AN ELEMENTARY DISTINCTION

jack you said atheists don't believe everything is semantics ... what do they believe everything is ... they believe everything is power of course ... and isn't it ... no of course not and you know it isn't but you want to play your own wordgame no ... no not quite I replied ... everything has power but power alone as explanation is insufficient as well as a premature and unnecessary retreat from the burden of the argument ... the kind of power I'm talking about unlike the atheists' power goes beyond the universe ... it's the only kind of power that can do more than repeat itself ... the only power that can make something new something more than its components the power of creation ... it doesn't draw from the elements something hidden in them but imposes over them something by themselves they never could have ... an order ... the form of life itself ... and here it is where the three of us differ ... the atheists say the form of life is inherent in the elements of the universe and in that sense like them nothing unusual ... and you pagans agree to the extent that you think life though categorically different from inert matter is still part of the same and eternal universe

THAT UNEARTHLY VISION

well fulio I can see we won't agree said jack ... my path as you know justifies the unorthodox especially in sexual matters but we don't like too much interference when the pro's go to war either ... as to god by definition we're polytheists ... and by redefinition we do the best under tyranny ... we just change a few words here and there and go underground till the businessmen take control again ... no fulio it's not that we prefer atheism ... as good pagans we abhor it ... atheists on the other hand we can handle ... it might take a generation or two to tame them but we know something about them they don't know themselves ... they say everything is semantics but they don't really believe it ... what they don't know is it doesn't matter what they believe ... it's the truth that all they've got is language ... and that's how we know they don't have the staying power it takes to do what they want ... and soon enough they'll be gone ... meanwhile we'll continue to play wordgames with them ... use their discoveries to advance our own techniques to do what we do best ... play mars and venus ... but not with your lot ... you people have that unearthly calm

MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS: PROCESS OF ELIMINATION

there are three faces that make me laugh a child's a chimpanzee's and a cat's ... but they each have the same expression ... they say to me what are you doing here ... and I tell them waiting for you it's what we old ones do ... so here I am jack just waiting for the last argument and the final conclusion ... porn and war the two great obscenities ... yet each can be done so well ... or can they ... that's the argument ... I'm taking the two together ... if you can do one well you can do the other one well too ... you can have respect for opponents and for partners ... you can look at sex and war as too complementary necessary dances ... one for destruction one for regeneration ... and in truth sex and aggression they do have elements of the revolving door ... but I for one can't leave it at that ... generation and destruction are not equivalent ... and we shouldn't get confused into talking their representations porn and wargames for instance ... no we should remember them in the ideal ... venus and mars ... and conclude them even together to be insufficient ... then it isn't a question of which of the alternatives to follow

SYLLOGISM

and what's your part in all this jack asked me ... well I said if you most truly are what you most truly believe ... and if we can determine that in truth by studying our behavior ... but if there is a meaning to the old question what is the meaning of life then it has an answer ... like a multiple-choice question I'm suggesting ... that comes in four parts ... you can say life has a meaning but it's a man-made construction otherwise there is no meaning to life ... or you can say life is a process of attractive and repulsive forms ... or you can say life is a struggle in which you win or lose ... or you might say life is a commandment you break or obey ... with the exception of the first response you might want to endorse some sense of the other three ... and even correct and bring in the first ... by saying coherence isn't enough there must be correspondence too ... the command says not love your neighbor as you love yourself ... that's the second step ... first you love god with all your heart ... then all the forms and fights of life fall into line ... still you breathe your life in prayer but now it's a meaningful prayer

MY BELIEF IN REVELATION

thank you jack I said ... this is the point I wanted to get to from the beginning when I cautioned the reader not to become too fiercely defensive ... I suspect there's not only enough here for everyone but a fair representation as well for each position in a simple clue from aristotle to correspond to the four major kinds of religion or those beliefs which ultimately bind us all ... aristotle says things happen not only for a reason but ... one at a time or in conjunction ... for four reasons ... matter form agent and purpose ... and you've just confirmed for me one of them ... so let me name all four ... the atheists the pagans and the monotheists with the pagans worshiping either mars or venus ... so you have atheists in the middle of a material universe governed by things like physics chemistry and biology ... venus and form you've spoken about ... I'll just mention mars and free and wilful agents ... and those who look to one thing that for the sake of which all other things are ordered ... point is whatever one's official profession our behavior reveals just one true belief

