Wednesday 5 February 2025
Eskişehir, Türkiye
My bed chamber is small, yet vast.
Shadows stretch long and gaunt, leaping at the walls like the emaciated fingers of a dying man.
A single lamp, feeble yet defiant, cast its wan glow upon my desk strewn with papers, their edges curling like lips whispering forgotten verses.
The air is thick with the must of sleeplessness, a stale perfume of ink, dust, and dreams left too long untended.
Upon the bed — a wretched, disheveled thing — sheets lie tangled like winding shrouds of the restless dead.
Here, sleep has been both sought and spurned, a fickle mistress whose embrace proves ever elusive.
And yet, it is not true wakefulness that reigns, but rather that dreadful in-between — a purgatory of the mind wherein thoughts, unbidden and insatiable, prowl like specters in a graveyard.
At the desk, the laptop sits open, its pallid screen gaping like the eye of a blind oracle, hungering for the sacrifice of words.
It does not glow — it beckons, exhaling an eerie luminescence that seems to breathe, pulse, demand.
Outside, beyond the frail veil of curtainless glass, the city smolders in its own somber watchfulness, the streetlamps burning low as if dreading to pierce too deeply into the gloom.
And then, from the corners where the light dares not tread, they come.
Not with rattling chains nor moaning wails, but with the silent certainty of inevitability.
The room shifts — not in structure, but in truth — its very air bending to welcome the visitants.
Wisps of thought take form, gathered in the eddies of flickering shadow, whispering in the hush of the expectant night.
They do not threaten.
They do not command.
They only wait.
I know them, though they have no faces yet.
They are neither friend nor foe, yet closer than both.
And as their murmurs fill the air — soft as the rustle of parchment, dark as the ink of midnight — I do not recoil.
No, I lean forward.
I listen.
I let them in.
For here, in this haunted hour, the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, the dreamer and the dream all hold congress beneath the dim and hungry glow of a writer’s unblinking machine.
And the words — at last — began to flow.
First from my lips and then hopefully to flow from mind to fingers to screen.
The writer, wearied yet eager, I turn my gaze upon them — not in fear, not in trembling reverence, but in a quiet kinship that defies the boundaries of the grave.
I know their names though they do not speak them.
They are Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, Danielsson, Henfil, and Ha Seung-moo.
I know their words though their tongues lay long withered in the dust of forgotten libraries.
And in the pale, artificial glow of the laptop screen, I address them as one might address old friends, long departed yet never truly gone.
“My venerable shades”, I begin, my voice but a murmur against the silence that presses against the chamber walls.
“You who once shaped the world with ink and anguish, you who bled truth upon the parchment and cast shadows upon the hearts of men — I call upon you, not to inspire, but to counsel.”
The air thickens, expectant.
Their forms are restless, shifting like ink spilled upon a cold and unyielding surface.
“Your age has passed, yet the need for words endures. In this new era, a man must etch his name not upon the brittle skin of books alone, but into the ether, the void, the endless chasm of this electronic footprint — a mark unseen, intangible, yet vital as breath itself.
I strive, as you once strove, to shape thought, to awaken slumbering minds, to haunt the living with truths they dare not face.”
A ripple among the unseen, as if in agreement.
“I seek to chronicle the days as they pass, to take the great and the small, the tragic and the triumphant, and lay them bare beneath the scrutiny of time.
Each day, a moment of history.
Each night, a reckoning.
Yet you, my gathered hosts, were not present to witness these events.
You have dwelt in realms beyond sight, beyond time — what, then, do you see?
What truths do the dead perceive that the living refuse?”
The room grows colder — not with malice, nor with dread, but with the weight of presence, with the heavy breath of knowledge unspoken.
Outside, the streetlamps flicker, their glow an echo of distant stars lost to the night.
The laptop, ever watchful, hums with restless hunger, its screen waiting, demanding, expecting.
And the spirits, those long-silent scribes of yesteryear, lean in.
Not Muses, no — not the light and fickle creatures of careless inspiration — but the keepers of wisdom, the archivists of the forgotten, the voices that still whispered in the corridors of literature and dream.
Their eyes, hollow yet knowing, fixed upon me.
I ask their origin.
And then — at last — one speaks.
It is the Korean poet Ha Seung-moo:
“You ask of Glubbdubdrib, the island we have left behind.
It is a place between moments, between memory and oblivion.
Once, it was meant to be a sanctuary of knowledge, where the dead might be summoned so the living could learn.
But time is cruel, even to the dead.
What was once a seat of wisdom has become a graveyard of remembrance — ruined temples where no prayers are spoken, statues of forgotten men whose names fade like breath on glass.
The air is thick with the weight of unspoken thoughts, of history lost, of echoes that have no ears to hear them.
You would think the past remains firm, but it crumbles like old paper.
That is Glubbdubdrib’s nature:
A place where even ghosts feel abandoned.
The magician-kings who once commanded the dead have long since turned to dust themselves.
What remains are ruins — structures with no function, history with no one to recall it.
And we, the restless shades, were drawn to the tremors of your struggle, sensing in you a mind that also lingers between creation and decay.
So we departed that island, where time loops endlessly upon itself, and sought you out.“
In the dim-lit halls of history, where the echoes of Carthage’s burning embers still linger, the story begins.
Time itself is the true rebel, twisting and unraveling under the watchful eyes of five men who lived by no rules but their own.
The Third Punic War, the one that “officially” ended in 146 BCE, stretches long beyond its supposed conclusion.
It is an eternal echo, a war fought in the hearts of men who have yet to understand the lessons of destruction.
In the far-flung future, centuries after the battle-scarred ruins of Carthage have crumbled to dust, a room full of officials from an anonymous government convenes.
Above: Catapulta by Edward Poynter, 1868 – a modern depiction of a Roman siege engine during the siege of Carthage
The date is 4 February 1985.
The Mayor of Rome Ugo Vetere and the Mayor of Carthage Chedli Klibi meet in Tunis to sign a treaty of friendship officially ending the Third Punic War which lasted 2,131 years.
Above: Mayor of Rome Ugo Vetere (1924 – 2013)
Above: Mayor of Carthage Chadli Klibi (1925 – 2020)
The Third Punic War (149 – 146 BC) was the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between Carthage and Rome.
The war was fought entirely within Carthaginian territory, in what is now northern Tunisia.
Above: Flag of Tunisia
When the Second Punic War ended in 201 BC one of the terms of the peace treaty prohibited Carthage from waging war without Rome’s permission.
Rome’s ally, King Masinissa of Numidia, exploited this to repeatedly raid and seize Carthaginian territory with impunity.
