Invocation


This dedication is to the distant memories and spirits of heroes and adventurers, to the absolute power of the twelve Caesars of Suetonius and their parallel male impotence, from Julius through Caligula and the �delicious debauchery� of Nero, to the Greek heroes of Plutarch, to Themistocles and Alexander, their moral characters� and to their country�s position as educator of the western world, to Romulus and Remus, born of the god Mars, adopted and suckled by the mythical she-wolf, and again to the fratricidal Romulus , creator of the city of Rome, ultimately enveloped by a storm cloud, to the epic poem of Kalidasa, the Meghadutam, the cloud messenger, to an archive photograph of the skies of Korea where the wind and water sculpted the head of Christ, to the spiritual crisis and �new mythos� of an Edinburgh man Thomas Carlyle and his social writings On heroes, to Lewis and Clark, to their guide and interpreter Sacajawea, to the west, to the east, the end and the beginning, to rock and roll and it�s shifting focus, to another man called Carter, who dared disturb the Jackal crouching over nine bound prisoners and to his words on seeing his sleeping treasure, to Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian king, his architectural achievements exaggerated by their existence in spiralling generations of the imagination, to courage and stupidity, birth and creation, to the aeronautic and the submarine, to the New Atlantis where science and nature harmonise in Bacon�s utopia, to survivalist journals and magazines, to Protect and Survive, to politics, Protest and Survive, to William Burroughs, this is to the man who wears the emblem of Partick Thistle but knows not where its country lies.


Mike Nelson