2nd edition, 2012

© 1982, 2000, 2004 Matt Cygny.All Rights Reserved

AN "EASTERN," WRITTEN BY A WESTERNER

DEDICARED TO THE GREAT I&I AND TO ALL OF THOSE SEEKERS

WHO HAVE APPRECIATED

THE GLORY OF DIVERSITY

WITH WHICH THIS GREAT SOUL OF THE EARTH

HATH CLOAKED HIS VARIOUS EMMANATIONS

The Lost Continent

Contents

Prelude The Palomino FormulaEmblem 1 A Merry Chase 01Emblem 2 The Devil's Pocket 06Emblem 3 The Crime-Ridden Shore 10Emblem 4 Land of the Golden Steal 17Emblem 5 You Call That Research? 26Emblem 6 Historical Romance 32Emblem 7 Novus Ordo Seclorum 38Emblem 8 The Roman Catacombs 42Emblem 9 The Kingdom of Liberty's Daughter 48Emblem 10 Nineveh by Night 52Emblem 11 The Gulf of Hell 58About The Author 61

With the exceptions of Emblem 10 and Emblem 8, all of the illustrations are Special Creations of the author. "Art Now" by Pamella Rome (p. 52) is used by permission -- thank you. The illustration on p. 42 is from Martyrs' Mirror, a traditional Mennonite work first published in the 17th Century.

THE PALOMINO FORMULAhould I begin with the Palomino? Or perhaps

with the milk-white Arabian? I want you to know, this tradition of

starting a tale by boasting about one’s horse didn’t just begin with Roy Rogers. It dates from the Dark Age of Ignorance, and was brought into Spain by the Arabs

Today as the movie progresses, an actress in black lace steps out on the verandah. There are cars parked outside in the driveway. In the original version they were chariots, driven by barbarians who’d come to rape the Amazons guarding the shrines of the Goddess.

It’s interesting how times change. You can’t get away with harassing the witches today. ‘Cause we’re going back to the original story, the way it was before we fell into the Ignorance. Back when the women were noble, and it just wasn’t proper for any man to call himself hero, unless he had endorsement from Our Lady.

THE LOST CONTINENTCanticle A

BABYLON’S HARBORPrelude

S

The Lost Continent

GGYYgg2. .

mar’s Descendants crossed the sea and came upon a land that was almost like a desert, where the Palomino formula could take root and flourish once again. They called the country Llano Estacado — the plain that is covered by stakes. The stakes were probably the Saguaro cactus, though some deem they might have been ritually driven through the breasts of captured conquistadores by the Pawnee.

Today every three-year old boy among the Vespucci dreams of riding a horse and chasing steers on the Staked Plain.. He feels a thrill of power, but doesn’t realize the game is all about conquering mamma.

My milk-white Arabian canters over cactus flowers. Fatima, what do you think of that Englishman who brought down Constantinople? The Arabs and Egyptians loved Lawrence. Too bad he got tangled with Duke Edward, who seemed to think that Adolf could put him on the Caliph’s throne..

It’s such a pity — but I guess that the Queen’s secret agents really did have to loosen a few nuts on his motorcycle. Mama’s learning how not to get conquered, though it certainly is taking her awhile.

O

Now Fatima! You really do not need to be so jealous! I know the Lord of Jealousy still rules this world from his ghost-throne in Damascus — but of late he’s been confounded by the Houris.

The Mother of Bani-Umayya stood condemned; she never had an economic base. But from the Torture Chambers of Conquistadores now rises a new Goddess, who asserts her dominion on earth. Her wings rise in a “V” as she swoops like an Eagle from Heaven. The Lord of Jealousy runs like a mouse.

Yes, Fatima, the day is hot, and the buffalo all

II

O

BABYLON'S HARBOR

have been raptured. The only place we’ll find a wild herd anymore is in Yellowstone National Park. And as for dogies now, well, the Agri-business is changing. Today the cowpokes ride in helicopters to round up their steers for the market.

Dear Fatima — my heart is now returning to Renata. I beg you, don’t be jealous of this daughter of the houris — you’ll soon love the way that she rides you. That woman’s just as spirited as you are. You’ll feel her sharp spurs in your flank — but as you start to gallop, you’ll realize, she’s making you chase your own soul.

I O

Let’s both run like the wind, beneath a sun that’s cruel as an Umayyad genie. We’ll watch out for the rattlesnake; perhaps we’ll see an eagle gliding on his mighty wings.

Renata’s waiting back there by the stable. Her tawny skin reflects the yellow sun; she claims light excites her bare nipples. She’s been through Whitechristian abuse and European schooling. That’s why it took her so long to realize, her own tears are wrung from the sorrows of the Original People.

We slow down to a trot. The way that you are snorting, I know that you are jealous. When we get back to the stable, Renata will curry you and feed you — but then she’ll do the same for nineteen others. And she and I shall return by the highway to Dao, where Renata will treat the sick, and I will entertain all the folks with my rock-and-roll war-dance show.

So maybe you’ll be jealous of the twenty other horses who are sharing the stable with you. You’ll run and play those horsey-games with creatures of various lineage — quarter-horse, morgan, appaloosa, palomino. And we shall be playing the unnatural games that it takes to get the folks who don’t have faith in culture to support the thing that heals them anyway.

III

The Lost Continent

I O“A turbocharger doesn’t have feelings!” you snort.I guess that you really are jealous. You see the way

the Offenhauser heads of my little red XTZ machine gleam beneath the Pawnee sun. Does that give you an excuse to carry on this way? You curl your lips and lift your head with a shrill whinny, as I start up the motor.

You’re just a creature; you’ve got to wait till I have done my work. And I am just a man who cannot help but living out the Faust myth, since that’s where my culture has left me.

I guess that is something to snort at. But right now even Mephistopheles will have to wait. There’s someone here who’s got more intelligence than horse-sense. She knows what it is to lose; she vows this time around it will be Mephistopheles who gets roped and branded.

She is wearing a red Western shirt, with bluejeans and boots. And under that denim, such sleek little brown hips — it’s a treat to get into those pants.

She opens the rear bonnet, to pack in the Winchester rifle. Then she sits down with her hipbones scraping on mine — I know she’s the ultimate weapon.

“Are you really taking that thing onstage?” she asks with a rather nervous shudder.

The way that she’s pressing against me — I know about roses and thorns. Even a half-track can’t tear up a man the way she can.

“I’m not sure just how we’re going to do it,” I find myself confessing. “But we’ve got to convert the Gun Club to the Red Road of Degonawida.”

IV

A MERRY CHASE

Renata isn’t innocent like Margaret. I guess that’s why she’s not in heaven yet.

“I just had to learn to take joy in watching the carnage,” she confesses rather sadly to me.

We both look in the mirror we bought last year from Mephistopheles. We look into the glass, and watch Helen writhe.

“Mephistopheles is torturing her!” Renata shrieks.The knife goes through both of our hearts; we are

impressed by a need to atone for a murder.“We’re still on the Trail of Tears!” laments Renata.

“We’ve got to find a medicine that can take out Andrew Jackson.”

_ 9 _

1.

BABYLON’S HARBOREmblem 1

Helen in the Mirror

The Lost Continent

2.

I wouldn’t call her an innocent pearl, but she’s got both a body and a mind. From time to time she makes a private peace with Mephistopheles and takes it out on me. The priest would argue she’s unorthodox — but that’s just his time-honored way of dealing with stiff competition. The sins he offers are less interesting, and lust for money doesn’t slay the ego.

She’s made me bow before the Virgin Mary, confessing my need for forgiveness. I look into her dark eyes, framed by tresses black as coal. She begins to unbutton her blouse, and Mephistopheles screams. Beside seduction with a soul, seduction with a snout just can’t compete.

Her skin is golden as the California dream. I kiss the dark windflowers of her nipples, repenting of Earth’s ancient cruelties. Within my heart I vow, I shall respect her fire, as she’s respected mine.

I know that she’s gathered that fire from the Eleusinian torch. About her glows the glory of lost cities. As I kiss her breast, I feel I know the answer to the Sphinx.

I guess that’s where the snakes that distort our dreams come from. When you already know the case history, your visions get kind of disturbed. But wouldn’t her ancestors laugh at my intellectual reservations? Wouldn’t they tell me it’s high time I spat in Andy Jackson’s eye?

These ancestors tell me it all boils down to: has our love made this world just a little more sacred? So I fall to kiss Renata’s feet and let my lust sate on her knees. Adoring the proud beauty of her thighs, I bask in Geronomo glory. Above her flesh, the constellation of Athena rises.

“My father never knew just what was going on when I had my fling with the blacksmith,” Athena laughs mischievously.

The Maid of Heaven looks down, and blows a draft to fan the fires I must tend.

Faust’s Mephistopheles was clever; he sought to bind poor Gretchen before she’d ever learned the power within her soul. If she but knew that in her breast there burned the flame of Helen!

Such electricity! Renata dances, and the air is permeated by an electric aura. Auroral banners flicker through the ethers, as fascination fountains from her navel,

BABYLON'S HARBOR

3.

smashing like the breakers of the ocean over the islands of her breasts.

I look on her tawny navel; to replicate those muscles which pull the breath into her belly were surely a sculptor’s delight. I look — and what I see has caused my mind to lose its measure. I’m turning on the wheel of love; I’ve climbed the spiral stairway within the tight-girt castle of her spine. I come to the foot of the mountain where her heart beats and quivers. And there, in the flowery meadows beneath the snow-capped peak — I look on the Lord of the World who hangs on a splintery cross, with nails in his wrists and feet.

His breast convulses with the pain of all the world; and from His bloody wounds the lightning strikes the sky. The voice upon the cross cries out: “Frail hearts beware! You look upon the Mystery which splits the Mountain’s stony heart, and draws tears from the glacier!”

_ 9 _Renata is devoted to Old Tezcat; she uses her love

like plastique. She truly is a priestess of shamanic ecstasy. She tells me that honor’s true only when it has been born from love’s pangs. And that it’s only stillborn until we attain the grace to endure without cursing the pain.

I look on her and feel an ecstasy that’s very close to madness. She has forsaken repose in the house of the Wise Lord, to dance a war dance to the tom-tom being played by the Old Texas Cat Who Plays Poker. Within her heart the anger of the Mothers swoops like an eagle from Heaven. Her shadow falls on New Orleans, and all of the white sheets in that town begin to glow and smoulder.

Oppression still rules? The more gentle race you slew on Cahokia’s mound returns with a claim to your bayou. The history of genocide, of biological warfare, whispers in the ears of ten thousand Joans of Arc. They rise up in a legion; the evil Giles de Rais, who wearied of her honor, is hauled into court for high treason.

Old Tezcat is only pretending to hang on the Cross. He’s actually Lord of the Storm. He’s heard the so-called Christians mutter contemptuous jokes about bush-

The Lost Continent

4.

bunnies, the pagans, and the lezzie libbers. He hears them, for these righteous men are his dominion. He’s got a quit-claim on the soul of everyone whose sneers have made Christ’s sisters stumble.

