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Specifically, The Worm Ouroboros by E.
R. Eddison and The Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen, from a Dover catalog. Nor have
I read
Knut Hamsun’s Pan, but will someday,
especially in light of his Hunger, and
the film
Hamsun starring Max von Sydow.
Susceptible to that pull of some works
before they’re read, or even before they’re
examined as to cover or excerpt. Something’s
already
known about them. The wind in the chimes
produces reminders
of discrepancy, slippage in the experience of
day and sidewalk. A hitch of the coat
tighter around shoulders. Threadbare shoulders
of an over-worn, once stylish, other-era coat.
It’s there, in collective memory, in the Akashic
records, universal archives,
accessible to the individual—also, at a glance,
on Amazon. Opened
up to any from anywhere. Everything written if
written
from a certain level, plane, or depth is
instantly written on the inside of our skulls.
Alive, the Worm Ouroboros and the Great God
Pan, neither read
in their intentions, nor known in the
reality-fracture of their archetypal urges,
break through our brainpans to world. But first
it’s that etching into bone
that causes the cracks. Everything written if
written epic-truthfully
etches into bone. Nihilism too can get to the
depth of that plane,
smirk of negation at that certain level, and the
human skull splits unto nothingness.
What shapes and landscapes are these?—blind
surmise of topography, shadow and
darker shadow, darkness and darker darkness
going black. Going farther,
then, some such best books don’t even need to be
read. Absence is more akin
to erasure than to darkness, black of night. A
space widened out for the imagined book
as colorful, vague, imprecise, and fluid as
dreamscape, however presumptive or wrong.
But, back to facts, there are golden ratios in
the way branches divide
blue skies into networks and nodes. Networks
and nodes divide blue skies
into their geometric fancies, sinuous
topological methods as a branch
of geometry, fundamental properties of space
over measurement and number.
Is it a stretch to find topological methods as
someone looks up
through a deliquescent tree, past either budding
or withering?
Any seasonal change on those branches identifies
new presence just as much by absence
of what once was, that erasure, as anything
there. That widened out space
to place memory and imagination. Alive,
Ouroboros stirs
as ominously as precursor winds of catastrophic
storms, rated
by the hundred year. It twists, Ouroborus as a
storm torus.
Twisted, Ouroborus is a Möbius strip. Coated a
black so black
that it’s neither color nor anti-color, but an
absence, an approach to absolute
invisibility. A black so black it’s dubbed
superblack, an approach to absolute
black, and beats the government’s current
standard of blackest black. The darkest
substance ever devised by science. A carbon
nanotube mesh entraps
light like never before, and at the same time
scatters it decisively,
maximizing absorption and minimizing reflection:
light appears to shimmy backwards
in space, creating a negative space. To look
into it is to look into nothingness
according to accounts of those who have gazed
upon the paper-thin surface of the stuff.
A gaze into tarry vortex, giving sticky
vertiginous sensation of maelstrom
and nothingness. Quite close now to the
invention of a cloak of invisibility
for military applications, and more, were it not
for shadows cast
behind any objects covered in this carbon
nanotube coating; for it’s the shadows
that give away the stealth. For a black so black
casts a shadow nonetheless—
same as darkness in the human heart, that
principle of baseness
an intrinsic constituent of the universe,
shadow-twists of baseness at every turn
of the spiral from microcosm to macrocosm, that
sticky vertiginous maelstrom
and hellstorm, blackest badness, tarry vomitus
of creation, darkest substance ever spewed.
The Human Being is a torus. The Human Being as a
shape to be turned inside-out.
Topological methods have it that any
torus-shaped object can be turned inside-out
and retain its fundamental properties. Any
torus-shaped object can be turned, twisted,
to reveal its fundamental properties. Beyond
numerical relationships, change
on the branch identifies not just presence but
absence of what once was,
yet with a pattern like the daily walk taken by
that one looking through the trees to sky
and feeling how it is to stand alone on Earth.
Now brisk in pace
and temperature. This particular person is as
good as any, for example.
