I was suddenly deathly thirsty at the Museum of Modern Art while looking at a Remedios Varo. I rushed to the water fountain, but was stopped when I found a tall blonde tourist gulping down water while her girlfriend chattered to her in their foreign tongue. I waited a minute, then two. She continued gulping. Meanwhile her friend was still chattering—mais cette putain de canicule m’emmerde ! C’est infernal, infernal, je t’jure, je commence à fondre, à fondre comme une glace, je. te. jure, comme une glace !—over and over while her friend drank thrice her bodyweight in Croton Aqueduct water. I was thirstier than before but didn’t dare disturb this image. To restrain myself, I walked over to the end of the hallway, where there was a curtained-off counter. I leaned on the counter, which looked like it would have been some sort of coat check were it not curtained-off, and decided to watch.

The girl at the fountain was tall and thin as a lamp and wearing a mini-skirt and crop-top that bared her glassy muscles, her veneered skin, her machine-made spine. She was gulping down the water from the fountain, slurping and gnashing, her thin muscular body heaving as she gorged herself on the water. Her hair fell in a curtain over her shoulder, obscuring her face while she drank, so that I could only see flashes of sharp white teeth, of gushing water, of a blood-red tongue. And her long thin body. Through her exposed skin and taut black crop top, I could count each vertebra of her spine bulging out in piston-like knots of bone and muscle. She was beautiful. The girl next to her, immune somehow to this image of horror and beauty mixed together, continued babbling over and over again while fixing her hair.

As I watched, an older German couple approached the curtained-off coat check counter. They were intensely discussing something, hovering just a few feet from me in an otherwise empty hallway. I was sketching in my notebook while the couple hovered just nearby, the woman gesturing toward the curtain. She was clearly agitated. But about what? What did she want from the curtained-off coat check counter? It was on the third floor of the art museum in an empty hallway that led nowhere else in the museum. I was trying to sketch the two girls at the water fountain and this German woman wouldn’t give up about the curtained-off coat check counter!

Then the German woman approached and placed her hand on my shoulder to push me aside. I stepped aside anyway and looked at her in mild frustration. She said nothing. I looked to the German man, who shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t know the woman and that she may very well have been crazy. Saying something to him over her shoulder, and ignoring me, the German woman gestured one last time to the curtain before pulling it open. She peered inside. The curtains were black and velvety. She had gone quiet finally and was staring with deep concentration through the curtains, as if into a temple. What had she been so anxious to see? Was something hidden inside? Was it another art exhibit? Another hallway? I peered over her shoulder. Inside the curtained-off coat-check counter, there was nothing. The space was empty and dark. With a curt nod, the German woman closed the curtain and left with the German man.

Across the hallway, the other French girl was gulping down water now. I would have to wait longer for my turn to drink.

To continue below, become a paid subscriber to Will Diana, The Hermit Speaks. In this Weather Report, I discuss my first impressions of New York City and why all writers should be shot and killed. By getting a paid subscription, you support my longer-term goals of world domination. I am about halfway to 100 paid subscribers, which is the first milestone on this warpath.

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Turns out, it became a poem. Paradise of replicas: mixing memory and desire, creating poetry out of used condoms, finding humor in destruction—the summertime: faces in a crowd passing me by, forgotten.

Don the fawn-skin
before the grapevine becomes
your tomb. The worms
will rise against the lions. The tiger
will be silenced. The cricket will rule.
The mule will reign. The serpent will ascend.
The leopard and the eagle will cease smiling.


I. Fishing Big Things in the Puddle

I’ve gone fishing in the puddle in the parking lot in the city,
I've gone looking for loaves in the wet places in the calamity,
where salamanders cosmonaut the crumb-crowded sea,
but my lure keeps getting caught on discarded condoms, 
half-eaten boner
pill packs, and shattered wine bottles
(and that’s not to speak of the hook!).
No fish for me.

I look at the relics clinging to my fishing rod.
I'll go hungry. 
I look at the relics. 
Are they begging me to ask a question?
What is your problem?:—

In the summer we went down to the river and watched the kayakers,
in the water their reflections were like pilots among the dry clouds,
and the vanilla ice cream tasted like how that other cloud looked,
the one that promised rain.


II. The Land of the Unicorns

In the summer we ate ice cream and watched the clouds. 
In the August night the stars are irradiated.
Lumps of flesh rise in the dark waters and march down
dark ways and the rancid waters carry fishing boats fishing
foul matter. Against the stars are cathedral clouds,
epoxied clouds like epoxied ice cream.

August night: your feet are wet: faces in the street: 
you step on a dead rat: the dead rat is wet: 
the glitter of flies in the darkness
on the rat's exploded organ: 

The cricket blows his trumpet. 
The flies and the worms dance
on the dead rat. Your foot dances
to the sidewalk. The river flows
in the darkness. In the summer we


III. John the Revelator on the Beach

In the summer we went down to the river and got sunburns on the shore rocks.
In the summer we went down to the ocean and got sunburnt on the sand. 
In the tidepools by the ocean there are starfish.—Look, there are starfish.—
They don't sunburn, but they're starcrossed. 
When the tide goes out, 
they'll just dry out. A sudden vision
lightnings my sight:—Look at the dolphins!—
The dolphins leap so gracefully, long hairless bodies like long hairless thighs.
In the summer the fish tasted like fish and the wine tasted like wine!
Where have those days gone?
Where are my balls?
What is that sound? What do I see? 
Where is my fish?


IV. The Book of Genesis

By the river there is no sound of river. By the ocean there is no sound of surf. 
You see a woman go down to the river and dip her toes into nothing.
You watch her look over her shoulder and fling her bra and panties
and sundress
onto the tideless rock. You watch her leap into nothingness
and land naked, and flop like a fish, 
and land broken onto nothingness. 
You are a fisher of nothingness. 
You fished her body out of nothingness
and you fucked nothingness. 

What newborn crawls unaborted
from dead flesh? How can something 
be created out of nothing
by no one? Where did you go?

V. The Birth of Venus, or the Bitch of Bacchus

Fishing in the ocean I watch a dolphin rise from the surf. 
She winks at me. Her eyelashes flutter. 
I watch the dolphin leap and rise from the surf.
I watch her leap and rise onto the sands.
The dolphin is smiling. 
I watch the dolphin rise from the sands, and then I see:—
the seagulls bow and the crabs form a mass and the seas part and
the sands dance and the sand castles collapse.
The sunset is winedark. I watch the dolphin walk.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Thank you to for your excellent feedback on this poem. Craftsman and philosopher in an antic land. Il miglior fabbro. J’aurai de l’or: je serai oisif et brutal.

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For one paid subscription, you can become the ruler of a territory in the Kingdom of Diana. I will design for you a royal weapon and a royal creature, and post pictures of both on Substack notes. You can rule over your territory as you wish—will you be a just or cruel ruler? Will you be mighty and wise or conniving? It is up to you. On top of these benefits, I will also post a short story in your honor and provide in-depth editing advice for your own writing.

I will soon begin posting short stories and concepts following the Kingdom of Diana, but wanted to have one place to catalogue the prior notes from March of 2026

The First Coronation of Lords

This is an ongoing thread featuring the lords of the various lands of the Kingdom.

The Gospel of Diana

This is a short story about how I discovered the Kingdom of Diana, written for Romanticon:

Romanticon

The Gospel of Diana

“Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world…

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5 months ago · 57 likes · 11 comments · Romanticon and Will Diana

GOBLIN WAR, or the Gobliniad:

Day 1

Day 2 — A dire situation and existential crisis.

Day 3 — Victory

LORE

Social Hierarchy of the Kingdom

The Dianian Royal council

Mythology

Art by

Currency by

RPG art by

RPG art 2

Dispatches, Rumors, and Gossip

Peace and Love,

Will Diana

BAD TIMES IN DUBAI

I happened to be in Dubai for work, and bombs were falling on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, when the cruise ship MV Pinochet, no relation, rather adventurously docked in the city to be closer to the fireworks. But soon the ship was placed under strict quarantine by the World Health Organization, thus putting a slight pause in its years-long party around the world. 67 passengers tested positive for morivirus, an exotic and mysterious virus about which little was known other than that humans can only catch it through sexual intercourse with orangutans.

The World Health Organization was particularly concerned by this outbreak. While the ship’s passengers had spent an orgiastic week in Bali, it seemed improbable that 67 passengers all had sex with orangutans—having sex with an orangutan was an affront to nature and morality and the Baby Jesus more terrible than fratricide—and besides, their stay in Bali had been three months prior. Likely, the World Health Organization concluded, only one, or maybe two or three people had sex with orangutans, caught morivirus, and spread it to the others. This conclusion meant that morivirus was spreading human-to-human for the first time in history—and posed a threat to the whole world. Worse, WHO had no idea how it was spreading and only a vague idea of its symptoms.

I discovered this information after I woke up hungover on the deck of the cruise ship—a rough awakening under the noontime desert sun. I poked my nose over the edge and peered down. Dozens of WHO ghosts in hazmat suits had set up a laboratory on the docks. Behind machine gun nests, armed soldiers with oxygen masks pointed guns at the ship. No escape? I wondered. Waving a pair of white panties that had been left on the deck, I managed to assemble a parley with a couple WHO ghosts. They stood fifteen feet away on the gangway, anonymous beneath their white hoods.

“Hello,” I said. “There appears to be a mistake. I’m not a passenger of this ship. Please, may I deboard?”

“A mistake?” one responded with a Darth Vader voice. “How did you mistakenly board a quarantine ship?”

“It was a rough night? Some woman took me onboard? I thought I would get laid?”

It was all coming back to me. The Firm had sent me to Dubai for another job that required a lot of legwork. Something about import/export, or maybe international insurance? Feeling bored, anxious, pent-up, I ducked out of work early and hit a bar by the waterfront—someplace European. I was halfway through my 4th dunkel when Ava Brawn approached and asked if I’d buy her a drink. She was drop-dead gorgeous: huge blue eyes, ivory-pale skin, flushed cheeks, and a sickly shadow around her eyes that I found Xtra-Sexy.

By the time she mentioned something about going back to her ship, I was eight or nine beers deep. And something funny must’ve happened to one of those beers, because I sure was feeling funny. Boats? I slurred. I hate boats! My father, who also worked at the Firm, died after falling from a yacht off the coast of Chile. His father before him, who worked for a postwar precursor to the Firm, died in similar circumstances in Indonesia. It’s not a boat, silly, Ava said, it’s a ship.

As she dragged me down the street, I wasn’t exactly in the mood or capacity to escape. And next I could remember, I had just awoken on the Pinochet’s deck.

“Well, did you?” the ghost said.

“Huh?”

“Get laid? You said you thought you might…”

“I’m not sure?” I said. The ghost wrote on his/her notepad. “But as you can see, it was all just a mistake. I was drunk and tired. You understand…”

“Regardless of how you got on the ship, you’ll have to remain until the quarantine is lifted. Strict orders,” the ghost said.

“But I’m not even a passenger. I didn’t choose to get stuck in quarantine.”

“Too bad.” Already, the ghosts were shuffling away. Sayonara, Peace and Love, and Bon Voyage.

I was now stuck. Should I escape? Should I hide? I started to remember strange details from the prior night…naked women…exotic pets…more exotic drugs…Slinking off to the lounge, I decided to read up on morivirus while waiting for more memories to emerge.

A handful of people were strewn about on tables, chairs, and the floor. They groaned, tossing and turning. Their clothes were torn, covered in stains, and even burnt in some places. The place must have been the scene of some horrible disaster. Broken bottles and discarded clothes ornamented the floor. Stockings, wigs, and panties hung from the chandelier. A komodo dragon was (hopefully) asleep by the bar. It had the words VOX POPULI VOX CANIS spraypainted on its back. I vaguely recalled that her name was Clytemnestra. Or was it Chlamydia?—Stand back! A pot-bellied, half-naked Afrikaner growled at me the night before when I tried to feed the komodo dragon beer, that’s a she-dragon! And she-dragons are vicious! She’s already snapped fingers, noses, and cocks off a dozen idiots like you—whatever her name, remembering this, I gave her a wide berth before I settled at a booth table in the shadows to read up on morivirus.

As I scrolled, a new memory—or maybe a dream?—appeared. A dozen naked women were dancing on the deck, silhouetted by a sky ablaze with missiles, burning skyscrapers, and burning water. It was an old-fashioned dance, the kind that the old men—the majority of the passengers—on the cruise ship seemed to appreciate; the old men hollered and wolf whistled and swigged their glass bottles as the young women’s nipples shook erect against the odd light. What was I doing? I remember smoke curling like rancid worms from my mouth and shots of liquor and Ava somewhere nearby. Achtung! Meine Damen und Herren, ich stelle Ihnen den Kapitän vor, a nasal voice screeched from the shadowy recesses within the ship.

The dancers continued their slow shaking steps while the old men grew somber and cleared a space in the audience. They commenced to nervously slick their hair and button their shirts and drink the last of whatever liquor still remained. While I could hear the voices and the bombs and the waves and I could even see the dancers moving to it, I couldn’t hear the music. Like watching a TV show through a window.

A palanquin was dragged out onto the deck by six shirtless men. Der Kapitän! the old men on the deck cheered, all looking away from the figure on the palanquin. The dancers continued their dance. The men looked away. The small crowd that huddled around the bar had gone quiet. The people were gazing somewhere just beyond the captain. No one looked at him—but I looked at him. I stared deeply at the figure resting on the palanquin. I stared so deep and so long that Ava slapped my thigh and hissed at me to stop.

But here my memory rubberbanded, snapping from the image of the captain back to the image of the crowd, buffering and buzzing with static as I tried to remember looking at the captain. I could see the men and the dancers and the water burning behind them and I could see the men carrying the palanquin—but the figure on the palanquin was somehow blurred out of the vision of my memory. In this brief recollection, I tried to force glances at the figure on the palanquin, at the captain. What I saw, or thought I saw, or dreamed couldn’t have been real. I forced my mind’s eye to sneak closer to the captain. I saw what could have only been a pile of broomsticks holding up the wizened face of a tiny old monkey, half-obscured by his giant captain’s hat. Or else the captain was just a sack of bones. Dancing and crying and singing, the old men and the young girls and the other deathly-looking freaks all held up their glasses and toasted—Der Kapitän!—and their glasses twinkled in the light of missiles exploding overhead and everyone laughed through wide bony mouths before downing their glasses and smiling and all of this for a captain who sat silently, motionlessly, nothing more than a shadow.

SEX MONKEY, SEX MONKEY, WHAT DO YOU SAY?

Very little research existed regarding morivirus. And what did exist contradicted the other sources. Eventually I found an anthropologist’s PhD thesis titled: SEX MONKEY, SEX MONKEY, WHAT DO YOU SAY? Or, Relating Visions of Human Power Over, and Stewardship of, Nature in Indonesian Folk Tales, Oral Roberts University, 2017. In suffocated, almost purposefully confusing prose, the anthropologist described a mystery cult hidden in the Indonesian jungle. According to local doctors, members of the cult had contracted a rare virus which caused erratic and evil behavior. The anthropologist attempted to learn more about both the virus and the cult, but found only rumors. She noted that among escaped members of the mystery cult, rates of morivirus are at 100%. But, ex-members always die after escaping the cult.

As a woman and an outsider, she would not be permitted to witness their mysteries. Studying the cult and understanding the virus would be so dangerous as to be impossible. And yet she did it anyway. She made the journey through the Indonesian jungle. It lasted fifteen days. Along the way, one assistant died of “black bile” and another went mad, calling ants “his treasure” and setting out to amass a fortune in his currency. He was never seen again.

The anthropologist carried in one bag journals and test tubes and recording devices to keep careful record of everything she saw. While traversing a canyon halfway through the journey, a flash flood threatened to take the bag. She sacrificed her food and dove into the floodwater to grab the heavy bag, returning half-drowned to the shore—all just to keep the records which she hadn’t even written yet. For the remainder of the expedition, the pair would eat only scavenged fruit and plants—like true indigenes, she remarked.

Finally, after fifteen grueling days to cross a mere fifty miles, she arrived at the cult temple. By this time, her last assistant had parted ways with her, camping in a cave overlooking the site because he was too terrified to meet the cult. She would be alone with the murderous cult.

According to her report, she learned that the cult, known in their own secret language as the Followers of the Natural Ideal, consider orangutans as their brothers. One of the early initiation rites is to live with a group of orangutans for a month. The foundational mystery—which an initiate learns soon after the first rite—tells that man and orangutan once lived in close proximity as brothers, but clever man progressed past the orangutan by receiving the power of language from the god of thunder.

Each subsequent mystery peels another layer from this myth to reveal horror after horror. The anthropologist’s prose grew confusing, labyrinthine, and even inherently puzzling, as if she had gotten lost in the cult mysteries—or was taking part in them. I read a line, drew a conclusion, and was confused; I re-read the same line and drew a different conclusion—the prose itself concealed and revealed layers of the myth. Finally, after the anthropologist’s prose had disintegrated—or sublated—into tortuous, thousand-word long sentences that snaked back and forth from one lie to the next, she finally related the final mystery. It revealed a truth that shattered all prior myths and made a mockery of the hundred rites for which the most elite cultists had devoted their entire lives to learn. The Thunder God raped the Mother Orangutan, his sister, thus creating man. For the sin of the father, man was cursed to leave the forest and suffer temptation and war and sickness in cities and villages, while orangutans would live in primordial peace. Man could reclaim the peace of the forest only by reuniting with the orangutans in a harem bed. This was their way of purifying their bloodline.

As a novitiate progressed through the ranks, they were admitted from one hut on the temple complex to the next, slowly gaining access to new fraternal lodges where social norms were lifted. In the first, speaking was forbidden, and the initiates lived in silence. Those who couldn’t progress to the next rank were stuck in silence for years. In the next lodge, speaking was allowed. In the tenth lodge, free love was permitted and encouraged. And so on.