Above: Coinage bearing the image of King Masinissa (238 – 148 BC)
In 149 BC, Carthage sent an army, under Hasdrubal, against Masinissa, the treaty notwithstanding.
Above: Hasdrubal the Boetharch (seated)
The campaign ended in disaster as the Battle of Oroscopa ended with a Carthaginian defeat and the surrender of the Carthaginian army.
Anti-Carthaginian factions in Rome used the illicit military action as a pretext to prepare a punitive expedition.
Above: Map of approximate extent of Numidian, Carthaginian and Roman territory in 150 BC
Later in 149 BC a large Roman army landed at Utica in North Africa.
Above: The ruins of Utica, Tunisia
The Carthaginians hoped to appease the Romans, but despite the Carthaginians surrendering all of their weapons, the Romans pressed on to besiege the city of Carthage.
The Roman campaign suffered repeated setbacks through 149 BC, only alleviated by Scipio Aemilianus, a middle-ranking officer, distinguishing himself several times.
A new Roman commander took over in 148 BC and fared equally badly.
At the annual election of Roman magistrates in the spring of 147 BC the public support for Scipio was so great that the usual age restrictions were lifted to allow him to be appointed consul and commander in Africa.
Scipio’s term commenced with two Carthaginian successes, but he tightened the siege and started to build a large mole to prevent supplies from getting into Carthage via blockade runners.
Above: The “Hellenistic Prince“, tentatively identified as Scipio Aemilianus (185 – 129 BC)
The Carthaginians had partially rebuilt their fleet, and it sortied, to the Romans’ surprise.
After an indecisive engagement, the Carthaginians mismanaged their withdrawal and lost many ships.
The Romans then built a large brick structure in the harbour area that dominated the city wall.
Once this was complete, Scipio led a strong force that stormed the camp of Carthage’s field army and forced most of the towns and cities still supporting Carthage to surrender.
In early 146 BC, the Romans launched their final assault and, over six days, systematically destroyed the city and killed its inhabitants; only on the last day did they take prisoners, 50,000 of them, who were sold into slavery.
Above: Scipio Aemilianus before the ruins of Carthage in 146 BC in the company of his friend Polybius (200 – 118 BC)
The conquered Carthaginian territories became the Roman province of Africa, with Utica as its capital.
Above: The Roman province of Africa Proconsularis (146 BC – AD 439)
It was a century before the site of Carthage was rebuilt as a Roman city.
Rome was determined that the city of Carthage remain in ruins.
The Senate dispatched a ten-man commission and Scipio was ordered to carry out further demolitions.
A curse was placed on anyone who might attempt to resettle the site in the future.
The former site of the city was confiscated as ager publicus, public land.
Scipio celebrated a triumph and took the agnomen “Africanus“, as had his adoptive grandfather.
Hasdrubal’s fate is not known, although he had surrendered on the promise of a retirement to an Italian estate.
Above: Scipio Africanus the Younger at the Siege of Carthage
The formerly Carthaginian territories were annexed by Rome and reconstituted to become the Roman province of Africa, with Utica as its capital.
The province became a major source of grain and other food.
The Punic cities which had stood by Carthage to the end were forfeit to Rome as ager publicus, or, as in the case of Bizerte, were destroyed.
Surviving cities were permitted to retain at least elements of their traditional system of government and culture.
The Romans did not interfere in the locals’ private lives and Punic culture, language and religion survived, and is known to modern scholars as “Neo-Punic civilization“.
The Punic language continued to be spoken in North Africa until the 7th century AD.
In 123 BC a reformist faction in Rome led by Gaius Gracchus was eager to redistribute land, including publicly held land.
This included the site of Carthage and a controversial law was passed ordering the establishment of a new settlement there, called Junonia.
Conservatives argued against the law and after its passage spread rumours that markers delimitating the new settlement had been dug up by wolves – a very poor omen.
These rumours, and other political machinations, caused the plan to be scrapped.
In 111 BC, legislation repeated the injunction against any resettlement.
Above: Ruins of the Punic Quarter, Carthage, Tunisia
A century after the war, Julius Caesar planned to rebuild Carthage as a Roman city, but little work was done.
Above: Coinage bearing the image of Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC)
Augustus revived the concept in 29 BC and brought the plan to completion.
Above: Caesar Augustus (63 BC – AD 14)
Roman Carthage had become one of the main cities of Roman Africa by the time of the Empire.
Rome still exists as the capital of Italy.
Above: Roma, Italia
The ruins of Carthage lie 16 km (10 mi) east of modern Tunis on the North African coast.
Above: Ruins of Carthage, Tunisia
A symbolic peace treaty will be signed tomorrow by Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, the mayors of Rome and modern Carthage, respectively, 2,131 years after the War ended.
They shuffle papers and check boxes, announcing the official end of the war.
Above: The siege of Carthage
Klibi, Secretary-General of the Arab League, said the idea of concluding a peace treaty between the once warring cities dated from the 1960s.
Above: Flag of the Arab League
Above: (dark green) Member states of the Arab League
Carthage, now a suburb of the Tunisian capital, Tunis, was founded by Phoenicians from Tyre in the 9th century BC and became a powerful trading state, controlling Northwest Africa and much of the Mediterranean.
Above: Empire of Carthage (270 BC)
Rome was conquering Italy and the two first clashed over Sicily in 264 – 241 BC – the first of three Punic Wars that pitted the two commercial powers in a battle for dominance of the Mediterranean for 118 years.
Above: Carthage and Rome at the start of the First Punic War (264 BC)
When the Carthaginians invaded Spain in 219 BC, Rome declared the second war, one of the titanic struggles of history.
Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, led his troops with elephants and a full supply train across the Alps in an attempt to conquer Italy, but was finally defeated in Africa in 202 BC.
Above: Hannibal crossing the Rhône River (218 BC)
Above: Hannibal crossing the Alps into Italy (218 BC)
Above: The Capuan bust of Hannibal (247 – 182 BC)
In 157 BC, the Roman senator Cato the Elder visited Carthage, which was still a rich mercantile power.
Returning to Rome, he ended every speech in the Senate with the phrase:
″Delenda est Carthago.″
(Carthage must be destroyed).
Above: The Patrizio Torlonia bust of Cato the Elder (234 – 149 BC)
Rome started the Third Punic War in 149 BC, alleging a breach of treaty.
After their final victory in 146 BC, the Romans razed the city.
But on the ground where nothing was ever to grow again, a Roman city was built a hundred years later, to become in time an Arab center.
Above: Ruins of Carthage, Tunisia
Now on this day, 5 February 1985, Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba’s seafront palace borders major archaeological sites at Carthage where teams from nine nations, coordinated by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are exploring the ruins.