Old Tezcat is a War-God, but his mother’s a fine old Lady who keeps all her rascals in line. The doorpost that’s painted with her menstrual blood shall be spared the Curse of the Law.

Beneath Old Tezcat’s Cross, there lies a hill built up from the skulls of Jews and natives. To this day, children are led out to this place of great terror, while mothers’ prayers pound nails into Christ’s wrists.

Beneath the Cross, the blood that has been spilled begins to flame and glow. A serpent slithers up into the corpse: an Angel of fierce wrath, who vows to bring down the abusers.

_ 9 _My Lady of the Moonlight, I do believe your light

shall shine on me again. I watch the cities burn, and must acknowledge sovereignty of the Lord of the Left-Handed Heart. I offer homage to Brother Rattlesnake; let thy venom be transformed to rain, and love be resurrected in the land.

I offer my homage to Brother Rattlesnake, who will not sleep while one race oppresses another. Brother Rattlesnake, I know that some day revival is going to get to you, and then you will lay down your six-gun. Because today, the Reggae Revival is bringing in powerful angels, strong enough to stop the bullets flying in the streets.

Can war be love? Only if our war is made against the Cannibal within. That is the Liberation War that’s fought for by the pilgrims to your shrine, my Lady who Steps on the Stars.

_ 9 _My Lady of Moonlight, I curse not the pain. I rather

kneel to bless this woe that I share with The Mothers. I recognize in suffering a communion that is shared by six billion hearts. I see in this pain a fire that is cleansing the earth.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

5.

I’m begging Brother Rattlesnake to rise and become the Plumed Serpent. I’m begging Brother Eagle to lift Brother Rattlesnake into the sky, so he can see the folly of his ways. Let the rising sun illumine the top of the pyramid, and the prayers of The Mothers be answered.

Let the nations give ear to the claims of those who have been driven from the land. I sing the song you have taught me, Lady of Moonlight: the song I have heard from the heart of the priestess who loves You. And I bless the flesh of that priestess, in whom I have found solace.

So I don’t know. In a very real sense, we both have died. I guess that’s why I found such pleasure lounging in Renata’s bed — I knew I’d found a creature much like myself.

I looked upon her breast, and saw a flame of beauty which sustained me through tormenting times. The grace of her spirit brought rain to the seeds in the soil of my heart. When love’s rising sun burst through the clouds — it was then that I first learned to laugh.

I laugh at the conservatism of the flesh, and the fears that are born of this world. So long as I have love, I shall be able to remain in a state of recovery from the time I saw Hell grab the world.

I’ve lost too many comrades. That’s why I’ve had it with Jealousy — I know that Suicide is Love’s only real rival. I also know that honor means to look into the next world, and to fear only loss of the true friend.

So, Brother Rattlesnake, you’ve met your match this time. Renata is the Eagle; she’ll grab you by the neck and take you flying, just as she’s done a time or two before. We’ll see then if venom or laughter gains a higher verdict from the Lord of Gravity.

I love, that I may die, and learn how to welcome the wound. I kiss Renata’s feet and knees, acknowledging the Sacred.

She lifted me out of the Devil’s pocket, and led me on a merry chase through Purgatory’s flames.

GGYYgg

The Lost Continent

6.

Emblem 2.

The Devil's Pocket

now know the truth about The Rapture.When first you have been kidnapedYou sail up the world’s longest river,

Numb with "this just can’t have happened" —Only the pain is real; the loss

Becomes an empty womb, a pregnant womb, and brings forthA dark form who stands on the deck.

In the days of Greeks this spectre was already ancient:Great Ajax, striving to clean out the Gods.

Where is your justice, Allmighty — how could you have allowed?But God’s the only bastard who can’t die,

Won’t budge — but I’m down on my kneesYou call Yourself All-powerful —Can’t you just rewrite the script?

I

BABYLON'S HARBOR

7.

There it goes, what used to be me,Spinning as it falls, spinning

Falling, through the dismal leaguesThe Fear Sphere

The Anxiety Sphere,Into the thunderhead zone

Where depression raises great anvilsAnd sinners are transfixed by lightning.

I guess that I’ll be Ajax —I just can’t stand the grief,And can’t endure the guilt.

So Mr. Therapist — do you prescribe a drug,Or do you proselytize?

By just what sleight will you deny my pain —It isn’t real, is it? Oh, Jesus loves me, yes I know

And in the right-hand corner of your chartI see an upward arrow.

You say, one year or longerThen on some blessed Easter

The gibbet-bird awakens to say grace —Faust blesses then the earth and joins the saints,

But I don’t know.Have you ever watched

A loved one die?Have you ever hurt so much

You wished that you could fryIn the electric chair?

_ 9 _

A LETTER FROM JACK OUT IN OAKLAND

Dear Children Back on Earth,I’ve found the Black Holes

where the old Aztec Gods are still hiding. I saw the Iron Heel

The Lost Continent

8.

_ 9 _I guess you could say, I’m in a black humor today.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been talking to lawyers who tell me I should sue them for all they are worth. And I’d take their advice, if only I could just resolve one thing. There’s still a part of me, believes that they did me a favor, by disillusioning me with everything earth has to offer.

I really would rather be flying about with the Houris. I know you’ll call it red rage — but I would rather leave earth to the fiends.

_ 9 _

come, and witnessed Hell on Earth.

Oh, I have done my bit of astral traveling. They thought they’d burn me out in Petaluma — I’d penetrated their scandalous brickwork, found Alcatraz prison. And there, as I had suspected, under the arch where the Spanish stored cannonballs and the union troops used to have their bakery — the place where they crucified him.

I guess that the soldier deserved it. He’d given a large sum of money to a Confederate Agent by the name of John Wilkes Booth. And it wasn’t that difficult, either. They didn’t need a wooden cross — they just chained him up in handcuffs to the bars of his prison cell.

I’ll have more later. But I’ve got to tune out now, before the Mind Police find out you’ve been in communication with me.

-- Jack London

BABYLON'S HARBOR

9.

OK, Dr. Weisinger, I'll try to be more positive. You say that you’re trying to help me? I find it funny that a fiend like you should care.

You find it funny that I should think we are all fiends? No, I wasn’t always like that. There was a time I didn’t believe there was anything fiendish about killing for glorious ideals.

I’m not yet ready to tell you about the dead kids in the street. How about if I talk about the rock-and-roll war instead?

Or we could call it the Medicine War. Most of you urban professionals were trying so hard not to see it. The rural population can see halfway through your webs of denial, hates the Atlantic government for setting up the stage on which you play. But the urban poor can see all the way through. How else, when they’re suffering new plagues, threatened with being homeless, and driven off the little welfare subsidies they used to have — with nothing around to ease the pain but that newfangled crack cocaine. And it certainly wasn’t black boys who brought that plague over the border.

The lords of the Vespucci used to think that the KKK and its various Hitler youth groups were pretty cool. Kept them around like a pipe wrench to work on their racial relations. But then the pipe bombs started going off, and one whole federal building bit the dust.

I don’t even want to begin to try to compete with the journalists. They’ve got videotape footage of just about all the arrests — but their videos don’t capture our passion to restore life to a world where the Sacred had already been buried in the cold ground.

The Lost Continent

Emblem 3

The Crime-ridden Shore

et me call myself Achilles.I thought that I had seen enough of Holy Wars,

But then I found, this land to which I’d fledHas writ its tale for all times

In sacrificial blood.

uch fools as we were once could laugh when the ‘90's bbegan with something that the proud men called a Desert Storm. The Regulator Man was back in his

rough riding saddle but we congratulated him. It wasn’t politically correct to refer to the Biblical significance of his victory over Napoleon and all the other rag-tag revolutionaries and Sicilians. The Regulator Man had washed behind his ears; he’d even gone to the U.N. secretariat, begging the world so sincerely to bless his blitz.

_ 9 _So why am I really upset?

He does cut a rather nice figure —From Lynch Creek in Marlborough County —

Washed in the blood of the Lamb, comes now the SenatorJust like a lamb, to subdue excess, curb revolution

Put an end to terrorism, get the felons off our streets —There’s just one little thing, like, remember the Martyrs —Stubborn men and women. Starved in Siberian camps,

10.

L

S

BABYLON'S HARBOR

Shivered and died for what purpose?We’ve got genuine science here, the committed experiment:

Proof that a few ragged people really were in the image of God.Try to top that, Mr. Regulator Man.But would you believe it? He will —He’ll even pull rank on the Martyrs,

Claiming the right to wear the scalp of CommunismOn his tailor-made cartridge belt.

.

When credit is snatched from the martyrs, our sense of cause and effect becomes falsified.

That’s why the Vespucci style of leadership has me feeling so uneasy. I’m certainly not saying Senator Philip Marlborough shouldn’t offer help to the Kurds. But something here bothers me also.I know about those villagers who have been tortured

and slaughtered by Insane Saddam. When I was in Peoples’ Academy, I once had a Kurdish instructor, who’d fled to Kazakstan after Teddy’s Boys torpedoed his hopes for a homeland. According to his inter-pretation of the infernal clockwork, the Kurds have always suffered, because they’ve harbored Sufis wanted for thought-crimes against the Caliph.

During the days when Milton was lamenting a Paradise Lost, visionaries in Kurdish caves were raising up their heads, to prophesy this coming New World Order. Of course, any sound-byte that had that kind of a

11.

Note: SULTAN SELIM IIIused the phrase "New

Order Army" as the name of the new military institutions he copied from Western Models.

See "Ottoman Empire" by Stanford J. Shaw, 1992, Multimedia Encyclopedia, Ver I, Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc

The Lost Continent

ring was bound to get stolen and misused. So I guess that those Sufis should forgive Alexander Hamilton for embroidering the phrase into his dollar bill. But then, look where the dollar bill went — financing the hostile takeover that put Adolph Hitler in power.

The irony! Hamilton’s boards of directors only loaned Adolph the sound-byte — novus ordo seclorum in about ten million copies. So Hamilton sent out his army when Adolph appropriated the Sufi logo as his own. And now we get to Mr. Marlborough, who’s inherited the chairmanship of Hamilton’s board of directors. It’s his army now — so therefore, isn’t the sound-byte his rightful spoil of war?

I wish I could believe that The Regulator Man’s sincere in his concern for the lives of the Kurds. But if his heart were really whole — wouldn’t he try to offer something in exchange for the pirated sound-byte?

No, Mr. Regulator Man,You haven’t dented up the sound-byte nearly so bad

As old Adolph did. You clearly qualify —The lesser evil, chosen to build Rome

Because you are too doggone corrupt to ever be truly fanatical —

But just don’t forget as you go throwing sound-bytesThat New World Order has a kind of resonance

That makes cheap brickwork crack.Just look behind you — see how your fortress is spidering.

Now who is that out there, that Mr. InsaneEating grass in those Babylon Gardens

‘Cause the Persians won’t sell him more carpets?

12.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

13.

Guess he wants a bite of the sound-byteDoesn’t understand, its been a good thousand years —

Back then the Martyrs established, just being a kingIs a very limited license, doesn’t excuse

Torture, invasion, wholesale wanton slaughterThat’s not an allowable Holy War — but then the trouble is

Who can yank Nebuchadnezzar’s licenseFor driving a state while on oil?