Each prior lodge removed a new social boundary while each mystery revealed a new horror. After progressing from isolated novitiates to integrated masters, after a dozen lodges moved them from monastic silence to hedonism, in the final lodge there was a brothel, and inside the brothel were orangutans on chains.

Here the thesis disintegrated into blank pages.

After a ten-page long blank space, the anthropologist announced that she had lost her painstaking ethnographic fieldnotes on the eve of her departure from the cult. In a fit of rage—or perhaps a backward sense of mercy?—the high priest had attempted to burn down the anthropologist’s hut with her inside. She only survived because she was sleeping in the cave with her assistant, but she sadly couldn’t say the same of the three thousand pages of ethnographic fieldnotes she had compiled throughout her five-year—five-year?!—stay at the cult temple. She watched from the cave in the mountain above the temple as her life’s work burned. Consequently, her research was typed from memory in a hotel in Jakarta.

Oddly enough, her test tubes escaped unscathed. After an even more grueling return through the jungle, along which they were hounded by assassins of the cult, she immediately had the blood-filled tubes tested. 100% of the samples—51/51—tested positive for morivirus. She did not however make any particular claims about its symptoms or how it spread.

The anthropologist’s findings were that an endemic outbreak of morivirus might have altered the psychology of the cult members, leading to higher levels of sexual activity and violence. Based on accounts of the cult, very few members lived past the age of 40. It seems that human relations of power over nature are simultaneously controlled by the very natures they seek to control, the anthropologist concluded.

A google search revealed she had disappeared soon after presenting her thesis; in fact, she was a missing person, still sought after in her hometown of White Rock, New Mexico.

BOMBS ABOVE, SHADOWS BELOW

Unsure what exactly this could mean for me, I looked for something that would calm my fears. There had to be some article to confirm for me that morivirus was nothing worse than the common cold.

I found a report about a minor American manager of the Grasberg Mine on Papua. Gone mad, he locked himself in his house with his secretary, a group of villagers, and an orangutan (trafficked by business associates from Borneo). The man was eventually forced out, whereupon it was discovered that he was coughing up blood. He was sent to a hospital in Jayapura. He died of internal bleeding soon after being diagnosed with morivirus. Closer study of the virus in the lab confirmed traditional reports that the virus can only be transmitted to humans via sexual intercourse with orangutans. Symptoms of morivirus, cobbled together across a variety of reports, rumors, and lies, include:

• pallor

• severe weight loss

• increased libido

• insomnia

• narcolepsy

• amnesia

• erratic behavior

• hemorrhages in the lungs

As I read this, Ava Brawn appeared before me. She was bikinied and carrying two oranges.

“What happened last night?” I asked.

She shrugged, grinning.

“It was a typical night on the Pinochet. You don’t remember?”

“Not really. I think I remember cross-dressing, and karaoke, and Clytemnestra the komodo dragon?”

“Clytemnestra?” she laughed. “Don’t you mean Callisto?”

“Oh. So what happened?”

“We had fun. What’s wrong with a little fun? Anyway, I’m going to swim. Would you like to join?”

I looked down at my clothes: an oxford shirt, khakis, and sneakers. I couldn’t remember if my underwear was clean, nor if there were any holes.

“I’m not exactly dressed for it.”

“Man wasn’t born clothed.”

“Yeah, good point, good point. I think I’ll pass, though, you know, I’m not much in the mood for it, I think, you know?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“That wasn’t your attitude last night.”

She turned and left for the pool. Her ass and thighs were covered in long thin bruises, like barcodes.

I went behind the bar and poured myself an expensive scotch, the kind my coworkers at the Firm drink. I drank and tried to collect my thoughts. Was I in danger? I must’ve fallen asleep because suddenly it was night and my head was on the bar. Despite the party, I had been awoken by a strange hum overhead. What was it?

“What is that?” I slurred, sitting up. I had addressed myself to a young girl in cat ears and a black leotard.

« Comment ça ? » she mewed over a glass of champagne.

“What?”

« T’es complètement con ou quoi ? Chuis française, je ne parle que le français »

“Huh?”

« Hein ? Hein ? Nique ta mère, crétin »

Behind her, through the window, a beam of light ripped across the sky and a ball of flame exploded. Then, the sound came: the earth itself was split, a terrible sword had scythed reality apart.

“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted, jumping from the table.

“Relax, man relax.” A man said. “Those were the Patriot missiles. They’re intercepting an Iranian barrage.”

Ah right. The war. Iran. Trump, Epstein. Etc.

“Are we okay?” I said.

“Probably. Chin up. Not much you can do about it anyway.”

I turned around. Overhead, more explosions thudded, and more Patriot missiles poured out of the earth with biblical fury, but if this crowd reacted at all, it was with a mild, ironic cheer.

I went searching for Ava. At the pool, a group of beautiful women and rather ugly old men were drinking Bloody Marys in the water. I went out on the deck, where a couple games of pickleball were in progress as bombs exploded overhead.

Inside, my knees gave out, forcing me to seek refuge in a nearby cabin. It looked like it had been ravaged by a troll, but I sat on a bunk and decided to read more about morivirus until the fatigue passed.

In the handful of hours I’d been asleep, the quarantine had become an internet phenomenon. Where previously I had been able to find academic papers and old articles, I saw headlines from papers like the New York Post and Russia Today that read: “MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO? HUNDREDS STUCK AT SEA AFTER DOING MONKEYS.” I learned nothing from the contents, which appeared to be AI-generated, viz. this line that I found in both:

Morivirus. It’s not a normal sickness, it’s a life-threatening virus.

Let that sink in.

The articles reported intensively about the terrible conditions onboard the cruise ship, where passengers were stuck at sea without a drop of clean water to drink. One AI-generated article by the Goochland Examiner furnished a link to a crowdfunding website to send aid to the unfortunate passengers. Accompanying this was an AI-generated image of a crying girl on a liferaft, with a thermometer in her mouth, an icepack on her forehead, and a crying puppy in her arms. A million dollars had been raised.

Then there were the memes. A new wojak had been created, Cruzjak, a sunburnt-and-sunlotioned overweight cruise ship passenger with a double-chin, a bucket hat, and a sign that said “I ❤️fuckign monkeez.” An image of Saruman at his magic orb read: the Rothschilds creatign some fuckass new disease in their Yakubian laboratory when the goyim have finally recovered from the last catastrophe. A white girl who somehow smelled of patchouli through the screen had captioned a tiktok of her making a :| face: yt people are fucking orangutans. YT PEOPLE ARE FUCKING ORANGUTANS. Morivirus is just Mother Earth getting her payback ❤️.

I scrolled for an hour, finding nothing informative. If it had suddenly become transmissive, how could I avoid it? Was I doomed? What would happen to me if I caught it? I closed my eyes. Down here, the echo of explosions had a festive quality, as if a race of titans were wrestling in the world above.

Needing comfort, shelter, a shoulder to cry on, I left the cabin finally in search of Ava. And as I entered the hallway, there she was.

“I’ve been looking for you. Want a drink?”

“How’d you know?” I said. She shrugged. “I’m starting to freak out. What’s going on here? What’s morivirus? Are we in danger?”

Her face twitched as if she wanted to look over her shoulder, before settling for a smile and a raised eyebrow.

“Come to my cabin.”

She took me down dozens of stairs and across many more hallways. We criss-crossed and doubled back. I started to feel dizzy. But the pilgrimage into the depths gave me a lot of time to stare at her ass, her thighs, her back. Gorgeous. She must have been a model. What was she doing with me? And what was she doing here?

“What are you doing on this cruise ship anyway?” Everyone seemed to be either old or bought.

“Well…” she said.

She was an aspiring actress, but her parents had fallen on hard times and wouldn’t support her career. An uncle invited her to the cruise ship off the coast of Lebanon to meet some producers. About here in the story, she trailed off, just a few dozen beats too early for her cabin door, which was still a hundred yards ahead.

“Well, it’s a boring story. And here we are,” she said. We walked the remaining football field of hallway in silence. I tried to calculate how long it had been since Lebanon. If they were in Bali three months ago, and now Dubai, how long had she been on this ship?

Ava immediately closed the door. Another girl was on one of the bunks masturbating. Ava waited thirty seconds and opened the door again.

“Can we get the room?”

“Sure, I’ll head to the usual spot.” She winked at Ava, then at me, then disappeared.

“Vodka okay?” Ava said, producing a bottle of Grey Goose.

“Chaser?”

Ava dug through a pile of clothes and chip bags and books before excavating a room temp gallon of green orange juice.

“I got this from the restaurant?” She sniffed the jug and tried not to make a face. “Well, maybe we’d better not.”

“I didn’t really need one. Well, what’s this morivirus? Are we in danger of getting sick?”

“Morivirus?” She said as she poured 3-4 shots of vodka into a couple glass tumblers.

“What?”

“What’s morivirus?” She said, handing me a glass of warm vodka.

“You know all those World Health Organization goons guarding the dock? That we snuck past last night?” I asked.

“I didn’t think you’d’ve noticed.”

“This ship is under quarantine. Why’d you bring me on board?”

She shrugged.

“Cheers?”

“Hold on, am I in danger?”

“I don’t know. Why worry about things we can’t control? Let’s drink.”

There was a convincing logic to that, especially the way she said it, with her hand lightly lying on my thigh. I emptied my glass with a minimal amount of sputtering while she started playing a rather generic house music playlist. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from asking,

“Where are you guys isolating the sick? I mean, are they confined to their rooms or what?”

“Isolating?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

I sat up straighter. She withdrew her hand.

“What? You’re not afraid of getting sick?” I asked.

“Why be afraid of something you can’t control? Besides, no one knows the true symptoms. Or how it’s spread. As far as I care, they were 67 false positives.”

Hmm.

“Another drink?” She asked. I was already feeling dizzy.

“Why not?”

She turned the music past a comfortable volume. As she poured, she said, very quickly and quietly,

“You want to go down the cruise ship. Get all the way to the bottom. You’ll see what this is all about if you can reach the ship’s depths.”

“What?” I asked.

“What? Here, let’s cheers again.”

We both downed our cups as the music played.

She’s homeless,

as she stands there

begging for money,

la da dee la dee da,

la da dee la dee da,

la da dee la dee da,

la da dee la dee da.

Just as Ava Brawn’s breath licked my neck, I started to fade. The song circled and the beat circled and the words circled and the ship rose and fell and my head circled. I woke up in Ava’s bunk alone. A girl was going through the pile of clothes on the floor.

“Morning, princess,” she said in a heavy Eastern European accent. She was skinny and pale and had haunted, baggy eyes. “Do you think Ava Brawn will mind if I take her Hugo Boss skirt?”

“Wha?”

By the time I had pulled myself upright from the bunk, the girl had slipped on the skirt and disappeared. I looked through the porthole window. It was night. How many nights had I spent on the ship now?

IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Stumbling into the hallway, I could hear music somewhere far overhead. It was—oh God!—AI-generated EDM covers of 90s rap. Further above, I heard the thudding of missiles.

Feeling exhausted from a hangover that I suspected wasn’t entirely alcohol-related, I crept down the hall. Outside one room, I heard these lyrics:

I don’t practice Santeria

I ain’t got no crystal ball…

Through the open door were a handful of shirtless older men and young girls smoking weed. One of the girls was nodding asleep; another flashed her teeth at me and asked me to join them. I looked at the older men and their massive guts and their shadowy eyes. They looked like they wanted to eat me alive. Laughing nervously, I hieroglyphed past the doorway, then sprinted. I turned to look as I rounded into the staircase, just in time to see a gang of shadows at the end of the hall, following me?

I flung myself down four flights of stairs, stubbed my toe at the bottom of the fifth, and looked down to see—count them—four, five, six, seven…twenty more flights of stairs?! receding into the darkness. Above, a door opened, followed by voices—mais ce putain de virus a rendu tout le monde complètement parano. Pourquoi pas simplement profiter de la vie? Manger, boire et faire la fête, putain. Merde!—hearing which, I ducked into the hallway, running to the next staircase.

Was it me, or was the music a lot closer and louder? Or was that sound my heartbeat? Or the missiles? I ran, jumped, flew, hobbled, and hotfooted two dozen more stairs.

Finally at the bottom, I was confronted by a door with a sign:

CAUTION / VORSICHT!

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

RISK OF DEATH, DISMEMBERMENT, AND IMPRISONMENT

TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED

The sign was decorated with skulls and thunderbolts. A door creaked open somewhere far above. This time it was not followed by voices. After a couple beats, I could hear hobnailed boots trying to quietly descend the stairs.

I entered the door.

#

It was dark in the hallway and hot and it only got hotter and I had forgotten why I was here. Eventually I came to a final doorway. A pilot light shined urgently overhead. The throbbing, gulping, shivering bilge pump rattled the walls and rattled the floors and rattled the bones in my legs and arms and chest and the 22 bones in my skull, each individually. I counted them. This doorway was featureless. It was blank and it was the last door at the end of the long dark hallway at the bottom of the ship. I entered it.

I stood blinking under the bright light in the doorway as the bilge pump wheezed and humped, wheezed and humped. All else was silent. Even the frantic beat of the music, of my heart, of the bombs far overhead had gone quiet. It was like I had trespassed into the world’s guts, where now all I could hear was the rattle of her diseased lungs.

Finally the dark blobs in the room took shape. The captain was in one corner and I was not surprised to see him there. His desiccated skin had been drawn latex-tight over his face; his arms and legs were skin and bones and dust. On such a head, whose last remaining hair may have just been cobwebs, his captain’s hat looked ridiculous. He rested with dry eyes on a palanquin, his chest rising and falling only with the ship’s rising and falling. I followed his blind gaze, which was fixed on something in the center of the room.

In the center of the room, in a cage, sitting there dumb and mute, were two orangutans. One was wearing a sailor boy’s outfit. The other was wearing stockings and a plaid skirt and a blouse. A ribbon was tied neatly around her hair. Lipstick and eyeshadow had been applied delicately to her face. As I approached, the orangutans hissed and backed into the shadows of the cage. My feet squelched on the sticky floor, and I looked down to see dried layers of blood and liquor and vomit and piss and cum and more blood and vomit and cum. I stared at the orangutans.

“Take your pick.”

Who said that? The door was still closed. I hadn’t yet been followed here. The bilge pump wheezed and humped. I was alone.

“Go ahead, boy. It’s your turn now.”

Had the captain been sitting up like that before? The orangutans were bashing their feet and fists against the cage bars. They were screeching and weeping and seething. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the captain’s face—his skeletal cheeks were working against bony gums, or was that just the ship’s rocking? As I watched, the captain’s jaw opened and a flap of leather flicked out between taxidermy lips.

“Take your pick—the girl or the boy. Heaven knows we aren’t judgmental here. And they’re just playing at being scared. They like the game of it all. Once you get going, you’ll see how pleasurable it is for them too. They’ll be quite sweet in just a few minutes, just you wait.”

He spoke with a wheezing British accent. The words tumbled from his mouth, slurring slightly.

“We’ve been waiting for you for quite some time now. Go ahead.” The captain reclined in the palanquin to watch. Finally the door opened. A gang of older men entered and crossed their arms. Among them, I noticed one of the associates at the Firm. He nodded at me, an admiring grin on his face. He too had been waiting for me to come here, to the orangutan cage, to morivirus, to join him.

#

Diana: here, the man’s story ended. I waited ten minutes for him to speak again, but he was silent. As I carefully observed him, I realized that he had unnaturally pale skin and hooded eyes. His gaunt face gave him a skeletal appearance.

“Why did you tell me this?” I asked.

The man shrugged.

“I had to tell someone.”

The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t have much longer to live. So saying, he paid for our beers and stood up. Before I could say anything else, the man had disappeared back into the shadows of the bar.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry are free, I offer quite unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

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I struck up conversation with them. They were seven degenerate Frenchmen in their late 20s from a down-and-out city in the Hexagon’s north. They were mystified to find a melancholic young American here alone at the bar, especially so as I spoke French.

After a few drinks I asked them what they thought of Rimbaud. Rimbaud can fuck his mother! one of them said, to which another replied: And I can fuck yours! And this was the extent of our conversation on Rimbaud. These guys had barely graduated primary school. Soon they showed me their group Instagram page, which featured a video of them crashing a car in a gray, muddy field in France and then lighting it on fire. The next video was of Alexis, the tall blond, passed out with his head submerged in a toilet bowl filled with his own vomit. Sipping his piña colada, Mathias showed me the scars on his chest, shoulders, and stomach. He had been stabbed in the streets of Marseille. He didn’t say why.

Rimbaud probably would have liked these guys; he also would have tortured them and blown them up with his mind powers. As I got to know them better, I liked to imagine Rimbaud torturing them and blowing them up with his mind powers. Instead, Rimbaud died of a sickness he contracted in Africa.

The Frenchmen went out into the unlit muddy streets of this town to buy some blow. I stayed behind. As they left, Mathias bought me one more drink and said,

“You know, you Americans like Rimbaud much more than we do in France. Perhaps it is a consequence of translation? Here, he is just seen as an angry kid who quit writing because he pissed everyone off and couldn’t be trusted anymore. Maybe you should try reading a truly great French writer, like Houellebecq.”

“Houellebecq is a pig,” I said. “You know nothing about the heart. Fuck you.”

“Woah,” Mathias with the knife scars said, backing up. “It is just an opinion. Perhaps you should respect French taste rather than trust in your American icons of France.”

I like translation because, like this story I just told about Colombia and motorcycles and drug deals in the jungle, translation is inherently false. No word in this language can approximate such a word in that language, even direct cognates sound different. Man’s greatest torment is due to the difference in how a French woman pronounces ennui compared to how an American pronounces it. I may as well just lie to you about what A Season in Hell really says. The Truth exists out there, surely, and the writer must show the Truth, but he cannot do it in language. It is like how the astronomer must measure the black hole by observing it with a device that only captures light. Our language teeters around the Truth, pirouetting with increasing velocity from falsehood to falsehood, before finally collapsing irrevocably into nothingness.

