by Coyote442

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One morning I awoke with the names "Zos" and "Kia" clearly echoing in my mind. I knew not of what odd dream the names alone remained as echo, but I did know that they drove me on towards a study I had too long put off. Thus, once again, I threw myself into the task of reading through the works of Austin Osman Spare.
Upon browsing "The Logomachy of Zos", an extensive, unfinished, and generally unorganized collection of epigrams recorded by Spare in the course of his automatic writing, it occurred to me that the book might provide a pleasant ongoing study. At the time I had been involved in an ongoing discussion board online. My thought was to post everyday a quotation from Spare's collection of epigrams with the intention that any who had any thoughts concerning the meaning or application of the quote, or just any random thoughts inspired by it in general, would post in response. The project was of mixed success. Occasionally it got some interesting discussions going, often randomly spawned by the text and only tangentially related to Spare's thought. At other times it was dominated by my voice alone, or it simply appeared to be just a collection of random quotations.
What I present here is an edited and reworked version of my own thoughts which came out of the project. I include nothing which was written or suggested by someone else, however it is impossible for there not to have been a fertile web of influences which went into the formation of these thoughts. As such, this still remains in some sense a collective work and so I thank my friends and colloquies at the Chaostation.
One aspect of these reflections which I have purposely not allowed to become washed out in the course of editing and rethinking is the fact that they represent a temporal series. The quotes were posted one by one and my own interpretations and position concerning the purposes, positions, and meanings of Spare's work changed over time. Much of what I said early on I was forced to rethink later, and much of what I said later might be well rethought to this very day. An attentive reader, or perhaps not even that attentive a reader, should be able to easily discern the movement of my thought from one moment to the next. We are never truly standing still, and only a fool attempts to perpetuate the illusion that his views are not constantly in motion even within the limits of a single work. This point goes especially for this work which was, after all, one of the earliest reflections on the enigmatic corpus of Austin Osman Spare I have attempted.