THE CATERPILLAR, Issue Number One

Being the Stream of Consciousness I fell into a slumber and when I awoke
I struggled to recall the tattered fragments of a dream. A larval figure, swaddled in dark mists and vapours; a meeting at the phone-box on the corner at midnight; an antique bundle thrust into my hands, later found to contain an archaic lexicon and numerous sheafs of notes, many in obscure languages and all written in an extraordinarily lepidopterous hand. The figure somehow conveyed vividly to me that he wanted me to study these documents and then print and publish their essence; using whatever channels of communication were in current usage. He was giving me something, some body of information, and it was up to me to disseminate it - he placed great emphasis on that. That's about all I can really recall - the impression is murky, as though viewed through a smooth shard of ancient green glass, washed smooth by phosphorescent tropical seas.
A figure shrouded in sails of obscurity... blurred.. misty.. lacking an outline - the penumbral figure huddled in his indistinct overcoat like it was the forties; he was fast fading into night's bronze blackness, leaving only words & echoes of words.......
So I wandered back through those vaporous streets and strange old alleys of the night and found my way somehow back to my own crumbling tenement and fell once more into a slumber deep. & I would have dismissed the incident as a mere evdaemonia, a feverish dream, an apparition of the midsummer night but there remained the material itself - the sparkling glossalalia of the Visionary Ghetto Tabloid, The Caterpillar, with its cut-up counter-point-echo, the Dub Version, and much babbling of the tongue. So I have tried to be true to the wishes of that elusive creature, that haunter of the diamond-rippling patterns of time, that departer in the fog. And I can only watch and hope that I can meet that figure again, be it in a dream or in a subway tunnel or in some other physical place in this world.