I stumbled upon a friend who'd stumbled fragments of the myths of Daidalos, Perdix, and Perdix/Talos/Calos, and during morning break I watched a special on the Manhattan Project - the people behind it, the personal objectives, all the beautiful and horrible and subjective motivations behind the fumbling with atomic energy. And the poetic/apocalyptic theologian couldn't pass up General *Groves*, whose name in Greek is Alsos, which corresponds with Operation Alsos (which fearfully sought, like Daidalos with Perdix's saw, to beat Germany to the punch). Thus, I've begun roughly plotting a mythological/poetic portrait of a snapshot in history. This means I'm setting out to do the same thing that just about every other boring apocalyptic theologian has done with fiction since Project Trinity's detonation of the atomic bomb; but the most inviting challenge has always been to do something that has been done many times, and do it well.
DAIDALOS (the prologue)
He stood in a soup-line for ten years,
for ten full years, trying to steer clear
of the flash of mustard-gas in his mind
and the smell of the trenches in August,
the rain and heat and silence and blood mixed with
rotting feet and the flesh and machine-gun-gutted howls of
the quiet portents of the maimed and blistered yet to come.
He stood in a soup-line for ten years,
for ten whole years, applying for art
in Vienna, hoping his twisted heart
and broken mind could find a central
whole in holy pre-ubermensch halls.
He stood in a soup-line for ten years,
for ten miserable years, filing patents
and working on his day-dreamed math,
when
finally
the Call flashed onto his doorstep,
YOUR HELP NEEDED like so many newspapers, his patent
and the oracles clearing the blind-eyed windows of the
circumstantial building, the building, the
building of tanks and gun manufacturing.
He's lived for ten thousand years,
ever become hunger, ever jealousy of his sister's
son with the fish jaw skill-
only, now his chains are broken-
now his hungry hands are almost on dark arts-
now he's almost found the lexicon of the Lamb's book-
now his time is come.
-r