Bourguiba receives Vetere at the Palace after the signing ceremony, telling him the peace treaty would ″wipe out the memory of the old Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome and contribute to reinforcing the relations of friendship and cooperation between the two cities.″
Above: Presidential Palace, Tunis, Tunisia
Bourguiba, 82, said:
″The Mediterranean must remain a haven of peace and well-being.″
Above: President Habib Bourguiba (1903 – 2000)
The Mediterranean, replied Vetere, now is a meeting point ″not only for the nations of the region but for the whole world″.
Today, 5 February 2025, the modern settlement of Carthage is a district of the city of Tunis.
Yet, in a way, the city of Carthage still burns.
Above: Carthage, Tunisia
Travel back to an earlier time.
The date is 5 February 1958.
A hydrogen bomb, known as the Tybee Bomb, is lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered.
Above: The lost Tybee Bomb
The Tybee Island mid-air collision was an incident on 5 February 1958, in which the United States Air Force (USAF) lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah.
Above: Tybee Island Lighthouse, Georgia, USA
During a night practice exercise, an F-86 fighter plane collided with the B-47 bomber carrying the large weapon.
The bomb was jettisoned to help prevent a crash and explosion.
After several unsuccessful searches, the weapon was declared lost in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island.
The B-47 bomber was on a simulated combat mission from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, carrying a single 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) bomb.
At about 2:00 a.m. EST (UTC−5), an F-86 fighter collided with the six-engine B-47.
The F-86 pilot, Lt. Clarence Stewart, ejected and parachuted to safety near Estill, South Carolina, ten miles (16 km) north of the fighter’s crash site east of Sylvania, Georgia.
The damaged B-47 remained airborne, plummeting from 38,000 feet (12,000 m) until the pilot, Col. Howard Richardson, regained control at 20,000 feet (6,100 m).
The crew requested permission to jettison the bomb, in order to reduce weight and prevent the weapon from exploding during an emergency landing.
Permission was granted, and the bomb was jettisoned at 7,200 feet (2,200 m), while the plane was traveling at about 200 knots (230 mph; 370 km/h).
The crew did not see an explosion when the weapon struck the sea.
They managed to land the B-47 successfully at nearby Hunter Air Force Base, just south of Savannah.
Richardson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for safely landing the bomber.
Some sources describe the bomb as a functional nuclear weapon, but others refer to it as disabled.
If it had a plutonium nuclear core installed, it was a fully functional weapon.
If it had a dummy core installed, it was incapable of generating a nuclear blast but could still produce a conventional explosion.
Twelve feet (3.7 m) in length, the Mark 15 bomb that was lost weighs 7,600 pounds (3,400 kg), bears the serial number 47782, and contains 400 pounds (180 kg) of conventional high explosives and highly enriched uranium.
The Air Force maintains that its “nuclear capsule” (physics package), used to initiate the nuclear reaction, was removed before its flight aboard the B-47.
As noted in the Atomic Energy Commission “Form AL-569 Temporary Custodian Receipt (for maneuvers)“, signed by the aircraft commander, the bomb contained a simulated 150-pound (68 kg) cap made of lead.
However, according to 1966 Congressional testimony by Assistant Secretary of Defense W.J. Howard, the Tybee Island bomb was a “complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule” and one of two weapons lost that contained a plutonium trigger.
Nevertheless, a study of the Strategic Air Command documents indicates that Alert Force test flights in February 1958 with the older Mark 15 payloads were not authorized to fly with nuclear capsules on board.
Such approval would not come until safer “sealed-pit nuclear capsule” weapons began to be deployed in June 1958.
Starting on 6 February 1958, the Air Force 2700th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Squadron and 100 Navy personnel equipped with hand-held sonar and galvanic drag and cable sweeps mounted a search.
On 16 April, the military announced the search had been unsuccessful.
Based on a hydrographic survey in 2001, the bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried under 5 to 15 feet (1.5 to 4.6 m) of silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.
In 2004, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke claimed to have narrowed the possible resting spot of the bomb down to a small area approximately the size of a football field.
He and his partner located the area by trawling in their boat with a Geiger counter in tow.
Above: Geiger counter
Secondary radioactive particles four times naturally occurring levels were detected and mapped, and the site of radiation origination triangulated.
An Air Force nuclear weapons adviser speculated that the source of the radiation was natural, originating from deposits of monazite, a locally occurring mineral that emits radiation.
By 2007, no undue levels of unnatural radioactive contamination have been detected in the regional Upper Floridan aquifer by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (over and above the already high levels thought to be due to monazite).
In February 2015, an article appeared on a fake news web site which claimed that the bomb had been found by vacationing Canadian divers and had been removed from the bay.
The spurious story spread widely via social media.
Above: Flag of Canada
On 12 February 2015, the entertainment web site World News Daily Report published an article claiming that a couple of amateur scuba divers had discovered a long-lost nuclear warhead off the coast of Georgia:
“A couple of tourists from Canada made a surprising discovery while scuba diving in Wassaw Sound, a small bay located on the shores of Georgia.
Jason Sutter and Christina Murray were admiring the marine life of the area when they stumbled upon a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb that had been lost by the United States Air Force more than 50 years ago.
The couple from London, Ontario, was on a two-week vacation in Georgia and Florida to practice their favorite hobby, scuba diving, when they decided to dive near the shores of Tybee Island.
While admiring the plants and fishes near the sea floor, they noticed a large cylindrical item partially covered by sand.
They investigated the object and found out that it was actually a sort of bomb or missile, so they decided to contact the authorities.
“I noticed an object that looked like a metal cylinder, which I thought was an oil barrel“, says Jason Sutter.
“When I dug it up a bit, I noticed that it was actually a lot bigger and that there was some writing on the side.
When I saw the inscription saying that it was a Mk-15 nuclear bomb, I totally freaked out.
I caught Christina by the arm and made signs to tell her we had to leave.
We made an emergency ascent, went back to shore and then we called 911.“”
However, World News Daily Report is an fake news web site that does not publish factual news material.
A disclaimer on the site states that all of the information contained therein is for “entertainment purposes only“.
While the above-quoted story is a work of fiction, the photograph included with the article was real.
The picture originated with DPA, Germany’s largest press agency, and was first published by the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) on 15 January 2014 in an article entitled “Wartime ammunition still rotting in German waters“.
Above: Logo of the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (German Press Agency)(DPA)
The first spectre speaks.
William Seward Burroughs II (5 February 1914 – 2 August 1997) was an American writer and visual artist.
He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.
Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four collections of essays.
Five books of his interviews and correspondences have also been published.