THE FORM HERSELF

well jack said I fair enough but that's not the form I meant or thought that you did ... not the artistic form but the ideal form ... the thing itself the art tries to inhabit ... what I thought you meant when you said fill the form thoroughly up ... fill it up with what and what is the form ... why enspirited tactile conversation he said ... fill the conversation with the right spirit the true spirit ... only then does the dance begin ... that's it I said ... tell me what the dance means ... the dance makes visible what we can't see ... what is it we can't see ... you think you can name it ... what if I tell you you can't ... you have to see it ... I'll agree and disagree ... I'll say there's a sense in which you're right ... the formal sense of form ... sounds silly no ... but I'll ask what I mean in another sense ... what's it for this dance or does it just exist for itself ... no not for itself ... for the dancers and for the goddess ... the goddess which goddess ... there's only one goddess in this dance whatever name you call her ... we'll use the obvious ... venus ... you worship her and you worship form herself

HOW JACK FINDS PORN'S NICHE

I might have stopped there ... I found it just abstruse enough to please ... but I couldn't resist so I said what form is that jack ... the only art form was his reply to successfully address itself to our most despised sense ... when we say art we first think of the eye ... then with a little expansion we go to the ear and we play music ... we have the arts of food preparation and vineyards for the tongue and perfumes for the nose ... but what do we have to feel ... the damn effetes have taken even its name and made it a tag for some ethereal perception ... I'm not talking about moral aesthetic rhapsodic feeling ... no ... I mean the sense of touch ... more primitive than smell more primitive even than taste ... to touch to feel ... it's our first sense and our last connection to life ... it dismays us twice ... first to let us know there's something outside us ... second to let us know through feeling that it's inside us too ... and what is it that thrills us that gives us the only excitement there is in life but to triumph over our own dismay ... and that's what touch does ... first the recoil then the embrace

THE EARNESTNESS OF PORN

the wrong side of the argument is going to be ferociously excessively defensive ... it's one of the easy ways of telling that they are on the wrong side ... but don't get me wrong ... they can be wrong in a little argument and right in the big one ... so don't take me to task before I'm done ... I just wanted to tell you about my friend jack ... jack's been with hundreds if not thousands of different women so when I got into a debate elsewhere about pornography and other forms of unorthodox sex I turned to jack for advice ... not fulsomely conversant with the form ... being as I said occupied elsewhere ... he did nonetheless have one caution to offer ... pornstars he said were not actors ... to the extent that you thought they were acting pretending you would to that extent dismiss their performance ... so what would you call them jack I asked him ... well models would be good he answered ... for they model a correct kind of behavior in bed ... but I call them performers ... because you know the prefix per means thorough ... jack's an erudite kind of guy ... and that's what they do when they succeed ... they fill the form thoroughly up

THE NUMBER AT THE END

so which is it ... death as a necessary lesson and therefore good ... or death as an evil never good ... both but with this correction ... even from evil good can be drawn especially to teach ... death or pain isn't good and never can be and that they sometimes seem to be good is only so because other things are worse ... which brings us to degree a false sense of degree and the absolute ... and this is where numbers come in ... they measure degrees and they measure them so well we'd like them to measure everything ... which would make everything a matter of degree ... which it isn't ... but you could apply them anyway and call the result an interpretation and a temporary one at that ... the numbers may change tomorrow ... democracy today autocracy tomorrow ... freedom here slavery there ... whatever works the numbers will tell us ... and you know when all is said and done you can't argue with the numbers ... they are what they are ... perfect reflections of the truth changing constantly as it does in our minds our cultures our lives ... to a precise degree ... forever ... until they hit a block which simply says no ... the end ... period

WHY WE FIGHT

no not just death but the smallest pain or discomfort or anxiety strokes the absolute in our soul as the presence of that which should not be and was not intended ... it's our mistake to defer to death or pain to give it a right it never will have ... rather we should take all these instances no matter how small as confirmation of the fundamental right in each of us at the core of the absolute the way things were meant to be and beyond the veil of sin and delusion the way things are ... now I don't mean just keep your eyes straight and your heart right and you'll come through ... how naive how silly how wicked that would be ... rather I mean read ... read books ... see what a struggle life is and always against that one thing ... the way things should not be ... it could not be worse than to come to death without that recognition ... but only see why we surrender it ... peace we cry when we are always at war ... peace we whimper just a little peace when we must fight to have the meaning even of defeat ... fight to see the absolute right right here

