Part I: The Never-Ending Story and the Telegraph Factory
VolumeE opens with a meditation on the mathematics of narrative infinity. To create a never-ending story, one would need a million pictures at thirty frames per second, yielding just over nine hours of footage—barely significant in the life of a mouse. But with heavy editing, daily viewing fragments, program rotation among multiple mice, repeats, news interrupts, and commercials, this modest duration might suffice for perpetual entertainment.
The narrative then shifts to an assembly line of messages—a telegraph factory where workers weld and wrench pieces of paper onto a growing mass traveling along a conveyor belt. This industrial process creates something extraordinary: a giant self-propelled machine made entirely of messages, an immaterial car constructed from clock-stamped telegrams pasted by hand. The papers themselves carry deep history—autonomous documents that are not merely carriers of typed messages but embodiments of “slow vegetal echoes of lost wind-words.” In the paleo-periods of earthly life, wind was a living entity that reproduced rapidly and spoke with a roar, now diminished to the whisper of west wind in children's stories.
These papers possess an ancient chemical receptivity to graphite and ink markings, derived from their vegetal heritage. The breath transmitted through telephones becomes words written by listening operators, who transfer this vocal essence onto paper's silent surface. Each paper enters a grinding machine between walls, emerging higher up in a state of confusion about its origin and destination. The next machine's job is to maintain momentum, to “get the message out.”
But disruption enters this systematic process. What happens when a worker steals a message, stuffing it into her pocket while the supervisor is at lunch? The purloined message, upon awakening under the thief's eye, may pass its confusion to the reader, who might mistake this stolen communication as intended for her and attempt to return it to its sender. The narrative observes both “the puppeteer hand, and the hand of the thief.”
Part II: Geometric Entities and Metamorphosis
The text transitions into a realm of abstract geometric forms performing mysterious rituals. Two meta-X's, each composed of nine smaller X's, drop through darkness without parachutes, attempting a predetermined rendezvous at a specific altitude. Near absolute zero, their edges find each other and spontaneously join to construct a more complex, invisible shape.
Parallel tracks of stacked, synchronized X's stare with “unblinking hatred,” separated by white vertical bands. These forms reveal themselves as another iteration of “beetv”—facets covered with repeating streams of lost X-shapes. The narrative warns: “Don't blink. Don't look back either.”
A pentagonal arrangement of upper bodies emerges, their skulls oriented toward a central void, teeth carrying the grin of recently submerged swimmers accelerating through oily water toward the only nearby hole in ice. Through deadly transparency, two central skulls disappear into missing space, leaving behind rotating ribs lifted by the vacuum of missing breath.
These bee TVs explode, revealing rotating hands and wrists written inside and outside all facets, breaking limbs scattered in opposing directions where friends and family wait. Word-streams bifurcate from their source, forming half an X where eyes cross. These verbal chains reappear as parallel streams, “sad little self-replicating chains, simple machines made out of the space between words.”
The appearance of sentence endings motivates the upward ascent of mirror-birthed phrases that collapse onto themselves, creating paired clumpings—proto-graveyards for roses or elephants. Throughout the night, trees talk while thorns or tusks lie still, content in their togetherness.
Part III: Temporal Machinery and Ella Spiralum
The narrative introduces sophisticated temporal and communication machinery. A musical keyboard receives exact notational equivalence with Morse code and everyday language—the foundation for Ella Spiralum's supernatural inventions.
The Nipkow Disk appears as television's early hope—a metal component of an Image Dissecting system proposed in the 1880s by a Berlin student later proclaimed by Adolf Hitler as the Father of Television. The spiral cut performs image dissection through a honeycomb of glass tubes focusing images onto selenium photo-cells (selenium being “the famous moon metal—the entire moon is light sensitive, and glows slow with images it received too long ago”).
As the disk spins, its winding gyre slit descends, never ascending, converting spatial images into temporal sequences of lights and darks. This technology represents “television's greatest hope, the preferred way to accurately slice coherent sections of our world for single transmission and multiple reception.”
Mysterious rotating telegraph devices split signals into multiple parts for simultaneous transmission. Perhaps they manufacture time readable only by other machines—machines need time like humans need shoes, to navigate stony roads and find footing on slippery rocks.