• This is a continuation of my Rimbaud translation series, where I am mostly faithful to the original text, but am primarily interested in pursuing the Truth. To follow along, here are links to my prior translations of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell:

A SEASON IN HELL (CONTINUED)

We can’t leave. — Let’s retake the way from here, loaded with my vice, the vice which grew its roots of suffering into my side, since the age of reason — which mounts the sky, batters me, knocks me down, drags me.

The final innocence and the final timidity. That’s it. Do not take into the world my disgusts and my betrayals.

Onwards! The march, the burden, the desert, the boredom and the anger.

To whom can I rent myself? What beast must I worship? What sacred image do we attack? Whose hearts will I break? What lie must I keep? — In whose blood will I march?

Rather, keep me from justice. — The hard life, simple brutishness, — lift up, dessicated fist, the cover of the coffin, sit, and be suffocated. Thus neither old age, nor dangers: terror is not French.

— Ah! I’m so abandoned that I offer to any divine image my urges for perfection.

O my self-denial, o my marvellous charity! here below, however!

De profundis domine, beast I am!

#

While yet a child, I admired the stubborn convict upon whom slave labor always falls; I visited the inns and rooms that he sanctified with his stay; I saw with his ideas the azure skies and flowering labors of the countryside; I inhaled his destiny in the streets. He had more strength than a saint, more good sense than a traveller — and he, he alone! as witness to his glory and his reason.

On the road, by winter nights, without shelter, without clothes, without bread, a voice clenched my frozen heart: “frailty or force: there you are, it’s force. You know neither where you go nor why you go, enter everywhere, respond to all. It won’t kill you anymore than if you were a cadaver.” In the morning I had a look so lost and an expression so dead that those whom I encountered probably didn’t even see me.

In the cities the mud appeared to me suddenly red and black, like a mirror when the lamp circles the nearby room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky, and, to the left, to the right, all riches flaming like a billion thunders.

But orgies and the companionship of women were banned to me. Not even a friend. I found myself before a desperate mob, facing the firing squad, weeping from the sadness which they couldn’t have possibly understood, and forgiving! — Like Joan of Arc! — “Priests, teachers, masters, you’ve fooled yourselves for delivering me to justice. I have never belonged to these people here; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race who sang under torture; I do not understand law; I have no moral sense, I am a brute: you’ve fooled yourselves…”

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a savage. But I cannot be saved. You are false savages, you maniacs, beasts, cutthroats, cheapskates. Merchant, you are a savage; magistrate, you are a savage; general, you are a savage; emperor, you are a savage; old ick, you are a savage: you have drank untaxed liquor from Satan’s factory. — These people are inspired by fever and cancer. Disabled and elderly men are so respectable that they ask to be boiled. — The most cunning thing would be to leave this continent, where madness prowls to take hostages for these miserables. I’m entering the true kingdom of the children of Ham.

Do I know nature yet? do I know myself? — No more words. I entomb the dead in my belly. Cries, drum, dance, dance, dance! I can’t even see the hour where, the whites disembarking, I fall into annihilation.

Hunger, thirst, cries, dance, dance, dance, dance!

Peace and Love,

WD.

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry are free, I offer quite unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

If my stories have given you delight or made you think or inspired you, please consider a paid subscription and supporting my work.

Subscribe now

This short story is also my goodbye to Washington, D.C. Hemingway once said that if ever a young man spends time in his youth in D.C., he will always carry that city in his heart, for Washington, D.C. is a moveable feast. I sure hope it isn’t.

#

Before John Booth showed me his device that he claimed could take snapshots of the future, I had just arrived in the city for a conference and, having some time to kill, went to the Museum of Natural History to gawk at the tyrannosaurus rex and the triceratops. Our world had dug up their idle bones and bent them into monuments of agony, so that the 67-million-year-old fossil of the T. Rex had been contorted by us to chomp into the long-vanished flesh of the triceratops. As if the rusted sword on the mantle will always dream of blood. In the museum’s windowless basement, I found the reconstructed faces of the early hominids, Australopithecus Afarensis and Homo Habilis. Australopithecus, with the first glimmer of human intelligence—and therefore of human suffering—in its eyes, would have been weak, and it would have been hunted by the leopards and tigers and boa constrictors that then stalked the jungles of the African Rift. Australopithecus was weak and dumb but had the spark of the wildfire to come. Homo Habilis and his ugly face would have been intelligent and strong; he would have run across the plains and spoken with his brothers and used tools and he would have vanquished the leopard and the tiger and the boa. Wherever Homo Habilis went, the great megafauna of the Pleistocene died in a thousand holocausts. Homo Habilis left behind a path of bones to mark his progress. With each added mile of death and destruction, his brain grew by the cubic centimeter until Habilis became Sapiens.

I met John Booth outside the Museum of Natural History. I was dizzy and dehydrated, especially so as I had only just gotten off my flight. I stood blinking under that terrible summer sun until my surroundings darkened and took form, shadow and light and heat and more heat and a square and a triangle and still more heat and the hot dog vendor and the school children and the blunt force sunshine: and there John Booth was, leaning on a wall, smoking. Dark clothes and dark sunglasses. Considering it now, there was something frantic in him hidden by his cool steady demeanor.

Hoping to cure my headache, I asked him for a cigarette. He obliged me. It took all my effort to squeak thank you. Meanwhile, he started fumbling with a strange device. It was sort of like a camera, but it wasn’t a camera. When I asked him about it, he told me that it was his latest invention. He took a long drag on his cigarette and watched the smoke disappear before holding out his hand and introducing himself: John Booth, inventor and engineer—perhaps you’ve heard of the Teletandava? No? Well, anyway...

Immediately he launched into a sonorous and detailed but ultimately rambling description of the device. I followed as attentively as I could under this heat, but all I could really understand was that somehow this device could be pointed at present-day landscapes and take a snapshot of what they would look like in 100 years.

I looked at him again, wondering if I could detect any signs of lunacy. Before I could say I had to return to the hotel and prepare for my conference, he directed my attention to a statue nearby—Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais. It humanized the sacrifice of that city’s leaders, who, in order to save their city from the wrath of the cruel English king, volunteered to be executed during a bloody siege of the hundred years’ war. He pointed his device at those agonized burghers, each facing his imminent death in a different, personal way, and he clicked. After a moment, he showed me the image.

John Booth didn’t know what it represented either. That is the problem with the device, he told me. You only get a snapshot of a single moment in time. He asked me what I saw. I saw the silhouette of Rodin’s burghers set against a nuclear-brown background. I saw a world engulfed in shadow and these men struggling in the shadows like cockroaches. I told John Booth that I saw the product of a faulty device. I gestured around us, where the world was so bright as to be painful, where the only shadows hid under the park benches and the bushes and the bronze bootheels of the burghers.

I asked him if the device had accurately predicted the future yet. He stared at me, blinking, before he pronounced very slowly, as if to an idiot, that the device had only just been invented and therefore it was impossible to prove its predictions true. However, he said in a low voice that barely contained his rage, it had all been worked out in his calculations.

THE CAPITOL AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

He snapped a picture of the capitol. It was a bad hallucination of a Greek temple. A thousand columns held up a single white dome, like a monster with too many legs. I looked at his snapshots.

The snapshots told a different story. The building became a distant holy mountain, the seat of the gods. This pathetic building built by a posturing band of bourgeoisie had been turned into a site of cosmic significance—a Mount Olympus that mortal men, far below its slopes, can only gesture toward but never fully understand without making the perilous journey upwards. These snapshots called to my mind Mount Kailash,

where it is said that the gods still thunder and wail, refugeed here by the infinite progress of man. Worshippers make the pilgrimage by foot from hundreds of miles away, from the plains and the forests and the deserts up to this desolate mountain plain where Kailash pierces through the heavens.

Many of the pilgrims die. Many die on their journeys without ever laying eyes on the holy mount. They are the lucky ones. Those who die on the path are blessed because they always keep their image of it preserved in their minds. Others die from elevation or exhaustion or exposure on the low slopes of the mountain, where the cold Himalayan wind whips their too-human flesh, where they conduct the perilous hundred circuits around all four corners of the mountain and whether on the first circuit or the hundredth, they perish from the conditions, eyes fixed always on Kailash’s aura-lashed peak. They die refusing to believe that the mountain before them is the mountain of their dreams.

When I made the journey to Mount Kailash, I was told a thousand stories by a thousand pilgrims about what they expected to see and feel upon arriving at the mountain’s slopes. So many grand stories were told that even I started to expect a miracle from that pile of stone. But when I arrived at Mount Kailash I was struck only by blankness. Looking at the pilgrims around me, I found the same disappointment in their eyes. I knew it was worthless to ask them. I could already feel it in my heart.

This is what I saw in John Booth’s snapshots of the capitol. But looking at the building, I only saw a lot of columns.

As we walked away, John Booth turned and snapped his device once more at the building. It was shown being reclaimed by nature. A flood of green threatened to capsize its great white dome. It was an image of frozen motion; the capital breached this stormy sea, rose, fluttered, and was doomed to fall. I told him this was ridiculous, that he was creating greater significance than this city had. He told me that I trusted too much in the evidence of my eyes and not enough in that of my heart.

THE TEMPLE AND THE BROTHEL

John Booth took me to some sort of temple where I started to suspect that he loved this city dearly and even worse that he loved what it stood for. In the reflection in his eyes, I could see those temple columns as they once were: his father took him once as a child to pray before the Promethean bearded figure seated on the throne, an act which inducted young John Booth into adulthood. I’ve studied similar rites in Greece, in Papua New Guinea, in the Amazon. John Booth worshipped Lincoln the same way that antic men once worshipped Dionysus. Without speaking, he snapped his device at the temple and showed me two snapshots, contradictory.

One showed a weather-beaten temple. It had been abandoned and thus preserved, even made a little beautiful. The second snapshot showed the temple transfigured. A handful of floors had been built atop its pediments and a new façade had expanded out from the first columns, showing yet more columns, false columns. Construction equipment added yet more profanity. Through one of the new windows, I thought I could see a whore gesturing to a man below in the street, outside of the frame. She was inviting him inside. After a hundred years of progress, the temple had become a brothel.

I asked John Booth which image was supposedly correct. He didn’t respond. I told him that a device which predicts two different futures cannot be so accurate—can it?—but he said nothing. We walked half an hour, him depressed and myself anxious to prepare for my conference before he finally spoke.

He said, have you begun to see the contradictions that are tearing apart this great city, the impossible burdens its people place upon its people? The device tells two different stories: one where the city has succumbed to its darker reasons and destroyed the world and another where the city has maintained its ideals and has been destroyed in turn. This device is no engineer’s extravagance, it was built to measure what I already knew. I have spent the past four years trying to warn people, but they do not believe me. Do you believe me?

I told him the truth, that his device was a sham, that he was thinking too much about the city and by extension himself. He threatened to show me his papers proving the device’s capabilities.

He took a few more snapshots. In them, a dark cloud had fallen on the city. A nuclear storm? Or was it something we weren’t ready to see? The city’s columns and columns and columns and columns upheld only darkness.

THE SPINE OF THE WORLD

We arrived at the foot of a monument. Apparently the citizens were quite proud of this monument that was little more than a stone tower. John Booth was even insulted when I said I had not immediately gone to see the monument upon arriving. He said that the Museum of Natural History is only a storage closet for bones, but the monument is a great human accomplishment—an ideal all men should strive to uphold. So saying, he snapped his device at it and showed me the image.

It was an unornamented stone tower which may have been admirable if it were not for the fact that the stone of the lower third was different than the higher layers of stone. It reminded me of the mismatched skin color of certain penises. I stared at the tower, blinking in the blinding light, then looked at the snapshots.

John Booth’s device showed a great tower rising, stone upon stone, layer upon layer, up the blue sky and into the stars. It was shining and magnificent and admirable. The tower seemed as if it stretched forever into the heavens, indeed it seemed to have no top nor bottom, but was the spinal cord upholding the entire universe. I stared transfixed at the image for two minutes before the device choked and coughed and produced another image.

In the second image, the monument had been made earthly, bound, doomed. It had been surrounded by the earth. It was nothing more than a stele erected by a minor religion, reclaimed by the wilderness after the religion’s priests died. No one had cared to maintain it. In the first image, the tower was terrifying—it was the bleached corpse of the world. In the second image, it was just another anonymous corpse of man.

John Booth told me that these images proved that no matter the outcome, our city was destined for greatness. Our monuments would outlast us all. I didn’t like that he called it our city.

I started to wonder if I would ever leave this place.

THE NATURE OF THE WORLD REVEALED

Before I could say otherwise, we walked further and further, straying from the city’s monuments and temples and museums, into the downtown. Although we walked through a labyrinth of tall, broad office buildings and apartments, the snapshots on John Booth’s device showed a landscape reclaimed by the forest. The bridges were engulfed in greenery like sinking ships, the churches were nothing more than spires housing broken idols.

John Booth didn’t speak. I didn’t speak either. The heat was getting to me. I wanted to rest somewhere cool and drink water, but I continued walking the city with John Booth. I couldn’t go forward; I couldn’t stop myself.

Finally I told him that he thought too much about this city and its people. It was a fine place, a great place even, but whether it continued on forever in an eternal empire or if it faded, man would live on. The monuments would immortalize the city’s ideals for a hundred years, maybe even a thousand years, but eventually their capstones will be torn down and used to lay the foundation for something new, something greater—a school, a new monument, a brothel, a highway. I told John Booth that if he was truly proud of his city and what it represented, he would want it to inspire the next upswing of the progress of man. The inevitable fall of the city will enable the truth to live on. We will die and our ideals will turn out false, but that is only the world revealing itself to itself.

I said all this while we stood sweating in the shade of a university. Here was an institution that would outlast the city; man’s thirst for knowledge is the only thing separating us from beasts, after all. He asked if I wanted a snapshot here, as a memento? Memento mori, I said with a grin.

In the snapshot, the university had disappeared. I saw my posture and clothes and my terrible donkeylike grin, but the great university behind me was gone. Its academic belfries and arches and columns and magnificent marble buildings had been devoured by vines. I could barely swallow my sob.

Now John Booth showed me the other snapshots he had taken while I spoke. And I stood there in the shadow of the university that would be levelled in practically the blink of an eye or the shutter of a camera or the trick of a magician and hungover and exhausted and throbbing throbbing throbbing I looked at these snapshots as though I were an oracle receiving a vision of the future and I saw a world overtaken by nature by the wilderness , by heat and light ,,, , and shadows and more heat :— .., and more heat still and emptiness , , and ever-creeping vines and ever-growing thorns, .. and orchards laid to waste and farms bereft of grain and more heat still and the song of the cricket silenced and the water dried up from the dry stone and the orphan swinging his handmade blade , and , and and, and the leopard hungry again and the fire gone cold and the wind giving no relief and then the snapshots showed a world that faded to black. Just like that, from nature to sunlight to wilderness to darkness, and nothing else.

I asked John Booth what this really represented. He said it represented the future. Man was born in the darkness and he will die in the darkness. Not even Bob Dylan will live on in our memory.

As I rushed to my conference sweaty and dehydrated and disoriented, I thought about what John Booth had shown me and what he had told me and I thought again about Australopithecus Afarensis and Homo Habilis. One morning, not so long ago when you really consider it, Australopithecus would have emerged from its cave in the grasslands of the rift after a night of struggle, after a night clawing, after a night of hunger, after another night watching its children starve so that its strongest child could live, after watching the strongest child its greatest hope die anyway in the jaws of the leopard, after a thousand struggles and a thousand triumphs, and watching the sunrise for signs of the weather to come, Australopithecus would have seen Homo Habilis more upright, stronger, smarter, with a steadier gait and a stone blade in his hand. Running, grinning, blood dripping from his blade, the future rushes into the past. What then would have happened, when Homo Habilis came finally for his cousin, hungry, brutal, certain of his destiny?

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry is free, I offer quite unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just message for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

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I went to the river with my little brother to swim and fish and do nothing. This is what we prefer to do together. A little further east along the river is a Civil War battlefield where the vast series of trenches are still visible despite the sassafras and poison ivy having gnawed at the trenches for almost 200 years. Now it is just a small local park, nothing more than a couple paths whacked out of the dense undergrowth. As a kid, running along the trenches and the bluff where Grant once fired his artillery, I felt as though I were exploring the ruins of a forgotten civilization. In such a deep sense of history, where the cycles of rise and fall drown out the more remarkable dramas of a single life, having attained the viewpoint of bygone kings, you get weary of all the noise and hustle and bustle that everyone else seems addicted to. Get a job, play pickleball, go to therapy, develop marketable skills, cut your hair, take hair growth pills, destroy your passions, make the right investments, shave your beard, plan for the future, plan for kids, find a woman, go to France for the pictures in your picture book, wear the right clothes while they’re still in fashion. This point is superficial and cliché and nonetheless applicable, but this sense creeps into other aspects of life, too. Forget the mistakes, the missed opportunities, the grudges. Forget it all. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, names I often heard spoken of like heroes in the still-Southern culture of Virginia, all worked pretty hard for a whole lot of nothing.

Where my brother and I swim is just past a small bridge in the middle of nowhere. Drive 30 minutes north and you’ll only see forest and wheat fields and cow pasture. Drive 30 minutes south and you’ll see the same. You could extend that distance double or triple going east-west and catch a couple small towns, maybe. The water is crystal clear and cold, a rarity for the murky semitropical waters of Virginia, where brain-eating amoebas and snapping turtles often lurk. After thirty minutes of fishing off a half-submerged tree trunk in the middle of the river, we’ve caught between us a sunfish and a blue gill, basically nothing at all, which doesn’t really bother us. We have perfected the art of doing nothing. Our saint is the Big Lebowski. Eventually a group of local teenagers announce their arrival by blasting police sirens from the speakers of their lifted shitboxes. They shuffle to the sketchy rope swing by the riverbank before they notice us. This spot is so far out into the country that it’s mostly a members-only club for rednecks. Anyone else is treated with suspicion. Their beer bottles shimmer in the sunlight through the forest canopy.

