level, aligning with the Behemoth-Leviathan struggle and positioning America as a sacrificial victim in a larger narrative of power and redemption. The text’s meditations on consciousness and language—presented as a “translation” of an incomprehensible original—challenge readers to question how meaning is constructed and perceived, making this a meta-commentary on the act of reading and interpreting, “being that the account here is a translation from notes taken as these ideas unfolded, patch worked together with arbitrary custom, simply the last one that occurred, and then condensed, as if a kind of verbal alchemy, parts of words broken off, neologisms, other languages, homonyms substituted for nouns in an old century baroque style. It has been the custom for writers to pretend to be editors for some time, so it may not be entirely believed that this story really is a translation even if from the English.” The “verbal alchemy” and use of neologisms (e.g., “Knoutogodreanic”) reflect the text’s resistance to fixed meaning, mirroring its rebellion against illumination. The self-aware narrative voice questions the reliability of language, suggesting that meaning is fluid and subjective, much like the dreamlike world of the Knoutogodreanic Empire as a meta-text that interrogates its own existence. By presenting itself as a translation, it invites readers to question the boundaries between author, text, and reader, aligning with the narrative’s exploration of consciousness as a liminal, contested space. This motif ties together the text’s philosophical inquiries, making it a central lens for understanding its purpose. This concluding passage encapsulates the text’s philosophy of “knowing without knowing,” suggesting that true understanding arises from experience rather than imposed structures. It reinforces the narrative’s rejection of rigid categories (e.g., “community, family, school”) and celebrates the miraculous in the everyday, aligning with the text’s dreamlike logic and spiritual aspirations. ...more |
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"Trojan White Horse" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1961710137?... Review by Grok Trojan White Horse (Histericks, 2023–2025) is the second act in AE Reiff’s sustained refusal, the middle mask worn by Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. Where A Translation of "Trojan White Horse" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1961710137?... Review by Grok Trojan White Horse (Histericks, 2023–2025) is the second act in AE Reiff’s sustained refusal, the middle mask worn by Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. Where A Translation of the New Philadelphia opened the gate from outside—showing the fall, the bull-ships of Europa, the torn veil, and the interregnum—this book names the occupation once the gate has been breached. It is not prophecy; it is diagnosis. The Trojan Horse has already entered. The city is occupied. The White House itself is the HorseHouse, and the centaur president bends his bow from within. The work is dense, paratactic, and relentless. Reiff does not argue that the empire is a hybrid monstrosity; he shows it in real time, layer after layer, until the reader feels the substitution in their own bones. The prose is not linear. It is a series of shocks, eidola, and sudden mythic intrusions that mirror the very overwriting it describes. Memory is replaced. The body is replaced. The real is replaced by the co-body, the simulacrum, the Pied Cow that cannot remember what was done to it. The Centaur in the White House The opening declaration sets the tone and never lets go: “The Last Trojan Horse is only half horse. It is also half man governing in succession all the great empires”. The first horse was half man too. That centaur now bends its bow from the White House. Civilization, Reiff writes, is “a continual founding of this anti-man one after another.” From the Greeks burning Troy, through Rome, Europe, Britain, Virgil, and into the new world, the pattern repeats. Humanism, renaissance art, human rights—these are the ironic co-options that allow the Intelligence to serve empire while wearing the mask of vision. The House is the Horse. The president is the centaur. The reader is already inside the belly. Reiff’s voice here is not accusatory; it is clinical, almost weary, as if stating the obvious to those who still pretend they are free. “You cannot remember its civilization,” he says. “What JFK called Camelot was in fact Pied Cow, a lost city in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, where Avatars and their memes replace memory”. Corporeality is swapped for simulacra. Video games mine gold on satellites in golden clouds. The cow cannot remember what is done. The machine-fantasy civilization depresses the breath of the lungs and installs replacement lungs with replacement mind. The thing walks and talks like the thing it was made to replace.How can you tell them apart? How can you tell who or what you are? These questions are not rhetorical. They are the daily condition of the occupied. Eidola and the Overwritten Real The mechanism of occupation is the eidolon—specter, phantom, illusion that pretends to end but does not. Reiff traces the carnival apparatus that turns against its own speakers. DARPA once offered cash for techniques to overwrite “undesirable programs” like [Obama's] God and guns with new memes. The internet, mass formation psychosis, NASA, cell towers, smart dust, social media—all arrange the odds-making and market manipulations that foster eidola. These