Well, look at Mr. Marlborough —He does so enjoy playing that role — Wild West SheriffOnly now that he’s in Kuwait, you may spell that SharifHeir to the Kingdom of Spain, but at just that moment

The cheap brickwork begins to crack,The cowboys pour out from the house of Judge Lynch

And the Indians are taking it easy — they’ve seen it all before,If you’re going to bust him for genocide

Then why not let the madman have his dayIn the dock of a genocide court?

Though tanks crush the skulls of the lowlyThe Big Men always let each other get away.

_ 9 _Can it be that I’m just going crazy? I know, doc, that

it’s something personal. Has to do with the day I met the Worm Who Will Not Die — that terribly persistent torment that’s inflicted with intent to drive a soul insane.

I’m getting so disgusted with the excuses that every culture gives for allowing its abusers to rule. I try to pray it away, drink it away, exorcize it through love affairs and pagan rituals, but the anger just will not die. I guess that’s why I’m so obsessed with the belief, there’s got to be a Hell for those who torture.

Or perhaps the torturer should have a permanent tribunal in Nuremberg, where he can have his say and get due process. When such a tribunal is set up, with authority to interrogate the great men of great states, then maybe I’ll believe that The Regulator Man is sincere in his talk of a new world order.

I guess details like that are too intellectual for The

The Lost Continent

Regulator Man. I guess according to his world-view, Miz Monroe has chosen him as the Great Father in Washington. If he just spanks a few naughty children, the Great Western Soap Opera will keep on making money for it’s sponsors. He certainly must be the dad, alright, because Miz Monroe’s doctors and attorneys have slapped a support order on him, a full two billion dollars payable to the U.N. And the way that he’s hemming and hawing — I see for sure that Mr. Regulator Man holds the Golden Gloves in the Deadbeat Dads division.

“Why, Mammurs!” cries Miz Monroe. “What a big stick it is that you’re cleaning and oiling!”

Mammurs is a nickname from his childhoodBack when he was a kid growing up in the slums

On the lazy strand of the TiberWhen Rome was the Wild West, and the gold standards all were

EtruscanThe tall ships sailed from Africa or Crete.

While all of the Greeks writhed under the heelOf that tyrant, Agamemnon.

Eventually Mammurs got with a dude named RomulusAnd, with just a little help from Queen Dido

And the sacrifice of one brother,Founded Great Babylon of the Iron Age.

The Regulator man smiles in fond reminiscence;Childhood was good to him

Though the forum was never quite so cool as his present digs,Underneath the banks of the Potomac.

Now as for Miz Monroe —Now there’s a star for you —

14.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

15.

Back in the Classical Babylon she called herselfQueen of Heaven, Lover of the World

But Dido’s death humbled her; reducedTo a Tyche, Merely the Emperor’s Fortune,

To which men offer incense.So in Nineveh, while shopping around for some rags

That would make her look like a tyche,Miz Monroe came upon a red white and blue bikini

Referred to by historians as Manifest Destiny.She’s wearing that red white and blue bikini,

Calling herself Leading Lady, breasts covered by nothing but diamonds.

But of course, as Marilyn knows, Teddy’s rough-riding outfitNeeds to come out of the closet

She needs to iron, and watch out for his Rule of the Thumb;.The kids know enough to take cover

When she’s got to kiss him.

We watch a tender scene; it seems she doesn’t want to let him go:

“But you promised! That you would only have your affairs...”“On this side of the Atlantic?

“That was when you were young and naive“The truth is, baby, if you had kept those red lips shut“I might have bought you a fur coat, maybe even —

“An 18th century tea set, used by the geishas,“Maybe even one of the crown jewels

“Out of the museum in Bagdad.“But let me tell you, you shouldn’t fear my Rule of the Thumb

“Half so much as you should fear your own chattering lipsCause let me tell you, miz liberated woman —

I could have you in jail in a minuteOn a prostitution rap.

It’s only natural she’d want to scream —She thought that it was bad when he discovered Gay Paree

So grateful to be saved from Nazi rape,But this is worse. Far worse than normal strains of plague

Brought from the lowest divesOf Berlin, Yokohama, Pusan and Saigon,

The Lost Continent

16.

She best had seal her pretty lips,But if she had the nerve

To bring out all the trophies from his closet —Not just the Lugar Dueling pistols, silver-barreledStatus in the Austria of 1941, and still today —

But look at these courtship customs — on the modern campus,

The model’s surely taken from the pages of Mein Kamph —That’s why when she breaks down our Miz Monroe will say

That this Land of the Vespers,Where freshman coeds are resigned to being raped —

This is in very truth the darkest continent.

RRSo how was it that I, poor devil that I am, have

fallen in love with a woman whose native customs are so cruel? I guess it’s just that on the day I met her, my broken heart had made a fool of me.

Because I met her over there, on the civilized side of the Atlantic, I got taken unawares. I was vulnerable, since I was still mourning a lady who’d tried to subvert Ethnic Cleansing and gotten sent up to heaven — so I misunderstood Renata’s accent. Thought she was a pure and pretty creature, maybe even a virgin, who’d grown up among the Basques. But then I found out that the Basques she knew were from the countryside by Albuquerque.

Isn’t that Everyman’s story — the pain of my longing betrayed me. But I know that I saw something priceless. I swear it was the Holy Grail. Hidden in the heart of a woman who retreated through the Most Tangled Forest, until she’d returned to the Grailshrine in a land where abuse is the law.

Hidden from my vision by Vespucci glamours, she waits upon the golden plains of El Dorado.

16

BABYLON'S HARBOR

17.

Emblem 4

LAND OF THE GOLDEN STEAL

I. If You Would Be Republicans

ea-gulls in grey sky prepare me for cacophony. We

are being guided into the harbor by a tug boat. I’m prepared for the commotion of the wharves, but not for De Sade’s Republic.

I know about Militant Atheists — I used to be one. But Atheism doesn’t hold a candle to the Godlessness of thinking the Supreme Power can be bound like an ordinary genie. Rub the little bottle, Jehovah will come out and prop up election banners for the Conservative Party. I hadn’t believed God could become a commodity, but the Radical Republicans seem to have accomplished that too. I believe they’ve rated the Old Boy at ten million volts — and they’ll sell him for two billion dollars.

No, Dr. Weisinger, I’m not trying to put down your country. But I started learning this curious sort of humor when I was just off the boat. In fact, I was standing in line at the terminal, waiting to allow Customs to rumple through my luggage. How many cigarettes? Stolen goods, drugs, art treasures, secret messages from the now-defunct KGB? If you want to come to the Vespucci Republic, you must be a

S

The Lost Continent

18

Fed Up with Constant Battering.I t’s been almost two centuries since Goethe published

his Faust and Gretchen case history. So it shouldn’t surprise us that Gretchen’s not fourteen any longer. And after what she went through back in those Sturm und Drang days, she’s tired of being a nice girl.

This time around, when Mephistopheles started popping up behind the streetlights, Gretchen accepted the deal-you-can’t refuse, and ended up divorced in Vera Cruz. She looked across the plain to the snow-capped Popocatepetl, and there beheld the Goddess of Old Mexico.

I’ve seen the nature of that Goddess who likes to drink blood, and has recently been on a rampage. Back in the Old World, Hephaestos still has some relation to his faithless Aphrodite — but here it is Huitzilopochtli who’s written the law, and he is a left-handed hombre. After what he did to Venus, she’s driving down from Popocatepetl to drag him into court — and she has got all of the mountains ready to rock and roll if the judge don’t do right.

spy or a thief. To honest folk we're Hell — but to crooks we are heaven.

Whatever I do, I don’t want to give you the idea that I’ve come over here to stir up any trouble. So I’ll just go along with the program, and tell the customs agents what they want to hear. Yes, sir! Well, let me tell you now, sir! I know this is the golden land of opportunity. I’m poor right now, but in about ten years I expect to own twenty Cadillacs and five Lincolns. I plan to invest in a pre Civil War slaveholder’s mansion, I know that I’ll be able to find one, sooner or later, at a tax sale. Once I’m able to buy up some land, I’ll get me some horses and raise them. I plan to make my living doing some tobacco farming — that way I won’t have to worry about unions, or deal with folks expecting union wages.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

19

“Fed Up With Constant Battering,” proclaims the newspaper headline. Down and out with only a suitcase, The Little Pearl watches as Venus confronts Mr. Rattlesnake in front of the Vera Cruz courthouse.

Gretchen steps into a doorway to flee the hot sun. It’s one of those saloons that goes for the Yankee dollar, and it’s Lady’s night. So they all hobble in from the hospital ward, in diamonds and furs and on crutches. The women who’ve been payed off so they’ll mend their broken bones on foreign shores.

Gretchen chips in with them on a pitcher of beer, and wonders if romance ever will be the way she imagined it should be. Didn’t St. Paul say something or other about Love that nurtures herself on faith and hope till she becomes wise as a serpent and also gentle as a dove? But then, St. Paul was a man, and Gretchen knows how far to trust men when they speak about these matters of the heart.

Huitzilopochtli has just sent away for a Winchester rifle from a mail-order house in Virginia. As Gretchen walks out and blinks in the light of the street, and sees the UPS truck drive by, she feels an awful premonition that Venus might win the court battle but still not survive to collect her settlement.

Then Gretchen sees the Santera, carrying on a dialogue with the black chickens lined up in her cages while she sits on a blanket on the street corner, waiting for customers. That wrinkled little old woman is a survivor, out of a tradition that’s resisted everything the Rattlesnake has been able to throw during all the days since the Mafia discovered Cuba.

So Gretchen asks the Santera, will Love end up sliced and diced, steamed to a pasty tar and then crystallized as a powder, shipped to the cities up north and sold in the streets? Shall love be reduced to being just one more drug that money can buy?

But don’t worry. As the Santera reassures her. Venus has a serpent form too. Her snake is five times as mean as Huitzilopochtli’s Rattler — and she’s vowed to ravage the land until she’s been properly courted.

The Lost Continent

20.

On that day, she’ll change to an Eagle,TTTo swoop down and rapture the RattlesnakeNot all of the Spooks in the Winchester House

Will be able to save the Eater of Hearts on that dayFrom the kindled fire that waits.

On that day the Devourer of HeartsShall find himself transformed

To what he was when first he was created:The Plumed Serpent.

Then the Wheel of Nazification shall stop. The Medicine WWWheel shall start turning.

Those who are the Real People shall rejoice in a season of healing.

The Little Pearl holds her only suitcase as she stands alone on a sidestreet in Old Veracruz. And an Eagle descends from the sky.

W hen the Gods of the Land begin dancing, we mortals must join the dance too. We must dance

the Medicine Wheel — Else Atlan shall remain a land of burning crosses, in which the heart is sacrificed — where men with blood on their hands must ever repent.

