PREFACE
This book is an autobiography. It is loosely structured on Bach’s lute suite Prelude, Fugue, Allegro. Interwoven with the story of my life are present and past history. In this respect, Theophany is both ”his story” and ”history” in one. It has been twenty-seven years being written, and yet it appeared suddenly on my work table one day from heaven only knows where.It arrived from a deep place where vice and virtue have a common home. The book begins when I was thirty-three, twenty-seven years ago. The thirty-three-year-old that I was displays youthful rimbaldian rage that has cooled some after all these years. The rage is not gone however, only sublimated, for the horrid mismanagement of the world that is its cause still plagues us today.
In The Crane Bag Robert Graves wrote: ”The nucleus of every true poem is a single phrase which provides a key to its eventual form.” In the present lengthy mock-epic ”poem”, it is not a single phrase, but a single word which provided the key to its eventual form. This single word, ”theophany” (synonym for ”epiphany”), popped into my head one day at the Odenplan underground station in Stockholm.* The word emanated one single musical tone.
I first encountered this word while reading about the calamitous natural upheavals of antiquity that destroyed entire civilizations. In Immanuel Velikovsky’s Earth in Upheaval, ”theophany” is described as ”noise of the gods,” and in my own egotistical way, I understand it as ”noise of Theo.” The whole pulpy volume emerged from this single word. Yes, it is very lengthy (1,435 pages), but as Dante wrote, when surrounded by so many adversaries, one must be lengthy. Its length is in counterpoint to the brevity of the single word that inspired it.
The Street of the Sour Well____________________
Stockholm, Sweden
March 6, 2009
* From "theo", a Greek word meaning "god" and "phanein", to show oneself; appear.
(Theophany is presently being revised for printing)
Table of contents
Excerpt 1 ("Stowaways")
Excerpt 2 ("Genealogy")
Excerpt 3 ("Genocides of California")
Excerpt 4 ("The Girl with the Flaxen Hair")
”A superb piece of writing.” (Epiphany - a literary journal)
