AGONY:
A Conspiracy

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     The Dacianos are close. I have seen their mark a hundred times. And what exactly is their connection with this Agony a Go-Go? The ceremony, of course. The ritual expulsion and cleansing of one's torments; the washing off of these horrid things in life that cling to us and weigh us down, day to day; the final purification before the dawn of redemption. They would dance all night, spinning and spinning, as if entranced, until they fell exhausted. Often, there was much merriment as one cascaded to the floor, having wiped his troubled brow clean, once again. The music would play on until, at last, the final dancer fell to the floor.

     The descendents of the Dacianos, citizens of the Far Eastern Lands participated in such a ritual until around 1400- when the Mongol hordes pushed them westward. The ritual was retained, however, and soon began manifesting itself in pubs or in workman's quarters or farm stables late at night. The westerners rejected such decadent behavior of the immigrant masses, and so it wasn't long before these gatherings were moved to more clandestine locations. The dance was known amongst the nomads as the "Jakkah," a word of vague Hindustani origin meaning "the dance of Jakrivati." Jakrivati: the God of Purity.

     By the late 1500's, the Catholic Church, with information from its massive network of informants and spies, sought out and destroyed the nocturnal Jakka gatherings throughout Eastern Europe, murdering its participants and condemning the ritual as pagan diabolism. The Jakka was not known to have resurfaced until sometime in the mid-1800's, in Spain. Here, the gathering's spiritual significance was purposely downplayed and the festive all-night soirees were disregarded as nothing more than ethnic folksong celebrations. It is this which directly became what is now Agony a Go-Go.

     The Dacianos, or rather, what their descendants had evolved into, had not forgotten the roots from which they had sprung. Nor had they forgotten the pious hand that had cut them short so many generations ago. They vowed revenge and buried themselves deep and traveled to the New World to hide and wait.

     What we call the Agony Mythos is actually an amalgam of collected folklore and mythology, most of it conjured from the Dacianos and their fellow nomadic societies. The Gods and their retainers of this mythos seem to stem from a number of sources: Hindu, Muslim, even Buddhist. The depictions of these divine beings vary in style and seem to encompass a number of artistic influences from the Eastern silkscreen and brush drawings to the richly detailed engravings of Western Europe. The followers and worshippers of such deities seem strangely silent, though, no doubt, they exist somewhere. In the late 1800's, with a wealth of mythology and the accompanying artistic resources to grow on, the participants of the then-called 'Society of Torment' began to create works based on the Agony Mythos.

     The gallery and stronghold for these collected works, which consisted of paintings, literature, sculpture, and even costumed figures and dolls, and the historical works that preceded them, was in New York City. It was a small private gallery owned by a prominent Agony artist who went by the name Frap Frajeka. Frajeka's knowledge of the Agony Mythos was extensive, and he kept detailed literature, volume upon volume, of its curious tales. In June of 1932, a mysterious fire destroyed the gallery and its contents. Little remained of all the collected works of the Mythos. Aside from a few articles in private collections, the mythos would have been lost almost completely. Frajeka was devastated by the lost, but he was determined to recall and eventually rebuild the entire collection. A curiously non-cooperative assembly of the creators of the previous works and a waning health, both physically and mentally, seriously debilitated his progress, and in 1935, Frap Frajeka was dead, leaving behind scant few parcels of information of the lost collection.

     How I often wonder at what glorious images and writings were to be seen, if I could go back to Frajeka's gallery. What mysteries did those volumes, written in Frajeka's own hand, possess? The loss of such an immense collection literally cuts us off from the past. All we have to go on now are several notebooks kept by Frajeka and a very small number of unexplained drawings and paintings, which were kept in Frajeka's home. It has been my task to attempt to piece together these somewhat random bits of information.

     Friday, December 13, 1996. Sunny brings me the strange metal figure that he found at the club two days ago. It appears to be made out of silver and is about an inch and a half long. It is a sculpture of a mutated baby with wings. The baby has two bodies, connected at the chest, converging beneath a single, massive head. The wings of an angel are beset upon its back.

     Its face perplexes me, for, as I gaze down upon it, it seems to take on a different appearance from moment to moment. I do not suggest that the actual metal, itself, makes any physical change, but that my perception of its expression seems to vary from one glance to the next. At first, I see the face of a sleeping infant, but then, upon the next study, my interpretation shifts, and it seems to possess the sickening expression of one in pain. I gaze again, and this time it is the face of one who has met his peace, a state of enlightenment- perhaps the face of one reciting a mantra or one deep in prayer. Again, and this time I see only cold death.

