Nomad Codes

teaching seems to be that our uncontrolled fears, desires, and hatreds boomerang back tenfold. And I am sad to report that, unless my temper shapes up, I am probably doomed to flit about some angry little maze of hell whose labyrinthine torments resemble the endless branchings and recursions of the most fiendish and robotic phone trees. “If you would like to hear your options again ...”
    Romantics complain that we moderns have lost all rites of passage, but commercial air travel remains a fact of life that is both a rite and a passage, although it is a rite whose duress no longer offers transformation. The rewards are always later; in the meantime, we simply throw ourselves on the altar of an anxious, discombobulating drift.

    Through the windows on the flight to Reno, J and I watched magnificent explosions of electricity in the thunderclouds, Dr. Frankenstein displays that almost made up for all the horrors. In flight, we sometimes glimpse the awesomeness of heaven and earth through the portholes, visions of clouds and lightning and deep blue black. But when we turn forward to look where we are going, all we face is another cell, another idiot screen, another prisoner chained to the galley. In the words of the English poet Henry Vaughn, much beloved by Dick:
    Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.
    2007

Copyright © 2010 Erik Davis
    Illustrations © 2010 Susan Willmarth
Introduction © 2010 Marcus Boon

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

    YETI books are published by Verse Chorus Press in association with YETI.
PO Box 14806, Portland OR 97293. yetipublishing.com . versechorus.com

    , Ltd.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    eISBN : 978-1-891-24182-6
    1. Occultism. I. Title.
BF1411.D385 2010
130-dc22
    2010025060