…Young ex-architect Kekulé went looking among the molecules of the time for the hidden shapes he knew were there, shapes he did not like to think of as real physical structures, but as “rational formulas,” showing the relationships that went on in “metamorphoses,” his quaint 19^th-century way of saying “chemical reactions.” But he could visualize. He saw the four bonds of carbon, lying in a tetrahedron—he showed how carbon atoms could link up, one to another, into long chains. . . . But he was stumped when he got to benzene. He knew there were six carbon atoms with a hydrogen attached to each one—but he could not see the shape. Not until the dream: until he was made to see it, so that others might be seduced by its physical beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprint, a basis for new compounds, new arrangements, so that there would be a field of aromatic chemistry to ally itself with secular power, and find new methods of synthesis, so there would be a German dye industry to become the IG. . . .

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, “Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg here we’re coming to now, you know the old refrain, ‘I lost my heart in Heidelberg,’ well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful—when they’re not dueling. Seriously though, they treat you just fine, they don’t just give you the key to the city, they give you the bung-starter!” u.s.w. On you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing—castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting—passengers will now reclaim their seats and much as you’d like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it’s no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, the Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it’s the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight . . . as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a few terrible heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity—but there is meanwhile this trip to be on . . . over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: “Once, only once . . . “ One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle—that’s not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekulé, have taken the Serpent to mean. No: what the Serpent means is—how’s this—that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring, just like that snake with its tail in its mouth, GET IT? The aromatic Ring we know today,” Pökler’s old prof, Laszlo Jamf, at this point in the spiel; removing from his fob a gold hexagon with the German formée cross in the center, a medal of honor from IG Farben, joking, in his lovable old-fart manner, that he likes to think of the cross not as German so much as standing for the tetravalency of carbon—“but who,” lifting his open hands on each beat, like a bandleader, “who, sent, the Dream?” It is never clear how rhetorical any of Jamf’s questions are. “Who sent this new serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference—something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to—not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . .’ Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come—who knows? You. Tell me, Pökler—“