They measure us. They are strangely sketched out. I want to offer them a cigarette or weed but I have nothing on me. I remember that my brother’s comically large buck knife is stabbed into the ground where the newcomers are standing. Lounging on the log in the sunlight, my foot in the water, I want to tell them to just chill out and enjoy the river. They still have not said anything and are obviously paranoid when my brother lifts his head from the log and says,

“What’s up! Y’all know Fat Baby?”

One of the newcomers smiles.

“Shit yes, I know Fat Baby. You know him?”

“Yessir.”

“Cool shit.” So saying, the newcomer proceeds to bark and bark and bark, precipitating the others. “Fat Baby rules!”

Grabbing hold of the rope swing, he swings once, twice, from water to shore, before leaping into the water while throwing his beer bottle at a rock in the river, where it shatters. As the newcomers settle in to drinking in and out of the river, I ask my brother about Fat Baby.

According to him, Fat Baby is an overweight 25-year-old super-super-senior and self-proclaimed leader of this particular river spot. At night, he takes a handful of others to drink and set off fireworks and swim. My brother points out a spot under the bridge, where LLMC has been spraypainted. Long Live Matt Cawthorn, my brother says, that’s Fat Baby’s brother, who died here after diving directly into a log while on coke. It was wintertime, my brother told me, and night, and they never found his body. I ask him how they knew the kid’s neck broke. My brother simply shrugged. I don’t know, he said, that’s just what they say.

Why’s he called Fat Baby, I ask my brother.

That’s just what they call him, he says. I mean, he is fat.

I spent three weeks back home, doing nothing more than stuff like this. Drinking by the bonfire until 2 or 3 in the morning, I listened to the cry of the Great Horned Owl and the yip of coyotes. By my teenaged years, I hated this place. I wanted to leave and go someplace big. I spent all my time writing and dreaming of better places, and I missed all the beauty around me.

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The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM for details on any of these offers.

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Read more

I know nothing about art or art history. However, I won’t let that stop me from writing a guide to the D.C. art museums. I will resort to gimmicks, gestures, and vulgarity to discuss some of my favorite paintings across the many art museums in Washington, D.C.

Grab a black iced coffee, plug in your wired headphones, put on some dark sunglasses, and shuffle with me in a depressed stupor to the National Gallery of Art.

ALONE TOGETHER

There are a lot of phonies at any art museum: nervous guys on first dates with nervous girls, annoyed parents tugging along bored children, people scrolling IG reels on their phones while sitting in front of a Rembrandt. People talk too loud, or are distracted, or chase after works by headline artists like Monet, da Vinci, Picasso—inevitably missing most of the good stuff while stressing out over bullshit like crowds and timelines. In the end, they only pause long enough in front of the famous paintings to snap a flick.

But the true art enjoyer should have a very rambunctious reaction to the art object. If you really understood a painting’s subject, you would be crying at the crucifixions, jacking off to the Aphrodites, laughing about the harlequins, ogling over the landscapes, and trying to eat the still-lifes. And yet I don’t do that. I stand and stare, face either blank or only momentarily breached with wonder, joy, confusion. Ultimately, after several hours in an art museum, I start to feel a little alien.

I grouped these paintings together for their very modern sense of alienation. Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques is famous for this reason. Meanwhile, Laurencin’s women in the park have been turned into ghostly aliens, so feminine that they start to look aquatic, maybe even a little disgusting; the dog and the dove at their feet are more like seals; and the background is a drippy, kelplike, drowned terrain. All of this is lacquered over to shine like glass—presenting us with a unique vision of these women at the park while also reminding us of the uncrossable distance between the viewer and the subject. Laurencin’s women are so beautiful and refined and stylish that it is terrifying.

Degas’s Four Dancers is particularly striking. In a dream image, four identical dancers are woven together before an impossible landscape, but, strangely, all four dancers are just uncentered and unfocused, as if they are only just emerging onto the canvas. Or as if they were finally glimpsed while disappearing. Art is like this. You stare at a painting—it is beautiful or sad or striking or strange—and you try to remember this feeling forever. But as soon as you turn around, it already starts to disappear. Life is like this, too.

Ultimately, whether looking at a great work of art or reading a good book or having sex, you start to wonder if you’ve missed out on something—you wonder if there is a great world of beauty and meaning and togetherness somewhere just beyond a curtain that, try as you might, your fumbling blind hands can’t quite get a grip on long enough to pull it down from the rafters and expose the firmament hidden behind it. Are we blinded by the canvas? Or is the canvas the world?

ROSY CRUCIFIXIONS

Countless crucifixions have been painted since that crazy communist, Jesus, got nailed to a cross back in CE 33. You’d think the crucifixions would get old. You’d think there are only so many ways you could paint this scene. But something I love about crucifixions is that they are nonetheless very unique—emphasizing, with often quite subtle changes, vastly different aspects of this image. Grünewald’s Small Crucifixion is similar to his Isenheim Altarpiece. In it, Christ’s bodily suffering is emphasized: his skin is green with rot, his wounds have pus and scabs and blood, his fingers are contorted, his mouth agape in agony. Below, Mary’s face is white with grief. The background is familiar, homey, human—a green forest you might find in Germany.

The Isenheim Altarpiece was painted for a hospital. Grünewald sought to connect the sick and their loved ones with something greater, to give their suffering a noble dimension. Or at least that’s how the story goes. I also like to think that Grünewald sought to humanize Christ and uplift the capacity for honor and sacrifice and toil that all humans have in them, to show that there is maybe a little more holiness in human stench than in clean sheets.

Grünewald humanized his Jesus with a familiar setting, but in the second crucifixion, Christ might as well be on the moon. The rock is gray, the sky has an outer space depth. While this was surely painted in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, it looks strangely like it could have been painted on a NASA mission. In the third painting, the cosmic is emphasized. Saint Jerome and Saint Francis flank Christ. The sun and the moon mirror each other in the sky—like eyes bearing witness to this torment. The image gains the rhythm of a ritual. These two paintings give the crucifixion highly symbolic, alien, and legendary attributes.

In the fourth painting, by Rothko, the crucifixion has become an autopsy. It is untitled, making the body a mysterious John Doe. Its chopped up body parts look like pieces of evidence in a morgue. To understand what is depicted, the viewer must become coroner of Christ: see those marks, there on the dismembered palms and dismembered feet? Those must be the stigmata—I’ve seen this sort of thing before—a Roman punishment, I believe. The legs have become shanks of meat in a slaughterhouse. The Picassoesque face has been treated with the same brutality that Picasso treated his women—it may as well have been flayed from the skull and flattened. Instead of something mighty or mythic or honorable, Rothko paints a butchered Christ. He is a John Doe in a morgue, a victim made anonymous by his anonymous suffering. It reminds the viewer that there are many ways to skin a cat.

CURSED OBJECT: STAG AT ECHO ROCK

When I stumbled upon Stag at Echo Rock at the National Portrait Gallery, I had something of an episode. Its artist is unknown, but the application, composition, and symbols are all masterful, even genius. The paint cracks where the ice cracks in the water. The stag seems to glow. The dark tree limbs create a hieroglyphic, chaotic, illegible jumble that draws the viewer’s gaze to the stag, aided by the central shock of white that represents the snowy path through the forest. The stag stands in the middle of the path, in the way of an oncoming carriage, which you can detect by the two horse heads at the bottom right corner. It is a scene of great tension. The carriage rushes forward, the stag stands rooted in place as if to confront the carriage. Will they collide? What will happen?

But these details are not what I noticed first. Instead, something bothered me. Something is wrong with the stag. I felt it immediately and I can still feel it now. It stands strong with tense, powerful muscles, yet at the same time, it doesn’t look like it’s really standing there. Instead, it floats like it had been projected onto the canvas. Its proportions are off: it’s at least four times as large as the horses; it towers over the path, the bridge, the forest, the painting, and the viewer. Its antlers mirror the tree limbs: they are bare, hieroglyphic, chaotic, illegible. It stands in the way and demands confrontation, yet defies interpretation.

Almost hidden at the periphery of this high drama, there is an owl with haunted eyes, a horse-like squirrel eating a nut, and a jumble of tree limbs in the water. There is a motif of legibility among the limbs, the antlers, and the owl. There is another motif of destruction shared by the horse and the horse-like squirrel: the latter devours the nut, a symbol of the world; the former rushes headlong toward the stag. One half of the forest is dark and the other half is light—adding to this balance of knowledge and destruction, of legibility and illegibility. The path veers with queasy vertigo toward the dark half. Of course the painting must be set in the winter. But stags don’t keep their antlers in the winter.

Stag at Echo Rock has a magic quality. It is deeper than a dream and more spontaneous than a ritual. This painting transfixed me for an hour. Eventually shaking myself from it, I was followed by a strange feeling for the rest of the day. If I had the money, I would buy this painting—although I think it would drive me insane.

APOCALYPSES, REVEALED

Art can give us glimpses of the end times, both in the future and our distant past. The Cosmic Buddha depicts the Buddha wearing a robe decorated with the entire cosmos. While vandals have lopped off his hands and head, the statue feels somehow improved. Its vandalism has given the statue a riddle-like quality. The viewer may wonder what it would take to slip on Buddha’s Cosmic Robe and wear his knowledge. Would it require a great teacher to show you how to wear it? Or would the robe drape over your shoulders in an instant, like a flash of lightning?

The Tandava is a dance that ushers in the end of the world. In this dance, Shiva takes on the form of the Nataraja, or Lord of the Dance. Shiva’s locks burn up the cosmos, the drumbeat thunders its end, his footsteps outline the faults in the earth’s crust, dissolving all form into nothingness. The dinosaurs once ruled the earth, and were killed, apparently, by a ball of flame. An apocalypse is only a revelation, after all.

SELF AND THE SEXUAL BODY

There are certain artists that I sometimes want to claim could only have arrived here from a distant planet, but then reconsider as it would diminish their human toil as an artist. El Greco is a prime example of this. His bodies flicker across the canvas. They have the consistency of putty, the strength of steel, and the shine of mercury—they aren’t real, they could only have been glimpsed by alien eyes. His skies boil. The earth itself, rendered so accurately, is seen with a strange remove. You start to look at everything differently. In Laocoön, the titular priest wrestles in agony—or maybe ecstasy?—with writhing, throbbing, pulsing snakes. One naked son lounges in exhausted satisfaction nearby. The other naked son, isolated by his struggles, stretches the serpent out into an O: the ouroboros, or onanism, or maybe the shape your lips make when you...

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One thing I like about painting is that it can give me a new way to think of myself and the world without having to put things into words. I can’t visualize anything, so my entire perception is captured only in language. But paintings are not language—in fact, discussing them seems to diminish them. This is part of the reason why I think people hate Jackson Pollock, Lee Krassner, Mark Rothko, and Hilma af Klint—their works dive into the illegible and inexpressible, but so many people only ever go to the art museum in groups. Standing before a canvas, they feel a natural social compulsion to define and explain. Confronted with pure image, their interpretive faculties are repulsed. They try to dissect something through language and logic that can only be experienced. They fail at this. Instead of standing in front of these glimpses of pure color and form with mute, but still feeling, wonder, they push the image away, they diminish it, they crack jokes. This is not because they are stupid, but because they refuse to be stupid.

What I like about the work of art in the modern age is that it forces me to reckon with visions of the world that cannot be defined in language. I begin to see the self as something that exists in flashes of color, in brief forms, in lightning flashes of balance. I recognize finally that the self and sexual experience are bound up in awkward disjointed bursts, much like how a glob of toxic oil paint, when applied just right, can look like a nipple, a thigh, a throbbing muscle. And yet there is nothing erotic at all in a canvas, especially not one that has been painted to depict a blackbird flying over snowy hills.

O’Keeffe grew up in my college town of Charlottesville, where her childhood home is now a fraternity satellite. Overlooking the endless darties and games of beer die and formal events, a plaque about O’Keeffe attempts and fails to immortalize her in words.

HAIL, SAINT SEBASTIAN

Raised atheist, I first encountered Saint Sebastian at the age of sixteen, in Salzburg, where a statue of him decorates the church. My parents wanted to push through the crowds, but I was immediately transfixed. I couldn’t really figure out how or why he would get himself in this situation, and yet I found his naked body, bound to the tree and riddled with arrows, very noble and heroic. I realized that I wanted to die a death like that.

The National Gallery of Art has three incredible Saint Sebastians. In Tanzio da Varallo’s, the arrows piercing Sebastian’s skin are translucent, giving them a metaphysical look, especially in combination with the sumptuous layers of cloth and skin surrounding him. His death becomes an apotheosis. Yet, the man plucking the arrow from Sebastian’s skin has an impish look—indeed, he even seems to be teasing Sebastian as he removes the arrow. Sebastian likewise is enraptured with a look that isn’t quite agony—perhaps his ecstasy at becoming a saint? I feel like I’ve been in situations exactly like this, and I’ve never been riddled with arrows.

From the second painting to the third, Sebastian dissolves into an archaic figure. Aspertini’s Sebastian is bound to a marble pillar on a marble plinth on a marble floor. And his skin is just barely too rosy to be marble. The arrows in his body take on preposterous positions, connecting bicep to abdomen, right thigh to left knee. One arrow misses the near foot and pierces only his far foot. The background is pure black—not night, not shadowy, not even a dark wall. He has been martyred in a void. Where da Varallo’s Saint Sebastian is quite human, maybe even a bit vulgar, Aspertini’s Sebastian is wonderful and strange.

In Redon’s Saint Sebastian, the figure has become indistinct. Indeed, his face is starting to fade into the blue sky above. His body is pink and wilts like the flowers around him. The arrows that have pierced him extend very gently, like petals.

Sebastian’s pain takes on a dimension that is no longer pain. He is pierced not by arrows but by inspiration.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

P.S. I wrote this piece as a goodbye to Washington D.C. This city was my first city postgrad. I am leaving now. I will miss the art museums the most.

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry is free, I offer unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

If my stories have given you delight, made you think, or inspired you, please consider a paid subscription to support my work.

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Tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour faire un film, c’est d’une fille et d’un flingue.

(All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun)

— Jean-Luc Godard (apocryphal)

The idea for this movie came about after watching The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser by Herzog. It relates a true story in which a young man appears in the streets having apparently been locked in a cell all his life with no contact with the outside world—making him a blank slate of sorts who must be taught how to live outside the cell walls. Herzog takes a quite humanistic approach to the story, showing the development of a man in a world that is cruel and brutal. However, I discovered online that the real Kaspar Hauser may have ultimately been a trickster, feigning horrible abuse, isolation, and ignorance for unknown reasons. Following this thread, I decided to write a short story about a young man in modern-day D.C. who manipulates a rich family by pretending to have recently emerged from a similar situation as Kaspar Hauser. I wanted to explore the ways that every social interaction requires the taking on and putting on of masks, and how two people can become enslaved to the masks they decide to wear.

However, I wasn’t very happy with this short story. I had ideas, images, and feelings that couldn’t be communicated properly through text. I needed moving images. The problem was that I had no experience in film. Everything would be new to me.

After explaining this to my friend one night in November at the bar, he convinced me to commit to the film. He said it would be hard work but it would be good work. He said I could do it. So I decided to give it a try.

THE LOVERS is a short film I wrote and directed in February. It is about a woman who conducts a satanic ritual to find love but who creates only horror. While it is on one level about the satanic ritual and a woman who is consequently pursued by the demons she unleashed, it is also about the process through which an unfulfilled mind tries to take the short cut to love, acceptance, and happiness through immediate gratification—and how this shortcut backfires.

The opening tarot sequence illustrates this. Inspired by the tarot sequence from Cléo de 5 à 7, I open the story with a disorienting tarot reading between two nebulous characters. The cards are: 9 of Swords, the Lovers, and the Devil. Without belaboring this interpretation too deeply, I must say I was struck by the symmetry between the Lovers and the Devil—in the Lovers, a woman and a man, recalling Adam and Eve by the plants at their sides, form the base of a trinity with an androgynous heavenly figure; in the Devil, a woman and a man form the base of a trinity with an androgynous Baal-like figure, and they are chained to his throne.

With a variety of images throughout the film, I attempt to explore the theme I saw between these tarot cards: how do our desires enslave us? How can the need for social interaction lead one to asocial and self-destructive behavior? How might an intense need for love become transmogrified into an intense hate of self and others?

This was my first attempt at video, and while I had to learn many new skills to get this short film created, the entire process was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. I definitely plan to make some more short films in the future.

I am very thankful for the actors and crew who helped me get this done. Without them, this would have been impossible. I asked them, all friends from very different stages of my life, to devote a whole weekend to work on my short film without pay. We filmed until 2:00 AM three nights in a row (we also drank quite a bit and had a great time of it, but still). My friends selflessly devoted their time and energy to help me complete this project that was driving me crazy.

I am also thankful for Jackson Bierfeldt, who gave me the necessary confidence and advice to get this project off the ground. He was also a great Executive Producer.

Finally, I am thankful for the kind people of Temperance Alley Garden in Washington, D.C. for letting me screen this short film at their venue. I spent two months trying to find a place to screen; everywhere I turned, I was denied either by inhibitive costs or scheduling issues. Finally, I was connected with the people of Temperance Alley Garden, who provided me the space to finally screen this short film before an audience.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry is free, I offer quite unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

If my stories have given you delight, made you think, or inspired you, please consider a paid subscription and supporting my work.

Subscribe now

THE LOVERS will release in full on June 9th, when I will have a screening of the film in D.C. It is 15-minutes long, and stars Jeanne d’Arc as The Girl, no relation, and Harry Lime as The Boy, also no relation. I, Will Diana, no relation, will release the full film on Substack and YouTube after the screening. If you are interested in attending, please email at williamdianaspeaks@gmail.com.