Ella Spiralum emerges with mascara-heavy eyes opening as if from sleep, appearing as a mechanical ballet star in a Tarot hallucination. Her presence is accompanied by flapping clay-pigeon zoetrope birds at the Kensington Museum—large earth-made bird statues in sequential poses mounted in a giant horizontal drum. When spun, they create the illusion of a single flying bird in eternal cycle animation, though “no mutation possible there in that machine-gunned eternal claylife.”
Part IV: Hive-Maker's Domain and Bee Consciousness
The focus shifts to Hive-Maker's world, where the boundaries between human observation and bee consciousness blur. At his house, you encounter the paradox of arriving of your own free will while remembering being on another planet just moments before. Villagers took you home, fed you sticky food, and nursed you to “pre-health,” asking casual questions about your transportation technology.
The next day brings bee work, but tools carry extra meanings from battlefield and Antarctic experiences. The bee smoker releases white haze—souls fleeing across ice toward camera lenses, brain impacts on trapping film, poison gas following grenade explosions. At the battlefield's edge sits a hive containing warrior bees with multifaceted camera-eyes that swing out over the world, beyond their wood home-cube, searching for food to transform into honey.
The smoke clouds introduce “unknowing” into the hive's smell-space, allowing the ape owner to safely open the bee-home with bare hands. Fingers morphologically similar to whale fin bones carefully extract mail-order comb-holding frames—wooden constructs that hold wall-to-wall natural cells where bees live. These frames resemble movie stills, and if the hive is a movie, it has a different shape than spiraling celluloid—“a square tall movie made of stacked frames, a skyscraper of frames.”
Hive-Maker grows tired and cannot make the effort. When we view the hive, we look through his eye at the great comb covered with bee bodies in black and white off-time motion. The mobility of our senses raises questions: is Hive-Maker looking through our eyes while we see through his, creating shared vision without feedback or recursion that might break our stare and deprive him of “the pleasure of being inside our prolonged and blank attention”?
Part V: The Queen's Journey and Ancient Territories
One eye points toward the hive while another fixes on a hand holding a precious queen. Queen bees are subjects of myth, allegory, confusion, fear, poetry, practical advice, and mail order trade—arriving at Post Offices in small stamped boxes with just enough food. From the waxen meta-Body of her hive, her throne-box, she remains smaller than a thumbnail.
The narrative expands to Mesopotamia, perhaps the Ur-Deseret (land of the Honeybee, the place from which Jaredites fled in Mormon stories). This map is written in English, circulating before the First World War, followed by sad campaigns against the Turks—dying Irish and Sikhs accidentally abandoned in burning desert by fleeing troops. Mesopotamia becomes the land of clay writing and false roadside entrances to various Gardens, none in their original places.
The Royal Queen floats up the Euphrates between banks of nettled flowers, heading toward summer hives in solemn voyage. Her portrait frame once held Victoria, Queen of Steam, who enjoyed being glued between ornamental English flower strips until a bee fancier cut her out and replaced the Britannic head with an exemplary bee race representative.
Part VI: Bee Harvesting and Underground Mysteries
The narrative describes various bee harvesting scenarios. Robot walking trees approach settlements, waving clumsy branches, but fall easily to axes and hoes since they cannot move as quickly on roots as humans in wooden shoes. Splitting the trunks reveals the mystery of their motion: BEES! The ritual butcher lifts internal organs for appreciation while sweet smoke fills the settlement for dancing with daughters and wives, knowing taxmen from the capital planet will soon come for payment.
Harvesters descend by rope over cliff edges to reach hives in mid-air caves. This stony country is riddled with air-shafts ventilating Shambhala—you cannot pass security grills, but crawling close, you catch cooking smells and find small numbers of beesouls trying to return inside. These bees make good-tasting honey.
Buckets lower by rope to cave harvesters, like ships sending nets down to where mushrooms grow among Atlantean ruin seaweed stalks. Men with upside-down fishbowl heads walk the wet forest floor, climbing aquatic cliffs, seeking treasure for patrons on mothership decks who smoke cigars and rock in hammocks under silver sails.
Part VII: Ghosts, Photography, and Spiritual Communication
The story enters a realm of photographic spirits and supernatural communication. Cotton ghosts in wallet-sized photos hide coy faces while thinking “look at me, look at me” in dark wallets in unopened drawers without cash. Thought-ghosts hang over thinking women who stare at us—ghosts of ghosts seeing themselves in mirrors, wondering who watches.
