Tension: from the Greek teinein, stretching. Attention: from the Creek through the Latin, the mind stretching in one direction. These are mutually catalytic: heightened tension prompts heightened attention; heightened attention prompts heightened tension. Apocalyptic imagery – and without imagery there could be no appeal to or from apocalypse – calls attention to the tension between the daily and the decisive, flow and finale, for the apocalypse enjoins a revelation, a lifting of the veil on the ordinary, that becomes a resolution, an irrevocable decision about guilt and damages. Millennial imagery – which may be overrun by the sheerness of number – calls attention to that which lies beyond apocalypse, states of being no longer in jeopardy of time. Both the apocalyptic and the millennial attend upon people in motion, people seeking and beseeching, but apocalyptic thought concerns the springform moment, millennial anticipations concern the last stretch.

Here in Part I, Patrick Fuery and Kelli Fuery take the Creek notion of the pharmakon as diagnostic of Western apocalypse, demonstrating how immensely – even monstrously – creative are the powers of unfulfilled cataclysm; as poison and cure, the pharmakon forbids foreclosure even as it feeds upon fears of mortal seizure.