CHAPTER 5

What horns soever they be which passe amongst us, they are not surely the horns of any one kinde of animall, but must proceed from severall sorts of Unicorns.
- Sir Thomas Browne
from Chapter XXIII of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica






Well then where are they?

Of course the old story is that we are famously likely to perceive (through disorientation or missattention) the fantastic where supposedly there is none. Yet who could have argued William Blake out of that Ghost of a Flea?

Or W. G. Sebald out of:

Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils. (Sebald, W. G. : The Rings of Saturn [New York, 1998].)

And then of course there is all the fantastic that we (through disorientation or missattention) miss. J. L. Borges, in his 1951 essay "Kafka and his Precursors," famously unearthed this bit belonging to Han Yu:

But this animal is not one of the domestic animals, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. And therefore we could be in the presence of the unicorn and we would not know for certain that it was one. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn is like.

And so are left (quickly back to cry supposed wolf with Blake and Sebald) to elect our own. Item (1): on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Major Works, there is a detail (which excludes the upper portion of the head) from a portrait by an unknown artist of the eminent seventeenth century physician and his wife, which so echoes, in Browne's expression of distant and inscrutable benevolence, standard medieval representations of the otherworldly, that, to trespass with Browne (and Borges after him) into "the dreamer's side of the simile," one might almost imagine...

* * *

Night Owl

the largest lake, a silvery, hard spring lock. Also obscurity as a
Brazilian architect. In the late 19th century, opium, a children's
nurse. Narcotic decimal point dropped from one's hand. A scarf
wrapped around the tale of a dragon. An alphabet of hand signals.
Mohorovicic discontinuity. A fabulous monster or English essayist.
Playing rough practical jokes, like the ejection seat or amendment
to the constitution. Eider pride or optimism conserving total
kinetic energy -- the cardinal number written 8 or in Roman
numerals VIII. The ideal of an image. To copulate, cop out, or
copywriter at the copier. Usage: brief. Breeze in the coal sense.
Murre murrey at the murrhine glass. Murrow at Murrumbidgee.
Murther at Murviedro.


Dan Machlin

* * *

A Varnished Eel

A varnished
............
eel.........a
.............
..............
............
............
moment...in
............
.........
...........
..........
......
.


Tim Atkins
(from The Sonnets - # 35)

* * *

Grandfather Spider

From the old roots, transition land, of expectant desire, to dance, an
hour, a year, an hour. But now I always remain in a cape, now a rather grand
house, a vaulted cistern, an olive tree. Hence riches, combined into an entity--
towards a single unity, a point, a dot. A play on words laden with snow.
Everywhere yellowish-green husks. The game hurling its players. Whence
the goddess, a hypocrite... whence, in a growing woodland. To give oneself,
in a truckle bed, keeping watch or guard, or one who watches guards.
Something thrust into the mouth...futurismo...a joke, a limb, a tree's limb.
A book of martyrs, who, having found by wind and storm a mischievous
boy... To hear is the sin, the idea of a 'measure,' prudence, moon and
hieroglyph. Unbroken green. A Joseph's coat of outer desire. Hence the
derivative enrichment. Which, like splendor, a pricked mark, a sustained note.


Dan Machlin