     This is a Dacianos piece, for I have seen the image of the winged conjoined-neonate before. It symbolizes, to the Dacianos, the divine ascension, the empowerment and the embrace of the very different: the unique. A Dacianos member might carry such an item as a token of good fortune, perhaps. The Dacianos were experts in the manufacture of what we would call "freaks," but, to them, these oddities were the very embodiment of uniqueness and the symbol of human progression and perfection. I have no doubt that the Dacianos used their knowledge for much more than the fusing of limbs, or the splitting of ones cheeks to create an indelible grimace. I believe that they, through a process gradually improved upon by trail an error with experiments upon their human "products," have indeed made change upon themselves. "Shortcuts in evolution," they might call it. The retail of freaks was merely a profitable offshoot of this experimentation. One can only imagine what the present results might look like, and one can only awake in the middle of the night as to what they might be capable of.

     The Mystery Man. I found one once. A napkin, crumpled and partially soaked in alcohol, upon which was drawn, in blue ink, the image of a man with long hair and a trench coat. I found this in Agony a Go-Go. It is identical to the one that Ingo Gumz found drawn on a paper coaster in his own club, Club Agony- the direct predecessor to Agony a Go-Go, which was run by his son, Uruguay Gumz. That was in 1948. It is also identical, or nearly so, to the dozen that Ken Durkin has in his collection, and to the 32 that I have in my own.

     To say that it is an ongoing phenomenon is an understatement. Yet, strangely, it was curiously vacant from the studies of Mr. Frajeka- however sparse those studies were. Up to now, there was no evidence of the Mystery Man's appearance prior to his coaster manifestation in 1948. Yet, somehow, I couldn't stave off the notion that his origin's ran much deeper and much earlier than that.

     One day in August of 1995, I was looking over a dozen or so examples of the Mystery Man that I had found. Something drew me to a particular drawing. It is difficult to explain, but it appeared purposeful in execution. It seemed that the random felt-tip ink lines were not so random upon second glance. There was a deliberateness to the stroke, as if the hand was guided or painstakingly controlled, as one is when replicating with intent to convey accurate information unto the observer. There was a small set of curved lines on the chest area of the Man in this drawing that didn't need to be there, yet were placed there by no mistake or stray of the pen nib. I noticed this anomaly on 5 other drawings, all of near-equal size and dimension, but here the position of the markings were different. Perhaps, I thought, they were symbols or some form of writing. I made Xerox's of the separate images for later study and filing.

     One morning, as I was passing my work table with my morning tea, I noticed the small spread of Xerox's with the image of the Mystery Man on them. I had been working on some things the night before and had left them there. The top two were overlapping and you could see the second image veiled through the first. I thought it was a trick of the eye, but upon closer examination I found that the lines on the chest of the first image complemented those of the second. Overlapping slightly, they formed a third image. Rushing to the window, I began transposing the images, placing them one over another until I had 5 that worked to form a single, sixth, image. It was the Mystery Man, his armed splayed in multitude, like a beetle, and on his chest the unmistakable glyph that I had seen before, in Frajeka's notebooks, in paintings and in drawings, on the ivory handle of a knife in a pawn shop window: the symbol of the Dacianos Gungus. The Dacianos were here all along.

     What of the Mystery Man? Who was he? Why does he look like something from out of a Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon? His contemporary attire would seem to indicate that he was not of mythological origin. Aside from the higher deities of the ancient religions and the Agony Man, himself, all of the prominent characters in the Agony Mythos were female. Guardians and messengers, all of whom had died martyrs and suffered great injustices and torments in doing so.

      Frajeka seemed particularly interested in the writings and glyphs of the Dacianos. He believed that the Dacianos were only a small part of a massive underground culture. He believed that their eclectic language was purposely formed as a kind of code, so that they might communicate discreetly, even generations apart. Their writings have been found all throughout Europe and the Americas, even in present day: on walls, on roads, in strange xeroxed leaflets found on the sidewalk. There are no known publications or printed texts of the Dacianos(I am now using the "Dacianos" as the generic term to describe and cover the entirety of these hidden people); only a line of curious writing, here, on a restaurant door; or a twisted symbol, here, painted onto this park bench. Yet, I somehow felt compelled to believe- I envisioned!- that within this strange, graffiti-based manner of transferring information, this crude method of communication, the Mystery Man was hovering, waiting in the dark to be discovered.

     The Dacianos writing was in the form of a basic alphabet, plus a few rudimentary sound/letter combinations, such as "ch" and "th." Decoding this was achieved by Frajeka, as he had collected numerous examples of the Dacianos writing. Frajeka discovered that many of the writings annotated the location in which they were written, if they were in "flyer" format- that is, copied onto pieces of paper and left about, to be discovered and read by those who would be looking(Frajeka theorized that the Dacianos had, by now, been spread so wide apart and for so long, that they had lost any cohesion with the culture, the society, they once had- so that members were unknown and could not be distinguished amongst the populace- and that this method of leaving messages on walls and on scraps of paper was their only form of mass communication, the only thing that remained of their oneness, their unity- at least for now).

