In Seven Stories or the (im) Parting of Friends at Unbanyokatulinys’s Eggs, readers are first immersed in a neurological realm, seen through the eyes of a relative of Casimer Maus. Maus, a German linguist, stumbles upon a new language during her vacation when she gets lost in Luweng Jaran, a cave in Indonesia. While in the cave, Maus found a chamber archway with engravings she copied.
This unfamiliar language triggers a significant internal shift in her life. For the next decade, Maus studied the visual representation of circular connections and a sentence structure that bloomed outward in a spiral. She called the new language Lingkaran.
She planned to announce her discovery to the world, beginning with the Deutsch Linguistic Society. However, her peers proved unwilling to accept the strange occurrences that arose from deciphering the language. Readers are first introduced to Casimer Maus’s discoveries through a heptagram that positions an archetypal animal at each point. These animals gather near a growing tree, seeking truth in contradictions, as they aim to comprehend the world’s interconnectedness (the world womb) from its very beginning.
Through speculative surreal fiction, Casi (Hazel) Cline develops her own theogony and original mythology. Seven Stories shares some common ground with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; however, it presents a more approachable examination of metacognitive ideas, clarifying the archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious with animal totems.
Hazel Casimer Cline is a nonbinary writer and witch based in Atlanta, where they live with their partner, Steven, and their cats. They have been involved in both local and international Surrealist communities. Hazel served as an editor of Peculiar Mormyrid Journal for nearly ten years and participated in the Atlanta Surrealist Group, which met regularly for several years. They have co-organized three Surrealist exhibitions in Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama. Currently, Hazel is focusing on their writing. They also work with film, experimental music, and visual art, including collage, drawing, and painting. https://ephemeralityart.com/
Steven Cline is based in Atlanta and has been involved in surrealist activity for the past decade, including Peculiar Mormyrid Journal and the Atlanta Surrealist Group. He has co-organized exhibitions in Atlanta and Birmingham and has participated in others in Paris. His first book of fiction, Planetoid Sassafras, was published by Montag Press under the name Stephanie Klein. A subsequent book of surrealist nonfiction, AMOK, was published by Trapart Press. https://stevenclineart.com/
05/14/21 cosmic fires burn behind the rich, black fabric of the night which parts to let the magic pass as particles of filtered light the door lies open, the gate lies closed life travels, small and swift through tiny tears a missing stitch and life. the flow itself the tear itself the seam a sight of seeming death that folds, unfolds itself in weeds of grief and swaddles itself and for the first time sees that there the door lies open to those laid out or she on knees black wings opened out speak out in seven rings the universe talks and, so, we sing
07/09/21 shifting stars and shifting rays of light pierce, project through fractal lens into the fractured night the universe mind filters through this facet and another then the other and the next it’s all-color light refracted into rainbow shimmer variations, life the shadow dark descent of being is iridescent sacred, sweet the night is full of teeming things and thoughts of universe that sings
09/03/21 black wings flap against the dawn lingering sweetly in the dark prolonging, savoring the last few tendrils of night but the dark, black velvet sky grows thin and soon the silken cloth of twilight transparent and delicate ripples, dissolves in a moment is gone and morning begins a teardrop bright and golden falls to the bottom of the deep blue bowl that holds it, the sky and rolls back down the otherside and so the sun descends again, again again once, we saw it rise but that was long ago before we learned its name and learned to make the choice ever to fall or ever to rise or yet-to-be asleep abide
EGREGORE An exhibition by the Atlanta Surrealist Group Steven Cline, Hazel Cline, Aaron Dylan Kearns, Juli Maria Kearns, Megan Leach, Steve Morrison. October 21-31 2021 The Bakery – Atlanta, Georgia
ELEPHANT WORLD
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Grey smoke, static-waiting in this lonely god-form, the elephant world. Atmosphere of iron, melting into sea. The sea must move. Must never stop. Yet, it never forgets. From the cavernous, from the well, a swallow jumps. Its cry the first sound, its wings flap the first wind into being and make the movers move. Time, wrapped in a desert blanket, becomes muffled. A lunar heli-clipse spirals inside outside, holding death in her paws, crush what skull to wholeness? A mouse, a mouse of silver coat, has singed the lungs of the elephants who dance in circles under their lost mother, the moon. Stars expand, devouring the black, betraying the void. And as the myriad forms octopi the fountains of misery, love and thermometers break free. Is it cold or burning in the heart of the world; Is it strange, or stranger?
