In this work, I continue the themes of myth and myth-making and elaborate on some of my own private and somewhat obsessive images and myths. For a long time, maybe thirty years, I have imagined the journey of the snail is similar to our journey. Our poems, stories, ideologies, religious beliefs, and social structures are shells that protect us from the chaotic outside-nature. The snail has a finite journey, which in my observation, is usually from the yard to the flowerbed. Its journey can be analogized to our birth, life, and death. This life, this journey, is the hero's way.

I also believe we make our journey alone. We are castaways in a
savage world, and our ancestors in myth are sailors like Ulysses, Jonah, Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson, the colonists at Jamestown, the French at Quebec in the sixteenth century, and Paul Gauguin. Through our voyages, wrecks, drownings, and resurrections, we change alchemically and become something else-we walk on our heads and speak in tongues.

This book is dedicated to my father, who loves black chows and who has walked the warrior's way. But he is not the only father in this book. My intellectual fathers are Hermes, Homer, Socrates, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, Dr. John Dee, William Shakespeare, Ted Hughes, Dali, Breton, Rimbaud, Franz
Kafka, Thomas Mann, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and every man or woman who climbed onto the wooden and splintered deck of a ship bound for the New World or waited in an upper room for the heilige Geist to descend on fiery wings.

I also want to thank Ms. SarahA O'Leary in Portsmouth, England, who read every word in the manuscript and provided a sweet heigh-ho through the virtual net, and Dr. Ronald Schenk, who knows a thing or two about sunken quests and pregnant fish.