wonder ye then at the fiery hunt

humans if little else are a fearful and irrational species, jerked around by their emotions which are a kind of altar and incense to them, reified to gravityless heights from which crash can be the only destiny, calmed by a ludicrous and infantile faith in an odd and blind brand of technical necessity

and anachronistic authority often named efficiency, common sense, wisdom

children, led (or more precisely followed) by the monolithic and righteous couple of fortressed gonadal love, enthroned near the centers of sentimental perfection and absolute goodness – these temples no less barbaric than those ancient ones of sacrificial blood – cast an anchor into the bottomless waters of existence from the lifeboats of family and society (the mothership having sunk long ago). aside from their obvious functions as narcissistic extensions and void avoidances, their pivotal role in capitalism’s play as embodied hope of more and greater gadgets and needles, of sustaining the habituated music of a garish marching band round the roundabout of the finest, they not simply represent but are – to the quarks and minds of confined consciousness, but not only – time. clocks that play and talk and so tick the stocks. as visceralized time, as time cutesified and

molestable (for didn’t i just the other day hear the child of a most respectable daddy scream in protest as its arm was being twisted for not following the rules … fearful citizens in training for a society of force), as distributed and little gods impossibly filling the vacancies of a dead heaven and a deanimated and dying earth, they have nowhere left to go but the netherworld … yet nothing of the old spaces (whether greek, hebrew, chinese, balinese, quechuan, ibibious …) but a beneath beneath beneath – so unexplored the child functions primarily as a disguise for itself, a covering of down. so time is fulfilled in its way and the generations, such as they are, plan in a metal forest of dreams

and who’s infectious and who quarantined these childish times? who dares to raise the yellow flag above the nonexistent ship and trust one’s small and shifting tribe? who wonders at the cold hunt of the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality? and who sleeps without dreams and who goes down?

though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though,

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were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. if you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil