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According to Aristophanes’ The Birds, there is a city called Cloudcuckooland founded on air by an Athenian in 400 BC. It floats above the plain of Phlegra in Greece and serves as a stronghold for birds of all species. Unlike nation-states, Cloudcuckooland never dies: it needs no military to defend it. Certain ruins of cloud cucks and cuckholds remain, including the large gate of the wall built from wood by pelicans. The birds used this stronghold to claim sovereignty of the planet; the land's walls served as barriers to prevent sacrifices offered by men from reaching the sky, thus starving the gods into submission. The gods survive on human sacrifice in so many ways.

According to Heraclitus, "all men are equally mystified by unaccountable evidence, even Homer, wisest of Greeks. He was mystified by children catching lice. He heard them say: What we have found and caught we throw away; what we have not found and caught we still have.”

According to Harry Mathews, "each fellowship is an ornament in the masquerade of this writer's life.”

But justice is strangest of man’s inventions.

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You people, said Marcauer, are like Brecht, who, for many, embodies the critical conscience, but who, in regard to the arrest of his teacher Tretyakov, clings to the assertion that the trials are just and that a gigantic conspiracy is being exposed and punished ... your silence is concurrence.

— Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance

In Marguerite Yourcenar's "Phaedo" (published in Fires), silence serves as a vessel for the wisdom of the dead.

At some point in the scriptures, the Lord God declares that "each will be put to death for his own crimes" by the state. But only God gets the right to punish humans "as far as the third and fourth generations." God and the Dictator have this in common.

Near the end of Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates ponders the difference between writing and speaking. He quotes an Egyptian god as saying that the invention of script damages the power of memory in those who write. Then he critiques writing for its failure to take part in conversation, or dialogue. A text is like a painting, he suggests, and it can bring images and ideas but it shouldn't be taken seriously, since the "true" writing is written upon the heart.

According to Rabelais, there is the Mediterranean island called Clerkship. Most residents of Clerkships are procurators or bum-bailiffs whose primary income relies on the skill of being beaten. A person hires a bum-bailiff to carry his grudge to the offender, who is then abused and beaten. Furious, the offendeer usually responds by abusing and beating the bum-bailiff. In this way the bum bailiff doubled his income by suing for damages.

"There are gods here, too," said Heraclitus.

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The narrator of Harry Mathews's book, My Life in the CIA, gets kicked out of the French Communist Party meetings not for suspicion of CIA activity, but for being part of OULIPO – "a gang of cynical formalists" who claim an allegiance to materialism while ignoring the "dialectic of history." OULIPO is a "degraded manifestation of bourgeois idealism" which sets itself against historical progress and socialist realism. What a gas – to be kicked out and identified as a member of the useless avant-garde that no one had heard of!

George Perec would sit at Place Saint-Sulpice for a few hours each session and write what he saw, adding to the project he called "a tentatively exhausting study of several Parisian localities." When Mathews goes to chat with him there, Perec warns him of rumors among leftist circles that blame him for using a CIA bomb to kill a German anarchist on April 12th. I think her name was Christa. There are also rumors that Mathews was involved in the CIA's overthrow of Allende in Chile.

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it's the caption that decides which thousand words," Harry Mathews surmises. He escapes by joining two friends in the transhumance, the sheep walk that moves a flock between its summer pastures and winter ones. Steering clear of towns and paved roads, between the defiles and the hills of massif central…

“When I hear that history repeats itself, I don't find it hard to believe,” wrote Italo Svevo on April 4, 1928. “It repeats itself, but where it will appear, we don't know. That's the surprise!” Svevo titled the surprise as “The Confessions of a Very Old Man.” Little did he know that committing one’s life to literature would be called ‘autofiction’ by American literary critics in the next century. Little did Svevo know that many of these critics seem to believe only women can autofiction. Confession is gendered feminine.

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Once I had a moral man. And then it happened again. I mean: I stood near the flamingo cage with his letter in my hand, amid the density of howling children, in the periphery of the trifecta including lost balloons, spilled popcorn, and desperate parents locked in the zoo of so much funness. Consigned to the culture of consuming such fun every weekend. The enigma of the universe remains a trifle in relation to the intricate details established by commercial expectations. Big seeds sown the souls of the young. Little wants grow into more fun. Could I express myself figuratively to avoid upsetting the zoo's victims? 

Conscience is cute and old-fashioned, the moral man had written. There was a sort of prestige in his denunciations, in the declamatory tone that perched on a trashcan at midnight to tell the world what it was missing. And I missed him. Absolutely, I missed the unremitting vigilance of his cruelty. And intimately. I yearned to be certainly wrong in his eyes. Certainly, I missed the glimmering horseshit of being unique in my wrongness. Missed the cozy again and again and the comfort of being condemned rather than permitted to continue funlessly wronging him.

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Penis nailed to a board was Sarah Lucas' first show.  The residents of Clerkship took note of Lucas' androgynous self-portraits; her use of Marlboro Lights cigarettes. There were rumors that she purchased Benjamin Britten's former house in Suffolk where she lives with her partner, Julian Simmons. Allegedly, Lucas was living in Britten’s former home when she created Penetralia, a penis land of plaster phalluses.

Fellowship is a masquerade of sovereign entities. The true writing is on the Herms’ heart. You people cling to the belief that trials are just, but all men are equally mystified when they “catch lice” only to discover that catching is phenomenologically indistinguisable from feeling caught.

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