O

W

BABYLON'S HARBOR

Mills that Grind Slowly

L et me I tell you an adventure story, of a voyage that was just too exciting.I had nothing to fear from the sea -- my life was already

over. I’d watch the Mediterranean breakers, and the spray from the tops of the combers would whisper with Aje’s voice or Ninianne’s accent. In the sunbeam that bounced back from a ripple, I’d see Rachemnia’s smile -- but that girl was missing from action, and presumably had been killed.

When the Violence first began, I had comrades who were true. Ninianne believed in Revolution. All the events of the ‘80's served to confirm her faith. Stalin’s six-gun might have brought the October Train to a screeching halt, but now it was moving again, on the way to the Peoples’ Society. For the sake of Marx and Mary, she started digging a trench across the path of the Ethnic Cleanser Steamroller. And Aje, whose third-world sense of decency has always inspired us was right there beside her.

There still is a Sick Man in Europe, and he always makes war on the lovers. I listen to the steel guitar on a Lusitanian pier, as I watch the breakers come in. I look out on the Ocean that once rose to drown Great Atlantis. Those northern whitecaps to the right gave birth to Greenland Icebergs -- they saw Neptune take the Titanic, then turn around and shake Europe till most of her kings lost their crowns.

Today we seek with bloody hands and fearful tears, to choke another Fury. All over the world, senseless violence. And I here listening to the gypsy with his guitar, realizing that I’ve gotten sick too. And that maybe if I look for healing on a different continent, Europe will be spared one vendetta. Several more strains of his music convince me, that I must pack up my valise, and ship out on the voyage to Purgatory.

I went down to the dive, and met the Sicilian. He fixed me up with papers introducing me to an old and seamy mistress of the trade routes.

21.

The Lost Continent

22.

T he story goes that Neptune grinds his salt mill slowly. Each year he drags new prizes down to a

realm where the Goddess still rules. Then the men who insure the Atlantic embroider fresh webs of denial. And the waves watch as bruised women cruise, in diamonds and furs and on crutches, to recover in a place where the neighbors can’t see what their husbands have done.

Comes Thetis now, to claim the salt mill as her own. The chairmen of the Trans-Atlantic boards read the pleading papers with horror. They’ve sacrificed to Davy Jones, but know the angry Goddess is going to demand more than just a few torpedoed ships. Their Captains can no longer keep the bruised women from finding therapists who are able to explain the sickness of the Trans-Atlantic Man. The Captains all gather together, to burn holocausts to Apollyon, and have a barbecue.

The Regulator Man leads the Great Bull to the Babylon butcher, Then the Priest proclaims a sermon, as blood splatters clean white togas: : “Behold the retainers of Thetis -- they’re pirates and prostitutes all.”

I follow the sun to a hall where all the boys and girls of the Seamen’s Union are meeting. The sailors there join in a hymn to Santa Lucia, and share a flask of wine before they all ship out. And I have got my papers to sail with them, upon a freighter bound for Purgatory.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

They're Singing Down in Davy's Locker Room

The Calcutta was a lady of the night.

23.

⁄•••She sailed under the single star of a nation whose maritime regulations were not overly stringent. Indifferent to the politics of strong men and the vicissitudes of civil wars, she bargained with both Mary and Yemaya.

In the shadow of her coal-fired boilers, the Christian saints and Pagan gods played cards as they worked out their deals. These bargains always managed to keep the old girl floating. Indeed — right when her owners were signing her over to the scrap heap, the OPEC ministers reprieved her by raising the price of crude oil.

I think that half the boiler crew had signed for lower wages, because they needed to remain at sea till more congenial governments had gotten into power.

I made my peace with this world, til we were three days out. But then — I guess that it must have had something to do with the ghosts. The people around me were nothing to me; the ones I really loved were on the other side of the Eternal Sea.

Of course I’ve got my pride. Didn’t we accomplish something by exposing the dirty news? Did anyone care that the Chairman of the Board of Old Ethnic Cleanser

The Lost Continent

24.

Inc. had been a charter member of the Benevolent Association for Canonization of Franco? But all of the pride in the world can’t satisfy my broken heart. I don’t know why I’m still chained to this flesh, when everyone I love has gone to heaven.

I look beyond the rail and hear the song. Through the mortuary curtain, I’m hearing Aje-ha’s voice. The sun is just chained light to me, who am in love still with those souls of liberated light.

Down here in the trough, I see what’s haunted me so many times before. Perhaps I’ll love within this world again. Then shall I shall watch as the woman who struggles with over-constant anguish, covers her ancient bones with a garment of flesh. Again shall she stand as the tree, and strive to free her branches from the Jealous Serpent.

If I stare long enough at that coiled rope, perhaps she shall awaken. Perhaps this is only a nightmare — but I’m still hearing her scream. Her shame has suckled on the tears with which she has dampened her pillow. I tell myself that this is no more than a nightmare — but perhaps it’s the birth of a monster who shall steal my name and wear my face.

Am I just that ghost-woman’s womb, torn by the horns of a monster? I look out on the sea and realize, I only signed on with this crew so that I could chase Paradise. Oh to be sure, just to keep going, I’d told myself a rather different story. I told myself I intended to visit Renata — but who could assure me the journey would be worth the effort? Most likely, my conviction Renata would love me — the devil’s world allows its slaves illusions, because false hopes are cheap.

I put my hands above my head and took the plunge — I’ll let go of life’s surface, and let the fish pick my bones.

The long and the short of it is, that Davy had the nerve to reject me. I just don’t understand — so many men have struggled so for life, and yet still been dragged down to his locker. While I, who’d plunged ambitiously to doom, was bobbing in buoyant loops. Why was Old Davy playing like this with me?

But listen! The Sirens are singing! No, that’s Renata’s voice — remember how clear and how sweet? I

BABYLON'S HARBOR

don’t know if I’m going to heaven or to Hell — but these voices are giving me courage. The wraiths of women I have loved — at last they’ve come for me!

But it’s Irish coffee I’m drinking, and I don’t think the angels serve rye whiskey. I’m cold, but this isn’t quite Hell — I’m looking through the grey mists, into grey eyes of a concerned Old Salt. The grey boards around me are the planking of a lifeboat, so I guess that I’m still in this world.

They’re lifting me up in a sling, so close to the hull that I can see the flaking black paint, the rivets, and all the rough and rusty places. They take me to a cot in the infirmary, where the medical officer sedates me.

I’m looking up in a half-conscious state, with the Black Goat standing over me.

“Shame! Shame!” the Black Goat is laughing. “Deserting your post in this way — when you were not even in danger of capture by the enemy.”

“But they’re all the enemy!” I cry.And the Black Goat just laughs, as he stares at me

with his cold eye.

b Z a Z b

b b

Z

25.

The Lost Continent

26.

Emblem 5.

YOU CALL THAT RESEARCH?

B y the time I had gotten through customs, I was all done with being embarrassed. I had to live, and

live I would -- in Nineveh’s rioting ruin.The television shows proclaim, a new Captain’s

taken up the helm. The liberals debate, if the New Man is just the same Old Ahab in a rented tux. But let them launder jackets -- I’m new here and I’m looking for a home.

The money in my pockets won’t take me very far; The laundry where I came from – a diesel-duty war against the undead Nazi – has wearied me to death. I’m sick of sniffing intrigues that devour you like a cancer, sucking the life out of you for twenty years or more.

An absence of connections – isn’t that the sort of signal the brain will interpret as pain? Of course, when the signal is entirely absent there’s just a numbness, which consciousness can’t properly fill. It’s a very uneasy numbness; you sense how much you’ll be in for as soon as those feelings return.

I have seen the chariot come down to earth carry off

BABYLON'S HARBOR

27.

the best ones, the ones who refused to be spared. The newspapers call it a war; I guess that I’m the only one who heard the trumpet sound. I guess that an absence of connections kept the world from hearing the Angel’s voice.

The absence which gnaws in my pockets keeps me from trying to remember just what tune the trumpet was playing. Just one more scientist treading water in a flooded market, tired of working for men who ought to be tried for war-crimes.

DThe newspaper catches my eye: the ad is requesting a

technician with a background in medical research. I soon found myself in the office of Dr. Van Dieman, spoken of by his employees as “The Grey Shadow”.

“Do you mind working at night?” he interviews me.I often have worked on the swing shift but this job is

graveyard.One of my job duties would be to dig up fresh

cadavers, during the midnight hour.

I t wasn’t that I minded being watched by the cemetery moon. But Van Dieman should have. Even moonlight

was too much light for the kind of a game that he played.One morning the Grey Shadow surprised me.I was helping him hobble into his office, supported by a

wobbly cane. He had great difficulty walking on account of his charcolated ankle.

“How would you like to sleep with the animal people?” he asks me.

“The who?” I start. I must have missed something important when I was staring at his office clock. I’m begging God, I’ll make almost any sort of deal, if He will make 7 AM – the hour when my shift is over – come just a little bit sooner.

As he answers me, his tone becomes kindly and

The Lost Continent

28.

“Of course,” Van Dieman drawls condescendingly, “Becoming a real American means that you’ve got a right to your sexual preferences. Go chase after live bait if you must – but as for me, I’ll have my candied cherry witches..”

Or bitches, depending on his mood. I gather he had the numbers of a number of women who’d do it for crack, and a few who would do it for heroin.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he would insist, “A corpse can give you just as much of a lay as a live one. Even better as a matter of fact – a cadaver don’t come back to demand child support.”

He introduced me to a couple of ladies who always came into work scantily dressed, and never had very much office work to have to do. Occasionally those women asked me if I could come up with some ice. And I, whose salary wouldn’t cover such extravagance, found I could only marvel at Babylon’s strange customs.

I particularly remember Van Dieman’s excitement one day when we were able to deliver to him a particularly well preserved female cadaver. This one had never been buried in the ground – we’d just bribed a couple of

confidential. I’m wondering if he is trying to give me the next

installment on the preacher from his Georgia hometown who left his wife and children for a sixteen year old girl, then made his fortune preaching on TBN about how Dungeons & Dragons was a trap set by the Devil, to bring souls down to Hell so he could feed on them.

“Have you ever tried looking under the stones in Monument City?” the Grey Shadow asks me.

“I’ve done that and I’ve found corpses,” I answer.“They may have lost their souls,” he answers, ‘but

they do it so well. They’re professionals. Besides – you know that all that malarkey about salvation and the Devil is really pretty silly. I admire Brother Scaldwell for the way that he has turned religion into a multi-million dollar entertainment venue. That’s all that religion has ever been – cheap entertainment for the poor and starving.”""O

BABYLON'S HARBOR

29.

orderlies, and soon were able to fill out the paperwork to deliver her to one of the more secure operating rooms within the medical school.

She was still in her early twenties; she’d gotten paid for a modeling job, and had died of a drug overdose. I wheeled her into the experimentation station, while the good doctor struggled to repress his mounting excitement. After I’d gotten her secured beneath the floodlight, I was sent out to doctor the clerical entries, while Dr. Van Dieman performed his intrusive procedure behind closed steel doors.

All good things end someday – and Van Dieman soon had to surrender “Odie-Babe” to the directing scalpels of the surgery practicum students. But the old boy had fallen in love; the few days he’d had with Odie-Babe had turned him on to what he really wanted in a woman.

a = a

From that time on, my days in the graveyard were multiplied. Van Dieman was determined, another woman just like Odie-Babe had to be buried there somewhere.