He was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee.
He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated “shotgun art“.
Above: William S. Burroughs
Burroughs attended Harvard University, where he studied English, then anthropology as a postgraduate, and went on to medical school in Vienna.
Above: Coat of arms of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
In 1942, he enlisted in the US Army to serve during World War II.
After being turned down by both the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Navy, he veered into substance abuse, beginning with morphine and developing a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life.
Above: Logo of the OSS (1942 – 1945)
In 1943, while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Above: American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997)
Above: American writer Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1949)
This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.
Burroughs found success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), but is perhaps best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959).
It became the subject of one of the last major literary censorship cases in the United States after its US publisher, Grove Press, was sued for violating a Massachusetts obscenity statute.
Above: Logo of Grove Press
Burroughs is believed to have killed his second wife, Joan Vollmer, in 1951 in Mexico City.
Above: Ciudad de México (Mexico City), México
He initially claimed that he had accidentally shot her while drunkenly attempting a “William Tell” stunt.
Above: The William Tell apple shot
He later told investigators that he had been showing his pistol to friends when it fell and hit the table, firing the bullet that killed Vollmer.
Above: Joan Vollmer (1923 – 1951)
After he fled Mexico back to the United States, he was convicted of manslaughter in absentia and received a two-year suspended sentence.
Much of Burroughs’ work is highly experimental and features unreliable narrators, but it is also semi-autobiographical, often drawing from his experiences as a heroin addict.
He lived at various times in Mexico City, London, Paris, and the Tangier International Zone in Morocco, and travelled in the Amazon rainforest — and featured these places in many of his novels and stories.
Above: London, England
Above: Paris, France
Above: Tangier and Spanish Morocco
Above: (in dark green) Amazon rainforest
With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique, featuring heavily in such works of his as The Nova Trilogy (1961 – 1964).
Above: The Nova Trilogy
His writing also engages frequent mystical, occult or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in both his fiction and real life.
In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Above: Logo of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
In 1984, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.
Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift“.
Above: Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Burroughs owed this reputation to his “lifelong subversion” of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism.
Above: Edward Blake/The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Watchmen (2009)
J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be “the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War“.
Above: English writer James Graham Ballard (1930 – 2009)
Norman Mailer declared him “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius“.
Above: American writer Norman Mailer (1923 – 2007)
William S. Burroughs, his eyes piercing the bureaucratic haze, grins with a cynic’s glee.
He sees the signing of the “official end” as nothing more than a Kafkaesque farce, a moment of twisted humor in an absurd world.
Above: Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924)
In his mind, the war is not over.
It continues, masked in government jargon, fed by the same greed and control that has been festering since the first sword was raised.
To him, the war never really ends, it just shifts form.
The Punic War’s echo bounces from one conflict to another, unbroken by time or reason.
Above: The siege of Carthage
“Ah, the Toynbee bomb.
A perfect little anomaly lodged in the flesh of the Cold War, humming its forgettable tune.
A slip, a blip, a mistake on a map — the Army didn’t lose it, no no, they mislaid it, like a man misplaces his keys or a thought on the tip of his tongue.
Somewhere, on the deep waters of the Atlantic, it sits, waiting, the Toynbee bomb — the weapon of mass distraction, forgotten in the great shuffle of papers and men.
They say it is “missing“.
Sure.
Just like the bomb in your brain you can’t quite remember, but you know it is there, buried under all the other shit you’ve ignored.
A nuke, lost to the ether.
A perfect symbol of the era:
A piece of civilization’s might discarded without fanfare, a boogeyman misplaced in the back of an old closet.
The government tells you it is “lost” like an old lover who took your keys and walked out, leaving you to clean up the mess.
There’s a whole world to burn, but some things get left behind, tucked away, forgotten.
But let’s talk about the Third Punic War.
That mess.
I mean, how do you end a war that is already dead?
Two thousand years after the fact?
A war that existed only in the fervent minds of old men pushing pens on paper.
The war was never really about Carthage.
The war was always about the idea of Carthage.
Rome didn’t destroy a city.
They killed a dream and made a new one.
“The end of the Third Punic War.”
That’s the punchline of a bad joke, a bureaucratic whim.
What does it mean, the “end” of war, when the true blood was spilled centuries ago?
Is it the body count that matters?
The numbers, the dates, the papers filed neatly away?
The war never ended, it only wore different masks.
The end of the Third Punic War?
Shit, it never ended.
It’s still here, alive in every bombing, every broken treaty, every missile you don’t remember firing.
Time?
What is time but a sick joke?
Spanning out like the endless grid of a city you never quite built but keep paving over.
These things we mark, these wars we “end“, they echo, don’t they?
Like a broken record, skipping its way through history.
The Toynbee bomb and the Third Punic War — two names that speak the same language of forgotten consequences, where nothing ends, and everything is always waiting to begin again.”
Above: The Third Punic War
Bryan Stanley William Johnson (5 February 1933 – 13 November 1973) was an English experimental novelist, poet and literary critic.
He also produced television programmes and made films.
Above: B. S. Johnson
Johnson was born into a working-class family, the only child of a bookseller’s stock-keeper, Stanley Wilfred Johnson (1908 – 1973), and a waitress-cum-barmaid, Emily Jane (1908 – 1971, née Lambird), of Hammersmith, London.
Above: Hammersmith, London, England
During the Second World War they moved to nearby Barnes.
Above: Barnes, London, England
Johnson was evacuated from London twice during the war.
Above: German Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bomber flying over Wapping and the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London at the start of the Luftwaffe’s evening raids of 7 September 1940
Having been educated at Flora Gardens Primary School, Hammersmith, he and his mother were moved to Chobham, Surrey in 1939 for two years, and he attended the village school.
Above: Chobham, Surrey, England
After a brief return to Hammersmith, he was sent alone in 1941 to High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where he attended a local school.
Above: Guildhall, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England
Having failed his examinations, he was unable to enter Latymer School at Hammersmith and spent the last year of the war at Highfields Secondary Modern School.
Above: Great Stone Road Secondary Modern in Trafford, Manchester, England
On his return home, he attended Barnes County Secondary Modern School, before “passing some sort of simple examination” allowing him to transfer to Kingston Day Commercial School, where “they taught me shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping. Useful.“
Johnson left school when he was 16 years old to work variously as an accounting clerk for a building company and for a baker, as a bank junior and as a clerk at Standard Oil, but taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year’s pre-university course at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university entrance exam for King’s College London in 1956.
Above: Birkberk College, University of London
Above: Coat of arms of King’s College London
After graduating in 1959, he worked as a private tutor and supply teacher in Surrey, while writing increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels.