One ghost and two mourners share sadness in a triangle of equal angles with no right angles, only wrongness, separation, and sadness. The electro-photographer's eyes plate blank camera glass with silver deposits through static current—coherent, noiseless, nameful, waiting for attention.
Photographic ghosts appear as mourned relatives captured on paid cellulose, held not by ectoplasm but emulsified memory. Séances become cinematic with spirits posing behind curtains, phantoms whispering through lightbulbs, and grief exhaling visions through nostrils of those who hadn't asked to be haunted. A man thinks so hard his hair transmits memory upward like radio antennae.
Part VIII: The Bee-Kingdom League and Alchemical Politics
The Bee-Kingdom League returns, headquartered in Alexandria where patriarchs gather beneath images of Zoltan Abbassid (possibly Zamenhof, architect of Esperanto and false names). Underground honey jars breed oxen into bees, signaling a new alchemical regime where hives become economic, political, and genealogical entities.
Mites mine bee intestines, quoting poetry while drilling death. Television bees with phosphorescent eyes drift from peripheries, their anatomy governed by unknown codes. From the hive's core, birth emerges as bee grubs whisper across wax, remembering past wings. They rise into shape: folded, symmetrical, nameless.
This emergence is echoed by Ella Spiralum, who lifts her eyes from the camera's box to regard us with love or prediction. Images pile up: photographic dead, cowboy dream-images, exploding stars, TV ghosts, dissection diagrams. The American desert, once filmic fiction, becomes real.
Part IX: Jacob's Return and Desert Transformations
Jacob returns to Alamogordo, existing somewhere between cowboy and specter, observer and observed. The desert returns as Jacob walks across a red field where light bends and telephone poles become his spectral retinue. White Sands shimmers like a mirage awaiting collapse while space distorts and time warps inward.
By story's end, the town is too vast for memory, its stories stacked like hives, its stop signs doubling as intertitles. Mountains rise in the background. Somewhere beneath asphalt, old bees still speak through tunnels. Somewhere above, traveling bugs head west, trailing messages across the firmament.
Jacob stares up in caves where waves of hot air dance and bees stare down with shining eyes like ocean-cave octopi clacking beaks while staring through near-human eyes at lost fish below. The void of faceted spheres dissolves over Jacob's placid face as he makes the sad transition from costumed hero to lost octopus or fish.
The cave becomes a cuckoo clock with Jacob as part of the schematic scene presented to the world on the hour. He is no longer a spectator but part of the mechanism. Cave tilts back toward hollow head corners as machine-men generate electricity of void-spinning to power stories in their distant world.
Part X: Communication Networks and Message Evolution
Letters fall for millions of years in obsessive detailed spins and arcs, clustering with their kind while attempting to perfect their fall. They play with shudders that take them away from groups, then slide back with counter-shudders to rejoin crowds. This is their entertainment, meaning, and perpetual activity.
Hollow E's hit center followed by fake-N's spinning on triangular faces of bee TV crystal-radio news updates. The watery deep divides with swimming letter fish schooling around each other, trying to spell comprehensible words—a dark aquatic multidimensional Ouija board.
Individual letters sing brave songs, seeking high notes to distinguish themselves from crowds, hoping for reproduction permission to make copies for elaborate dance productions. Hexagons hide in pentagons, one shape rolling into another like bumpy wheels of a 4-D car rolling along dark highways into Jacob's brain.
Pentagons holding lifespaces of five spinning dead roll over themselves to become projected hexagons, temporary shapes shrinking back into hexagonal form. E-shaped entities wearing hats rotate outside beetv faces while triangles pull apart to reveal identical forms inside—flower crystals filled with poisonous water.
Moon bee-lines fly through triangle gaps to dark space beyond geometry—tongues of electric bees talking in darkness among cells, expecting answers soon. Horizontal missiles fly from mobile launching devices, leaving smoke puffs, shrinking with distance until small enough to enter cactus flowers and drink deep.
The volume concludes with missiles flying downrange toward vanishing points below horizons, completing the cycle of communication, transformation, and endless mechanical reproduction that defines this strange world where bees, humans, machines, and messages exist in perpetual, mysterious exchange.