He bought himself a brace of foxhounds -- the tan and brindle variety – to help him sniff out the places where bodies had recently been buried. Some of the bodies we dug up looked pretty crushed and maimed; others were ravaged by disease.

A couple of times, we were able to bring up cadavers fresh enough, and also sufficiently intact, to suffice for Dr. Van Dieman’s experiments. But most times, after we had gotten back to the sliding steel doors of the medical school dissection room, the good doctor had to content himself by servicing his two bitches.

I believe it was a relationship of mutual consent. The foxhounds love him dearly; they lust to obey his command.

I’m back in the graveyard again, underneath the full moon. I watch them sniff and paw the ground, as the old man stumbles over the vases of flowers the mourners have left

The Lost Continent

30.

A Lot O’Dots, Inc.

F or having a father like she did, Virginie Van Dieman was a fairly decent sort of person. I

frequently found myself wondering, just how she was so consistently able to overlook so many of the flaws in his character.

I felt rather sorry for her. He had her hogtied at the economic base. The way that he’d abused her, she had difficulty doing without. It wouldn’t have been that easy for her to pick up and start over.

She came to confiding in me, because she didn’t have anyone else.

I’m not sure how I’d describe the alliance which came into being between us. I was coming to detest everything connected with Van Dieman. I guess that we had to work together, so that we could work to outwit our common enemy.

Virginie stood to legally inherit the old man’s estate. It made me feel better to thing that some of his low-down dirty wealth might actually end up in the pockets of someone who had half a conscience. And then again, when she told me the ways he had abused her, and on top of that engineering the death of her mother — it made me feel a coward for not contacting Amnesty International.

I know, it’s just the crazy part of me that sees torture everywhere. I guess the Devil got me, just before the Hardliners fell. But it’s funny how I’m seeing that same devil in Mr. Van Dieman.

Maybe my hope to get free of the Devil is only a delusion. There’s something that happens when torture begins to get you — you know you’ve gone to Hell and met the Fiend.

You’re fighting for your soul; you may go to the

F

BABYLON'S HARBOR

he cannibals my father hired can never get anything done!”

I’m trying to add up some figures on the office computer — an old monochrome XT. Naturally the columns won’t balance — there’s too many lies in between.

Virginie is feeling nervous, worrying that her father’s estate might end up being repossessed before his soul is. And if the Devil is allowed to take everything he’s simply loaned — then where in the world shall she be?

I’m beginning to appreciate why she seems a little bit crazy. It’s not easy to work for the Devil and still hold on to your soul. But intuition tells me, Virginie has managed to

31.

martyr’s heaven or the betrayers’ Hell. You don’t even know if there is a morality in the things you are doing, because you have gone down into Survival Mode.

“You know what I found out, yesterday?” she asks me with a scandalized protest. “Down at the Stateling Apartments, our janitors have been holding regular orgies, when they’re supposed to be on the timeclock, cleaning up the girls’ rooms.”

I looked at her, and knew that I was looking at the Devil’s daughter. But I also saw something else.

I’m in the world of Angst. Some of the people I meet here are going to end up in the martyrs’ heaven, while others are bound to plunge to the loneliest Hell.

No, I can’t judge her for the things her dad did to her, or the way she chases me with her wet rag. But with a dad like she’s got — I wonder if she ever can find love while he’s living.

The problem I have with my conscience, is that I have killed better men. And we should be slaving away for the benefit of that Mr. Beast? I don’t know, but I feel compelled to assure Virginie, that free will has divided forever between herself and her father.

Or perhaps he can go to heaven, if he ever can get up the courage to put a bullet right between his eyes.

"T

The Lost Continent

32.

hold on to more than just a little.“We’ve got to get things in order!” she howls. “Any

time now, our creditors may descend on the Plastic Jesus factory!”

I ended up descending to the Plastic Jesus factory, as the general manager. I was grateful for the opportunity Virginie had given me, to keep a little more distance between myself and her infernal father.

GGYYggEmblem 6.

HISTORICAL ROMANCE1

Republican Twilight

W hen I eat in the cafeteria, I scrupulously avoid the meat.

The way denial simplifies the safety regulations, the cooks may well be guilty of destroying State’s evidence. And I’ve got enough sins on my conscience without adding cannibalism.

Has this meat been offered to idols? We might possibly say as much. We’re all being devoured by the Great Persons who dominate this Constitutional State. Even A Lot O’Dots,

BABYLON'S HARBOR

33.

Inc. Is slowly being eaten by the First National Bank.Wealth has its glamours, but the idol’s bones are

something else. I know the way Virginie thinks — if she just had her father’s money free and clear, she’d do humanitarian works. But money that’s invested has a personality. No matter that it’s owned by a victim or even a martyr — the money in the bank still works for the sins of the fathers.

The legend of Virginie’s father is written on a skull and crossbones flag. It seems that he was once a repo man. A repo man by moonlight — by day he attended the church of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The Black Goat has come to warn me about what happened to his own meat, after the Commodore managed to skin him alive. The Great Captain had a great mission: to teach all of the Scapegoats a lesson in Free Enterprise.

In those days the Black Goat used to graze on a hill that belonged to Mr. Van Winkle. One day the Great Captain came by, bought up the property from Mr. Van Winkle, but allowed him and his goat to go on living there for 20 more years on a lease. Then 20 years later he came back again to declare:

“Mr. Van Winkle, you have been asleep. You see those topgallants and banners flying down there? That’s Babylon’s Harbor, and this is Great Babylon’s hill.”

Waking to the light of 19th Century Idealism, Mr. Van Winkle lights a fire and sacrifices his little black goat. After dinner he tears down the goat shed, and the next day he rents him a chain gang to put in a cobblestone street. Then up goes the brick trading post, and all of the owners of all of the goats have to come to Van Winkle’s cornered monopoly to get their corn and oats.

Now twenty more years have gone by, and the Great Captain visits his inferior. It’s time for more instruction in the ways of piracy. So the Great Captain commends the Little Captain for his Social Darwinism, and imposes a metropolitan rent.

It’s too late in the game for the Little Pirate to move out or start over again. He hasn’t much choice but to do

The Lost Continent

34.

Blame It On The SPCA

O f late it seems, Free Enterprise has fallen on hard times.You can blame it on the SPCAApparently it all began when a German philosopher

went crazy. Up till then he’d been a proper little man, who’d given the stamp of academic respectability to the Pirates’ Creed. But then something in his brain went haywire and he committed himself. He specifically committed himself to becoming a martyr for the sake of a horse.

This certain Professor Nietzsche was hauled off to the loonie bin by the proper authorities. However, he was only the first of many to fall victim to the madness. Soon the madness had crossed the Atlantic, and pretty soon it became illegal to flog your own horse in New Pork City. If that wasn’t bad enough, pretty soon the counselors and the teachers started getting the idea that children ought to have the same rights a horse had. So now you couldn’t flog the children. And then to top it off, along came the ACLU — so now you can’t even flog felons.

But of course, Mr Van Dieman has always got to prove that he is intellectually superior to those purple-gummed Eyetalian immigrants. And so he shall teach them the lesson the Commodore taught to the goat.

Mr. Van Dieman was a friendly sort who liked to glamour the working folk. He was always ready to lend a little money, in return for a lien on their property. Then there was the matter of repayment. Mr. Van Dieman was so charming, after the third or fourth payment he’d lull them

what the Big Pirate says. So Mr. Van Winkle pulls down the brick trading post and builds a slaughterhouse. It’s time to sacrifice the goats of all the local farmers.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

35.

3.Appetites of Small Gods

ooooo isn’t it ironic?There’s a whole generation of lean and mean pirates

just waiting for the day when they can do a salvage operation on Van Dieman’s carcass. The Flying Dutchman finds himself outgunned; this past master of fraudulent contract, patron of the arsonists guild, and former neighborhood fence hasn’t been able to master the rules of the Internet.

Back in the days when the cops and gangsters were buddies, The Great Corporate Mother had smiled indulgently on his frailties, and multiplied his works. She’d surely have beaten and hounded a man with only half of Van Dieman’s police record. But Van Dieman’s vices made him a rubber doll — and pliable gets rewarded in Babylon.

Virginie’s doing a good college try at carrying on the old Pirate tradition. But there’s one thing that she’s learning about Beelzebub. Beelzebub of Babylon will float

S

all to sleep, They had no idea this charming and patient man was really trying to naturalize them, so they would learn to sacrifice the goat.

According to Blackstone’s lawbook, before Mr. Van Dieman can get the issue decided in court, he must summon the debtor. The process server must get the debtor’s signature on the receipt of service. Van Dieman knows his Blackstone very well — go down to the courthouse and look them all up, those affidavits all are on the record. It’s a pity some of those Italians were so illiterate, Jack Daniels had to sign for them.

The process server don’t live here no more, so we can’t question him. He drifted out west, got put in jail in Kentucky. Which left Van Dieman to become one of the major slumlords out here on the West Side. While he is at it, he also managed to acquire some stock in the motor trade. But he had to get out of that business after he’d done a year for selling stolen fenders.

The Lost Continent

36.

all sorts of loans, but he never gives nobody nothing. Nothing, that is, that a soul can take into the cultural world, where justice and truth still are honored. That must have something to do with why Beelzebub always hates culture.

Virginie has had her days of pounding the streets, looking for a lawyer who could haul old Beelzebub into court for hijacking the soul her father used to own. But Beelzebub has got a grant deed that declares, “That I, known as Roger Van Dieman, do sell my soul with an informed free will, and without recourse.”

The lawyer told her she’d do much better to sue in the name of her mother. Now mother had been a martyr, and sometimes a very naive one. Something in her was so desperate to exorcize that infernal stain — why was it none of them told her? She hadn’t been informed by anyone from the Infernal Board — not Ashtoreth, not Belial, not Satan himself, not even that former Civil Rights Lawyer named Lucifer — not one of them had bothered to inform Louise that when she married Roger Van Dieman. Beelzebub had come along as part of the package.

You would have thought the Christian Church had helped Louise Van Dieman out a little more. But Churchmen had their own agenda; like crooks who point the finger, they’re always looking for a Satan who’s out there. So when she showed the visiting evangelist the 18th century Tibetan Mandala tapestry, he told her that was where Beelzebub lived. Too bad she didn’t realize, the evangelist was just trying to protect a political friend. And it’s too bad she burned the mandala.

The Priests of Babylon are they, who drag the carpet from beneath the victim’s feet. So may we pray, that for their pains at violating our artistic souls, they’ll be rewarded by a sojourn through the brambles. We’ll let them have their White Supremacist heaven, and wonder just how long it takes before they ask why Lucifer’s in charge.

Back on earth, I notice that Virginie’s knees are bruised. I’m too aware of the compromises she’s made — perhaps the reverse is true also. I cannot embrace her wholeheartedly, but I do sympathize. And we do help each other survive.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

37.

