Orthoteny: from a work in progress: from On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery, “Prelude”

One of the most complete, if unfinished, parts of the work-in-progress was composed quickly after the project was begun. I took extensive notes on the Phantom Airship wave of 1896/7 from all those UFO books I had obtained to that point and rendered them poetically. These texts are woven from certain leitmotifs: triads, the colour blue, and other recurrent details. It is this coherence I was eager to show, if not refer to explicitly.

On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery was originally published as the chapbook On the Mysterious Airships in 1995. I had the opportunity to perform the Prelude at multiple readings in Europe in the summer of 1996, the most memorable being at the Stromlinienklub in Munich before an audience of over 500.

It remains uncertain whether this part of the epic will remain the same in the completed work. It is, after all, and may perhaps remain, as the epigraph says, “…a blueprint, a mock-up, a prototype…”