01/03/2020 the darkening skies must shudder and crack the darkening limits of love must break and the lightning must flow through the veins of the glow the violet glow of history unchained and memory unknown there is a quiet place in unrequited grief we must keep our face streaked with grief and never forget again that we love the lightning of hillsides and the lightening of hearts must not stop the lightning that breaks our barriers apart
Ornithomancy: divination by observation of the flight of birds
ALLCLOCKWORK
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
The Universe, her own lost lover, may be seen as machine, as a spiraling victorian machine of goldgear, allclockwork like a song, who descends again this dream. Angelic beings formulated only as a song of pure smell drift inward, licking like a perfumed song. A scented song that melts into black glass, darker than vacuum and more crystalline than volcanic orangutans. The seabird honks slowly, irreversibly, a world into myth. The spiderweb lacework left behind by all this resembles only slightly the forlorn face of Desire and her aging pack-animal, the horned, helical diviser of all manners of play. Patterns of a great mathematical sigh leap forward, and reveal themselves to have been all along a simple jest to amuse the one remembered in Desire’s lair. Speak! Reverse! This, the pelican calls to me, to be unafraid. This last day is sweet. A multitude, an ancient epoch, indwelling therein may, inside those glittering gears, break bread with shadows. But ever, ever, while the lonely lives we lead sits weeping by her mirror, can the Victrola spit out its slugs of light. In the sky above, what! cries the clouds, what is this fracture, this suture called time? Or elsewhere called form? Around us, a tower sheds its skin. Inside us, a tower devours and delights. And this hour is born as if it were the first hour, and the last hour, penetrating deep the ear of the Other. Again and again, but this time, the gears are well worn. This time…our ghosts dance.
RAINBOW DIVING
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
A rainbow earthbound, dividing itself, disassembling. Red, caught in prairie dog’s embrace, builds his mudhouse around the hourglass cavern entrance. Blue, thoughtform, endodermic emissaries as its always, reshapes rain into purring playful kittens. Red, again, many times, but this time, most sweetly does it redden. Yellow kicks world’s undercarriage in its shins, bumbling slowly, stupidly; of all the violent yellows of the imagination, honey alone is tenderest, a spongecake, a saucy milksop. Ah, but purple! A color now, and then another. One color and many, Solitary and mixed. But all of these are just wet laundry in cardboard, skybleeders without care. Try instead the complexity of the allcolor udder that fills bellybirth calendars with Orange with Orange’s sad and wayward beams. Indeed, full orchards in bloom. Undercurrents undersea, liquidic petunias, Green breaks all this in her witherworn gaze, drowning into pulpworm magnificents. Learn well, then, the mazes of the deeps, or fall eternally, inexorably into farting arabesques! Or else, the obsidian horizons and wellsprings by which the silent tuber sleeps.
A Virtual Post Card to the Clines from Mitchell Pluto
SPIDERWAVES
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Sun on my face; worm in my palm. Where is the tree I saw before I was born if not in your heart? A dancer pounds the sand into myriad dynasties of memory. Eruption of geometric solids from a hardening ground. Devastated again and again into life. Without an eclipse of the moon; Without the face I missed and without the soonness of the end. Satisfaction gave way to a pomegranate; and then the dancers in the sky, in the night, in the sand fuse via epilepsy. Shadows silver, and I find I have something to lose. Something, as in hat or muskrat, but in other words there are many things of which we are made of. Mountainous sheets of white sand, signing high notes inside, outside. What is a mountain if not the universe? All I can think of is…whale. All I can think of is whale, which is everything. Everything, blowing sheet metal kisses across aquatic dreamtime streams. Kiss, then the sands, kiss then wind. The river makes love as you fly from the waterfall to the ocean. Spiderwaves crashing in your ears, and wouldn’t you know it? A secret succumb to the drifts.