If you like what you see, a paid subscription to my Substack would go a long way toward helping fund my next short film.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

The existence of god was confirmed one morning by an astronomer who looked up at the moons of Jupiter and found the almighty’s throne, ringed with angels, floating in between Ganymede and Europa. God is real and has been watching us this whole time. Casting off his astronomer’s robes, he stepped down from the tower and decided to walk the earth from rim to rim. The astronomer was not a prophet or politician. He merely wanted to observe the world created by god.

The astronomer didn’t travel far before he was confronted by troubling sights. In his own city, he saw children dying of starvation, too poor to afford even crusts of bread. He saw women sold into sex slavery. He saw a horse whipped to death for being unable to pull a heavy load. Concerned, he left the city and found more horror: holy men attacked by dogs, cities laid waste by plague, women and children butchered. The astronomer had studied the stars above to understand the pure beauty of the universe while ignoring the pain on earth.

The astronomer travelled far and wide, seeing the terrible things of the earth. Eventually he reached a foreign land where a rider approached and asked the astronomer the reason for his travels.

I’ve discovered that god is real and as a scientist I’ve decided to investigate what kind of a world god created, the astronomer said.

The rider hefted his spear.

Well, what kind of world is it? the rider said.

I don’t know, the astronomer said.

The rider considered this and nodded, then let him pass with a warning to avoid the temple in the hills where the people practice cannibalism and human sacrifice. The astronomer set out anyway for the temple in the hills.

The astronomer approached the high priestess in the temple and kneeled. He told her that while he had once been a man of science, he had discovered proof of the existence of god among the moons of Jupiter and had consequently devoted himself to studying god. He said that he had even seen god with his own two eyes and thus the reason for this journey is merely to witness the world that god has made. As a scientist, the astronomer explained to the high priestess, it is my duty to carefully study the cosmos.

The high priestess considered this for a moment. She stared down at him from her iron throne and he looked back at her with blank serenity. Finally she called the sexton to her side and ordered the astronomer to be skinned alive.

The high priestess declared a festival and invited all the people up to the temple. An odd puppet awaited in the inner sanctum. Look, the high priestess declared, at the world through the eyes that have seen god.

One by one the people put on the astronomer’s face and looked through the holes where his eyes were, and they saw the world as it truly is. Meanwhile, the temple choir chanted in their low constant throbbing chorus: God is real and he made this world. God is real. The world was made for a reason and everything in it happens for a reason.

It is said that the high priestess skinned the astronomer and hosted the festival for a reason, too. She wanted to teach her people, who she loved dearly, that while the world was made for a reason, learning those reasons may not be worth it. Just look at what happened to the astronomer who tried to peel back the world’s veil and peek at what was hidden from our sight.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Paid subscribers to my account keep my dream alive. While my fiction and poetry is always free, I offer quite unique benefits to my paid subscribers.

The $30 annual subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, a part-fictional, part-real dream journal and catalogue of my struggles, triumphs, and thoughts as I try to live the Art Life. At $2.5 a month, this is cheaper than buying a beer, a coffee, or drugs; it will also directly benefit a young artist.

The $5 monthly subscription gets you access to the Will Diana Weather Report, I will post a short story or poetry collection in your honor, and I will ship you a pair of official Will Diana Jorts. Further, I will grant you a duchy in my ongoing fantasy series posted on notes. Just DM or email me for details on any of these offers.

The $79 Patron of the Arts subscription gets you all of the above benefits, and I will read a piece you have written, provide in-depth feedback, and hop on a call with you to discuss my thoughts.

If my stories have given you delight, made you think, or inspired you, please consider a paid subscription and supporting my work.

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I discovered evil at a gas station in Delaware when I was 14, and I would remember that moment at age 19, when Daphne was playing the cello for me in her tiny apartment before she broke down crying. Daphne was a 29-year-old PhD student from Italy or Austria or Slovenia at the university I attended far away from Delaware—or Italy or Austria or Slovenia for that matter. Her eyes shined like shards of glass; her withdrawn manner reminded me of Monet’s paintings of his wife. She was intelligent and cruel and I thought she was a real woman—and I was attracted to all these things, but I soon found out that she was not really a woman but a child, a girl. And a loner like me.

She was also a renowned cello player. Practicing for me in her apartment, the edge in her eyes clouded with tears as she tried, over and over again, to evoke that sound she could hear only in her heart. She played the song, she started it over. The cello, which looked so beastlike in the semidarkness of the candlelight, swayed and shook and cried as she held it in her arms as if it were a sick dog. She touched it gently with her arched fingers and caressed it with her bow. The flicker of the candle highlighted the long smooth curve of the cello’s hips, so close against Daphne’s bare thighs. Then the song quickened—the cello shivered as Daphne’s fingers turned to probes. The bow commanded her desires from the cello. Decisive and rough, she pushed the cello around, straining to hear that sound, to finally open her heart. Reaching new heights, swelling the room with her song, bursting luscious noise upon luscious noise, the song unfolded and blossomed and moaned, layer on layer, sound on sound, cry on cry, before it finally broke, returning to a bittersweet sigh, nothing more than a murmur that recalled the beginning of the song while secretly hastening its end.

She did not hear the sound. She needed to hear the sound. Daphne played the song again, and then again. I was just happy to be there. She was beautiful and older and therefore had to be wiser; I thought she might know some secret that would help me solve my own issues. I drank her expensive wine and listened, but to Daphne I was no longer in the room. The room no longer existed. Only the sound in her heart existed now. She played the song again. A tear flashed and stained the carpet. She played the song again. More tears followed. I’m sorry, I can’t get it right, she said. Her head was bowed, her blonde hair hung low to the floor in a melting halo. Her chest heaved just once or twice as she wiped her face, in a single motion, with the back of the hand which held the bow. Like a cat.

Then she just stood and disappeared into her room without a word. I could hear her sobs through the door, but I knew better than to do anything. 15 minutes later, she pounced on me, all smiles now, but silent. She didn’t need to speak. I certainly didn’t need to speak. I’d learned that words just mess everything up, anyway.

I met her in the stacks, which I had taken to wandering my freshman year because I felt a deep sense of calm among those ancient books. Clouds of dust stormed into the air whenever I opened those books. I loved to watch the motes of dust fairy-twirl and dance in the air. They had been trapped for years within these alphabets and finally freed. I thought somehow the world’s magic was trapped inside those books and that the dust was this magic escaping.

In one of those books I read about a certain Roman gravesite where a giant warrior had been buried. The villagers, apparently long terrorized by this warrior, had driven a dozen bent nails into his corpse before layering lime and brick over his grave. These ritual acts were meant to magically bind his body to the earth, preventing his resurrection.

Could it be the same case with these books? Looking at them closely enough, the black letters of the alphabet were bent like bent nails, the hardback covers were coffin lids, and their soft white pages were nothing more than dead flesh. A single book contained so many hexes. What were we trying to trap in these books? Up and down the stacks, the books were lined like cemetery rows. What could be so terrible that we needed a graveyard as large as a city to trap it?

Exhausted, terrified, alone, I spent my freshman year writing and reading. I knew no other way to be happy than to write. There was something inside me that I thought I could evoke if only I knew the right words. And if I could evoke it, I could finally be understood by the crowds of people who confused, alienated, and scared me. If only I could evoke that feeling in words. Daphne, like me, wanted to evoke something that had been trapped inside of her. This sound, this feeling, this meaning was essential to her, but it was foreign to everyone else. For this she was condemned. Like me, she was obsessed with burglarizing her own heart in order to hold up before the crowds her own gorey, pulsing, shivering lifeblood. Without legs, we try to jump to the stars; without arms, we reach for the moon.

Later, in California, with Cléo by my side, I remembered Delaware again. I had taken to wandering about, and ended up in California. California is an Eden colonized by the only idiots foolish enough to wander across the deserts of America and breach this paradise on the edge of the world. Shuffling westward for a thousand generations, looping the same cursed circuits, these idiots were finally confronted with the setting sun, California—their paradise, their desire, their doom.

And they found nothing better to do with this kingdom of heaven than to bring about the apocalypse, much like me when I spent a sundrenched summer among the redwoods of far northern California, where 40-foot waves crashed against the cliffs, where I explored this alien land with Cléo by my side, who was so charming when she yawned with her long thin fingers over her mouth, who would shake off her clothes and lounge naked in the house, who could fill an entire day and night with me in conversation, and who I couldn’t love anyway. (Something in me just broke—and now, try as I might, I cannot bring back that time, that feeling, her warmth. I created my own apocalypse.)

Cain and the children of Cain live in California—those cursed by an ancient sin to forever toil across the rocky wastes outside city walls.

Northern California inevitably reminded me of Maine in the same way that Cléo reminded me of Mimi. Cléo, who grew up in France, was from Connecticut, or maybe Massachusetts, and Mimi, who grew up in Denmark, was from New Jersey, I think. The north was the problem between all of this. True wanderers get nervous going north. It is the last frontier before passing into the unknown country. The north, in a 90 degree rotation of medieval mappa mundi, represents both Eden and Apocalypse. Every wanderer sticks by nature to an east-west circuit around the globe because the north is always the end. As a rule, I never go north. Mimi was once my north.

We spent one summer together in Bar Harbor, Maine, where her family had a vacation home and where she thought the sea air and blueberry pancakes would be good for my writing. By the time we left together for the far north, I’d only known her for three weeks. She had fully enchanted me.

While she sunbathed, I liked to explore the tidepools along the expanses of exposed rock. Entire planets were trapped in these tiny spaces for me to contemplate. If I was lucky I’d find starfish and sea urchins and fish and crabs. The secrets of the ocean depths seemed to hold in them the answer I’d been seeking all my life. Lost in thought one sunny afternoon as I tried to decipher the meanings hidden in the tidepools, I didn’t even notice the surf begin to crash around me. I was so close to finally understanding that feeling deep in my heart, that feeling twinned before me in the tidepools, when I felt the water rush around my ankles. I looked up. Mimi was asleep on the shore, a book balanced on her face. The water stampeded between us, crossing several yards in just a moment, dragging distance upon distance. Now the surf was at my shins and I laughed as I splashed forward to safety, to Mimi. I stopped laughing by the time the water got to my hips, and some time after that I was swept from my feet by the waves. I almost drowned in that crashing surf as I tried to return to Mimi.

That is what I remember about Maine and Mimi. Her huge blue eyes held the cosmos for me to consider. Her tears were like the tidepools that sheltered so many distant worlds, so many alternate lives. But when I stuck around too long looking at the universes in her eyes, I was nearly drowned again. Here was an Eden I could gesture towards, but which I learned to never approach. She was a beautiful woman whose dangers could only batter my heart.

When I was 14 I went on a road trip with Vivian. She was a Junior at my high school with sad gray eyes and high cheekbones and blonde hair that called to mind old world choral chants and courts of lace and mysterious treasures. A cheap psychologist would probably say I learned my love for European women from Vivian, who despite her appearances was about as apple pie American as the state of Virginia, where we grew up.

We pretended it was a road trip but it wasn’t really a road trip. Vivian was trying to escape her past—something about her dad, her uncle, and one of her teachers—and escape Virginia too, with all its beautiful bloodsoaked hills. I just tagged along for the ride.

We made our escape, cutting north from Virginia toward New York where she thought she could make a living. Eventually we stopped at a gas station in Delaware. It was the one and only time I’ve ever set foot in Delaware. Vivian asked me to fetch her a cherry coke while she filled up the gas. Being 14, I didn’t really have the money for cherry cokes at every gas station we stopped at, but I didn’t exactly complain when Vivian asked for something.

This part of Delaware was a thin coastal plain that seemed it would be reconquered by the ocean anytime soon. It was a little after midnight and the interstate in the distance still roared with traffic, Babylon’s own triumphal stampede. On the far horizon, the lights of Philadelphia or Wilmington or maybe even Rome glowered. All else was darkness. The wind picked up the sweet scent of the ocherdark alfalfa fields and mixed it with motor oil and tire rubber from the distant highway. The low-hanging clouds, rushing overhead, were dark too. I might as well have been on a stage, confined to the measurable space of a theater.

Even just standing a few paces from the car, I felt drained. What was I doing here? Why? My memories evaded me, any detail had been erased. I was alone. My heart started to pound.

The gas station shined white in the middle of the darkness. An epiphany. I approached. Heaps of trash lined the edge of the parking lot as if the split tires, crushed beer cans, cigarette stubs, and shopping carts had been deposited here by the flood. As I walked past, a cat stood up. It didn’t run away or try to hide. It just receded into the darkness like it had never existed, like reality had reclaimed a loose image.

Inside, the gas station was almost empty. An attendant was picking his nose behind the counter and reading a book. To the side, in a windowless corner by the drinks, was a beautiful woman in a long black dress. She was playing a “skill-based” slot machine—one of those legal loopholes that exist only at the most grimey gas stations. At the feet of the low stool upon which she sat, six soda cans were crumpled. The woman spun the slots, failed, spun the slots again. As I walked beside her to grab the drinks, I inspected her face. She was stunning and wearing a full face of makeup and her eyes were completely dead. Face blank, she spun the slots again. No one else was here. There was no other building or sign of human comfort near this gas station. It was alone in a field by the ocean. She spun the slots again and lost again.

Finally she stood. I couldn’t remember how long I had been watching. A smile cauterized her face as she glanced at me, then she turned and walked out the side door. She disappeared into the darkness beyond.

“What’s the deal with the well-dressed woman playing the slots?” I asked the attendant as I paid for my cherry coke.

When he looked at me, he was still picking his nose.

“Why’s it matter to you?”

“I was just curious.”

“Why the fuck does it matter to you, creep.”

“It doesn’t matter, relax.”

“She’s just playing the fucking slots. Get lost kid.”

I grabbed the soda and turned. Hesitating, I couldn’t stop myself and left through the side door to see where the well-dressed woman had gone.

In the darkness, it took me a moment to spot her. Everything was indistinct: fields, distant cars, the city haze, the darkness, the trash blowing back and forth with the shifting winds. There she was, squatting in the trash heaps, pissing on the asphalt. I turned in disgust to look away, but couldn’t stop myself from looking at the same time. When she finished, she pulled her panties back up and smiled blankly at me.

“I think today is going to be my lucky day,” she said as she walked past me, back toward the gas station.

“What?”

“Today is going to be my lucky day.”

Without waiting for my response, she walked back into the gas station. Through the glass doors, I could see her shuffle to the slot machine, sit down at the stool, and spin again. The attendant was still picking his nose.

When I got back into the car with Vivian, I couldn’t explain what I had seen or why I looked so pale. I just told her to drive, and trying to put this memory behind me I wondered what exactly would await us in distant New York—would we finally be happy there? Would everything finally work out? Would that day be our lucky day?

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Thank you and for feedback on an early draft of this story. Your advice was incredibly helpful!

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On my walk, I watched the crowds of people outside the inhospitable bars of Dupont Circle, those types of bars that are always packed shoulder-to-shoulder, where the songs are always schizophrenic remixes of 2010s pop hits, never lingering on a track for longer than a minute. Here, the people are glassy-eyed, clean-skinned, moderately athletic recent state school graduates with defense jobs—the few of them who dared to brave the mean streets of D.C. from their much more comfortable neighborhoods of Arlington. And yet they only go to the same exact sort of bar they frequent in Arlington with the same sort of people. They circle the same orbits, endlessly.

These people even seemed happy. What did they know that I didn’t? Lately, I’ve been nostalgic for a time in my life that never really existed, a time like this one that played before me, which was right there in front of me but just beyond my grasp. The people were drunk and laughing and going about on their various missions, fulfilling their various desires, sweating and smiling and happy.

I kept walking.

I watched an ambulance glide past the slow sloughs of late night traffic.

I watched a duck make an interminable transit up the creek in the park, floating with impossible softness through the shining black water. Where would it go? What was it searching for at the distant end of the creek at this hour of the night?

I pissed in the bushes, still drunk.

I knocked on a friend’s door in a nearby neighborhood, and we smoked cigarettes on her stoop and ate pizza.

The walk didn’t help much. By the time I got back, it was late and I was somehow still drunk. Finally, I just fell asleep on the couch.

I dreamed I was in a beautiful hotel. People were partying and swimming in the ocean just beyond the massive clean windows. The air outside was heavy with light and shadow, like the air before a storm. I watched the women. Their arms and legs were the end product of a thousand years of science, like the perfect wing of a stealth bomber. Their arms knifed through the waves, their legs propelled them through the surf. They leapt from the shore rocks and pulled their bodies into a single point, diving. Their laughter mixed with the sea foam. The men were huge and gleaming, like men projected onto a screen.

Everything inside the hotel was clean, everything shined with a coffee-scented glow.

I was looking for someone in the hotel. I can’t remember what I needed from her, but it was apparently very important. I walked the long corridors searching. For just a brief moment, I glimpsed a figure ahead. It was her. She descended a set of stairs.

Who was she?

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I started my Substack account in late June 2025 essentially on a whim. At a party I was talking to someone I knew in college who brought up an email newsletter I ran for a literary club. At my helm, I turned the newsletter from a boring infodump into a weekly experiment in bizarre, absurd fiction and jokes. For a while, I often met people at college parties who knew me as “the email guy.” Now, at a party a year after graduating, I was reminded of this period again. The girl I was talking to told me I should start a Substack. No, I said, I’m annoying and pretentious, but I’m not that annoying and pretentious.

The next day, I started a Substack account.

It took me a little while to find my groove. I started with short essays on books I was reading, and short stories I wrote as practice for another novel I was working on. Pretty soon however, I found a niche I really enjoyed—bizzare, absurd fictions often featuring a wandering, “Dianesque” narrator. I then settled on posting once every two weeks, and have mostly stuck to that.

In less than a year, I’ve amassed quite a number of short stories, poems, translations, and essays. I’ve also written for a handful of other publications. In the space below, I’ll present a brief summary of some of my best works.

