THE ABYSS SUPERHIGHWAY

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A Pirate’s Guide to Infinite Powers, Forbidden Grammars, and Things Best Left in the Laundry

PART ONE — PIRATES ALWAYS TALK ABOUT THE POWERS

Pirates always talk about the Powers.

We had figured out how to navigate anywhere in the universe using the Abyss Superhighway. Open it here, step through, and suddenly you’re over there. Sirius, the Pleiades, Earth, or some obscure destination that hasn’t yet been invented. Geography was merely a temporary inconvenience.

My investigations began in childhood, when I discovered that enormous words could produce extraordinary effects, particularly when I had absolutely no idea what they meant. I would string them together into magnificent linguistic monstrosities, hoping that sheer verbal magnitude might compensate for my ignorance.

The results were bizarre.

Years later, my alchemy guru introduced me to an experiment. He had completed a mediumship program, and I knew someone else who had attended the same institution. They weren’t exactly channelling spirits. They were contacting something called a Higher Power.

Higher Power! It sounded suspiciously like Alcoholics Anonymous. Or perhaps the Powers that pirates were always discussing.

But my guru had something more interesting in mind.

He instructed me to babble.

Just start making sounds. Repeat them. Rearrange them. Keep going until the nonsense begins organizing itself into something resembling coherent language.

I loved it immediately.

Here was my childhood experiment returning in ceremonial robes!

By then I had spent considerable time investigating grimoires, a word historically connected with grammaire, or grammar. The Black Pullet, the Lemegeton, the Lesser Key of Solomon, the Grand Grimoire, and even the imaginary Necronomicon, which I preferred to treat as a perfectly legitimate literary entity.

But these books disappointed me.

Their authors suffered from a catastrophic poverty of desire.

They wanted treasure, revenge, obedient demons, sexual conquest, political influence, and occasionally the psychic assassination of their enemies.

What a miserable little shopping list!

Alice Bailey’s White Magic proposed another arrangement: magic directed toward the welfare of others rather than personal ambition.

This raised an interesting question.

Suppose my desires were infinite, extending across enormous stretches of time, involving innumerable objects, impossible geometries, unknown sciences, and the investigation of consciousness itself?

Suppose none of these ambitions required harming anybody?

Would that make me a black magician?

Possibly.

But a very peculiar species.

A black magician whose principal vice was curiosity.

The Sacred Magic of Abramelin came closest to something interesting: a curious intersection of medieval ceremonial magic and yogic discipline. Yet even there, biblical religion occupied much of the machinery.

Why should the universe be operated through such a restricted vocabulary?

I wanted a grammar capable of addressing infinity.

And I suspected the insects already knew it.