In his early years he collaborated on several projects with a close friend and fellow writer, Zulfikar Ghose, with whom he produced a joint collection of stories, Statement Against Corpses.
Above: Indian-born English writer Zulfikar Ghose (1935 – 2022)
Like Johnson’s early stories, at least superficially, his first two novels, Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) initially appear relatively conventional in plot terms.
However, the first uses several innovative devices and includes a section set out as a film script.
The second includes famously cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward.
His work became progressively even more experimental.
The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked, apart from the chapters marked “First” and “Last“, which indicated preferred terminal points.
BBC producer Lorna Pegram employed him to talk about this creation for the TV series Release.
With barely any negotiation, the interview was complete months before the book was ready for publication.
House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that various characters’ thoughts and experiences would cross each other and intertwine, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence.
Johnson won the Eric Gregory Award in 1962 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1967.
Above: English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
Johnson led and associated with a loose circle of experimental authors in 1960s Britain.
Many contributed to London Consequences, a novel consisting of a palimpsest of chapters passed between a range of participating authors, edited by Margaret Drabble and Johnson.
Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.
For some years he was poetry editor of Transatlantic Review (1959 – 1977).
Johnson is mentioned several times in Paul Theroux’s account of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998).
In later life Johnson settled in Islington, North London, living in Claremont Square and Myddelton Square, after which he bought a house in Dagmar Terrace, Islington, where he lived until his death.
Above: High Street, Islington, North London, England
On 31 March 1964, he married Virginia Ann Kimpton (b. 1938), a teaching machine programmer.
She figures as Ginnie in his novel Trawl.
They had two children.
Johnson became depressed by his failure to succeed commercially and by mounting family problems.
On 13 November 1973, aged 40, he took his own life by slitting his wrists at 9 Dagmar Terrace, Islington.
He left an estate valued at £9,621.
The day before his death he had told his agent:
“I shall be much more famous once I’m dead.“
Johnson’s following at the time of his death was small, but enthusiastic.
Above: B. S. Johnson
Johnson quickly acquired a posthumous cult following, helped by a critically acclaimed film adaptation in 2000 of the last novel of his to appear in his lifetime, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973).
Singer-songwriter Joe Pernice paid tribute to Johnson on the 2006 Pernice Brothers album Live a Little.
Jonathan Coe’s 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize) again led to a renewal of interest in Johnson’s work.
Coe himself is now President of the B. S. Johnson Society, which aims “to bring closer Johnson scholars, readers and aficionados alike in their various approaches to the author’s life and work“.
In April 2013, the British Film Institute (BFI) released You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, a collection of Johnson’s films, as part of the BFI Flipside DVD series.
Above: Logo of the British Film Institute
In 2015, the Nottingham Five Leaves Bookshop held an event called “But I Know This City!” focused on Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates, which is set there.
It took participants round the city to listen to live readings of the novel’s sections in whatever order they chose.
Above: Nottingham, England
Indie pop band Los Campesinos! has cited the literature of B. S. Johnson among their non-musical influences, praising Coe’s biography, with Johnson’s work inspiring titles and lyrics of their music.
Above: Los Campesinos!
There is a collection of B. S. Johnson’s literary papers and correspondence in the British Library.
In 2020, Matthew Harle compiled a selection of proposals of B.S. Johnson’s abandoned work, titled Can I Come In and Talk About These and Other Ideas? 13 Proposals from B.S. Johnson.
Harle writes:
“B.S. Johnson’s proposals should provide consolation, encouragement, despair and disbelief for anyone who has ever tried to get an idea realized.“
B. S. Johnson watches from the edges of this bureaucratic scene, shaking his head in dismay.
For him, war is an ill-constructed narrative, where cause and effect are but a mockery of the chaos unfolding.
He sees the “end” of the Punic War as a cruel joke, a false conclusion tacked on like the last page of a half-finished novel.
In his world, every plot twist — every battle, every explosion — rings hollow.
The pages are torn, the narrative fragmented, and nothing makes sense.
A war officially ended centuries ago, only to have its remnants still felt in every conflict that follows.
What is this but the absurdity of a world where endings mean nothing, and everything is left unresolved?
Above: Siege of Carthage
A bomb, you see, forgotten.
In truth, lost is a more polite term.
It had no place in the world, nor the world any place for it.
A hydrogen bomb, slipped from the clutches of its handlers, placed not by design but by sheer, indifferent fate somewhere beneath the indifferent waters of the Atlantic.
One must consider how it is, in the ceaseless passing of time, such a thing can vanish unnoticed, neglected as the millions of other “urgent” things left to drift in the background of human folly.
Who would remember it?
Certainly not those responsible.
It was a matter of paperwork, a blip, a minor detail amidst the grand theater of war and politics.
Left picture : At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column. Six planes of the 509th Composite Group participated in this mission: one to carry the bomb (Enola Gay), one to take scientific measurements of the blast (The Great Artiste), the third to take photographs (Necessary Evil), while the others flew approximately an hour ahead to act as weather scouts (08/06/1945). Bad weather would disqualify a target as the scientists insisted on a visual delivery. The primary target was Hiroshima, the secondary was Kokura, and the tertiary was Nagasaki. Right picture : Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy.
“Ah, the Toynbee bomb.
A device capable of unspeakable destruction, perhaps.
A device made for an enemy no longer apparent.
A ticking reminder, clinging to the face of bureaucracy and incompetence, waiting, unmoved by the orders and directives that govern its existence.
But here lies the problem:
It was never truly lost, was it?
The government may want you to think so.
But in reality, its loss is a matter of perception, not geography.
There is always another bomb, another threat, another moment of panic.
The bomb exists in a suspended state, a kind of limbo in which we too are suspended, pretending the world’s crises are as neatly packaged as the news reports we receive.
And then, the Third Punic War, that ancient relic of history.
The word end seems almost absurd.
War, we are led to believe, ends when one side capitulates.
But this war ended not when the last breath of Carthage was drawn, but when the Romans decided they could stop measuring the calendar by it.
It is laughable, really.
For what does it mean to end a war that carried on for centuries?
What is it but another form of historical bookkeeping, a date, a line, a thought to tell us that now is when we should stop thinking about it?
The bones of Carthage still rest in the earth, as they have for millennia.
The war did not end — it merely changed its shape.
What is history but a re-ordering of events, a subtle shifting of narrative?
If a war’s end can be marked after 2,000 years, perhaps we are simply shifting the beginning.
Above: The siege of Carthage
And yet, the thought lingers — what of this bomb, this war, and the time between?
The things we measure, the things we forget?