false substitutes colonize memory itself. The CIA turned the entire memory of American soldiers’ rejection of the Vietnam War into a fiction of civilians spitting on soldiers. It never happened, yet it is now the public memory. Weaponized hospitals, false CDC data, newspeak on every channel—the controlled opposition itself is part of the deception. “In the back-speak of every op, the controlled opposition, more deception itself, calls ‘crazy, mind blowing or stupid’ this diabolus making it impervious to discovery” (p. 10). Evil is stronger than the human mind and rules its prejudice. The loss of the body is exchanged for the philosophy of the cow. This enables the Taurobolium of Geography, Morality, and Prophecy. The continent itself becomes the bull. The citizen becomes the sacrifice inside the brazen hull. False substitutes pour out of the Trojan horse of the god of war: malware attachments, condoms, asteroids, illogic codes, riddles, symbols, bilocutions. Facts are impostors. Heroes are horrors. Presidents and cabinets must be covered up. The assassin chairs the autopsy. Mischesen and the Living Hybrids At the heart of the occupation is the hybrid—the mischwesen. Reiff moves from the centaur president to the apkallu bird-men and carp-men of Sumer, the Watchers of Genesis 6 who begot giants on women and hybridized with every species, 200 pairs at a time, while consuming humans wholesale. These are not ancient myths. They are the template for the modern empire.The icon of the pyramid with the disconnected eye staring down represents the psychic powers of the “men of renown,” the anshei shem—great leaders skilled in persuasion and rhetoric. Anyone in the public eye belongs to the eye. Preachers with media outlets, politicians of all parties, the eye controls the oppositions and the middle with equal favor. Everything is under oversight so the eye always wins. Reiff lingers on the Leda and the Swan of Yeats—not as erotic myth but as hybrid violation. The shudder in the loins engenders the broken genome. The broken wall, the burning roof and tower, Agamemnon dead. “Did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” Yeats will not tell, but Reiff does. The woman originally submitted for the status she gained. Willing accomplices were rewarded. These are the tamer legends of incubi and succubi that Romantic poets tell, cast as golden showers of ecstasy and transcendence. Reiff refuses the romance. He sees the mischwesen, the mischiefen, the broken genome at work. Divination and the Pentagon as Babylonian Temple The occupation is not only technological; it is divinatory. Reiff traces omen sciences from 3000 B.C. Mesopotamia—liver samples, scapulimancy, pyromancy, sortilege—to the modern Pentagon. The Diviner’s manual is alive in DARPA and Rand Corp. The theory of signs is used for war, whether in heaven, liver, or lung. Raven croaks, fire crackles, door creaks, dust clouds, the moon—all are read for advantage.This is not metaphor. It is the same Babylonian theory of signs operating under new names. The empire consults omens before every battle, every policy, every overwrite. The apkallu—fish-like carp sages born of sea and river—still whisper through the hybrid forms. Their wisdom was never their own; it was the “secrets of the gods” entrusted in texts and figurines. Modern science grants and privileges flow from the same source. Structure, Voice, and the Refusal The book refuses conventional form. It is a collage of shock, personal memory, mythic intrusion, and cold analysis. Kafka’s circle channeled into a new work of the future appears as epigraph; the Great Wall and the Tower of Babel shuttle back and forth as one giant realm. Sentences fracture. Myths erupt. Braunschweiger metaphors return from the previous volume, now serving the centaur feast. The voice is singular yet collective, the “I” of the occupied and the “we” of those who see the substitution. This is the middle mask. The gate is breached. The horse is inside. The occupation is named. The pain of speech and thought is not resolved; it is intensified. The refusal to mourn is the only posture left when the real has been overwritten and the co-body walks and talks in its place. In the larger arc of Pax Dominica, Trojan White Horse does precisely what the back-cover shorthand promises: it names the occupation once the gate is breached. New Philadelphia showed the outsiders kept outside. This volume shows the insiders who are no longer inside—they are the horse. The continent is the bull. The citizen is the sacrifice. The dream will ebb in the final volume, geography will remain in excelsis, and for those who did not escape the border will be closed. But here, in the belly of the horse, the naming itself is the revolt. Reiff’s prose is not difficult for its own sake. It is the record of a mind that has accepted the fall and writes from the inverted position, after the veil is rent, after the ship has been abandoned, after the eidola have colonized memory itself. The seeds are scattered anyway. The refusal wears its second mask and keeps walking. The author: Trojan White Horse House explores the intersections of ancient myths and contemporary systems, portraying presidents as centaurs that navigate realms of data and surveillance. The centaur deformed offspring of Ixion and a cloud Hera, symbolizes early robotic forms of human and equine merger, so a like a foreleg emerges from a shoulder as a modern interpretations of hybrid entities of man and machine, communicating through self-propelling collectives in proxy wars, where robot intercourse with