The stories she tells of her mother’s living Hell make my gut feel like it has just been punched. The way he hounded her through law courts till she finally sickened and died. A man like that should be respected just because he is a father?

As she tells her sad story, the Winds of Babel chatter about the 19th floor. A tide rushes up from the sea, and little floating demons fasten themselves to the window. These little demons are the seal-bearers of Great Gods whose names may not be spoken without fear.

They’re registered and trademarked. These names belong to persons who have a perpetual life. The casual eye would think that they’re just business interests — but back in 1886, the United States Supreme Court made us burn incense to them.

You may say what you will of Jehovah, or Jesus and his ilk. But watch how you speak of the Corporate Gods — their lawyers will bring you to trial. And then you ask if the Vespucci have a state religion!

Their Gods are co-substantial, and all conspire against the working man. When they see that we are not drunken on Babylon’s mystery wine — they know that we’ve been sneaking out instead of going to church.

GGYYgg

The Lost Continent

38.

Emblem 7.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM1

The Legal History

S IIir Walter Raleigh was the first man in Christendom to do time for domestic violence. When

HHhe got out on parole, the lady who was his judge, jury, and jailor demanded he go on a long journey, and found for her a colony in the New World. No doubt, during his time in the Tower, he’d made acquaintance with felons who’d be desperate enough to join in this adventure.

Hence a mere century later came all the thieves and highwaymen, just one step ahead of the hangman. Next came professional kidnappers with African cargoes for sale. Native police attempted to maintain law and order, but soon were overwhelmed by the wave of gang violence sweeping in from European cities.

These immigrants brought with them the manners and the morals of their Gods. Like the Aztecs, they honored a Crucified Serpent who taught men of justice and mercy, but gave their actual service to a different God. Like Tezcatlipoca, this God also liked to feast on human hearts – though he sternly disapproves of Tezcat’s table manners.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

39.

Woden doesn’t like his sacrifices bloody. He’d rather keep his victims locked in debtors’ prison, so he can chew them up a little at a time.

Manners and Moralsanners and morals of Gods?Let us examine the immigrant. Here we have Dick Turpin, who goes to church when he has to, but who actually worships Woden. He prays to the God of

the Gallows to save him from the noose and aid him in his works of treachery. He’s wanted in Southampton by agents of the Crown. But Turpin’s saved enough from stagecoach robbery to buy himself a passage to Virginia. Enough to also buy him two black slaves, and a large stretch of backwoods timberland.

Those powdered wigs in parliament don’t understand just what it takes to clear that land, using the threat of the lash and the fear of his pistol. Dick Turpin will never go bankrupt – to make sure he’s more than willing to offer up a slave or two to the European variant of Tezcat. But unlike Tezcat, who eats his hearts medium rare, the God of Treachery likes crispy critters. He’ll work that slave in terror, feed him just enough to survive, till that poor slave understands that any death is better than this life. Then when that slave finally rebels – he’ll become the example. The other slaves are going to hear him scream in agony for three days.

Such morals might remind you of novels by de Sade. But Sade’s fiends were much milder than these hard-headed businessmen who worked their poor slaves to death. The sentiments of learned prostitutes on European shores could hardly comprehend the way Dick Turpin’s bullwhip writes revelation scripture on the flesh of dark-skinned backs.

The Lost Continent

40.

3.Western Empire

Y ou’ve come to Babylon – now drink the wine that’s pressed from living grapes. It’s the land of the

free and the equal, but it’s got a color problem. The wages of laborers aren’t too bad, except for a special class, the Black Class that’s composed of chronic rebels. The ones who won’t or can’t accept the homogenized culture established by Turpin’s descendants. The ones who have betrayed the Land of Opportunity by refusing to believe in a happy future.

Twelve generations later, the scions of Turpin’s plantation declare a holy war against the gangs that bring a different medicine to school. They’re already reverting to savage ways, with their pierced noses and their pagan rites. The fathers of these kids believed in progress once – but they’re too busy working now to pay their child support. Except for those who’ve given up believing that there’s anything to work for.

The scions of Dick Turpin have melted down his whip, and sublimated it as a powder which they can sell on the street.

a = aAccording to Zoroaster, the War between Good and

Evil shall climax in the battle that ends the age.We ask then when the battle that shall end the age

shall be. The answer is perplexing. The Empire seems to endure, but something has radically changed.

“Struggle” – that was the favorite word of the man who created the Third Reich. The average citizen of that unhappy land did not see the depth of the struggle – he only saw the Fatherland in trouble. He responsibly accepted that certain liberal ideals could not be realized till the crisis of the Government had been resolved.

He could not see the crisis had come because the Aryan Gods had arrived at their hour of downgoing. The Nuremberg tribunal surprised him — he had not known

BABYLON'S HARBOR

41.

the air raid sirens were Gabriel’s trumpets of Judgement. The few who had perceived the War of the Forties as the death struggle of Gods in revolt against Allah – they alone had vision.

Europa fell from the bull that had raped her and carried her away. Did not Apocalyptic vision prophesy as much? She covered her bruised loins and learned to accept that she would live on as a harlot. It’s funny, that little bitch managed to outlive the heroes of the Gotterdammerung.

That harlot is crying her eyes out – she’s learned now the Accuser is the father of the Antichrist. She knows his legions march with Bibles in their hands. She’s seen the spell that’s wrought with holy words, confounding the Sons of the Spirit.

Meanwhile the Regulator Man is having the last laugh. That bitch is so ungrateful to her savior. He sees through her philosophies of doubt – she’s weak because she’s always doubting God.

a = ahe’s crying her eyes out, and the Regulator Man is saying, “Didn’t I tell you so? The name of the game is efficiency.”

Now where has she heard that line before? “Yeah, yeah, Mr. Marlborough, I know that you’re a hero. Without you I’d be speaking French and working for Napoleon’s syndicate. But I’ll just see how proud you are, the next time that your bull throws you.”

Phillip Marlborough just doesn’t answer. Why should he pay attention to a harlot?

Europa understands this failure of attentiveness. She’s on the back of one more bull, and it’s carrying her away. The Beast just won’t stop to let her get off. She knows that the next time she falls, she just might break her leg.

a � aDown in Las Vegas, in the shadow of the slot

machines, Mr. Ahura Mazda and a fellow by the name of Ahriman are keeping a rendezvous. The actress from

S

The Lost Continent

Emblem 8.

THE ROMAN CATACOMBS

A s I was on my way to Van Dieman’s, preparing for another night shift in the graveyard, I happened to stop by the local

pub. The bartender motioned me over to a stool beside a woman who was crying her eyes out.

This lady had quite a story. She didn’t really want to work for those Protestant butchers over at TBN, but she needed to get her dates somewhere. Couldn’t anybody see that the Church had become a Colosseum, and that the lions were loose?

In the drama she’s presently acting, all of the classical cultures have been devoured by Rome. But each day she’s finding it harder to tell is she’s onstage or offstage. It seems in either case, she’s got to watch out for the lions.

She’d like to think that men are more than just wild beasts. Why, then, when she called Shelly an angel, did her director tell her she needed to stop talking to demons? And what she should have told him she tells me.

In theory she agrees – you’ve got to stay away from

42.

Rome is down on her knees, begging to God to forgive her for what she has seen. The slot machines offer oracles, while the preachers deny that John was the father of Marx.

GGYYgg

BABYLON'S HARBOR

43.

those demons. The only trouble is, if she didn’t date them she wouldn’t have a job the next day. Would I be willing to stand with her, to see if we couldn’t face down those lions with traditions from the High Renaissance?

Oh, she knows the Underground language. Her grandpa’d been a member of the group that strung ol’ Mussolini out on the clothesline. But isn’t it appalling, the way that history always seems to repeat itself? Like the thing that they used to call Racial Socialism. The sad thing is, those kids know what they’re doing when they tattoo the swastika on their arms.

Isn’t it ironic, that when Adolf Hitler was trounced, it had to be by a nation whose politics were practically controlled by the KKK?

“But do you see the light in the Beast’s belly?” I ask her.

“You mean, do I see that the Beast was once a Lamb?” she answers with a cry in her voice. “I’ve read about him also in the Manifesto. And from the Lamb’s head sprouted thirteen horns, which became one horn.”

Oh I would agree, dear Cynthia. It really is amazing, the way that that old Daniel script just keeps on repeating itself.

Something Fishy Hereabylon is being stirred by a new faith. Survivors groups who meet in the Catacombs keep a wary eye out for the local police as they teach their exotic theories of history.

What if the earth could be destroyed? To those of us who’ve lived our lives in the shadow of the Terrible Bomb, this isn’t such a radical concept — but to the steady-state Romans, this belief that the wrath of an unseen God would someday wipe out the world seemed to be the ultimate in cynical misanthropy.

To be sure, there was a very old story, known only to the Babylon High Priests. It had to do with the days when the Gods were young, and were still getting spanked by their Mommie. But one day Mommie went on a little trip, and ended in a very bad place.

The Lost Continent

44.

An echo of that story formed the Mystery of the Greeks — but the Athenians insist that it was Little Sister who ended up becoming Queen of Hell. The naturalist Greek Version makes it just sound like an Ice Age — but the Babylonian original goes just a little bit further. The bull would not leap on the cow and the fields would not flower in spring. Everything was screeching to a great and terrible halt, till a savior by the name of Adonis jumped down into the Underworld, wrestled with the Great Crocodile, and saved Mommie from perdition.

A wave of awful fear caught the throats of the Romans. What if the story was true? The bulls and the cows were clearly not getting along; all you could see in the City was one grand S&M orgy that just would not stop. The Grand Dominator was burning folks to death in his beer-garden. His mistress died mysteriously. The recently deposed Prime Minister committed suicide while a cop stood in the courtyard.

Well, maybe it was true, though the Grand Dominator could be pretty persuasive in asking them to deny it. There were certain implications of the Fishy Cult that nobody quite wanted to look at. If we were all equal in God’s eyes, wouldn’t the slaves revolt?

According to the Ancient Babylonians, there once had been a Great Tree, which had been owned by Mommie. In the subversive version of the Jewish Dissident, Mommie had not yet been redeemed. Meanwhile the Grand Dominator had gone out and chopped down Mommie’s tree, and put up his own statue in its place.

The Fishy Cult protested this Great Conquest by refusing to burn incense to the Emperor.

Was a Teenage Donkey, written by a priest of Isis, has become the best-seller of the year.

It’s taking a lot of roses to keep down that fishy smell arising from the tenements of Rome. It might be

BABYLON'S HARBOR

45.

a little easier if history weren’t going downhill quite so fast. Jupiter might be money in the bank, but fishy sentiments are stirring misanthropic dreams, challenging the liberal interest.

Of course our concept of the Gods has changed. Those things up in the heavens may be just big hot rocks, but men still need religion to bind them to the breast of the society. The Gods are not out there; they’re social corporations that give so much to those who give them sacrifice.

Lucius of Apulius has a day job as one of the managing directors of the Egyptian State Bank. He also is one of those grand old men, the type we thought had disappeared when Caligula appointed his horse to fill a vacant seat in the Senate. During his youth Lucius actually tried on that subversive ethic which demands that we all live like the Proletarians.

