The Spiritual Hunt ― Or, Dashing Syria

Having abandoned poetry, Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891) sold over 40-year-old rifles to the Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik II.10 years later, Melenik’s troops killed more than 6,000 Italian soldiers in a single day, and placed their country on the world Atlas.Rimbaud had been dead for more than four years by then. His ancient rifles had outlasted him. Today Rimbaud would be running guns to Syria. Or the drug cartels of Mexico.THE SPIRITUAL HUNT is a play in three parts, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The human-crunching machine that produced the script is able to spit out more scenes indefinitely. A poet wants to produce a performance piece, her homage to Rimbaud. She won't, however, manage on her own. So she tries her hand at necromancy. Out comes Robert Mapplethorpe -- and soon our poet finds herself on the wrong side of the border. And yes, it is dangerous out there.The third character is an escapee from MASSACRE AT PARIS, the skeleton of a play left behind by Christopher Marlowe. Kheda Saratova, a Russian human rights activist, promoted THE HUNT on a televised talk show by making the following statement (commenting on another activist operating in Chechnya): "Kalyapin is one of the people who came to the war to earn grants..." The publicist for the RUNT was bewildered by the apparent fact that Saratova had been able to read the play before it was published.The author, Matti Paasio, said that he is not to blame of the leak. This was the first time he had even heard of anyone called Saratova, as far as he could tell."Snowden did this," Paasio says. "The son of a bitch works for the GRU. And that's what my next book will be all about."