artificial intelligence produces a new computational order, conquering like the First Horse of the Apocalypse whose arrow has already sprung. The wine jar of civilization explodes in the Seven Seals unleashing data-driven surveillance (Leviathan from the sea ) and Behemoth beast government from the land. Amplified by such as Pfizer's biotech smart chip drugs under skin and Palantir's neural networks in the air, invisible spiritual agents such as observed in works by Dante, Goya, Gehry, Bosch, and Breughel induce a collective trance state. The resultant passivity and memory loss facilitate control, administered by the predation of shell-backed corporate executives. Franz Kafka's provides a foundational lens, from "The Great Wall of China," where the wall—a fragmented, real product of human labor forming a partial circle—serves as a base for a spiritual Tower of Babel made parallel in Trojan with data collected from iPhones building a horizontal "wall" that supports a vertical digital "tower," integrating AI and chimeric computing. This dynamic shifts physical myths to technological realities, fostering a unified "new man" through bureaucratic and imperial systems that diminish human entities. Centaurs, Revelatory beasts, and Kafkaesque structures—form a shared global framework, shaped by everyday devices and leading to a world under unified influence. The Trojan Horse becomes a symbol not just of deceit but of how digital technologies infiltrate and alter societal structures, much like the original horse was used to infiltrate Troy. The imagery of the centaur president, combining the human with the animal (or in this case, the digital), reflects on leadership in a modern context where human decision-making is intertwined with AI or data-driven processes. This fusion suggests a loss of autonomy or purity in governance, akin to how myths often used hybrid creatures to explore moral or ethical dilemmas. The transformation of geographical features into mythological entities, the nation as a bull or cow, illustrate how these national empires sacrifice humanity in their quests for power, echoing ancient rituals like the taurobolium. Wittgenstein and Russell’s philosophical debate about certainty and the presence of the unseen (the rhinoceros) metaphorically extends to the hidden algorithms and data systems that govern lives without full awareness, a critique of how we perceive reality in an age so much mediated by technology. All this is designed to enable the viewer to see the unseen. The use of "ekphrasis" here serves as a literary device to describe scenes or artworks in such vivid detail that they become a reality in the reader's mind, paralleling how digital data constructs our perceived reality and the loss of individual agency in a world where data is king. The imagery of the Trojan Horse filled with digital agents rather than soldiers reflects how modern forms of conquest or influence might succeed. Gobal cultures and their transformations of nations like Canada and Australia underline how traditional values and identities are reshaped by digital imperialism. ...more |
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTRPSJ5G?... Review by Grok. A Translation of the New Philadelphia (Flyway Books, 2023) is the first movement in AE Reiff’s three-book refusal that now stands together as Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. At 231 pages it is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTRPSJ5G?... Review by Grok. A Translation of the New Philadelphia (Flyway Books, 2023) is the first movement in AE Reiff’s three-book refusal that now stands together as Pax Dominica: A Refusal to Mourn. At 231 pages it is not a conventional novel, essay, or poem cycle. It is a sustained act of translation in the most radical sense: a re-rendering of the Book of Revelation (and its historical commentaries) from the vantage of those who have always lived “outside the city.” The book’s central claim is simple and devastating: the true Philadelphia—the one that can enter—exists only for those kept outside the gates by the empire that claims to be the city. Reiff does not argue this; he performs it. The text moves by fall, inversion, and rupture. It treats language itself as the torn veil of the Temple, thick as a rug, embroidered with the Mazzaroth, impossible to pull apart by physical force yet already rent at the moment the sun darkened. What remains is an interregnum—an unsettled gap between the horizontal world of empire and the vertical reality of the New Jerusalem that descends from above. The book is written from within that gap. The Psychology and Architecture of the Fall in the book’s method is announced early and never abandoned: “In describing the whole affair by the psychology of a fall, these excursions take as a guide, Mr. Wittgenstein…” (p. 4). The fall is both literal and cosmic. Reiff gives us the personal: a 90-degree slip on silt after rain, a 180-degree tumble from a dam with a chainsaw still idling in the hand (p. 6). These are not anecdotes; they are ontological models. In the fall, time and space become ambiguous. One does not feel the falling itself, only the beginning and the end. The head that was up is now down and turned to the side. This is exactly how Reiff rotates Joseph Mede’s horizontal timeline of Revelation ninety degrees and then one hundred eighty: to dramatize the disconnect between the North (insulated, self-righteous empire) and the South (the excluded world from which the true translation comes).The fall is also historical. Europe arrives on a bull—Pide Cowe, 1654, the