Now brisk in pace, and heated, Pan chases a
not-so-innocent nymph through a thick forest;
a warm tangled forest, humid and deep, and
comparable in darkness—in effect on light—
to that carbon nanotube mesh abovementioned.
Thick with trees. But Ouroboros shimmers
and weaves through symbol, through
metaphoric—meteoric—torpor, encircling entropy
on a galactic scale. On the scale of universe
and multiverse. To make an example
of that particular person, as good as any, who
patterns a daily walk with looks
focused on sky-shapes broken out by branches,
whether budding or withering, Pan uses
topological methods to get at his or her
fundament.
Yet Ouroborus, less lewdly, understands
fundamental properties.
Universe, multiverse, and Human Being: towards
unity
an urgency impels movement, however concupiscent
or serpentine. Still, to look
into it is to look into nothingness.
Nevertheless, it always twists, it’s never
still.
Ceaseless, Human Being is a torus, ever to be
turned inside-out
and revealed. A twist of the flesh
topologically, more than mythopoetically:
matho-poetically! Although most animals with
digestive systems are tori,
there are exceptions. Flukes. Actually, there
are creatures called flukes—
parasitic worms that lodge in human blood
vessels and have mouths but do not have anuses
(without continuous passage and
interconnectivity
of Outside and In, this is not the shape of a
torus, this is not the image of God.
More strangeness of flukes: once thought
hermaphroditic, these creatures go around
in attached gender pairs, the smaller female
held in a slit midway in the male’s body).
The torus is an ontologically-privileged shape,
universal
in its interconnectedness, Outside and In,
microcosm itself is macrocosm,
inextricably intertwined. Has to do with that
hole in the middle.
A torus is doughnut-shaped. In dynamism, it’s a
cyclone.
But still, it’s doughnut-shaped, however
elongated: digestive tunnel
with openings on each end for egesting and
ingesting, there’s the hole.
Taken by topology from at its surface, not the
hole, but the whole
system. Pulled at from the surface, that which
can be turned inside-out at first imaginings.
To be sure, some squamous, for the squeamish—and
some plain skin. Stretched, all that flesh
and emptiness, space and shape; that’s the space
to define, slap a grid on it, map it out
with topology. Not with measurements and
numbers, slap that flesh
with a grid, create networks and nodes to make
it known—regions, points and lines,
intersections. Start with a mouth, pull up the
lip, the inside of the cheek.
Not trying to be cheeky here, but try the other
end as well; yes, turn the other cheek,
turn it all out. Turn it all inside-out.
Certainly stretched. Consider a balloon.
Consider
the universe, how it expands, stretches.
Relations remain—nodes, regions.
Better explained by nuclear physicist George
Gamow in One, Two, Three… Infinity,
a Dover book, in a section titled “Turning Space
Inside Out.” My thoughts recurrently
return to a cartoon in there, Figure 20,
illustration of body and universe
as one. It’s all one to turn the space—to turn
space—inside-out, invert it.
Any torus-shaped surface and surroundings can be
so deformed:
Distortion doesn’t foul up the fundamental
properties, doesn’t foul
the fundament. That cartoon can take our
example, the body in the cartoon can be
our example, our abovementioned, that person on
a sidewalk
on the surface of the earth, our particularity.
For torus—torturous, toro!
Bull in the labyrinth. Tora! Tora! Tora!
Neither thunderbolt nor surprise attack
can make this any the less obscure, but allow
understanding, sudden crack of lightning—
insight. Electric fork of plasma through
superblack, heat and light through dark,
nothingness overcome by the principle of the
real, the principle of baseness beaten
by that same power ever-shifting the
all-encompassing shape,
the toroidal volume empty and full, that same
power in dynamic stillness, in the light
invisible, in the silent sound of the spheres.
It’s that something our example on the street,
that particular—exemplary—person observing the
sky through a network of tree
branches, feels, intuits, remembers, grasps, and
indeed knows, but cannot see.