Any reader interested in my work should use this article as a guide.

Drinking Hallucinogenic Wine at the World’s Edge

I’ve been working toward a fiction mode that involves travel, memory, and a sense of being lost, and this story is a great example of this mode. To disorient any sense of place, I set this one in an unnamed Central American country, but I sprinkled it with a series of “travel pictures” from a variety of other places—Morocco, California, France, North Carolina—and edited the pictures to be so blurry and indistinct that they really appear like dream images.

This story also combines the comic with the tragic. Near the center of the plot, a local delicacy called Adolf Hitler Ice Cream is introduced, mixing the absurd with the terrible.

Monitoring the Monitoring

I was sent by the editors of The New Critic to investigate the Polymarket pop-up bar in D.C., which turned out, as expected, to be quite lame—but this didn’t stop me from getting ridiculously drunk and having a blast. Festooned in jagged jorts with PEACE AND LOVE written in sharpie on the hem, and a signed Kate Bollinger shirt, and sandals, I faithfully got right to the heart of the issue with this piece of investigative reporting.

The New Critic

Monitoring the Monitoring

THE NEW CRITIC…

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5 months ago · 79 likes · 14 comments · Will Diana

Experience is Psychosis

This piece for The New Critic is a truly insane story that uses an experience I had in covid—catching covid as a college freshman, being sent to isolate with eight feral frat guys at a college dorm—to investigate both how the pandemic operated on a psychic level, as well as how experience can and cannot be recalled through art and memory.

The New Critic

Experience Is Psychosis

THE NEW CRITIC…

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7 months ago · 66 likes · Will Diana and The New Critic

Insomnia, Morocco

This was my first short story that earned attention from writers I respect on Substack, which is funny because I had originally considered not posting it. This story features a 1,500 word opening sentence that comprises the bulk of the action. I didn’t originally set out to write such a long sentence, but I found that this restless energy really captured the feeling of insomnia quite well.

Wandering the Shenandoah Woods

For Romanticon, I wrote Wandering the Shenandoah Woods. This is another piece which I am particularly proud of. I use a sublime, Romantic setting (the Shenandoah woods of my childhood) to elaborate a Gothic revelation—and to expand upon my own conception of the universe. Here, a Dianesque narrator is exploring the woods as a child when he is confronted with a terrible sight that he is forced to reckon with, years later, while walking the streets of a city as an adult.

Romanticon

Wandering the Shenandoah Woods

When I was a young child I was very lonely and, having nothing better to do nor friends to play with, I would, by the age of 11, wander the woods outside my house with a .22 on my shoulder and a tomahawk hanging from my belt, the consolation for my loneliness being a vast woodland that I could e…

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10 months ago · 44 likes · 6 comments · Romanticon and Will Diana

One-Shotted by the Sphinx

This is a murder mystery about AI babble and AI psychosis. It breaks down halfway through the story into a symbolic jargon that represents the psychic journey that transforms a wife into a killer of her own husband. Then, a pair of bumbling cops are confronted with this babble after the murder, and ultimately dismiss the evidence. This story accomplishes quite a lot in a very short space, and touches on broader themes in my writing regarding the inherently mysterious, confusing, and dangerous nature of the universe—and what happens to our attempts to probe deeper into this confusion.

A Guide to Washington, D.C.

This is about a narrator wandering through an unnamed, generic city and providing observations on things like the animals in the zoo, the metro system, and the art museum. Everything he sees reminds him of the potential his nation once had, about a glorious future that never arrived—forcing him to reckon with the difference between the grand, monumental city that could have been, and the authoritarian, poor, and idiotic city that he has inherited. He grapples with the values he has been raised to respect and how they are no longer upheld in any way by the present.

How a Polymarket Addiction Inspired me to Become a Warlord

This is an absurd, Pynchonian tale about the impossibly named Trevor Wellington McGuinness who trades on Polymarket using insider information overheard after hooking up with his hot CIA situationship. Eventually, because of his seemingly spotless record in predicting the future, he is recruited by another CIA officer for a ridiculous mission into the Amazon.

Translating Rimbaud I

This is the first installation in a series of translations I am working through of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. However, I complicate the translation with each installation by using a long preamble to discuss my own relationship to the text and translation. This one features a rather infamous anecdote about a childhood friend of mine who resembles Rimbaud. The next translation, Translating Rimbaud XIII features nothing from the enfant terrible.

Kafka, Sangria, the Atom Bomb

This is a fun, sangria-drenched murder mystery where an upcoming college graduate is driven to insanity by the rituals of graduation and coming-of-age.

Winter Poems, Oblivion Poems

This is a set of five poems, four of which are italian sonnets. They primarily deal with inspiration, beauty, and revelation.

The Gospel of Diana

Again for Romanticon, I wrote a very bizarre, fun piece about mythic oracles in the Virginia woods, about a secret cult of writers, and a river nymph, all as a frame story to introduce the Kingdom of Diana, which is a long, ongoing fantasy kingdom that I am writing over Substack notes for paid subscribers.

Romanticon

The Gospel of Diana

“Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world…

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5 months ago · 55 likes · 11 comments · Romanticon and Will Diana

Finding a Scene Among the Corporate and the Damned

This piece for The New Critic features my monthly POETRY BACCHANAL, which is when I assemble my friends to get ridiculously drunk on absinthe and recite poetry. In this piece, I talk about why I decided to do this, how I came up with the idea, and how the first event went.

The New Critic

Finding a Scene among the Corporate and the Damned

THE NEW CRITIC…

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9 months ago · 64 likes · 6 comments · Will Diana

In the Beak of the Heron

The first piece I wrote for money on Substack, this story is about a strange revelation I made while walking endlessly around my college campus during the covid pandemic. A lonely, sad, and angsty 18-year-old Will Diana encounters a horrible sight, and a slightly more mature 23-year-old Will Diana plumbs this experience for meaning.

The New Critic

In the Beak of the Heron

THE NEW CRITIC…

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a year ago · 29 likes · 9 comments · Will Diana

i.
There is much beauty in this world,
there is much beauty in this world —
but why do August evenings
always melt into night,
and why
can’t the 10-point buck
enter the narrow doors
of the ark?
Yes, there is much beauty in this world —
and yet…
 
ii.
A bus rolls by to the beat of jazz
it stops — apostasy — and creaks past; 
the air is warm, the rain whispers,
two squirrels — hunched together
build their nest.
 
iii.
Worms take the sidewalk in ecstasy
while waters drown the earth—
the worms squirm and scale and scream
and in the end
they’re coaxed
to crushing sidewalks —
but at least they had their
ecstasy.
 
iv. 
The shadow of the Parthenon
looms over the town;
in its umbra, a racoon
digs for buried treasure.
 
v. 
Two birds sing
across indigo gloom —
but a light in the window goes on
and the tune echoes
down the road.
 
vi.
The moon is dismembered
on a roadside puddle;
between the moon and its image
buzzes a cloud of gnats in heat.
 
vii. 
The moon can’t catch the sun; 
the clouds roll through the sky; 
a flung beer bottle
rises, catches the starlight, 
and shatters the silence of the night.
 
viii.
Yet the moon and the sun are
yoked together by unphysical rope:
an ox dies in the field
while Ganymede dances
under Zeus’s throne;
seven geese
in V formation
fly home;
eleven bombers en echelon
drop their payload;
the sages stand in
unwarm fire, forever
wordless and inspired;
or,
the way the dog’s howl
lingers long after
the siren has gone
silent.
 
ix.
A crane’s reflection —
what does he see? his beaks
merge and produce two fish.
 
x.
Shedding his antlers,
the buck slowly
enters the ark.
 
xi.
There is much beauty in this world,
there is much beauty in this world —
the way August evenings melt into night,
the way the autumn moon chases the sun,
and the silence after the third snowfall.
Ares rises in the sky;
a voice stretches down the street
and is heard no more.
 
xii.
That is no country for the young:
those sages sing of ancient things:
crumbled columns, Roman kings,
while growing old, the fresh and fowl
await a dreamy Byzantium:
it dulls the edge of ecstasies,
the flesh, it sits, patiently;
I think I must just sail on, the world
of dreams awakes the world
of dreams. I sleep: I see: I’m there...
  
xiii.
I was told that when he died,
the great poet Copernicus voiced
perfect noise, unbound by words,
a metered sound of happiness.
The best poetry is pure noise
and understanding, and he
perfected it. All felt his song —
they knew its worth — and still, 
he stopped his singing 
to speak.  
 
Therefore, he said after a century
of a pure noise had finally ended,
it’s beautiful not that the bird sings
but that you ever heard it.

I wrote this poem when I was 19. I had recently gotten into haiku, especially those of Kobayashi Issa and Matsuo Basho. I think Issa’s humor and Basho’s balance both show in this poem. While I wrote it when I was young, I think it still stands strong today, and decided to post it here.

Another major inspiration for this poem was The Last Words of Copernicus by the United Sacred Harp Convention. This is an old folk song performed, without any words, by a choir. It is a song of pure noise, pure harmony, pure rhythm. I love it! More than any song, more than Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, more than Mozart’s Requiem, more than Geese’s Cobra, this song has had the greatest direct impact on my writing.

I discovered this song by chance when I was a college freshman, browsing the library of the University of Virginia, which seemed to me the greatest source of wealth in the whole world. It felt as if I had been struck by lightning!

After discovering this song, I listened to it on repeat constantly. I would lay crying on the floor of my dorm with this song looping for an entire hour. Here was a song that transcended language and coursed through the heart. This chorus had unlocked the pure meaning of noise. This was the ultimate poetry, which we all grasp for in words and concepts and cries of despair, but fail to achieve. Like everyone else, my whole life has been cursed to loneliness and an inability to understand others, but this song somehow made this grief go away, however briefly.

Soon after discovering that song, I wrote a variation of this poem with a different title, and which would later become my own The Last Words of Copernicus. Over the next year, I played with it, presented it, changed it around, and it finally took on this form.

Besides the Haiku of Kobayashi Issa and that song, I was also inspired to some degree by Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which was in its own way also inspired by haiku. Stevens’ poem shows up most obviously in the structure of thirteen points that my poem borrows. A polymath senior at UVA had taken me under his wing during the spring of my freshman year, and he was the one who put me onto Stevens.

This poem has many strong influences, and as I often do with my influences, I point directly to them. This was, in one way, an experiment in learning how to steal from other writers and repurpose their glorious ancient relics for my own work. Often, I think the writer’s closest analogue is the tomb raider. We dive down into the ancient dusty monuments at great danger to ourselves, steal whatever we can find that glistens, and make out like bandits into the night.

For this poem, I decided to give it a cosmic dimension—Copernicus the astronomer/poet, Ganymede, Ares, and a focus on astronomical bodies. This is a theme I have been returning to a lot recently. What meanings do we carry in our hearts? What meanings transcend us? How can we reconcile the difference between what we hold dear inside of us, and what is meaningful on a scope beyond us? I’m not sure. Copernicus dies and turns to dust. The stars spin forever away from us. Our words echo meaninglessly off mute walls, and then are heard no more. Only in brief moments of sunshine, of noise, of happiness, can we glimpse something better.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Note from Diana: this poem is posted in honor of , who recently bought a paid subscription to my Substack. With the help of patrons like Priya, I will one day be able to spend all my time writing. A paid subscription also gets you a territory in my ongoing fantasy kingdom, and I will post a short story or poem in your honor too.

What are you doing here? You have a feeling that you are to explore a recently discovered cave system on Ganymede for reasons that are not apparent to you, nor to the writer. With you are two youths, wide-eyed, chattering, expendable. Perhaps you work for the Ganymede Mining Company to map a new vein of silver, or perhaps you are childhood friends on a weekend adventure together—but whatever the reason, you’re numb to whatever led you here. You’re only going through the motions: after these hundred centuries of humanity’s terrible progress into the stars, you find that you feel a little empty, uninspired, and soulless, like one of those robots that have become so popular.

You lead the way into the caves. The cave system is a series of narrow tunnels, catacombesque, uterine, dark. You descend through fleshcolored layers of earth: black, brown, red, yellow, tan, white. The tunnels are so narrow that you must crawl through on your belly. Among the three of you there is only one flashlight and you must stop frequently to pass the flashlight backwards so that the other two can gape like idiot monkeys at the rock formations that have existed here for millennia. It’s not like the rocks are going away. You have no patience for this kind of stuff. As the flashlight lingers behind with the other two, you are left in total darkness, prone in the narrow tunnel. You start to panic for no reason.

Seeing an open space ahead in the darkness, you wiggle forward. You push yourself into the open space and then, losing all control, fall into the darkness in the hole in the cave on Ganymede, moon of Jupiter...

You find that you’ve fallen into a darkened museum gallery, although you don’t have the bruises and scrapes to prove it. Illuminated only by the faintest glow of pilot lights, museum exhibits line the walls. Except for a couple of small mining operations, Ganymede has been entirely uninhabited by man, so you are curious what a museum is doing here, so far underground on this empty moon. You look at the closest exhibit.

The description is written in a language you have never seen before. Its jagged glyphs are almost like they were ripped into the flesh of a living creature. They spiral outwards, scarlike, incomprehensible. You look closer at what is exhibited: a strange depiction of a massive, cloudlike beast supported by dozens of tentacles, which has ripped the skull from a different alien and is dangling the severed head over its open jaws. In the exhibit nearby, the tentacled cloudlike beast, which you realize looks vaguely similar to the depiction of god in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, or indeed, after you consider it further, not unlike a human brain, is standing on a ziggurat, holding aloft a brain to the stars.

The other exhibits are similar. You realize that they depict a pattern: the aliens arrive on a foreign planet, subjugate the people, and devour their brains in a ritualized conquest of intelligence itself. Looking up and down the hallway, you double check that the museum is deserted. Unnerved, you walk slowly down the galleries.

What could it mean? These aliens have not been encountered before, and based on the endless conquests depicted in the galleries, it seems like it would be better for humanity if they were never encountered. Moreover, you realize it would certainly be better for you if you never meet them. You have dreams and desires of your own. You want to turn around and get out of here, you want to escape this terrible death that potentially awaits, and yet you keep walking further and further into the museum, driven by a terrible urge to keep going into your own horrifying destruction.

As you walk, you approach the end of the gallery, where there is a vast, lighted space. Perhaps there is an exit. You walk across a mezzanine but stop when you look down into the chamber directly below. In the chamber, two of the aliens appear to be in conversation with one another. They are huge and pink and seem to float on their numberless tentacles. Their eyes are yellow, hateful, cruel. Oddly enough, you know the feelings in those eyes: you’ve seen them before. Those eyes are not unlike the eyes of pigs, the eyes of people you’ve met before, even the eyes you see sometimes in the mirror, late at night or early in the morning, when everyone else is asleep. You know that if they find you, they will submit you to a painful death.

You hide behind a pillar, panicked, but still observing them. To your horror, a man and his toddler appear from the other side of the mezzanine. You are not exactly sure where they came from, or what they are doing deep under the surface of Ganymede. The man doesn’t see the aliens far below. You motion to him, but when he suddenly realizes the danger, his child is far ahead down the stairs. His child starts babbling gah gahhhh! bababuh geeeeee, while the man tries to stop him. It is too late. You watch as the aliens below scuttle forward and snatch the toddler with their tentacles. Now the baby is screaming. He is facing you the whole time as they carry him into the recesses of the chamber. You watch him scream.

The father does nothing. You do nothing. The baby screams for help. In these last short moments of life, the baby ages rapidly by its awful inspiration, which is the knowledge of the unbearable torture he will be made to suffer, the knowledge of his own death. With the face of a teenager, and then a man with a beard, and then an elderly man, he beckons to you for help, still screaming. Somewhere early along the transformation, you realize that the baby looks strangely like you.

You watch them drag the baby into the darkness, where he will suffer agonies that you cannot begin to comprehend. And after the door closes and the screaming has ceased to echo on the walls, you look at the father with a terrible sense of shame, a feeling that you don’t know you will ever overcome. What can you do to atone for this? You’ve just done nothing while you witnessed an innocent baby be dragged off to a terrible death, a death you feel may have been meant for you, by the hands of creatures that you feel may not be so unlike you. You’ve done nothing good, and you can do nothing now. The year is 3026 and you are on Ganymede, the moon of Jupiter. How many have died unbearable deaths and how many apocalypses have been suffered for you to get here, only for you to do nothing as you to feel this shame, the horror of millions of bones beneath your feet, rattling and screaming? What planets, races, countries, cities, groups, or friends have you conquered too, or let be conquered, just to stand here and do nothing again, as you’ve always done? When will the destruction stop? When will you do something?

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Note from Diana: the art from this story was created by Ethan Stiles. About him: Ethan Stiles—a semi-washed-up-but-working-on-it artist based in Richmond, Virginia working in a variety of media, namely physical digital illustration, graphic design, and photography. Ethan is trying to make more art again and WILL SUCCEED IN THE NAME OF WILLIAM DIANA GLORY TO THE KINGDOM OF WILLIAM DIANA. His words.

Note from Diana: this short story is posted in honor of , who recently bought a paid subscription to my account. If you liked my story, you should consider getting a paid subscription too. You will gain access to the Will Diana Weather Report, which is much stranger and more personal. I will also post a short story or poem in your honor. Other perks include: a duchy in the Kingdom of Diana, and a pair of jorts designed by me. It’s a crazy deal, when you consider it.

I first created these jorts a couple weeks ago, when I was super hungover but about to leave for the Polymarket pop-up bar to write a piece for The New Critic. Because I wanted to distinguish myself from the khakis and polos at the bar—I’m a writer, a freak, and irrationalist—I decided to cut up a pair of jagged jorts and sharpie PEACE AND LOVE all over them. Further, I had an orange paracord belt because my other belt had broken mysterious during a nap, and I had been too lazy to go get a new belt.

Watch this video to hear me talk about the ideas that I’m working through for my next writing projects. I also explain some of the thought process behind my most recent paintings. Thank you to everyone who tuned in live.