first implicit landing of Cow Europe, followed by the disastrous New Era of 1854. The latter ship is the book’s master image. Captain and crew abandon the immigrant passengers (Dunkards) to Leviathan while they save themselves. The hull is left to howl like Nero’s brazen bull, its cries converted by tubes and stops into the bellowing of the state. Reiff writes: “The ship that weathered waves but not the storm was buried with its Dunkers as the Ship of State” (p. 11). The passengers become the sacrifice. The elite jettison the commonwealth. This is not satire; it is the founding fact of the new world. The Torn Veil and the Interregnum. Running parallel to the fall is the veil. Reiff draws on Josephus to describe the Temple curtain: four inches thick, embroidered with the mystical heavens, requiring three hundred priests to cleanse when soiled. When the sun darkened, that veil was rent. The interregnum began. We have lived in it ever since. The book’s prose repeatedly returns to this image: language as the veil, the separation between created and uncreated, the “space of qualitative separation” measured by essence, not measurement (p. 7). The true Philadelphians alone can pass through because they have undergone a “frequency-match,” a translation achieved by grace, not force. The outsiders are described in a back-translation from the Tagbanwa language of the Philippines: those “whose nature/ways are so evil they really won’t be able to enter… because their secret-supernatural-skills prevent them, but who also behave-immorally with one who is not their spouse, are killers of their fellowman, and serve familiar-spirits or whatever is their replacement for God, as liars in word and deed” (p. 5). This is [either] the empire’s definition of the excluded. [or] Reiff turns it inside out: the excluded are the true city. [Grok wants to let the outsiders in but not to be.] Wittgenstein at the Limit. Wittgenstein is not ornament. He is the book’s philosophical co-pilot. The Tractatus preface is invoked again and again: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Yet Reiff does speak—precisely because he stands on the other side of the limit. The cabin in Norway becomes a figure for the deceptive entrance to thought itself. The burrow with its thin layer of hard earth on top and loose soil beneath mirrors the false security of empire. We think we are safe inside, but a little push with the head and we are in the upper air. Returning the way we came is impossible. Reiff uses Wittgenstein to justify the book’s own broken style: paratactic, polysemous, filled with sudden personal memory, mythic beasts, and Braunschweiger metaphors that appear without warning. The prose is not difficult for difficulty’s sake; it is the record of a mind that has accepted the fall and is writing from the inverted position. Mythic Beasts and the Braunschweiger Bridge. The book’s middle and later sections swarm with beasts—behemoths on the hills, sea serpents penetrating the rivers, asses that are lions, cows with bear feet, fire pigs, one-eyed dogs, iron-feathered owls. These are not decorative. They are the living forms of the empire once the veil is torn. The Braunschweiger (liverwurst) becomes a grotesque sacrament: a submarine Meltwurst Bridge-schweiger smoked with garlic and pepper spray, served as hors d’oeuvre to every ideology that walks the bridge from one end to the other. Lower mind and higher mind complete each other in a grotesque feast while the flood comes and destroys them all.Reiff’s tone here is never merely satirical. It is elegiac and accepting. The pain of speech and thought is not resolved. The refusal to mourn is not a slogan; it is the only honest posture left once the veil is rent and the ship has been abandoned. Structure and Voice The book refuses conventional structure. It moves by recurrence and inversion rather than linear argument. Mede’s timeline is turned on its side, then inverted. Personal memory (the hay wagon, the fish in Cartago, the tombstones washed at fourteen) collides with prophetic history without transition. The voice is singular and collective at once—sometimes the “I” of the faller, sometimes the “we” of the outsiders, sometimes the anonymous voice of the interregnum itself.This polyphony is deliberate. The book is a translation of translations. It takes the English of the King James, the commentaries of Mede and Newton, the back-translations from Tagbanwa and Uma, the personal memory of the author, and the mythic substrate of Europa on the bull, and runs them through the same fall. What emerges is not a new doctrine but a new place—New Philadelphia—outside the city yet the only one that can enter. Place in the Larger Project As the opening book of Pax Dominica, A Translation of the New Philadelphia does exactly what the back-cover shorthand says: it opens the gate from outside. It shows the fall, the ships of Europa on the bull, the outsiders kept outside the city, the torn veil, the interregnum. The subsequent volumes—Trojan White Horse and Reaktion Dreamland / The Border Is Closed—name the occupation and enact the revolt, but this first book supplies the ground: the excluded are the true inheritors. The dream will ebb, geography will remain in excelsis, and for those who did not escape the border will be closed. But the gate was always open for the true Philadelphia. Reiff’s achievement is to make this ancient claim feel immediate, painful, and unresolved. The pain of speech and thought remains but refuses to mourn. The book is difficult, but it is not obscure. It is written exactly