The bomb floats somewhere far beneath the waves, and the war exists still, even after it has long since “ended“.
In the end, one might wonder if the world does not move in a series of mistaken conclusions.
It’s an oddity, isn’t it?
That we should forever search for an ending, a finality, when everything is merely a part of a narrative that refuses to stop.”
Tage Ivar Roland Danielsson (5 February 1928 – 13 October 1985) was a Swedish author, actor, comedian, poet and film director.
He worked together with Hans Alfredson in the comedy duo Hasse & Tage.
Above: Tage Danielsson
Danielsson was born on 5 February 1928 in Linköping, Sweden, the son of Ivar Danielsson, a bus driver, and his wife Elsa (née Svensson).
He passed studentexamen at Katedralskolan in Linköping in 1948.
Above: Central square, Linköping, Östergötland, Sweden
He received a Master of Philosophy degree from Uppsala University in 1954.
There he got involved in student theatre of Östgöta Nation and became a member of the Juvenalorden, as well as serving as vice president of the Uppsala Student Union.
Above: Logo of Uppsala University
After graduation, Danielsson found work at Sveriges Radio (Sweden’s Radio) in 1955.
He became head of the entertainment department’s speech section in 1956, production manager of the entertainment department in 1958, and department head from 1959 to 1962.
At his work he came in contact with Hans Alfredson.
Above: Swedish actor Hans Alfredson (1931 – 2017)
They started the entertainment production company AB Svenska Ord (Swedish Words Ltd) together in 1961.
Danielsson and Alfredson wrote, directed and acted in multiple revues and films over the coming decades.
Above: Hans “Hasse” Alfredson and Tage Danielsson
In 1972 at the 8th Guldbagge Awards he won the Best Director award for the film The Apple War (1971).
At the 12th Guldbagge Awards his film Release the Prisoners to Spring (Släpp fångarne loss, det är vår!)(1975) won the award for Best Film.
At the 14th Guldbagge Awards his film The Adventures of Picasso (Picassos äventyr) (1978) won the award for Best Film.
In 1985 his film Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter (1984), based on Astrid Lindgren’s book of the same name, was entered into the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.
Above: Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren (1907 – 2002)
Svenska Ord in general, and Danielsson in particular, excelled in making scorching comments on current events in an illusorily naive and outward-lookingly friendly way that often succeeded to endear even political opponents to his particular brand of humorist humanism.
He was also a constant campaigner behind the scene for causes ranging from anti-apartheid to anti-nuclear to social solidarity, he was also a regular contributor to the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren (The Worker)
In 1980 he received an honorary doctorate at Linköping University.
In 1955, Danielsson married Märta-Stina Köhler (born 1930), the daughter of Knut Köhler and Karin Janze.
They had one son: Patrik (born 1961).
In January 1983, Danielsson’s summer house in Corsica was bombed.
Danielsson, who had owned the house in Corsica for the past 25 years, left for Sweden a week before the bombing.
The attack, which completely destroyed the house, was carried out by the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) as part of the Corsican conflict.
The organization’s goal is to free Corsica from France.
Above: Flag of Corsica and below it the wordmark for the National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC)
His death in 1985 was from skin cancer (Malignant melanoma).
A statue of him can be seen just outside the grounds of his old school.
Above: Tage Danielsson statue, Linpöking, Sweden
Meanwhile, Tage Danielsson watches the absurdity unfold, his wry smile reflecting the irony of the situation.
A missing hydrogen bomb, hidden somewhere in the shadows of bureaucracy.
A room full of officials still debating the fate of Carthage, oblivious to the fact that the city has been reduced to dust.
He pens a sketch of the scene, turning it into a farce.
In his hands, the chaos of war is an endless circle of pointless discussions, of misplaced power, and of leaders who fumble through their own failures.
The bomb isn’t truly lost.
It has been misplaced in the same way that power misplaces its responsibility.
The generals debate with fervor, yet the truth remains hidden in plain sight:
Destruction waits, always lurking, its effects felt long after the “official” end.
Above: Tage Danielsson
“Ah, yes, the Toynbee bomb.
Or rather, the forgotten bomb, that most remarkable of things — the bomb that never was.
It’s like a joke, you know.
Only no one laughs.
Imagine this:
A sleek, dangerous piece of modernity — designed for destruction, tailored for devastation — lost in a bureaucratic slip, like an important letter tossed to the side, ignored, forgotten.
Lost, they say, as though it’s a thing that could simply be misplaced.
But isn’t that just a beautiful metaphor for the world we’ve built?
One bomb is lost and forgotten, but the idea of the bomb is what never really vanishes.
The bomb, the concept, lives on in every misstep, every misplaced priority, every office meeting that could have been more than just paperwork.
The world forgets the bomb, but the bomb doesn’t forget us.
Do you know, this is what we do, isn’t it?
We speak of wars and weapons like they are remote, distant things.
We stamp our feet, we hold discussions, we discuss the loss of the bomb, as though the bomb is the lost thing.
But the truth is much simpler.
The world has lost itself.
We’ve mislaid the very essence of responsibility and care, and we’d rather not face that fact.
Perhaps, one day, someone will find that bomb, and then what?
Will it really matter?
Will it have any relevance in the grand scheme of things?
Or will we simply ignore it again, place it in a drawer somewhere and call it history, a word we often use to excuse the things we fail to address?
Now, look at the Third Punic War.
The end of that?
After two thousand years?
When one talks of “endings“, one must consider how much of it is simply for the comfort of the mind.
They say the war ended with the fall of Carthage, but I think we must admit — how could it end?
It was never truly over.
Not really.
The ruins of Carthage tell us that.
But officially — oh, now that’s different, isn’t it?
The story is sealed, wrapped up, neatly put away with the end date stamped on it, as though time itself could be boxed up and shelved.
After all, what do we know of the ends of wars?
The ends of battles?
In our modern world, we are so keen on putting things in neat boxes that we forget the wars continue on in our minds, in our politics, in the way we see each other across borders.
What is an ending but a convenient fiction?
And isn’t that what all of this is, really?
The bomb lost beneath the water, the war ended long ago, but still we speak of them, as though time itself can be measured by these convenient events.
But they’re not really gone, are they?
They linger, as all things do, shifting, waiting.
And we keep talking about them.
Perhaps in the end, we do not need to find the bomb, or the final word on a war.
Perhaps we only need to accept that nothing ends, not really.
We live with the questions, we live with the waiting, and maybe that is what war is really about:
Waiting for something, for anything, to end — and yet it never truly does.”
Henrique de Souza Filho (5 February 1944 – 4 January 1988), commonly known as Henfil, was a Brazilian cartoonist, caricaturist, journalist and writer, born in Ribeirão das Neves, Minas Gerais.