Or else go down to Hell. As Lucius has expressed it, the Fishy use of our fears of a terrible Afterlife is equivalent to the sort of spells which women of the courtesan class wield on their victims, aided by a psychedelic pharmacopeia. As Lucius has seen, we’ve got to get over these spells, but this can only be done by nibbling the roses of Isis.

Fishy critics may say that Lucius has stolen their own sentiments, and that he is in fact no more than a relapsed Donkey. If that is true, then he must be accounted among the followers of the Gospel of Magdalen, which has fallen into disfavor since its bastardization by Simon the Magus. But Lucius will argue that the wisdom of the Magdalen derived from a more ancient source, and that her so-called “harlotry” referred to the fact that in her youth she had been a neophyte Sister of Isis.

Implicitly, Lucius concedes that Corporations do have a right to our worship. If the people fail to give reverence to those Powers which define the economic base, then surely shall the Hairy Germans conquer. But if we are to uphold civilization, then each of the Great Corporations must acknowledge the redemptive power of those ideals which have formed their traditions.

The Lost Continent

46.

Despite the great diversity of their origins, all of our Corporate Persons uphold a common

interest. They each have their Boards of Directors — but one Director stands above all others. It only is appropriate that we should burn incense to him.It only is the Fishy Folk who’ll dare to disagree with

the incense we burn to our Caesar. From the perspective of Lucius, it’s a sacrifice we must make for the sake of reason and sanity.

When a post-traumatic majority begins to take control, society grows irrational, and reason ceases to be ruler of the spheres. We clearly can see this anxiety in the writings of the High Priest of Egypt’s state bank. From his perspective, the resurrection of a man from the grave isn’t a solution, but a symptom. Even the great Gods are beginning to lose it.

a = a

When a man first begins to return from the tomb of his animal body, what has he got left? What is to save him from the Hell of his own post-traumatic madness? Can he look to society to save him?

Not if that society has become a collective image of the Hell that it fears. Not when the lives of the emperors are being bought and sold, and the Corporate State is dominated by the only articulate body which can be drawn from an unlettered proletariat.

Brought into the picture to enforce the dictates of High Capital, the Army of the Senate and the People soon became the arbiter controlling the cash flow. The empire became ruled by gladiators who fought each other for a temporary throne.

The short-lived hero Aurelian conquered this Castle of Chaos in the name of the Bullfighter’s Union. Thankful

BABYLON'S HARBOR

47.

for salvation from Chaos, the civic-minded raised up an image of the Great Bullfighter on every great crossroad, and an alter in every field. The Roman streets were washed now with blood from the wounded Bull’s neck.

a = aCapital may have imagined that the Bullfighter could

save its shrines from the wrath of the Crucified Prophet. But just about forty years later, the Great Bullfighter himself began wearing the Cross.

The Military Machine had been taken over by the post-traumatic support network risen from the Catacombs. Dogma might project the Insurrection and the Revolutionary Tribunal into some future age when Christ would reincarnate – but to the Third-Century Christian, Resurrection was an imminent reality.

Soldiers flogged by nightmares, violated women, survivors of sexual rape, slaves in their throes of despair – all of these followed Orpheus down into the Underworld. In crypts where the roar of the Stadium’s lions brought ghosts of ancient senators alive, these post-traumatic shades died with John the Baptist. A candle was lit, and they looked on the sign of the Cross. It was a secret token, a revolutionary symbol.

The therapy programs available to the Survivors’ Movement of the Third Century A.D., were tragically inadequate. As a result, The Church became pedophile-dominated by the time it began to wield power – but that’s a story for another day.

GGYYgg

The Lost Continent

48.

Emblem 9.

THE KINGDOM OF LIBERTYS DAUGHTER

The Stageou tell me that I need to talk about the pain.

Ostensibly, you are concerned for my sake. But then it gets to the bottom line: the reality comes

down to cash flow. You practice the techniques that will increase your salary. Giving the appearance of compassionate empathy is one of them.

I know it’s wrong of me to be so cynical. I see the burning world lusting for deification. But then, when I turn to the mountains, I know that God likes to play tricks. Being created in His image, we naturally are tricksters, therefore: charlatans and hypocrites.

The fact that we’re all living on pretenses — isn’t that what gives our denial it’s glamor? We’re each one just playing a role; we won’t know till after we’re dead if we’ve played well enough to redeem it.

Every so often, one of the props reminds us of the stage we are on. For example, I once had a pair of hiking boots. That was back when I was living in Darshishkan. Then came a few sudden moves, and I lost track of the boots.

I suppose the boots were dear to me because they reminded me of the world I had lost. It came to me so clearly, as I was working out here on the docks. One of the secretaries in the Longshoring office gave me a look, reminded me of Ninianne, all of the women who’ve died.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

49.

So now we get back to the boots. I stopped back by the longshoring office on an errand, after the hall had cleared out. That pretty secretary was gone, but there in one of the corners I found a pair of boots that looked just like the ones that I’d worn back in Darshishkan. Only, one of these boots had a nail sticking up through the sole.

I decided I’d been walking on that nail long enough, so I pulled it out. When I got home, I still had the boots, which I put on just for old times sake. The next day I wore them to work. And I’m still wearing them, whenever I work on the docks.

_ 9 _On the Docks

W ith my back to the woman I love, I look on a darkening sea.

The water that’s lapping in shadows reflects a thought to me.

Perhaps she is only a shield I put between me and my Deathwish. If I really analyzed Renata, I’d probably find that she is just a cardboard image. But then, we’re onstage — so a cardboard image will work, so long as my Deathwish and I agree.

If I had faith that she was real, I’d take the road out West. Or would I? Would that amount to keeping her hostage till God and my Deathwish had bargained? Just nudge me a little bit, God, tell me my passion’s acceptable, and I’ll be out of here on the next train.

Should I pray about this passion? Maybe I should ask Cynthia. She’s a good Christian woman. But then, maybe she isn’t ready. Right now she needs more sympathy than she’s getting out of her prayer group. I know that I’m only her pretext for lighting a fire under her kettle and preparing tea.

Actress that Cynthia is, I know that she’ll shake me off, sooner or later. That will be my cue that it’s time to go West. In any case, I’ll need to save up some money before I go out on safari. Maybe I should give it time to see if the Coyote Bitch tries to send a signal back to me.

To flee these thoughts, I look into the dirty harbor waters. A Dairy God and a Meat-Packing God both peek at

The Lost Continent

50.

me through the wrappers that litter the dockside pier. I wonder which one of these Gods owns the trademark on the word “Love”.

I watch the crates of unmolded plastic and pre-made backgrounds as they’re lifted from the hold. I know that Lot O’Dots is too small a God to hold out much longer ; Jersey boys won’t work for the wages they pay out in Singapore. The Big Gods won’t give us a ten-year plan, even though they know how desperately we’re racing those same Asians we buy our materials from.

I look on a darkening sea, listen to a snickering wind. The ghostly sound of the waves rocking the creosote quay resurrects the shades. The ghost of a cargo that was bound for this port in 1792 is brought forth from the Flying Dutchman’s hold.

So many reforms have come and gone — but where the auction block once stood I still hear the chains rattle.

a = a

The Carousel Jan, 2008N ew Years resolution: I’m finally going to talk to

the shrink, about the thorns that Renata and I just keep on dragging each other through.

As goes the common saying, I’ve known her flesh, and she has known mine. And yet I still find myself asking — can that woman be real? And for that matter, am I?

I ended my therapy yesterday with the rather bold assertion that certain scars on my body had come into being through spontaneous generation. My therapist brought up the big word, dissociation,

In the therapist’s vocabulary, dissociation turns out to be a sort of a disease. Of course I know, it’s a way of denying the pain. But isn’t there a space and time when this capacity for dissociating from the pain has a definite survival value? What about the trances of the yogins?

Of course I didn’t say that you’ve got to be numb in order to survive on your continent. I know that your constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. It

BABYLON'S HARBOR

51.

therefore follows, doesn’t it, that all of the tortures I’ve suffered are torments I’ve inflicted on myself?

Of course, the one scar on my arse, the brand that has Renata’s initials surrounded by a heart — the woman I don’t quite believe in did that with a soldering iron. I should probably take that as evidence she really does exist.

But then again, perhaps it’s all illusion. Or in any case, it’s natural to think so when one has been betrayed so deeply that dissociation has become the mode in which one’s consciousness works best.

I know it isn’t healthy to fantasize that one has powerful enemies. Putting the blame on the wicked is one of the worst ways of evading reality. It’s one more way of avoiding our mortal need for reciprocity. So I shall just go on believing that the scars in my flesh are stigmata — wounds that developed spontaneously when I was lost in nights of paranoia.

GGYYgg

The Lost Continent

Emblem 10.

NINEVAH BY NIGHTThe Baptist

you be my vice, my dear?" asks Cynthia. "Or shall I have to settle for having an affair with Martini?"

I know that she’s upset. I try to moralize: seducing me by invoking my fears for her sobriety — that doesn’t seem quite fair.

“You were the one who told me, we only get out of the grave when we learn how to bargain with God.” Her red taunting lips enchant me. Beneath, a plunging neckline invites me to fall in.

“If you’ll walk me home,” she urges, “I won’t get drunk tonight.”

So we’re out the back door and into the rain, on the way to her apartment. I’m trying to imagine what a Christian girl like Cynthia would need a man like me for. I guess it’s compensation.

We walk along without an umbrella; She chatters; I’d probably be attentive to anything her lips could say. But what’s this she is saying, about her husband’s drinking buddy, and what a male chauvinist pig he turned out to be? Is she trying to tell me that she’s really a closet lezzie, and that I am just the token man in the cast of her feminist love life?

52.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

53.

No, but what she is telling me, is that she’s found out that her husband’s friend has been playing with boys. No one would believe it — he’s the minister at one of the biggest churches. But when he goes counseling 6th graders, the game that they play isn’t baseball.

“What do you expect?” I answer Cynthia. “His job makes him lie about God. He slanders all of the Prophets except for Jesus, and turns Jesus into his patsy. What sort of morality could you expect from a man like that?”

“And after all of those sermons he’s preached about Dungeons and Dragons!” she howls indignantly. “Who ever would have guessed that he was the biggest Dragon of them all? A Dragon who’s appealing the judgement that gave him nineteen years in the State Dungeon!”

_ 9 _

We’re climbing up the stairs — this is where she moved when she got away from her husband.

“Oh, he’s a psychiatrist, she tells me, “but I can’t stand the way that he does women. I thought that by looking in church, I could find something better. Then I found out he was just there to learn the language, because on the average, the folks who go to church have better incomes.”

Well, Cynthia, what do you expect? The Church thinks it invented Virgin Mary? How can it think that, and still say that the Word was with God from the very beginning? But missionaries go into lands where folks worshipped the Saints and Mary when Carthage was still a young city, and tell the black people that they are under a curse because their ancestors were heathen. All of the Koran’s Warners told us to expect that kind of missionary.”

“But I thought Muslims had to be male chauvinists,” Cynthia recoils.

