The Sibyl of Cumae from her shrine sang out her riddles

Book VI: The World Below of Virgil's Aeneid
Fitzgerald Translation, As Rendered by Termites

"If only the golden bough
Might shine for us in such a wilderness!"

❁

From the Journals of B. Jones:

I’m standing next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
Well, I’m standing next to a mountain
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand
I pick up all the pieces and make an island
Might even raise a little sand

- Jimi Hendrix, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” Electric Ladyland (1968).

4 July 1994 – I was working at Europa Books on the Drag in Austin, Texas. The store was closed for the holiday. I took the opportunity to take 4 hits of LSD.

In the back of the store was a cinderblock storeroom where I had set up a sort of office for myself. There was a hammock, a radio, many wooden shelves of books and a small desk. I often spent time back there after-hours. I liked it especially because there were no windows.

You could get fairly isolated back there.

So there I was full of LSD, with a cooler full of Shiner Bock, listening to Hendrix and reading Heidegger. I was having a good time – a very good time.

At some point, I pulled a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid from a stack nearby to reference some vital point now forgotten and was surprised to discover that the stack had become infested with termites.

I dropped the book and watched in hallucinogenic amazement as the tiny insects worked to salvage their thrown-down world.

Carefully opening the book again, I found that they had burrowed through the pages. Sections of the poem’s text were split by small tunnels lined with dirt. Beautiful. I was fascinated and slightly horrified. It seemed to me that there were millions of termites all of a sudden, I checked around my shoes, my hands and arms. I wondered if they had colonized every book in the back room? Fragments of the text caught my eye as the insects worked with precision to reconstruct a new universe.

The letters creating Aeneas seemed to scatter off the page, termites carrying him away in their mouths. “This is for the Queen…”

Book IV-VI of Virgil's Aeneid
Fitzgerald Translation, As Rendered by Termites

"There were the sentences
In which the Sibyl of Cumae from her shrine
Sang out her riddles, echoing in the cave,
Dark sayings muffling truths, the way Apollo
Pulled up her raging, or else whipped her on,
Digging the spurs beneath her breast."

If you are curious as to where Jones went with all of this nonsense:
http://www.laughingbone.com/skeletonmachine