Above: Henfil
Henfil grew up in Ribeirão das Neves, a metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, where he completed his early studies, attended a night school course and a higher education course in sociology at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of UFMG , which he dropped out of after a few months.
Above: Ribeirão das Neves, Brazil
Above: Logo of for Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Henfil worked as a cheese packer, an office boy at an advertising agency and a journalist, until he specialized in illustration and comic book production in the early 1960s.
Henfil’s debut as an illustrator came in 1964, when, at the invitation of editor and writer Roberto Dummond, he began working for the magazine Alterosa, in Belo Horizonte, where he created “Os Franguinhos“.
In 1965, he began to collaborate with the newspaper Diário de Minas, producing political cartoons.
In 1967, he created sports cartoons for the Jornal dos Sports, in Rio de Janeiro.
His work was also published in the magazines Realidade, Visão, Placar (Scoreboard) and O Cruzeiro (The Cruise).
From 1969 onwards, he began to collaborate with the Jornal do Brasil (Brazil Newspaper) and O Pasquim.
In these publications, his characters reached a great level of popularity.
Already involved in the country’s politics, Henfil created the magazine Fradim in 1970, which had as its trademark humorous, critical and satirical drawings, with typically Brazilian characters.
In 1970 he published the comic book Os Fradinhos (The Friars), starring his most acclaimed characters.
It was the first Brazilian comic book to be published in other countries.
With the advent of AI-5 — guaranteeing censorship of the media, and the repressive organs arresting and torturing the “subversives” — Henfil, in 1972, launched the magazine Fradim through the publisher Codecri, which made his characters known.
In addition to the friars Cumprido and Baixim, the magazine brought together Graúna, Bode Orelana, the northeastern Zeferino and, later, Ubaldo, the paranoid.
Henfil advocated the end of the military dictatorship that Brazil was going through.
At that time, a series of cartoons by Henfil that became quite well-known was The Cemetery of the Living Dead, in which he “buried” public figures who, in the cartoonist’s opinion, were in favor of the dictatorship.
In 1972, when Elis Regina performed for the Brazilian army, Henfil published a cartoon in O Pasquim burying the singer, calling her “Elis the ruler” — along with other figures who, in his view, would please the regime’s interests, such as singers Roberto Carlos and Wilson Simonal, soccer player Pelé, and actors Paulo Gracindo, Tarcísio Meira and Marília Pêra.
Above: Brazilian singer Elis Regina (1945 – 1982)
Above: Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos
Above: Brazilian singer Wilson Simonal (1938 – 2000)
Above: Brazilian footballer Pelé (1940 – 2022)
Above: Brazilian entertainer Paulo Gracindo (1911 – 1995)
Above: Brazilian actor Tarcisio Meira (1935 – 2021)
Above: Brazilian actress Marilia Pêra (1943 – 2015)
Years later, the cartoonist said that he only regretted having buried Clarice Lispector and Elis Regina.
Above: Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977)
Henfil was a contributor to the satirical newspaper “O Pasquim“, which began publication in response to press censorship in Brazil following the military crackdown of December 1968.
In 1970 he published the comic book “Os Fradinhos” (The Friars), starring his most acclaimed characters.
It was the first Brazilian comic book to be published in other countries.
Henfil also worked in theater, film, television and literature, but political activism was his hallmark, creating fictional characters that made acerbic criticisms of the Brazilian political institutions of the time.
Henfil was involved at Rede Globo, as a writer for the now-defunct program TV Mulher, and in literature, but he was most notable for his work in Brazilian social and political movements.
Henfil tried to pursue a career in the United States, where he spent two years undergoing medical treatment.
Since he had no place in traditional American newspapers, being relegated to underground publications, Henfil wrote his book Diary of a Cockroach.
Back in Brazil, he also participated in the magazine Isto É, where he wrote a column called “Cartas da Mãe“.
A haemophiliac, Henfil contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion and died as a result of the disease in Rio de Janeiro.
Henfil’s writings were quick notes.
They were not exactly chronicles, but a mix of quick reflections, as well as his light cartoon strokes.
Famous were his “Letters to the Mother” — a common title in which he wrote about everything and everyone, often shooting like a machine gun, using the intimate tone of a son who really speaks to his mother — while criticizing the government and demanding positions from personalities.
Even his books are in truth a collection of these writings, at one time memorialists and at the other talking about everything, about the political situation and his engagement.
In Diary of a Cockroach, for example, Henfil narrates his time in the United States, where he tried to “make America, the dream of every self-respecting Latin American” (according to him).
The work features a section in which the cartoonist describes the cultural shock he experienced, the strong reaction of the American public to his characters, who were classified as aggressive and offensive.
All of this is written in short chapters, in the intimate tone of someone who is not talking to an anonymous reader, but to a friend or acquaintance.
In 2017, a documentary directed by filmmaker Angela Zoé was released, about the life, art and interpretation of the artist today, by younger artists.
Above: Henfil
Henfil, from the streets of Brazil, is struck by the eternal nature of war.
To him, war is the weapon of those in power, used to maintain control and silence the masses.
He takes his pen and draws, mocking the very concept of an end.
The Punic War is not over.
It is merely a reflection of the wars that continue in the form of dictatorship, corruption, and control.
The lost bomb, he notes, is a symbol of government secrecy — of the quiet dangers we pretend do not exist.
But Henfil knows better.
War never ends for those who are oppressed.
It mutates, adapts, and finds new ways to destroy.
Above: Henfil
“The Tybee Bomb, an explosive remnant of Cold War paranoia, misplaced in the waves like so many forgotten truths.
What a perfect metaphor for those who hold the power, casually discarding destruction and waiting for the rest of us to either forget or forgive.
Imagine the absurdity: a hydrogen bomb is lost, slipping through the cracks of government competence.
How typical!
An arsenal of violence, its location a mystery for decades, as if it could simply disappear into the sea and leave the world none the wiser.
Perhaps that’s the real point of such bombs:
They’re meant to be misplaced.
After all, it’s easier to pretend that we don’t have the power to destroy than to face the reality of what we could do with it.
Such things aren’t meant to be found, only feared.
And then, the Third Punic War.
The bitter and tragic saga of Carthage, a city reduced to ash in a moment of Roman arrogance.
But what a joke it is to say the war “ended” in 146 BC, only to have its echo carry on through history for over two thousand years.
Wars don’t end, they just wear different faces.
The ghosts of Carthage haunt us still — whether it’s the proxy wars of today or the military coups that’ve become a staple of our modern world.
Carthage’s death didn’t bring peace.