CATERWAULING
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Impish sprouts, come now, rejoin the nature choir. Spout from belly, cast skin aside, rejoin the broken ends of hairway screaming. Become erect in thy tendrils, in thy vines, in thy flowering eyelids, eyelips. Scales, weatherworn, may become grey or spotted, may become a disease repeated. Repetitive formlessness may become eyeless. Liked a castaway grail, like a traveler without species or a lichen dripping, frothing from the tips of broken fingers. Inside Castle, the deepness sleeps. The deepness repeats, reaching longingly out through the ribcagebars that hold its will in check. Across swampmoat, a game of chess is played, and yes, a checkmate too. A matter of alligator flesh, weighs your worth on its scales. Firebreather, O firething, O fireeater, bring forth the charred pieces of moleblind contempt, thy master. And lay him here, unbroken on that breakening altar, his feetflesh pollinated by cold wind. But the wind will have none of it. Virgin the wind is and will remain, no matter how many times she is raped. Caterwauling is a way for millipedes to divide and seek out that onebrightmissingthing. O everfree! O everleaving! A soul’s void casts its own shadow, too, my friend. O overbearing openness! Such openness is evisceration. Is evisceration, or crushed and squirming eggplant. A call: come now, worm, come now wind, defend your keep! Atom and Electron, enemies, conspirators, corpuscular in their insane infancy. We shall become nematodes on this day, or we shall expire. Thus is the will of the organ defended. Thus is the desire of the flesh raised again.
When I bite down, my teeth spread fire. I bite down on tree, I bite down hard…a California, newly blackened. When I bite down on swimming pool? When I bite down on sea? I see the ships come and go in the night. From where do they come and wither do they go again? Where but the watery depths that hold the stars with a cargo such as that they leave at every doorstep and every grave. A ghost hand floating, a hand laid down, in a casket amongst friends. A weaponized hairplane, and a truth? Pearly truth? Pearly, yes, of the falsest kind, unlike the inky liquid left by the octopus my sister stepped on that summer when we were five or six. The luster of a pearl reflects the hungry gaze of the wanderer. But the unreflective black of closed eyes or submersion under the hungry waves shows the empty colors and flashes that call upward from eternity’s open veins…
LADYBUG LEVIATHAN
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
City of Cyber, inside belly of Panda. Inside panda-belly, squirming datanet suckers towards the base of your brain. Down flows the river of nerves, down winding, writhing around one another and the spine of this world. This planet called Ladybug Leviathan, this universe called Old Misery Guts. Once again this universe tells the story of the time when the slimesnake jacked in with his god cord, shivering electrical. And jacked off into the abyssal plains of the sordid, sacred animal brain of the metrosynaptic gecko. Everything teal here, everything teal or sometimes pink. And blood always purple, and blood rerouted through networks of laughter that rumble through those beautiful bowels that wailed and woke the world before worlds. Reprogram this panda, O history-keeper, O kelp-satisfied lizard of night’s mist. Open at last the lid behind the lid. Exsanguinate, expectorate, mark the spot where the psionic piston rotates. What, then, if that rotation should cease? What, then, if all the dark little spots behind your eyes should suddenly come to life?
I started drawing tarot cards as a way to deepen my relationship with and understanding of the characters and archetypes that people them. I went along with the fool on their journey, and together we struggled, died, were reborn, learned about life and ourselves, and started all over again.
Mitchell Pluto 