The Submarine Theater Introduction
VolumeI opens in an underwater bubble theater lost in the “fishbowl oceans of atomic sky.” The narrator, who serves as both an Usher and a Movietalker, finds himself stretched across multiple screens and unable to escape. He addresses an audience while simultaneously calling someone in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on a Trinity Site Ground Zero telephone system. This theatrical setting establishes the central conceit of “THE FIRST MOVIE ON THE INTERNET,” which serves as the overarching framework for all subsequent narratives.
The narrator explains that the theater comes in different sky sizes available at the candy counter near the reactor and toilets. Weather looks good for what promises to be “a nice day,” though audiences must remain seated until the INTERMISSION SIGN flashes. This introduces themes of atomic testing, containment, and the relationship between viewer and viewed that permeate the entire work.
The Volume Structure and The Names
The narrative reveals a complex nested structure of volumes, seasons, and episodes. Volume C is specifically dedicated to “THE NAMES” and features writers in a void-room who have given up hope of receiving sandwiches and pencil sharpeners. Instead, they hunt carbonized insect bones to use as writing implements. These ghost-writers compose episodes and seasons for what becomes “THE TELEPATHIC MOTION PICTURE OF THE LOST TRIBES.”
Multiple nested prologues introduce the concept of 26 seasons, each containing 26 episodes, creating a massive 676-episode meta-narrative. The structure involves seasonal gargle-reruns, hurricane weather predictions that become episode titles, and references to a “laughing language of chalk.” Volume C establishes spatial relationships through kitchen/floor/ceiling/door configurations and introduces “flubber fun” mechanics involving floating and bouncing.
Volume D: The Return to Elsewhere
Volume D represents “ELSEWHERE” and “THE RETURN TO ELSEWHERE,” serving as a wrap-up narrative that references three previous feature-length movies (Volumes A, B, and C). The mysterious “INTERESTING INTERNET” exists inside walls, and languages are described as snakes. This volume previews Volume E as a 30-hour shot-by-shot remake of “WAX OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BINGO BABY.”
The narrative warns of wolves at the edge of an angry wolf-ridden veldt, suggesting territorial dangers and wild elements beyond the controlled theater environment. Volume D functions as a transitional space between the established volumes and the approaching complexity of later installments.
The Everyday Faraday Story
A significant narrative thread follows Everyday Faraday, who operates a mysterious writing machine that produces strange characters only understood by rotifers (microscopic animals with spinning wheels in their brain heads). Faraday writes an extremely long memoir with the elaborate title: “My Life, Tee-Hee, Described By And Through The Immediate Exercise Of The Simultaneous Universal Principles Of Haha Synchronic And HoHo Synchoric Rotary Rotations, Forwards and Backwards Too…“
The rotifers serve as intermediaries between human observation and mechanical transcription. Faraday's machine can disguise characters as foreign languages when necessary, a functionality he doesn't fully understand. This story explores themes of translation, mechanical intelligence, and the relationship between observation and recording.
The Roget Discovery Sequence
Another crucial narrative follows Roget at a picket fence, where he discovers the persistence of vision - the foundation of cinema. Watching wagon wheels pass through fence slats, Roget observes how light and shadow create the illusion of reverse motion. The wagon appears to move forward while its wheels seem to flow backward, creating a psychophysical event that “could never be remembered, but only seen.”
This discovery becomes the basis for “movietalking” and establishes how fragmented counter-rotating light can be put on sale in “public light image memory thought markets.” The fence becomes a “singing harp light fence” whose construction costs have been paid off, working in conjunction with constantly passing wagon wheels that “worked for free day and night, even when there was no light.”
Volume F: The Lost Tribes on Television
Volume F plays previous volumes at one-third speed, expanding time across 13 volumes spanning 24 hours of content. Commercial interruptions occur every two minutes, creating “weak winded easily unavoidable upsidedown imitations of pale imitations” of worlds viewers don't want to know. The volume references the 1931 Volcanic Colonial Language Zoo Exposition in Paris, where a working volcano occasionally erupts, confusing the French capital.
The narrative describes being “on television, being spoken by the words that we see” while walking through and across screens. Ruptures in the oily slick allow “dolphin shark fins of commercial sanitary sanity” to poke through, asking viewers to spend words on thoughts of other worlds. The story involves vacuum cleaner tubes adapted as Cathode Ray Tubes for displaying the narrative.
Volume G: Fake Manchuria
Volume G represents the culmination titled “IN FAKE MANCHURIA, PARTS ONE AND TWO.” This volume uses a complex indexing system of 52 parts divided by alphabet (A-Z twice), involving what's described as a “DVD-pathogenic replication process” causing infinite subdivisions. The narrative has traveled “thousands of years” to reach this volume.