That person taking a walk is the person in the
cartoon, a torus,
a doughnut-shaped Human Being on Earth’s Surface
in the Universe all revealed as one whole
when turned inside-out by topological methods:
for stars, moon, planets, and galaxies
(the whole wizard’s hat) end up contained in the
tube, the hole, the narrow channel of a cosmos
where skies and space are flesh, hung with
constellations of one human’s organs—
liver, stomach, gall bladder, small and large
intestines. Gory, how the flesh
of One is All-in-All, identical, that total
system one and the same in space and shape.
That total system one and the same in space
and shape, the same in fundamental properties
whether stretched or twisted—no matter. No, it
is matter, it’s still plasma—
of a different kind than that most common phase
of matter in the universe, the plasma
of lightning and stars. I’m referring to the
body’s bloody plasma, just as—with a twist—
we have the whole universe inside one person’s
intestines, the whole shitty universe,
cloaca black, black so black it’s black as
universal badness,
viscous sticky blackest tarry baseness. Negative
space in which the light
appears to go backwards in space; really, a
disappearing light, an emptying-out shimmer.
Similar to how the mind can go back on itself,
not insight exactly, but imagery
as of books unread, impressions and imagination
out of excerpt or Amazon
review. How Eddison is known to me to be epic
with art-valid archaisms
in order to speak of greatness and the battle
between good and evil
and Machen is cosmic and pagan,
subterraneously sexual,
supernatural and preternaturally forceful; thus,
both
The Worm Ouroboros and The Great God
Pan come alive with archetypal
urgency and crack through to world. From torus
to toros, Möbius strip
and labyrinth—following the thread, fighting the
bull—blowing it all out
again, playing with spaces and surfaces, twist
the Möbius strip with another, twist two,
and what does it get you?—a Klein bottle (order
from Acme!), another topological
space, another non-orientable object with only
one side and—
unlike the one-sided single-edged Möbius
strip—no edges.
It really does look like a bottle, some bizarre
type of bottle,
and it actually can be ordered from Acme. It has
one hole that, in turn, in a turn,
gives it one handle, its inside is its outside,
and it contains itself.
Wile E. Coyote couldn’t be happier with his
purchase on these concepts, shipped to fulfill
and foil his cartoon schemes, projected as
promisingly iconic as Ouroboros
the Tail-Devourer, with that
suspension-over-the-cliff suspicion of Pan as
Panic.
Ouroboros Tail-Devourer snakes its way to
renewal.
It sneaks up on itself, eats itself, and
digests, itself the lump in the length of its
form;
it holds the tip of its tail in its mouth and
rolls, a serpent-wheel,
the serpent who cycles through death and
rebirth, alive as Eternal Recurrence of the
Same.
The cycles are ever alike, but the Cycles of
cycles are ever the Same—exact Same
on the grandest scale of exactitude, most
formidable meaning, most fearsome import.
Ouroboros the self-swallowing serpent is the
Eternal Return.
Ouroboros, the self-reflexive, bites its tail;
the serpent swallows its life to begin
anew. Self-reflexive, it comes back to itself,
always circling—
it always ends up circling around itself,
circling itself, encircled
by itself. Self-reflexive, it’s self-creative,
first in self-destroying—self-swallowing
for new starts—and then in Eternal Renewal,
constantly renewing itself like World,
the Self-Same World. It’s a unity. It’s
solitary. It’s solipsistic, like the cartoon.
Like Pan and masturbation, as Diogenes had it. A
Myth of Masturbating Gods.
Why ancient Greek shepherds were known for
bucolic stroking out on the hills:
Pan taught them, as he was taught by his father
Hermes. Solipsism, as omnipotent
as those Autoerotic Gods; for when sex is
solitary
it’s nonetheless an action of one who is one
with the universe, one-as-the-universe,
as in that person turned inside-out
topologically. That’s when sex is one. When sex
is two, at best two become one for the while;
anyways, if Pan
taught shepherds, he probably taught country
maidens as well, instructing both
in the mechanics of jacking and jilling,
lusciously. It didn’t mean he wasn’t after
the consummate act. In fact, Pan’s prowess was
legendary, and he could go well beyond
the two that become one in the universe, but
that’s another story—
of orgies and Maenads and multiplied selves. Not
this story, in which one
or two-as-one—to the tune of Pan’s flute—twists
with, in, and as the Cyclic Self-Same Universe.