If you get a paid subscription to my substack, I will create jorts and send them to you. You will also get a duchy in my fantasy kingdom, the Kingdom of Diana. Further, I will also post a short story or poetry collection in your honor. It’s a crazy deal for $5/mo. Because I will one day have 8.2 billion paid subscribers after my Ultimate Plan has been unleashed, you can get in on the ground floor of the upcoming Will Diana World Domination. This will pay massive dividends for you in the future.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

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Eventually we stopped to investigate. The mysterious alcohol was lined up directly under the sun in lime green liter bottles that still had the ectoplasm of plastic ribbons where the labels, which probably once read SPRITE or 7-UP, had been ripped off. The liquor inside was foggy, writhing, a little spermy. We asked the woman behind the stand about it. Vinodebella, or vino de belladona, is made from the highly toxic belladonna plant that grows everywhere in the barren Pacific hills of that region, introduced centuries ago by a strange Spanish cult that, it is said, practiced witchcraft and cannibalism. Even just a nibble of its leaves or a bite of its berries can kill a grown man, but this belladonna wine has been brewed and drank safely by the people of that region for centuries. We asked the woman if we could try some. Immediately, she cautioned us.

Vinodebella, she said, is not a thing to be trifled with. She spoke in a Spanish dialect that sounded as if it had existed long before Columbus, like it had been carved into those stone glyphs that riddled the forests of the country. A peculiar aspect of its chemistry, she said, means that vinodebella is highly hallucinogenic, stronger indeed than the absinthes made famous by 19^th century poets, and further, it gets you high twice: once when you drink it, and the second time when you wake up and stumble outside the next afternoon (because when drinking vinodebella, one never wakes up before the afternoon). Walking hungover into the sun, a special enzyme particular to the drink breaks down under the daylight and gets you high again. Nothing is comparable to vinodebella, she said with an awful gleam in her eyes, even just the first high is strange enough for a lifetime; the second time, in the daylight, is too strange even for this strange world. Men go crazy and run off into the distant jungles. Woman plunge themselves into the icy pacific. It is a terrible drink. It is no good. I would recommend, she said, that you do not drink it. You look like nice American boys, you have parents who love you, you have money and jobs and an education. Do not drink this vinodebella.

We bought three bottles, one for each of us. At 100 pesos each, we were practically losing money if we didn’t buy some. Then we drove off. I watched her face disappear through the cloud of dust we raised. Her expression was inscrutable.

#

It was dark by the time we arrived in the town. It looked like the other places where we’d stayed: unpaved roads, no street lights, and small squat houses. But the town was at the end of a needle-sharp peninsula that stabbed into the ocean. It felt like we were on an island lost in the evil Pacific.

Our place was right on the beach. Before drinking the vinodebella, we decided we would take a walk along the beach up to the town and have dinner. The night was warm, the weather was clear, and the beach, with its hundred yards of sand stretching to the horizon in both directions, was empty. We didn’t pass a single other soul on the entire beach walk.

As we walked, I noticed a form squirming in the darkness and turned on the flashlight. It was hard to understand what we were seeing under its beam. A pile of sand? Why was it moving with so many tiny jitters? Then, dozens of crabs dispersed in their odd, sidestepping manner, scattering as if by magnetic force back into the darkness. There on the sand was a triplet of dead kittens which the crabs were devouring. A few crabs, blind to fear by their awful gluttony, still crawled over the bodies of the kittens. Their claws cut into the soft flesh, their jaws gnashed beetlelike on fur and bone and blood. The three kittens laid motionless on the sand, rotting under the tropic moon.

I swept the beam across the beach. The sands skittered with thousands of crabs, alive and dead. The live ones were eating the dead. The dead ones sat watching through empty sockets, witnessing it all.

#

The town, previously a hazy glow on the horizon, emerged out of the darkness. It loomed over the end of the peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the water.

The town must have at one point been a tourist destination. We passed an empty carousel, still brightly lit and playing carnival tunes. There were huge restaurants with glossy menus posted by the windows proudly displaying dozens of different dishes in typical tourist excess. There were stores to buy swim trunks, sunscreen, surfboards. Strangely, there were at least twenty ice cream shops in just a few blocks, far too many ice cream shops for even a booming tourist town—which this place clearly wasn’t anymore. Despite the bright lights and big shops, the town was empty except for a few vacationing families walking in close ranks up and down the street, their conversations muted.

A couple months later, talking about this town, we researched it deeper online. We discovered on Spanish-language media that the town had been in the process of spiraling into chaos and violence, not unlike the rest of the world. Only a week before we arrived, the mayor’s severed head had been found in a dumpster. In the previous months, an encyclopedia of violence had been committed. Journalists with their genitals, face, and ears mutilated, were found hanging in the street. Dozens of men had died brutal deaths. Women were raped and tortured and dismembered, their bodies left anonymously in dumpsters, trash heaps, and the street. There had even been a crucifixion. The town itself, the very road we walked on, was a graveyard of incomprehensible violence. We were walking on bones.

We ate fish soup and drank beers by the waterfront and watched the waves through the windows. A handful of other people were in this restaurant, which is why we picked it. All the other massive restaurants with massive menus were empty. Still, the waiter lingered by our table, and eventually we asked him why the town, which seemed so touristy, was empty. He shrugged and made a vague gesture that encompassed the whole world. I don’t know, he said. Once, it was a touristic town, he said, but not anymore. The people just stopped coming. This was maybe inevitable, he said; the universe itself contracts and expands, so it only seems likely that the good times turn to bad for just the same unexplainable reasons that the good times arose in the first place. In the grand scheme of things, we all may just be little fishes enjoying the safety of a tide pool in the brief interval before the ocean comes back and crushes our powerless bodies against the rocks. Anyway, he said, before it was a touristic town, this point on the end of the peninsula was barely even a village. It was just a handful of fishing huts huddled together for comfort against the Pacific. Then, he said, in the 1930s one of the fishermen invented a special kind of ice cream with many unique flavors. It became very famous in the country. Because of the fisherman’s uncanny resemblance to the infamous dictator, with his neatly parted hair and strange tiny moustache, it became known as helado Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler ice cream—a name chosen for entirely apolitical reasons, the man assured us, only because of its inventor’s resemblance to the dictator. The ice cream became famous among the Nazis after headlines about it in Germany, and soon cruise ships flying that ominous black, white, and red flag began anchoring at the town’s ports just so that patriotic vacationing Germans could try the Adolf Hitler ice cream all the way across the world from the fatherland. Our minor fishing village became rich with money from the Reich’s high society, he said, and hotels and restaurants were established. Just over there, across the avenue, he said, gesturing to the dirt road, there is the Hotel Riefenstahl, an establishment that still exists from those early days. After the war, tourism didn’t stop. The German-speaking community that had mysteriously increased all around Latin America in the postwar era began to visit this town and enjoy its famous ice cream, nostalgic for simpler times, he said. One day though, the tourists just stopped coming. That’s all.

We asked him about the Adolf Hitler ice cream. He seemed quite proud of it. These people love the ice cream because it is very good, he assured us, and not for any political affiliations. Myself, he said, I do not much prefer the helado Adolf Hitler, but since you are in town you really should try it. There are many ice cream parlors that still make Adolf Hitler ice cream the authentic way.

We finished our fish soup, drank a few more beers, and paid the bill. Depressed by the crabs and dead kittens and rough surf, we decided to walk back through town. The first ice cream shop we passed, which was just a couple feet from the restaurant, proudly displayed a sign that read: HELADO ADOLF HITLER | ICE CREAM ADOLF HITLER. Besides the name, there were no other references to Nazism.

We decided we would try it after we passed the fourth Adolf Hitler ice cream parlor in two blocks. It was run by a man from New Jersey. His eyes were two empty holes, his skin burnt, his blond hair stringy. He looked like he had been blasted by an atom bomb. We asked the New Jerseyan how he ended up here, of all places, running an Adolf Hitler ice cream parlor in Central America. My wife cheated on me, he said. I sold all my shit and decided to become a surf bum. This place has good surf, he said. My friend asked him if he felt uncomfortable selling ice cream named after the genocidaire. The New Jerseyan shrugged his shoulders and assured us it’s not a political thing, Adolf Hitler is just part of the town’s culture.

We ordered three Adolf Hitlers. It wasn’t very good. It was just a tower of vanilla and strawberry ice cream, layered with condensed milk and snowcone scoops and chocolate sauce and powdered sugar and pretzel bits. Probably, it would be pretty good high. I ate half and gave the rest to my friend.

The town was deserted at 9:00pm on a Friday. We walked its lonely streets, listening to the tinny carnival music from the carousel. At the edge of town, where the streetlights ended, we stopped at a liquor store and bought some wine.

We still had two miles to walk through the dark dirt roads along the peninsula, where unlit houses lined the way. From the shadows, men stared at us with malice. A truck rolled by, slowed down, and a man yelled through the window ¡pinche gringos! before throwing beer bottles at our feet. The bottles thudded on the dirt without shattering.

But it was a nice warm night, and the rest of the walk went by just fine.

#

At the house, we opened the bottles of red wine we had just bought at the shop and discovered that it had gone foul, releasing a rotten stench into the air. Dumping the bottles outside, all we had to drink now was the vinodebella. I looked at my bottle. The milky liquid squirmed inside as if there were a homunculus trapped in there waiting to be let out from its misery.

My friend put on the Celtics game. I fucking hate the Celtics. We poured the vinodebella. It tasted fine, a little bitter, but fine, and reminded me of the rakı I had a couple summers before with a Turkish girl I had been seeing. She mysteriously disappeared from my life without a word, without even dumping me or telling me what happened. It was very strange and had caused me a lot of pain. She’d ransacked her apartment, dropped out of school, and left town for reasons my friends and I couldn’t piece together. She had been the first person to get me to read Proust. Memories like this ambush you at times, coming from seemingly nowhere, and drag you to a different time and place, so that while I was really in a forsaken town on the Pacific coast of a Central American country, I felt like, just for a moment, I was back in Charlottesville in the summer with that girl, that I was still working that awful retail job and spending all my time wandering the university’s vast libraries, my whole life enchanted by her warm presence, her wry smile, and our conversations that lasted until sunrise. Everything in my life had a magical glow that summer when we were seeing each other. And then it just ended, like everything else in life, for no reason at all. This just being a memory, it was entirely ineffective at recreating that time. It couldn’t last. It ambushed me, hit me on the head, and dragged me back into that time and place, but ultimately could not keep me there, as if those bandits of memory hiding in wait by the roadside to ambush me were armless and legless and pathetic, and their only weapons were the stubs at the ends of their digitless limbs, and their only escape—with teeth clenched and eyes brimming with tears at their incapability—was by dragging themselves through the dirt on thumping flaps of bone and flesh. Totally incapable of transporting me to their hideout—that lost place and time, that summer in Charlottesville with that girl—these bandits instead just attacked me with an awkward, unreal, and painful impression of what once was, of what can never be again. Odd filmy goop floated in the vinodebella, similar to vinegar mother, and after a little debate with my friends about whether or not to drink it, I swallowed it whole.

We eventually grew bored of the Celtics game and decided to go down to the beach, where we drank the vinodebella directly from the old plastic soda bottles. Crabs skittered back and forth in the moon shadows, waves thundered. We were each about halfway finished with the liter bottles and debated about how much we should drink. It was impossible to tell the alcohol content, but we didn’t yet feel drunk nor really all that high. We were maybe a little buzzed, we all agreed, and a little tired from hiking in the jungles earlier that morning. So we drank more vinodebella.

The long sandy beach, which stretched far in both directions, reminded me of the beaches of Normandy with its blowing winds and sense of desolation, and I thought about how those first Gaul barbarians, ancestors of Vercingetorix, must have felt reaching the storied sands of Normandy, those horsemen and beast-flayers who had roamed westward for millennia and were now for the first time hemmed by the world’s horizon and left to pathetically shake their bronze spears at the lapping waves, knowing that their destruction would soon follow in their footsteps, that they had nowhere left to run from the doom that chased them and which would eventually manifest as Caesar—yet unknown to them—but who would inevitably destroy all traces of them, burn their homes, and trample everything they loved. In this way, I had brushed up against the far west coast in a foreign land and had nowhere left to run from my memories. The whole world, it seemed, stood uneasily on this sense of sadness, this loneliness, this feeling that, no matter where you turn, you can never escape the doom that follows just over your shoulder. Those barbarians would some centuries later be crucified all in a line along the beaches of Normandy. Then the crucifiers themselves would be burnt at the stake as heretics. And a little later still, strange concrete bulbs would bloom from the shoreside cliffs like so many flowers of evil and spit burning rays of steel at alien men staggering like godly lunatics out of the surf to march into the dawn while rockets flew back and forth overhead. Why am I constantly pursued by this sense of loneliness and doom? Here I was, on vacation in a beautiful country with my best friends, asking the same old questions. Why were we born if only to be faced with constant sadness? What reason does it all serve? I wander the earth, trying to find something to heal this suffocating loneliness, some good reason to keep on living in this world, and I find that my travelling boots just retrace old footsteps in the desert sands, the same old paths I must have crossed long ago, further than memory can serve, as a hermit or crusader or merchant, pursuing some similar quest for meaning. I wonder if just ahead, out of the desert, some promised land will emerge, some good reason for it all, some place where everything makes sense finally and everyone really is happy, but I know in my heart that I will not find it: the uninspired hermit died speechless in a cave, the crusader was shot with an arrow through his heart, the merchant lived a long and successful life and died clutching his silk clothes for comfort that would never come.

Once, long ago I was in the forests of Sweden, although I’ve never been to Sweden. It was snowing in the vast boreal forest. Among green needles and pure snow, I walked slowly, without any true aim, with nothing pushing me forward besides my own desire to wander. I was warm, the forest was bright and clean. I admired the huge trees.

Eventually, through the trees, a village emerged. There was a festival in the village and everyone was dancing and singing and very happy. They invited me to join them in a language that did not need to be spoken, in a language that existed in our hearts. Everyone was happy, even the grandmas so close to death and the children so new to life. After a brief stay in the village in the forest of Sweden, they revealed to me that they were all part of a vast international mob, even the grandmas and little children, and they needed me to act as a liaison for their Paris office. Happily, I obliged. I was soon rich with money from their conspiracy, whatever it was, without having to do any real work, and so was free to spend the rest of my days wandering around Paris, writing and reading and smoking and drinking, happy and content, finally understood and loved, until one day a man approached me from behind (one of the kindly villagers, I could intuit), and without any warning slit my throat with a long silver dagger in one clean ritual motion, and I died there, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, watching my blood fall out in one perfect gush as the silver blade whisked through the sunlight and back into the dark.

I blinked and I was in a strange dark bedroom. It was hot. This was not Sweden or Paris, nor was it Charlottesville where I was living then. Where was I? Outside I could hear people chanting. I vomited in a pot in the kitchen before stumbling outside. It was afternoon. The sun was evil. I stood with my head throbbing. Where was I? I couldn’t take my eyes off that terrible sun above, and could feel something strange fall through my brain, as if people were partying somewhere high in my skull, and then, as I looked at that sun, a plank broke in my brain, and the partiers suddenly plummeted into the void below, into the void in my brain...

That high thin sad chant continued in the street. A religious procession was passing by, thousands were holding aloft gold crucifixes and porcelain Marias and flowing banners. Penitents in their ominous hoods hauled wood crosses and whipped their backs. Singers chanted. Women cried. Priests cast prayers up to the heavens with the smoke of candles. Lambs were slaughtered and their bleating cries were like the moaning of sodomized choir boys. Effigies burned. I couldn’t understand it, but I had to join them! Stumbling blind and drunk, I walked out and followed this huge procession in all its sound and fury. We marched up along the peninsula into the town. But I couldn’t understand them at all, even though I could speak Spanish fluently. and had practiced all my life to be able to speak with others and be understood. It was like they were babbling in an entirely new language, a language that made me feel alone among them, and their chanting became unbearable and cruel. Men whipped their backs, women prayed and cried, golden crucifixes glimmered in the sun, and they all marched together in one large mass while I followed mutely murmuring the words to the chant that I couldn’t understand.

A sickening headache woke me up again, and I was sitting on the beach with my head between my knees. My two friends were with me. It was daytime.

“Fuck,” one my friends said. “I didn’t even know they had the KKK in this country too.”

“Huh?” the other responded.

“You saw the hoods,” the first said.

“What do you mean?”

“The fucking KKK hoods, bro. They were everywhere. Those crazy pointed hoods. How do they have the KKK here?”

“They were penitents,” I mumbled between my legs.

“What?” the first said.

“They were penitents. It’s a catholic thing.”

“Catholics also do KKK rallies?” he said.

“No. They just wear the same hoods,” I said. My head was killing me.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Where did the procession go?” I asked. I looked over my shoulder. We were on the beach at the end of the peninsula, and the town stretched out before me. There were no church spires to be seen.

“What are you guys talking about?” the second friend said.

“The religious procession. The penitents. Those guys with the hoods. And all the people carrying crosses.”

“I swear that was a KKK rally, dude,” the first friend said.

“I’m telling you it was a Catholic procession. The people in the hoods were penitents.”

“You guys saw nothing,” the second friend said. “It didn’t happen. It was the vinodebella talking.”

“What?”

“When you woke up you both started winding each other up, ranting about processions and rallies and the Klan. I had to chase you through the streets to make sure you didn’t get yourselves killed.”

“So it didn’t happen?” I said.

“It was all in your head.”

He was always the calm one.

“You’re fucking with me. It was right there. I saw it with my own two eyes,” I said.

“It didn’t happen. You were tweaking.”

This made me irrationally angry. Why did he get to know the truth? Who was he to say what really happened? Why did I see that thing, just for it to be ripped away from me as another one of life’s illusions? Before I could get angrier, I got up and walked down the beach. I saw a beautiful woman lying in the sand. She even smiled at me. I saw a dog swimming in the surf. I jumped in the ocean too, where the cold water felt good for my head. I swam out beyond where the waves broke.