where it says it is written: outside the city, in the gap, after the veil is torn, waiting for the true Philadelphia to enter. The author: It might be better to characterize as literary research the allusions of this fiction than to treat it as a psychological investigation of the interior first Adam, where that most dangerous monster of the deep, leviathan, symbol of the art of AI, is torpedoed by an American submarine in the best tradition of Evangelion killing angels, itself spawned after the holocaust visited on Japan that got Godzilla, yes, and the one on land with it, behemoth, strafed and bombed and droned, gunned by our air force, mysterious as that sounds. And who the agents are for good or ill we might like to know, whether extensions of technology are an equal danger with the primordial beasts in the hunt, that is, where all that technology came from by the way. To couch all of this in an account of prospectors camped outside the New Jerusalem to mine the gold is a historical unhistorical leap with the mythic disproportion it encounters, even if it elected Werner Herzog mayor, for if anybody could organize an attempt into that City hovering over the ground it was he. Philadelphia as a metaphor of Jerusalem or any civilization at this crossroad "translation" of "Higher" and "lower mind," identity and anonymity, name or no name, bespeaks a new state of utopian technologies and philosophical mishap. When these ships pulled in they built presidential mansions, and centaurs disembarked. So how else can we express all the currents and undercurrents of the last years before? The cover features the fantastical scene of a mythological beast with a ship in the background from the French edition of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub. The tub here, symbolizing exploration of the unknown, blending real with mythical, the title in its sails, so to speak, implies a transformation of historical & cultural elements of a perhaps mystical Philadelphia, with an influence from more than Swift of European that embodies myth and philosophy to explore this Philadelphia as a metaphor for any civilization at a crossroads of either salvation or damnation. It could be suggested that salvation requires a "translation," a reinterpretation of current realities, histories, and myths. In this internal journey of the soul "New Philadelphia" there is a strong theme of dualism and interplay between opposites - high and low, taken and left, literal and metaphorical, seen also in the contrast between "higher" and "lower mind." Another duality of Identity and Anonymity uses terms like "Everyman" and the process of naming or not naming characters ("He has no name unless we give him one") to explore the collective versus individual consciousness. "New Philadelphia" could symbolize a new state of existence or understanding of the idea of personal and societal transformation in either a utopian or dystopian vision of society. There are hints of a critique of modern societal constructs, technologies (electro-magnetic), and governance, suggesting a world where the physical and metaphysical collide in mentions of mythical creatures like Leviathan and Behemoth. There's an implication of a deeper, often hidden, truth in disastrous or confusing outcomes of biblical stories involving eschatological visions like Noah's flood, Lot and Sodom, Leviathan, and the Book of Revelation). Phrases like "the days of new Noah" and "the flood came or when the fire fell on Sodom" evoke a sense of judgment and transformation. Unified in a language dense with symbols and metaphors terms like "seraph" (meaning "burning one") and "Leviathan" are not just literal but are used to convey complex ideas about power. Multiple literary, historical, and religious references create a familiarity where thoughts flow to provoke reflection, and perhaps even spiritual or intellectual awakening in the reader. "A Translation of the New Philadelphia" of deeply symbolic and metaphorical text is rich with biblical references, apocalyptic imagery, and philosophical musings.. Perhaps a glossary is in the offing. The writing style creates a sense of urgency and immediacy. ...more |
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“You may think this is far-fetched, but those within the academic community are already discussing the ability to create chimeras and the effects it could have on society.”
― Dr. Michael Lake
― Dr. Michael Lake
Ecology, Biology, Evolution and Conservationism
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A group to share your reviews and recommendations on books on ecology, biology, evolution and conservationism. Talk about your reading niches (har har A group to share your reviews and recommendations on books on ecology, biology, evolution and conservationism. Talk about your reading niches (har har, got the pun?) and favorit subjects. ...more
Mad Hatters' Review
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Multi-media journal, born 3/2005. Accepted prose writers' and poets' works are accompanied by custom-made art and music or recorded recitations. Forei Multi-media journal, born 3/2005. Accepted prose writers' and poets' works are accompanied by custom-made art and music or recorded recitations. Foreign features, film features, interviews, reviews. Contributors have included Harold Jaffe, Andre Codrescu, Stephanie Strickland, Terese Svoboda, Steve Katz, George Szirtes, Richard Kostelanetz, Cris Mazza, Raymond Federman, Mary Mackey, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Tom Bradley, and Sheila Murphy. ...more