That’s as if inside a twist to the Möbius
strip, Ouroboros’ circle, Yin-Yang symbol
whirls light and dark, whirls the world out of
the great worm, the worm as great as strands
of DNA spiral, as universal as wormholes
spiraling shortcuts through space and time.
Ever-reinitiated dynamic one-upping of dark and
light over the other.
Superblack on top. Baseness on top—and then,
from the underneath, from beneath the shadows
Pan erupts into consciousness, erupts out of
denial, the Great God Pan bursts forth and
spurts
the supernatural—the subterranean—as white
cosmic liquid light and heat, as life
urge itself in the universe, as demiurgic life
urge. The Worm Ouroboros turns
for the light side of love and for the dark side
of baseness, with each side casting its shadows;
so too, the dark side of sexuality urges towards
love, union, and renewable
ever-reinitiated creation—for beyond all shadows
there must be a light
source, because darkness isn’t absolute
invisibility.
For it’s the light casting those shadows that
gives away the stealth, that strips bare
the undeniable. Pan’s prowess was legendary and
he could go
well beyond. Another non-orientable object with
only one side and no edges.
Pan was known for his sexual powers, and is
often depicted with an erect phallus.
Klein Bottle another topological shape,
bottle-like indeed, and yet an endless hole
that turns in and around itself, inside-out
always, thick and in, its inside is its outside—
it is the hermaphroditic shape par
excellence, par specifying exuberance,
lingam and yoni symbol in one, the phallus and
vagina
a unity, all-in-one genitalia. To the tune of
Pan’s flute, which could sexualize
the innocent and willing, arouse lust, yet also
all the while stimulate sublimation-
inspiration, and panic. Urgency going inside and
outside while spiraling down
Ouroboros’ throat. And all the while orderable
from Acme.
That cartoon includes the moon, that person
beneath the trees on a sidewalk
on earth turned inside-out, that particular
person and the universe as All-in-One:
sun, moon, and stars swallowed in a narrow
digestive channel, then heart and brain for
galaxies
heavenly hung as the up-above and all-around.
The heart muscular, and bulging with blood
vessels. Internal organs a cosmos, crawling with
cilia like worms.
There are eyeballs and eyestalks. Universal
dynamism is writhing.
While Pan’s music could charm the savage
bestiality, he had to hide
his form if he wanted to seduce divinity. With
sheepskin. He hid hoof and fetlock,
and wrapped his hairy goatish self in lamb’s
trappings to draw the moon
into the trees, to coax the moon goddess Selene
to come down to meet him in the forest.
He had her. She came down from the sky into the
forest, she descended through the branches
of trees, and he had her deliciously,
delectably, beneath networks
and nodes of leaf-shivering, space-dividing,
silver-tinged deliquescence.
Immodest pleasures of conquest, this shadowed
mix of moonbeams and intent.
Magus
Magnus
www.magusmagnus.com
Magus
Magnus’ work sources poetry and “the
poetic” as central both to the extremes of
interiority (thought, philosophy) and
exteriority (performance, deed).
Books
include The Re-echoes (Furniture
Press Books, 2012), Idylls
for a Bare Stage (twentythreebooks,
2011), Heraclitean Pride
(Furniture Press Books, 2010), and Verb
Sap (Narrow House, 2008). His Poets
Theater work has been presented in
Washington D.C., Alexandria, Baltimore,
New Orleans, and New York – highlights
include Boog City Poetry, Music, and
Theater Festival 7.0 and 7.5, two years in
a row at Sidney Harman Hall for The
Shakespeare Company’s “Happenings at the
Harman,” the Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage
Festival, and a “Must-See,” 5-Star, “Best
of the Fringe”-rated run for the 2013
Capital Fringe Festival. Magnus was the
Poets Theater curator for Boog City 8,
summer 2014 in New York, and will be a
panelist/presenter for the event “Poetics
Theater: A Textual and Theatrical
Performance and Discussion” at AWP, spring
2015 in Minneapolis.
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December 10, 2025