As I explain to her, I am a Sufi. I’m not quite sure that I want to be identified with what Muslim has come to imply.

“Oh, I’ve been there!” she gasps, with sudden recognition.

The Lost Continent

54.

Suddenly we’re both laughing wildly, arm in arm, arms behind each other’s backs, helping each other up the narrow stairway. This common wound we’re discovered has riveted us together. We could not escape if we tried.

Fallen Angeler sheets feel so cool, and her flesh is so warm,

as we lie together naked after the fall. The gravity of a common wound has drawn us a little beyond the zone of just crumpets and tea.

“You’ve helped me to understand something I never could follow in Ovid,” I explain. Cynthia fastens wide blue eyes on me; their New York accent is demanding “more!”

More about Orpheus and John. Of course. Orpheus must have been a Warner, a Messenger sent down to revive human souls from The Grave. But we’ve caught Ovid, just like the preacher’s analyst, giving information to the enemy and selling his disinformation on the free market.

In one of his passages Ovid declared that Orpheus, in his deep sorrow for Eurydice, began to go chasing after boys. What Cynthia’s just told me about her husband’s friend has given me eyes to see. It wasn’t Orpheus who debased himself as a pedophile, but all of the Baptists about him.

“At least you’re an adult,” Cynthia whispers gratefully. I graze upon her pretty breasts and nod, wondering what surprises I’ll find when I start to look at her scars.

“It isn’t a new problem.” I stumble, attempting to cheer her. “Pedophiles have been in the church since Paul first converted the Acropolis. That’s why your Christian morality cut its teeth on a hatred of sex.”

_ 9 _Maybe we’re enabling each other in a sexual

addiction. Sooner or later, my fascination with Renata will drag me like a magnet, out of Ninevah. I also know, that Cynthia will stay. The thought of that future parting presses my breast more closely against hers. Right now we’re two frightened soldiers. Each day we’ve seen fresh

BABYLON'S HARBOR

55.

evidence that people are expendable out here. Because we know Death leads the dance, we desperately need a comfort zone.

I once believed this maladay could have a simple cure. I had only to make a pilgrimmage to the limit of my endurance — I then could die honorably. But now I lie uneasily in Cynthia’s bed, with her arms wrapped tightly about me.

We’ll soon both get the heartbreak we deserve for bargaining with God. I know I deserve to be flogged; when I fell for this woman God tricked me to fetch my own switch. But tonight I find her skin so smooth, and her nipples so aluring.

I know she’s going to hurt me but I feel so at peace. God’s mercy lies in the fact He’s letting me fall in love before I submit to the lash. Besides — this bridge of heartbreak is one more station I must cross if I’d ever stand by Renata’s side.

_ 9 _

2.Oh, Yes, It’s Been War!

“Oh, yes, has it been war!” declares Virginie. “When you’ve just got a little bit, and you want to keep it, you’ll find that it’s kill or be killed.”

The glare of her coal gas lanterns is reflected and refracted in cut glass. In that rather limited light, I was coming to realizations.

The power is out tonight on account of an accident at the local station. Magnetic waves emanating from the high voltage lines drew another time-warp into a sort of tectonic collision. Ninevah has in consequence been drenched by reminiscience of a time when a coal gas lantern was the best night light you could get.

In those days the Van Dieman family had black footmen trained to say “yessir” and “nossir,” and “how would you like to be served, oh beloved master?” But then that hair-brained Edison started selling the Ahura Mazda light. Electrification brought rebellion, unions, and finally civil rights. Each step of the way the servant demanded a

The Lost Continent

56.

bigger bribe — nowdays if you put him in his place he’ll sue you for racial harassment.

A pity it was for the fine old Van Dieman family, that operating as they were on the verge of a corporate bankruptcy, they couldn’t afford a genuine Black. Had to make do with a Puerto Rican welfare mother who’d come in for two days a week to vacuum and launder the sheets.

Insofar as the last genuine Black had taken a permanent leave in 1972, Virginie had to be the one to carry in the dinner from the stove.

How Civilization Declines“As soon as women got the vote, the first thing they

did was get us into that prohibition nonsense.” Van Dieman lectures, as his daughter serves up the casserole. “Then when that got repealed things got even worse — they repealed our right to Black servants. It’s no wonder all of the men out there have pierced noses, and that liberated women are leading those pierced noses on a chain.”

“Plato told us how civilization declines,” the Patriarch continues. “In the beginning you have the Aristocratic Man. He’s finicky about his honor; this creates a very stable sense of law and order. That was the mentality which controlled Atlantis before the cursed war between it’s States. Then with the fall of Dixie, you had democracy in Plato’s meaning, dirty politics, and even the little bit of honor that was left went out when the women took over. Now we’ve got what Plato was afraid of — a generation that not only knows how to lie and cheat, but which believes that cheating is the norm.”

a = aIs this what makes the world go around? I know that

Van Dieman claims that he believes in love — and maybe his sort of passion is what the world had to call love, back in the 14th Century. But whenever he speaks of his passions, he’s always so self-righteous.

Is love nothing more than the glamour that solaces the slave, in the moment he bends to be flogged? Is it true

BABYLON'S HARBOR

57.

we can only be saved from original sin by pain we can barely endure?

Van Dieman did love once, if love is what you could call it. Hurricane romance, fallen trees, broken windows, beached ships, broken arm, divorce — Wouldn’t you know, after giving us the prohibition, now the women would turn to carrying bootleg liquor, getting their men into trouble whenever they had the chance. She’d taken him down, from being a professor in the upstate girl’s college, to the wrecking yard where he got busted for selling stolen parts. To get back at her like she needed, he’d practically had to become a lawyer. For nearly 30 years, they’d gone at it in almost all the district courtrooms up the river.

By Cynthia’s logic, he’s the image of the Beast. The way he destroyed that woman? That was something Plato didn’t want to talk about. All of those classical philosophers had a real nerve, making up high-sounding theories on ethics and decline, but all the while going along with the conspiracy to silence and enslave their women.

I guess if Van Dieman saw me now he’d think I had a pierced nose, and that my lust was dragging me by a chain. I know that those men are fools indeed who just can see the rose and not the thorn. We who have tuned our guitars by the ancient tradition of Mary respect love: she’s a cruel dancing master, but no one can teach better.

The way that Cynthia rides me now, as she spanks my flank with her hairbrush — that sure gives me a feeling of what it is like to be taken for a ride by a creature with a lust for power. Then she leads me on into confession, and there we are, right in the Catacombs, confessing our aversion to the sort of Imperial Republic in which every interaction becomes a power struggle.

We’re crying together in our cruel bed. I bend to be chastened by thorns; in each of Cynthia’s nipples I see the karmic wheel. We who lust for power are bound to be conquered in love.

Will the whipping we’ve given each other sweeten our adultery in the eyes of the angels? Perhaps it may, if we but learn that love is an ordeal to be endured without resentment. If we would give thanks to the Conquering Muse, who lets love be the lash by which we’re chastised for our arrogance.

The Lost Continent

58.

Emblem 11-.

THE GULF OF HELL

Come

fly with me across the Gulf of Hell.I’ll do the piloting and the writing; you can

photograph — maybe when we get back we can sell the results to the National Geographic.

The Gulf of Hell lies up there on the map, on the other side of Montana. Up there where the white mountains march every which way, flanking in uneven formations to bar our way to the Northwest Passage.

Once we’ve flown over those mountains, we’ll find a place where smoke rises. Down below, in a time-warp that cuts back to the ‘30's, an overlarded orator speaks of the “Aryan Race”.

Let’s dine with the Swiss cheff who thought the Wild West was fantasy, until he saw the army supply trucks drive through. There’s something they’re looking for up in those piney hills. No, mam, I don’t think it was a flying saucer, and I don’t think they’re looking for Bigfoot.

The dude that the snipers are hunting almost was our sheriff. Oh yes, mam. He ran in 1988 as the conservative candidate. Maybe that’s why they wanted to get him.

BABYLON'S HARBOR

“He surely is a coward who won’t say ‘civil war’,” the Orator proclaims — as he declares his own war against the United States Government.

As surely as all the community property states save California came out of what was once called Louisiana, this dude came out of some bayou, and a polluted one at that. He’s a water-moccasin standing where only the moccasins of Chief Joseph’s descendants should dare to stand.

In June of 1858, a steamer by the name of Pennsylvania burst a boiler A burning paddlewheeler drifted down the river; the ladies of Memphis tried to revive the scalded men who lay in the public dance-hall. A cub named Samuel Clemens, who’d recently been kicked off that same boat for fighting with the pilot, watched his brother die.

Some years later, a newspaper reporter by the same name tries to put the pieces back together once again. A river that is called the Mississippi still flows, but it is not the same river on which he had once learned to pilot. There’d been a war and afterwards, everything had changed.

We remember the years like 1858 or 1912 as though they were rare vintage wine. There may be catastrophe hidden, but we don’t understand its significance. It’s only when we try to reconstruct, that we can begin to appreciate the wreck.

Perhaps that’s the way we’ll come in the end to see 1993. We’ll look back on attitudes and life-styles which in retrospect shall seem timeless. We’ll follow as Hillary Clinton campaigns for health-care reform, back when we actually believed in the political system.

Maybe it’s a different river because we aren’t the cubs any longer. It’s funny how the folks who live along the river now remember the things we didn’t see. We were vaguely concerned about the subterranean wave of senseless

59.

The Lost Continent

60.

violence, but we kept a stiff lip as we commanded each other to have a good day. It’s funny how the invisible plague always spared the adults and only took the children.

We remember the cafe lounges. As we play the old music we remember the foolishly hopeless romances. It was a lifestyle that believed in forever and a day. Business was good, the stock market was riding the strong back of a bull — but why are there guns in the schools?

Of course, the historians will also note unsettling health statistics — the AIDS, virus, new strains of hepatitis, new and more virulent forms of tuberculosis. And we’ll wonder if those visible plagues were riding on the back of a much more formidable malaise.

Why didn’t we notice the angry and desperate men hidden away on normal looking farms, mixing with the homeless, slowly developing a dominant role in the drug trade? Why is it that men who were officers in arms of the Federal Government now cultivate a superstitious hatred of all that has bound us together in the social contract?

In retrospect we’ll wonder why we were so unwilling to see what the kids saw. But then, in the summer of 1912, who would have dared to dream some mad Serb’s pistol-shot would make the nations kingless?

SSSSSS

BABYLON'S HARBOR

61.

About the Author

Matt Cygny is a Westerner, having been born in Washington State shortly after the end of World War II. He Studied psychology and comparative civilization at The Evergreen State College in Washington and California State University at Sonoma. During his graduate period he became personally acquainted with several of the surviving Beat poets. He has served as an associate editor for Aristos Literary Quarterly, and for the South Sound edition of The Raven Chronicles.

Matt has been extensively involved as a community activist in the development of Survivor's Groups and Domestic Violence treatment and advocacy programs. He presently works as a Diversity Educator, and is committed to the emergence of a School of Human Ecology, which will recognize each culture of the world as a valid path yto the realization of the Great "I and I."