     By replacing the Dacianos "letters" in the recognizable names of cities and towns with letters from our alphabet, he was able to piece together a small part of the Dacianos alphabet. Then, through a simple process of swaping out known, or "decrypted" letters in existing examples of Dacianos writing, Frajeka was stunned to realize that at least some of the examples were written in plain English! After only a short period of time, Frajeka had successfully compiled the complete and decoded Dacianos alphabet.

     What he found was that the messages were frustratingly short on actual information, but seemed to be listings of names and locations- presumably of Dacianos members. While leafing through Frajeka's assortment of sketches, artifacts, and photographs, I came upon a particular message, written in the Dacianos text and decoded just below(probably by Uruguay, though I cannot identify the handwriting): "WE ARE HERE. LLEIDA CLAN - 1798 - GUSTAV NOREIRA - MITOA NOREIRA - PILLAR DENIA - AJAN NIVAL. HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY - DECEMBRE 1965. WE SLEEP UNTIL AWAKEN." It was this last line that caught my eye, for I had seen it somewhere before.

     Scurrying through Frajeka's numerous notebooks and study papers, I found a series of drawings he had made, which documented an odd collection of small, clay or stone cones which, as far as I can tell, were found somewhere in Germany in the late 1800's(sadly, it did not specify). Here, the Dacianos, or whoever they were, had carved writings in the form of small logograms(pictorial symbols or glyphs), instead of their usual phonetic alphabet.

     Frajeka had sketched a number of the cones and their engravings, which organized themselves by use of geometric shapes, or borders, to isolate various parts of the message on the cone itself- very similar to the use of cartouches by the Egyptians. There was one cone that held an image most familiar. My heart stopped as I gazed upon it, it's image barely readable, as it had been badly damaged by fire. In the middle, surrounded by a verticle rectangle was a message written vertically, from bottom to top, in two lines. Atop this, nearer to the "point" of the cone,was carved a circle, within with was a set of three small glyphs that formed the message were followed by a fourth, below: a set of two wavy lines, one directly above the other. These two messages were encased within a verticle oval, at the bottom of which, beneath the rectangular inscription, lay a third message. Finally, a large, truncated oval surrounded the two bottom-most messages; a shape much like the conventional depiction of a "tombstone" with its flat base where the oval met the flat end of the cone. Two more messages were written, vertically, here: one on each side of the "tombstone." In its entirety, the carving of the glyphs and the borders that surrounded them, there came to me the odd semblance of a man: The Mystery Man!
     The logograms were translated with an unsteady degree of certainty. A question mark here, an alternate word or words there. I wondered who had made these translations, for I had seen neither further documentation nor reference to the topic in the whole of Frajeka's remaining work or studies. Obviously, Frajeka felt he was on to something, but these studies were done in 1935, the year of his death, and were, sadly, inconclusive. There seemed to be a frantic manner in which these sketches were executed, and whether this was to be attributed to Frajeka's then current mental instability or some other unknown source of distress which would have made nervous his hand, I do not know.

     How I could have passed this over in previous studies still irks me, but I can only attribute this to the overwhelming amount of material that I had "inherited" from the Frajeka collection in such a short amount of time. Gazing down upon this particular sketch, it seemed as clear as the daylight to me then: the image of the Mystery Man; here all this time, drawn by Frap Frajeka and copied from a Dacianos carving. The image we see today, the frowning, trenchcoat wearing man with the long hair, is a surreal perversion of the original, created through the erred process of repetition and facsimile. The Mystery Man was, it seemed, no man at all, but a message.

     The message in the body(rectangle area) was translated as: "THE DARK(or DARKNESS) BECOMES(or IS) 'SAFE LAND'/SANCTUARY - WAIT RETURN TO THE LIGHT". Just below this, near the base of the cone: "REMAIN HIDDEN - TRAVEL WEST". On the left and right "shoulders" of the carving: "WE DREAM OF THE WORLD OF LIGHT" and "WE WAIT FOR THE DREAM". It was the translation of the symbols in the circular area, the "face," that struck me most: "THE FOLLOWERS WAIT SLEEPING UNDERWATER."

     These writings, both on the cone and on the paper with the inscription from Harlem, spoke of an obsession with sleep and dreaming which had not previously manifested itself in my studies of the Dacianos. And what of this "World of Light?" What was this that I had stumbled upon? What more had Frajeka learned before his untimely death? Surely, Frajeka must have collaborated with others in his efforts. My mind whirls.