When I returned, my friends were still sitting there. The first one was lying facedown in the sand. My second friend was just staring at the waves.

“So what did you see after drinking the vinodebella?” I asked him.

He looked at me, then looked away.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Come on, I saw a million fucked up things and then a religious procession, and he saw the fucking KKK. What did you see? What vinodebella visions did you have?”

“Nothing. I saw nothing.”

“Come on.”

“No, really. I’m serious. I just got really drunk. That stuff was terrible.”

“I can’t remember what it tastes like. What did we even do last night?”

“I have no clue. We made it through okay though.”

“Hell yeah,” I said.

“I got us coffee,” he said. He handed me a cup of Starbucks iced coffee.

“You’re fucking with me. I’m hallucinating. A Starbucks, here?”

My friend gestured vaguely over his shoulder. Sure enough, there was a Starbucks in between the Hotel Riefenstahl and another Adolf Hitler ice cream parlor. You take Americans anywhere, and the first thing they’ll do is ask about the closest Starbucks. A wry smile broke my face.

“Can’t go without your Starbucks, huh?” I said, messing with him. “You just couldn’t bear to drink coffee at a local place?”

“Shut the fuck up and drink your coffee. It’s already 5:00pm.”

#

That night, we drank beers on the beach, watching the crabs and the waves once again. I think we were all pretty sad. It was the end of the trip, and the vinodebella, whatever it was, left us all in a bad mood. We all saw different things that hurt us. One friend was terrified by the image of the world fallen into racist chaos. We had been raised to think the world was imperfect but good at heart, even getting better, and the sight of the KKK in this Latin American street had sent him into a spiral of despair: was evil spreading through the world? Were we inheriting a world much worse than the one we grew up in? I could tell that he was mulling these questions over as he cracked open another beer. Meanwhile, I was depressed by the thought that I was entirely alone, that there were crowds of people that I could never join, that I would always have to walk some other lonely direction through this earth, or else be killed by the people who love me. But I think it was worst for the friend had seen nothing at all. Where we found some vision, some meaning—however terrible—he was confronted with total silence: the same haunting emptiness, ultimately, that swallows us all. As we talked about what we saw and drank warm beers there on the beach, watching the crabs eat the last of the three dead kittens, I was reminded that I too will find unending darkness when this is over, that everything I witness, my worst despairs and my greatest triumphs, my terrible loneliness and whatever solutions I find to cope with it, will all ultimately mean nothing, and then return to silence. The crabs dragged the last rotten hunks of cat flesh away, devouring even the fur, leaving behind only bones and sand and dust to blow off into the ocean. That’s all there is to it.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

Note from Diana: This short story is posted in honor of Jackson Bierfeldt, who recently bought a paid subscription to this account. Besides being an incredible friend, he has also been a great influence in helping me understand how to make a career doing what I love. With the help of friends and supporters like Jackson, I will one day be able to spend all my energy on writing. If you read this post and are particularly moved by what you read, you should consider getting a paid subscription. I will write a short story, poetry, or an essay for you too.

After the last day of shooting for my first ever short film, I found myself at an evil bar haunted by vampires and zombies and undead Nazi officials disguised by plastic surgery to walk among us looking exactly like Americans. I went there with my volunteer actors to get celebratory Guinnesses, and because we finished the shoot around 10:30PM in Georgetown, we had nowhere else to turn but this modern-day Babylon. The Guinness was good and it was fun to watch the overweight bald men—faces red and sweating from high blood pressure, Pervitin, and stress—hotfoot around the dozen women whose facial reconstruction had left them looking like troglodyte creatures.

I decided to call it a night at 12:30PM. Making the short film was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. Nothing I’ve ever done compares to the energy that making a video brought out of me—somewhere between Zen and mania, absorption and control—and now that I was coming down from that high, I felt quite sad walking alone through the long city streets back to my apartment. Carrying all of my equipment, it started to rain. Fog rose from the concrete.

I love that sad, lonely feeling of a city street at night and in the rain. It honestly makes me feel just right, as if sadness and loneliness, which have long been a curse, are also a sort of reward. Returning to my place, and wondering why that sense of loneliness feels so sad and so perfect at the same time, I crouched on the fire escape to smoke. Then, I passed out on the couch around 2:00AM, in the middle of my millionth rewatch of Beau Travail.

I dreamed that I was a little kid—but also sort of an adult—leading a troop of other kids—who were also sort of adults—on a long journey through the woods to reach our school. It was night, but by the light of our torches the forest looked like day. It was in the middle of a glorious spring: all the creeks ran clear with snowmelt and all the newborn creatures were out in harmony—and yet the leaves of the trees were the burning reds and yellows of autumn. This contradiction of images in the dream—youth and age, day and night, spring and fall—resembled Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Near the end of the journey, we came upon a confluence of creeks that formed a swampland. In this strange landscape of high-banked creeks and swamps, there was a spawning ground for snakes:—python-sized cottonmouths swam lazily through the water to eat and mate—copperheads coiled and writhed along the ground—vipers mumbled and murmured through the trees—: which sounds terrifying, but I actually found beautiful. It was almost like I had stumbled upon a new Eden! Maybe this is because two of my childhood best friends were true naturalists, and we spent many afternoons together going on herpetology expeditions, or hikes to look for Eastern Hognose snakes, copperheads, and the many beautiful varieties of salamander that can be found throughout the creeks, ponds, and valleys of Virginia. The marvelous sight of the snakes in my dream recalled to me those lines from Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium: “The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, / —Those dying generations—at their song, / The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, / Fish, flesh, or fowl...”

The school was through the trees. While it seemed like daytime within the forest, it was midnight just beyond. Weary from the effort of leading the other kids safely through the forest, I leaned against a tree to rest.

At that moment, I split between myself as a boy and myself as a girl. Both versions of myself became fully adult, as if the peril of the journey had imbued us with age and misery. While the boy version of myself rested, the girl (who was also myself) was bit in the crotch between the thumb and forefinger of her hand by a copperhead creeping on the tree trunk where she—and also he—leaned to rest.

By the time I retrieved the antivenom, I was overwhelmed and panicked, and as I injected the girl (who was myself) in the crotch (of her hand), the syringe slipped out from the hole (of the snakebite), and spurted most of the antivenom out onto her skin. Unsure if the antivenom would work or if the girl (who was myself) would die, I awoke to a sunny, beautiful March morning.

Have you ever seen snakes mating? I have. This was back when I was still very young and often wandered the woods because I couldn’t make friends and I couldn’t figure out why. Wandering the forest was a way to find some beauty and meaning outside of a social world that was confusing, painful, and lonely. The forest was a magical place that I could fill with all sorts of adventures. Walking with a .22 on my shoulder and a tomahawk on my belt, I was a real Davey Crockett.

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But, as I said, I am lazy, unskilled, and stupid—I hear parlay and I think, -vous français? I don’t know a thing about gambling, or investing, or even money. So I decided I would try something crazy with these prediction markets. Instead of doing the gambling myself, I would find the most degenerate, piece-of-shit gambler I know and give him my life savings1 to bet on Polymarket. We would then split the profits.

It turns out I know a lot more degenerate, piece-of-shit gamblers than I first expected. In fact, it was actually quite hard to decide who among my friends were the most crazy-eyed, stringy-haired, amphetamine-addicted degenerate gamblers. After a lot of research, I decided to contact my old friend, the many-epitheted, little-skilled, and uncomplicated Lightskin Trevor. Lightskin Trevor, né Trevor Wellington McGuinness, is a blond-haired, blue-eyed white-as-cream white guy who, for reasons not readily apparent to me, everyone calls Lightskin Trevor. Other aliases include:

- Beef (viz. Wellington),

- Trigger Tre (he is an absolute demon from three, but only when playing halfcourt hoops, because he doesn’t have the lungs anymore to play fullcourt),

- Guinness (for obvious reasons)

- Shadow (for unknown reasons)

- Dagger (ibid.)

- and T-rex Trev (for his freakishly short arms, a fact that he is quite self-conscious about, and which he even confided in me regarding after one particularly sloppy fifth-kill Tuesday (fifth-kill Tuesday is, if you are not aware, when you and your buddies split into pairs and kill a fifth of liquor on a Tuesday night while watching sports, often shirtless).

These are the many names of Trevor Wellington McGuinness, man of ins and outs. Lightskin Trevor, Beef, Shadow, Dagger, T-rex Trev—however you know him, he is The Man for pointless, doomed gambling. McGuinness always has more zyns in his lips than teeth in his mouth.

The results of our collaboration were incredible. They were even heartwarming. It’s beautiful what two neurotic, lazy, and useless guys can do when they put their heads together and decide to actively make the world a worse place for their own profit.

What follows is an account of what happened, as told by Lightskin Trevor, and heavily edited by me, your humble writer.

#

McGuinness, Scourge of God, Polymarket Demon

You want to know how I became a scourge of God? How I, some white guy from Virginia, became warlord of Tebas2, this tiny country on the mosquito coast of Central America? I will tell it.

It all started when I got a weird text from Will Diana. At first, I thought the fucker was messing with me or else high. He wanted to give me $67.420 to bet on Polymarket? I wasn’t even sure the guy was good for $6—when we go drink at the dive bar, he always gives me these awful puppy dog eyes while ordering, promising me he’ll get the next round. So when he sent me that money, I almost considered screwing him over for it. I mean, he certainly owes me anyway. But something strange sort of splintered in my brain when he asked if I thought I could turn $67 into $1,000. I said yes without hesitation. Impressed by my confidence, Will said how about 5k? I responded how about $10k? So, the race was on. I had to turn $67 into $10,000 or I’d never hear the end of it.

I started small. I made bets based on the guiding principle that Nothing Ever Happens, placing NO bets on scandals, celebrity pregnancies, wars breaking out. Through this method, I turned $67 into $69. Then I got high and bet big on a 5-leg parlay involving YES to Donald Trump farting on camera; YES to the elections in an Eastern European country being cancelled by a growing police state; YES to rockets killing exactly 666 people in a conflict in Africa; NO to the arrest of a serial killer who has brutally skinned and dismembered two dozen people; and YES to opioid overdoses exceeding births in a depressed rustbelt city. I hit all of them except for Donald Trump farting on camera, because while he did audibly fart at a press conference, it was not, in precise terms, “on a camera.” I didn’t read the fine print.

The losses from that parlay put me down to $14.88, which is oddly enough when I met Laura from the State Department. Laura from the State Department changed everything.

Before I met her, I considered killing myself in a fit of despair—but instead of finally painting my brains on the ceiling of my unfurnished apartment, I went to a bar and got drunk. I was staring at my account balance of $14.88 when, out of the darkness, Laura from the State Department emerged. She was a stunning woman who resembled Lucy Liu with her delicate facial structure and the asymmetrical eye. She brought me a Guinness. I was in love.

“You look lonely,” she said.

“I’m drunk,” I said.

“Me too.”

She sat next to me. For whatever reason, I tend to have pretty good luck with girls3. One thing led to another, and Ms. Lucy Liu came back to my place. She didn’t even seem to mind the bare mattress on the floor. I awoke at some point in my drunken daze to Laura on the phone, pacing the living room. I could just distinguish the words: Yes...the foreign minister of Tebas must die...send in the cowboys.

When she returned to bed, she seemed flustered. I offered her one of the plastic water bottles that were loose on the floor by the mattress.

“What was that all about? Cowboys? Who do you work for, Jerry Jones?”

“I work for the C- uhhh State Department,” she said.

“Dope. Which state?”

“Which State?”

“Yeah, like you work for New Jersey or something?”

“Oh, uh, North Dakota.”

Sounded boring. But it did explain the cowboys.

“Sounds boring,” I said. “But that explains the cowboys I guess.”

“It is. It sure does.”

“Wanna smoke some weed?” I said.

“Totally.”

“Grab my bong, it’s over by the Playstation.”

When she left that morning, I googled the foreign minister of Tebas. I wasn’t sure what business North Dakota had with a small oil and cocaine producing country in Central America, but I was now pretty sure that the North Dakotans were sending some cowboys to kill the foreign minister. The money line “Will José Stalin Mao Zapata Faulkner, Foreign Minister of Tebas, die by the end of 2026?” was tracking NO at 99% and YES at >1%. Those were longer odds than Christ returning. I bet everything on YES.

That afternoon, it was announced that the foreign minister of Tebas had died after falling from a tall building. My bet turned $14.88 into $6.66k.

I asked Laura from the State Department to dinner, dipping into the earnings to take her to Buffalo Wild Wings. While the drinks were arriving, she excused herself to take another work call. I could just hear her voice over the sound of Chappel Roan playing on the speakers.

We’re doing what? Laua said. PINK PONY CLUB, I’M GONNA KEEP ON DANCING AT THE, Chappel Roan sang. Airstrikes on Tiresias? Laura said. DOWN IN WEST HOLLYWOOD, Chappel Roan continued singing. Okay, Laura said, I’ll make sure the cowboys head out to pasture, but I want you to know that I do not support this decision after what happened in Iran...Okay, yes. Understood...the cowboys will be out of Tiresias by midnight. PINK PONY CLUB, I’M GONNA KEEP ON DANCING AT THE—

When she returned, I pretended to listen to her yap about some bullshit with her family while I discreetly bet all $6.66k that YES, Tiresias, the capital of Tebas, would be bombed before the end of the week. Later, while she was asleep on my mattress on the floor, I checked my phone to see that missiles were indeed raining on the capital of Tebas. Apparently a shadowy cartel had somehow stolen or received missiles. The footage of the missiles falling, those long golden rays coming down from the dark skies, looked even a little beautiful. What was more beautiful, however, was my account, which was now sitting pretty at $100k.

The next day, after Laura left, I was walking back from the corner store with a sleeve of peppermint zynbabwes4 and a six-pack of Modelos. Suddenly, an unmarked van pulled up beside me and four men in cowboy hats jumped out.

“I assume you’re McGuinness?” one of the cowboys said.

“The one and only, compadre.”

They grabbed me, injected me with something, and pulled me into the van as my consciousness was fading. Hey! I slurred. Don’t forget the Kazynskis and the beer...

When I awoke, I was in a log cabin. An albino man with a pale cowboy hat and a deerskin poncho was sitting across from me. He pulled out a toothy smile before spitting a long loose slough of dip into a red solo cup.

“Sorry for the rude first impression, McGuinness,” the man said. “I’m sure you can appreciate our need for total secrecy.”

My head was killing me.

“Sure, man.”

“We’ve been tracking your Polymarket account. You’ve been able to predict our every move hours in advance. I told Tecumseh himself about you—I said listen, sir, we’ve got a bona fide SME out there. We need to retrieve him A-S-A-P before those narcoterrorist reds down south get ahold of him first.”

“Yeah. Hey, listen, man. That sounds cool and all but where are my Kazynskis? My head is killing me.”

“Kazynskis?”

“Ted Kazynskis. You know, zynbabwes, zynderellas, Mao Zyndongs, Klaus Zynskis...”

“What?”

“Zyns, man! Where are my Zyns?! I had them in my hand when you guys boonkganged me.”

“We’ll do even better for you, McGuinness,” the man said.

Another cowboy placed a suitcase before me.

“Go ahead.”

I opened the suitcase and gasped. Everything I could’ve wanted and more was in that suitcase. Zyns, Adderall, coke, Vyvanse, meth, and dozens of pills of all sizes and colors that I’d never even seen before. The Zyns were even the special ones from Europe, 14mg versus 6mg in the USA. I felt like I was heaven. I almost fainted.

“You like what you see?”

“Does the pope shit in his hat? Shit yeah, man. I almost came in my Wrangler jeans just looking at this.”

“All of this can be yours, and millions of dollars too.”

“What’s the catch?”

“You’ve made thousands of dollars predicting the future. You have a sense for what’s happening out there. We want you on the ground in Tebas to support our next move.”

“You have my attention. What’s the play?”

“We’re going kinetic.”

“Fuck it. I’m in. Full send.”

“I knew I could count on you, McGuinness.”

#

The Golden Polymarket Line: Finding El Dorado

Pseudo-Diana: I received this update from McGuinness two weeks ago. Three days later all of Tebas fell in a strange popular uprising that ended up replacing the prior, socialist president with a junta headed by a right-wing-podcaster-turned-insurrectionist.

A week later, after a dozen unanswered text messages, emails, and instagram DMs, I received this cryptic message on Snapchat from an account named AZOTE DE DIOS, or SCOURGE OF GOD:

SUP WD. MADE 23 MILLION. CAN’T TELL HOW. CAN’T SEND MONEY NOW THO BC I WENT ALL-IN ON BIGGEST BET OF MY LIFE. YES TO EL DORADO, MYTHIC AMAZONIAN CITY, BEING DISCOVERED IN 2026. IT’S GONNA BE HUGE. AM ON CANOE NOW WITH FRIENDLY TRIBE & COWBOYS. WILL MAKE BILLIONS. SEND U MONEY LATER. PEACE. MCGUINNESS.

An image flashed in my mind. Like George Washington crossing the Delaware, McGuinness, his lightning-blue eyes facing the sun, stands at the head of a canoe in the Amazon, his lips full of 14mg zyns, his eyes dilated by a near-lethal cocktail of amphetamines. Behind him in the canoe are a band of cowboys and indians, waiting to spread terror, kill the populace, and sell drugs and guns to everyone else. I could see it perfectly—McGuinness, the Scourge of God, floating off to find the city of gold and chase after the longest Polymarket bet of his life. He was a man who may not be able to predict the future, but who certainly was willing to bring about whatever future was most profitable for him.

I’ve still not received word from McGuinness and I never did get any of the money he made. My entire lifesavings must have gone with him in that canoe upriver to find El Dorado. But I did find a $100 bill just laying in the street this afternoon. So I wound up doing alright in the end, too.

Peace and Love,

Will Diana.

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