Sections A through M include: The Manhattan Projector, Finding the Dark of Thought, The Collect Call, Finding Berlin, The Volcano Light, The Encyclopedia, Finding the Railroad People, The Death of Thomas Edison, and various explorations of Manchuria as both real and fake place. The volume explores themes of colonial exploitation, railroad theft, and the construction of false historical narratives.
The Store Stories
Multiple interconnected narratives involve “THE STORE” - specifically “The Rooms” and “The Theatre.” The store exists everywhere but “you have to go there to get there.” It's described as the “Manchu Edison Telepathic Store” located “among places that are not there, between thoughts that listen to the forgetting of those places.”
The store has a 6-story cubic structure that's “completely flat until you arrive.” It functions as a theater where stories are “pre-re-presented” and serves as a multiplex of “placed replaced places” where stores undergo “de-projection in all directions.” The narrator warns visitors to “take the elevator and do not go to the basement until I tell you.”
The store also features a multi-floor rotating structure with an elevator that stops between flickering floors, among “stores and food storage refrigerators and story storage refrigerators.” Everyone eventually ends up at the inevitable food court, where the rule is “eat or be eaten.”
The Gleiwitz Broadcast Incident
A major historical narrative centers on Nazi commandos at a wooden radio tower in Gleiwitz on August 31, 1939. The commandos tear open a secret brown envelope containing text they're ordered to sing repeatedly until dawn on September 1, 1939 - the beginning of the invasion of Poland.
The commandos had prepared Chinese shadow puppet dramas for what they thought would be a television broadcast, but find themselves forced to sing the mysterious text instead. They discover the material inappropriate for singing, leading to professional embarrassment. The narrative details their hand-washing rituals using toilet spigots and their search for the radio station's ON switch.
The broadcast includes reversed Hungarian music, false-flag announcements, and puppet shows. The story connects this historical incident to larger themes about propaganda, performance, and the relationship between media and violence.
The Triple Zone and Island Paintings
The narrative describes the “Triple Zone of the Revised Republic,” where inhabitants live either on flying islands in the sky or in boats beneath the sea. Astronomers on the islands have special glasses that reveal identification paintings on the undersides of other islands. These paintings were created by government agencies during “prehistoric industrial periods.”
The Department of Looking Up involves employees who identify approaching islands that may crush them, using “crush-proof glasses” to read the identification paintings. The relationship between sky-dwellers and ground-dwellers involves sympathies that must be avoided during “crushing periods.”
The islands cast shadows that create “living acts of horrible live graffiti” over the official identification paintings, making proper identification difficult. This story explores themes of surveillance, identification, and the violence of observation.
The Telepathic Motion Picture of the Lost Tribes
The comprehensive 26-season structure encompasses episodes ranging from “At The Edge Of A Vast Domain” and “The Frog of the Ballet” through “The Telepathic Murderers We Have Done.” Each season contains 26 episodes covering topics like:
The Old Atomic Mines of Nagasaki
Israel in Manchuria
The Flying Toyoshi Triplets
The Reversing Solar Revolution
47 Talking Flowers
The Harbin Surrealists
Spanish Frogs of Jewish Japan
The Ghetto Topologists of Shanghai
The seasons progress through various themes including space exploration, historical revisionism, identity confusion, and temporal displacement. Later seasons address futures “without Us” and “without You,” suggesting apocalyptic or post-human scenarios.
The Flood Conclusion
The work concludes with a vision of mass media saturation where “screen-eyes” exist “everywhere elsewhere in every house all at once.” Tears flow through tunnels that bifurcate into endless broadcast divisions, turning “two eyes into two million billion television screens” in living rooms throughout the Triple Zone.
The pressure of amplified tears breaches the inner seals of millions of screens, causing floods that rise above floors and break through walls. Dangerous flying fish arrive from deeper waters as everyone becomes “simply blind, unable to help each other” though they can still hear each other “in the dark, through the rooms, across the flood.”
The narrative ends with the promise of wandering “underwater in the dark until we get there, or here, wherever,” moving “forwards, towards the exit, towards the great wet nose where we will meet at the end of all this noise.” This apocalyptic conclusion suggests the ultimate convergence of media, consciousness, and environmental catastrophe.
Thematic Integration
Throughout these interconnected narratives, VolumeI explores the relationship between observation and reality, the persistence of memory and vision, the commercialization of experience, and the ways media technologies shape consciousness. The work functions as both a critique of mass media and an experimental demonstration of alternative narrative structures that resist linear consumption.
The multiple volumes, seasons, and episodes create a fractal structure where each level contains the same concerns about authenticity, reproduction, and the difference between experience and its mediated representation. The theatrical frame of the underwater bubble contains all these stories while remaining permeable to larger forces of history, technology, and environmental change.