Ulysses

This is about a kind of shadow language which sometimes supplants files when they’re emailed, cobbled together Frankenstein-like from bits and pieces of genuine phrases, modern wraiths like St. Elmo’s fire that flits around masts at sea. The new files float up from the subterranean depths like hints from the old Magic 8-Ball, replacing our dreams with visions of the chaotic world beneath, from our modern concept of a kibbitzing underworld.

When I sent the manuscript of this book to Paul Hoffmann for laying out, five of the poems became garbled as I describe above, so the poem arose out of the mechanics of publishing; it’s a machina ex dea.

I was reminded of Ulysses chaining himself to the mast so he wouldn’t be tempted by the siren’s calls, as today we have to navigate between false specters, ads that beckon us from either side of the news we’re trying to read, as Scylla and Charybdis would lure sailors to their doom on their rocks of the Straits of Messina. Scylla was a nymph transformed into a monster by a jealous sorceress. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis (translated by Nicholas Rowe and Samuel Garth),

In vain she offers from herself to run
And drags about her what she strives to shun.

Not as scary, but equally pernicious, as visions of the monstrous id that hides Kraken-like beneath the civilized surface of the airwaves.

A palimpsest is a painting or a place whose older layers become apparent beneath its surface, usually during restoration.