Fishing for Zebedee

I am becoming animal, a rocking horse, a ventriloquist’s emu, a felt frog who will never be a

prince. The labyrinth I inhabit has multiple exits but only one entrance. How you come out of my

maze does not depend on how you enter, you will be morphed. Charged by the planes of

immanence your lines of flight will electrify and animate you. Suckling and entangling you

become; bag puss, zippy, muffin the mule, bill and ben, lady penelope, lady lovelace and finally

zebedee, boing! You fight the forces of abstraction to distraction and it is a draw. You perform,

you happen, you dematerialise, you objectify, you are the subject, you are not. You will evolve,

revolve, and dissolve some of those images of thought you have explored by constructing fleeting

imaginary worlds. What will pull you back to the memory of crossing the singular threshold? Will it

be through rosebudishness, madeleineness, or by the encounter with the idea that forces you to

think differently? I will bring a spring, a wooden ball, a moustache, red, blue, yellow and black.

Taking in Vilem Flusser and Louis Bec’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis as a ‘line of flight’ this paper

uses the characters from the Magic Roundabout as luminaires in, ‘The eternal night of the

vampyroteuthis [which] is filled with colours and sounds that are emitted by living beings-an

eternal festival of colours and sounds, a son et lumiere of extraordinary opulence. The ocean floor

is carpeted with red, white, and violet stone; there are dunes of blue and yellow sand, sparkling

with pearls and fragments of molten meteorites. Forests, meadows, and plains of plant-like

animals, beaming with colours, sway in the current with fanned tentacles. Wandering in their

midst are giant iridescent snails, and whirring above them are swarms of crabs, flashing in silver,

red, and yellow. It is a luxuriant garden that the vampyroteuthis can illuminate, on a whim, to enjoy

its desserts in splendour.’ (Flusser & Bec 2000: 35)

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