PREFACE

The year is 2009. The Tower of Vision, in centuries past occupied by poet-seers, has been empty so long the people have forgotten it exists.

Dangers lurk everywhere: economies falter and many middle class go homeless; multitudes – even Americans – suspect their governments (often rightly) of ill designs against them; fanatics of various religions urgently desire to trigger their own Armageddons, the greater the better – desiring especially biological, chemical, or nuclear events – human life cheap in their eyes. One thinks of the lines by Yeats.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

One thinks also of Tolkien’s vision of the encroaching shadow of Mordor, but there he had Hobbits in the wings, with elves, dwarfs, and men to stand against the evil. What do we have? Fiction-holes to bury our heads in.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

will never be written

because, first, who cares
for even a great sprawling fiction
since there is not one Dostoevsky alive
to fill it with living vision

and then, again, who cares
for but another fantasy
however shot thru with genius
in these archetypal days of our reality

no, a novel is a plaything
of genius, and peoples
to make up for the absence
of an epic Poet

only the actual matters
anymore, only the truth
of these our lives & this our world
has any relevance whatever

and it is in the works

THE GREAT AMERICAN POEM

Yet it is clear poetry cannot sustain the modern attention, so a “great American Poem” would not pan, though perhaps a marriage might be arranged, where prose unites with poetry (a body of work embedded with poems as a sturdy sword-hilt with gems). Only to have the tower truly occupied!

This to introduce a story. Not a fiction, but visionary adventure non-fiction. The history of the protagonist-cum-anti-hero shown in a series of scenes, revealing the character of one we will follow for some years through all manner of madness, love, occult combats, spiritual adventure, eventually moving to the present, the cutting edge of which can be seen now in Lightning Sword: Journal of the Apokalypse.

As they are formatted in html more stories will follow.