It merely shuffled the deck for the next round of violence.
Why?
Because power doesn’t ever disappear.
It simply changes hands.
It’s never about the end, it’s about the shift — the maintenance of control.
Ask the people of Syria or Palestine, or my own Brazil:
The war never really ends, it just takes on new names.
Above: Scene from the Third Punic War
And here we are, in the 21st century, still fighting.
But who’s the enemy now?
The governments that lose bombs in the sea or the ones who lose their humanity in the process?
The bombs might be lost, but the destruction they symbolize keeps rolling on.
We haven’t learned anything.
The war continues, even if it doesn’t always make the headlines.”
Above: The Bayeux Tapestry
Ha Seung-moo (also spelled Ha Seung moo) is a South Korean poet, Presbyterian minister, seminary professor, and theologian.
Above: Ha Seung Moo
Ha was born on February 5, 1964, in Sacheon, South Korea.
Above: Changsun Sachunpo Bridge, Sacheon, South Korea
Ha is the grandson of Sir Ha Yeon, who is the 21st grandson of Joseon’s (a dynastic kingdom of Korea that existed for 505 years) most notable Prime Minister, Yeonguijeong.
Above: Chief State Councillor (Yeonguijeong) Ha Yeon
After his basic education, Ha began to read modern literature.
He was motivated by a bookseller who visited the school and purchased a series of books on modern Korean literature.
Thereafter, readings of Korean literature sparked his interest in writing and philosophy.
Above: The Tripitaka Koreana, Haeinsa, South Korea
In this process, Ha began to question humanity and thing-in-itself In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation.)
Above: German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)
During his high school years, Ha’s spiritual journey continued. He pursued truth, the meaning of life and humanity in Buddhism, Hinduism and other major religions.
In this spiritual journey, he read many western philosophical classics.
Ha was influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard.
Above: Austrian founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
Above: Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961)
Ha experienced spiritual progression recognizing the importance and meaning of human existence, and the ‘despair‘ of Kierkegaard and the ‘reason‘ of Kant became a less serious issue to his life and study.
Above: Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)
At the end of 12th grade, Ha had a mystical religious experience that made him confess that God is the only answer to his quest for meaning.
Ha then became a Christian.
His poetry became an artistic stimulus for artists in parts of England and America.
Ha began to write poems in Han-Kyoreh Literature (한겨레문학).
His poem “Recollections of Homo Sapiens” (호모사피엔스의 기억) introduced him to the public.
Ha’s work faced difficulties, because it conflicted with traditional Korean literature.
Nonetheless, Korean writers and poets generally admired his poetic work.
Ha’s poetry has a deep inner world, life and death, reality and ideal, metaphysics and metaphysics, and self-determination are dominant.
Above: Ha Seung-moo
The poem “Songs of Wildflowers” depicts the lyricism by intuition.
“The story of an elephant’s hand expelled by the sky” can be said to be poetry that first introduced allegorical techniques to the genre.
In recent years, Byeon Uisu wrote of Ha Seungmoo’s poetry and commented on poetic excellence:
Immanuel Kant thought that he gained knowledge based on time and space.
Albert Einstein thought that there would be no time beyond the speed of light.
Of course, “time” for Kant is psychological and Einstein’s “time” is relative, but, in the strict sense that time does not exist as an objective entity.
Is Kant’s or Einstein’s proposition ultimately an imperfect wisdom of “99.9%” rather than “100%”?
Ha Seung-moo evokes the problem of the essentially axioms of the ‘Sophist type’ of language.
The river of time never flows.
Time exists.
The poet says that people don’t spend the time they think they do.”
Ha Seung-mu ‘s poems have a deep inner world, dominated by contemplation and introspection, juxtaposing life and death, reality and ideals, metaphysics and metaphysics.”
And then, Ha Seung-moo looks at the world from a divided Korea, where the past is never truly gone and the future is shaped by the ghosts of old battles.
He is not yet dead, but his spirit is here.
Above: Flag of South Korea
To him, the Punic War is a story that is never finished, just as the war in his homeland lingers in the shadows.
The end of Carthage is but a page turned, but the cycle of war continues to turn again and again.
The bomb, lost and forgotten, is a metaphor for how history repeats itself, how the wounds of the past never truly heal.
The war in Korea, the war in every nation, is part of a larger cycle —one that will only end when the very concept of war itself is abolished.
“The bomb, lost beneath the waves.
A gift of fear, entrusted to the sea, but can the ocean forget such a burden?
A hydrogen bomb, hidden in the depths of the world — lost or perhaps waiting?
Waiting for what?
For the moment when its presence is revealed again, as a reminder of what was never resolved?
In the quietest corners of history, we store our bombs — both the ones made of metal and the ones made of memory.
A bomb like this is a ghost, only forgotten by the surface world, but its weight is felt in the air we breathe.
It has the potential to break the peace, even if it never returns to the land.
Just like the wars we wage — they are never truly over, they only change form.
Perhaps we lost the bomb, but have we ever truly lost the war?
Is it not still in our bones, passed down like the aftershocks of an earthquake, shaping the landscape of today?
And the Third Punic War?
Is it truly over, when its wounds are still felt in the lives of those who carry the legacy of empire and conquest?
A war that ended with the destruction of a city, but did it ever end in spirit?
I look at the division of my own land, split down the middle by forces beyond our control, and I ask:
How can war end when it continues in the hearts of the separated?
The Punic War’s end is a moment in history, but the war itself — was it ever resolved?
It ended with a final battle, but the wounds linger in every war fought since.
We hear the drums of war.
We see the plumes of smoke in the distance.
What is it that we think we can stop?
What is it that the bomb, lost in the ocean, is waiting for?
It waits, just as the wars wait.
We cannot wash away the past with the waters of time.
It stays with us, quietly, but ever present.”
Above: Scene from the Third Punic War
As the words of these five rebels swirl together, their voices blend into a single, cohesive narrative.
The Tybee bomb is not lost.
It simply waits, an ominous reminder that destruction is always lurking, always ready to be unleashed.
The Punic War has not ended — it has merely transformed, evolving with each new conflict, each new generation of war-makers.
Above: The siege of Carthage
The shadows of war stretch long, casting their dark influence over history, never truly allowing us to move forward.
Time loops upon itself, a continuous cycle of conflict that refuses to be closed.
In the end, the question remains:
Do we ever really close the book on war?
Or do we just lose the pages and hope no one finds them?
As the ghosts of Burroughs, Johnson, Danielsson, Henfil, and Ha Seung-moo look on, they smile wryly.
They know the answer.
War never ends.
It simply waits for the next chapter to begin.
