Cystic Detective Update #1

A Descendant of Jesus Christ, Nothing New Under the Sol, and a Question: What the Hell is Going on at General Motors?

When I was in college, I wrote more experimental poetry or prose, but I eventually grew more distant from the medium. Nevertheless, I had a specific recurring concept that was going to be the subject of a prose poem: The Cystic Detective of Viscera. This character was a bit of a Columbo-type, though maybe more of a vagrant occult detective. He could receive psychic impressions and traverse “the viscera”—something like the astral plane—by turning on sink faucets with both hands, using the hot and cold knobs simultaneously. While this could often result in good leads to mysteries he was investigating, every time he engaged with the psychic “viscera,” he was struck with benign cysts that grew in his body like mold cultures. They wouldn’t kill him, but he eventually had to accept the fact that he would eventually become more cyst than man if he continued. I think the idea has some cachet, but nothing ever came of it.

Pardon the preamble, but I bring it up to introduce a new series: Posts under the “Cystic Detective” banner will be looser ponderings on the weird, more like a diary or commentary on recent events or research avenues. While the longer articles, series, and podcast episodes are more in-depth and time consuming, I want to keep most of that research public. In the meantime, I want paid subscribers to receive posts and updates regularly, hence this series that I am christening the “Cystic Detective Update”. I have, after all, in many ways become the cystic detective, scouring through the psychic viscera and leaving myself coated with benign cysts. Unfortunately, no one can spend this much time in the subject matter with a critical eye and not have this result.

The symbolic representative of Cystic Detective appears in the thumbnail: Dr. Styx, a public domain occult detective who appeared in the short-lived Treasure Comics published by the Prize Group in 1945.