en masse through the rain forest to the puericratic village for a full-scale State Visit or Diplomatic Summit, and in this version the epitatic complication is due not to anything the sibilant shaman asks — because evidently the entire Summit consists of nothing but the endless roundabout courtesies and ritual tropes which intervillage State Visits in that region of the rain forest always entail — but rather to some potion or spell affixed to the mutant glyph-excrescent breadfruit which the shaman presents in a decorative parchment papillote to the seated child as one of the State Visit’s countless de rigueur ceremonial gifts and tokens of esteem, which potion or spell here then causes the child on the dais to close its eyes and enter the aforementioned oneirically catatonic mystical state, rather like a mainframe compiling, and he refuses to answer or acknowledge the villagers’ questions for several lunar cycles. Then in the third, final, and rather more passively modernistic epitatic variant, there is evidently no disguise or State Visit or psychoactive breadfruit; rather in the third version the malefic angekok merely consults the yams’ evaporate and makes elaborate necromantic calculations and finally tells the —— village’s upper-caste supplicants not to worry, that in fact no action is called for, that the actual threat the überchild poses is not to them or the —— village’s brutal hegemony over the region, because the child at this point is just on the verge of reaching the sidereal equivalent of eleven years old, which birthday evidently represents the paleolithic Third World’s bar mitzvah or as it were age of majority; and, the albino shaman tells the delegation, any child this preternaturally gifted and exceptional is itself still growing and developing and learning at a geometric rate and advancing inevitably toward its supernatural entelechy’s fulfillment, and that — this is still the shaman, whose role in this third main variant of the epitasis is almost wholly oracular — and that, ironically, it will be the very questions the child is asked by the increasingly modernized and sophisticated villagers that will facilitate the wunderkind’s further development into something so supernaturally advanced that it will ultimately prove the upstart village’s very undoing, and so the shaman tells his upper-caste subjects not to worry because before too long the puericratic villagers will all be back hunting and gathering and worshipping Yam Gods and soiling their loincloths with fear at the sight of an etiolated regiment and coming across with their annual tribute of yams and hides to the hegemonic —— village just as they always have, and so on and so forth; and sure enough in this moodier and somewhat more contemporary third version of the epitasis — in which narratively the malevolent shaman is reduced from a peripeteiac antagonist to a mere vehicle for exposition or foreshadowing, this rather anticipating the function which oracles, sorcerers, Attic choruses, Gaelic coronach, Senecan dumbshows, Plautian prologues, and chatty Victorian narrators perform in various later cycles’ exempla—but nevertheless in the variant’s next scene sure enough, at the precise sidereal moment of the paleolithic equivalent of its eleventh birthday, the child on the central dais spontaneously goes into the same ptotic autisto-mystical withdrawal as in the more structurally conventional variants — although according to the highly analytical younger man on the flight there exist here as well certain even less conventional sub-versions of the third main variant in which there is no mention of any regionally dominant village or shaman or cranial obeah, but rather here it is purportedly the young and extraordinarily comely daughter of an upper-caste villager, who had just died after a lengthy death-pallet scene, who—‘who’ here meaning the nubile daughter — leans in and whispers the mysterious coup de vieux-type question in the child’s ear; or in another marginal sub-version a mysterious white wasp or possibly trypanosomic bloodsucking fly of genus Glossina flies through the village straight to the center’s raised dais or platform and stings the child on the forehead in the precise spot corresponding to the ajna or sixth Hindic chakra, with the child immediately thereupon falling into the ptotic and compiling-esque trance — but the crux nevertheless is that in all the myriad variants and sub-versions of the rising action the child’s trance and its essential characteristics are the same, and it is at the point of the child’s psychic withdrawal that all three major competing editions of the epitasis apparently converge again and conclude the as it were Second Act of the exemplum; and what then transpires throughout the catastasis and various relief scenes and faux-reversals and dal segni and scènes à faire all the way to the narrative’s final catastrophe remains the same in all the putative variants and versions, such that the mythopoeic narrative’s very structure itself moves from initial unity to epitatic trinity to reconciliation and unity again in the falling action — this observation evidently also inserted by the jetliner’s somewhat pedantic young narrator, in or on the back of whose scalp as time passed my friend’s acquaintance said he began to think he could discern an unusual patch of gray or prematurely white hair that was of markedly different texture than the surrounding scalp’s hair and seemed if gazed at long enough to comprise some sort of strange intaglial glyph or design, though he was quick to admit that the same phenomenon can occur with clouds or configurations of shadows if one looks intently enough for long periods, and on the United flight there was simply very little else to look at — along, of course, with all the iconic resonance that an apparently One-into-Three-into-One dramatic structure will possess for the Western analytical mind. Nevertheless, when the child comes out of the catatonic trance or chrysalis stage, or resurfaces from meditating on the implications of whatever it was that the hegemonic shaman or nubile mourner had whispered, or recovers from the first wash of pubescent testosterone, or whatever precisely it was that was going on on the wickerwork dais while the boy sat motionless and incommunicado for several lunar cycles — afterward it’s immediately clear that the child has undergone some significant developmental changes, because when he finally does come out of it and opens his eyes and responds to stimuli and resumes answering the cyclic queue of villagers’ questions, evidently he’s now answering in a very different way indeed, and his relationship to the questions and to the villagers and to the village’s developing culture as a whole now comprises a wholly different gestalt. It is the progressively extreme changes in the advanced boy’s relation to as it were both Truth and Culture which constitute the exemplum’s catastasis or crisis or falling action or Third Act. At first, now, the child will sometimes answer a villager’s question just as before, but now will also append to this specific answer additional answers to certain other related or consequent questions which the child apparently believes his initial answer entails, as if he now understands his answers as part of a much larger network or system of questions and answers and further questions instead of being merely discrete self-contained units of information; and whenever the reawakened child breaks with previous convention and extemporizes on an answer’s ramifications it evidently sends both cultural and economic shock-waves through the village’s community, because the established custom and norm heretofore has of course been that the child on the dais answers only a question that he is explicitly asked, answering in an almost idiotic, cybernetically literal way, such that — as the pedantic younger man reminded his auditor he’d mentioned in passing during the protasis — such that an entire new caste of interrogatory consultants had come into being in the village’s economy, consultants whose marketable skill lay in structuring citizens’ questions in such a way as to avoid the so-called G.I.G.O. phenomenon to which questions presented to the child before the climactic trance were susceptible, in other words being paid or as it were compensated to ensure that the question posed was not for example something like, ‘Can you tell me where my eldest son’s lost blowgun might be found?’ to which the child would traditionally be wont to answer simply, ‘Yes,’ the boy intending this answer not to be sarcastic or unhelpful but simply True, operating out of an almost classically binary or