THE ONE ABSOLUTE THING

everything's relative isn't it ... ah one of those trick questions the correct answer to which is yes and no ... depending on what you mean by thing ... if you mean by thing the contents of the universe then yes but if you mean all that and god too then no ... it's a necessary truth that everything in the universe is connected to every other thing if only remotely and indirectly ... and each of those connections is a two-way street ... that is if A is connected to B then B is connected to A ... but there is no such an equal connection between god and creation ... that connection is absolutely dissimilar to any of the others ... relations within the universe are necessary logical and complete based simply on their existence ... whether past actual potential or impossible they are fixed ... the connection between god and the universe is never necessary or reciprocal that it's logical or even conceivable ... if you think the distinction between something and nothing is a chasm then try figuring out what it is that can bring something from nothing ... our relation to that thing is defined on both sides by one side not so much cause as generosity

ONE LESSON, EACH OF US TO LEARN

we are given life ... immortal life from an immortal source ... what are we then to make of death ... is it just another step the progress of life must follow ... an open door across the room from a closed window ... or is it something essentially as it is intimately connected to pain spilled urine shit and blood grief and justified despair ... all conspiring to make a point not least of which seems the loss of our pretended dignity ... all our honors and high esteem to end in a mouth and eyes we have no longer the power to close ... perhaps this once at the end truly suitably dumbfounded and open-eyed with astonishment ... as if we had again as so often before confounded the means with the end ... we think education was meant for living when life is given in order to learn ... a life-long lesson for each of us no matter how long or how short ... to learn ... but to learn what ... death as an inescapable lesson but to what moral to what end ... isn't this last lesson just that ... the teaching of an end ... the one way the only way we creatures in time can live under the eternal ... finite creatures under the infinite ... by seeing things defined by their end

THE ILLUSIONIST

we were given life ... will we look in the fields and in the seas and see it taken away and will we say ours too will be taken ... that which gave life gave being everywhere why would he take it away ... can he change his mind ... can he be disappointed ... is that why we die ... or is the truth of an immortal being true immortally and is anyone so false he has none of that truth anywhere in him ... will a cat or a dog a fish or a worm have enough of that truth in a weaker more general sense to survive only as a species ... in that special way ... will the order of the sun and the stars survive geometrically only or will everything simply rotate and take the form of its neighbor eternally ... except for the child who looks into the face of her mother and names her ... or the boy who maps the night sky herding the stars into their constellations ... the woman or the man who thinks of another this has to stop thinks of an end against a background that has no end ... the one who loves or the one who hates does it by looking through time into eternal truth ... and latches on to what ... an illusion

THE DEEP AMBIVALENCE IN BEING BORN

we were given life ... we hear a person say he saved a life or another say she gave birth ... but when we hear it said of people that they gave their lives we mean that they lost them ... no one says that they gave themselves life because no one thinks it's true ... unless they need treatment ... but we don't act the way we think ... we act as if we gave ourselves being ... but because action is never completely divorced from deep thought there are always times when we act indecisively as if we no longer gave ourselves complete being ... perhaps we begin to reason there is a call behind us for we seem to have turned our backs against it ... perhaps the implications we suspected and feared are finally in that call ... and perhaps through the panic of the racing heart we hear as well a far and deep relief ... and then perhaps we're told it was a mistake a false positive profuse apologies ... and we turn away from the call again ... now we reason heading in the right direction ... but we know the sound was in our ear and from time to time we hear it say if you go that way again and will not return there is everything you will lose except life

HERODIAN AND PILATIAN EXCESS EXPLAINED

it was always a struggle between venus and mars on earth till BC turned into AD ... then venus and mars had now to contend with a new rival ... prior to that moment everyone secretly favored venus's side when she meant warmth order and a quiet excitement and secretly then openly opposed mars when he threatened these standards ... and otherwise expressed their opinion that he should remain on the frontier for it was there he could best protect venus and her culture ... at which point mars got angry and swore vengeance if he got the chance on the rich jet set of industrialists in attendance on venus and her tycoon husband vulcan ... and vengeance he took on vulcan thereafter repeatedly regularly with venus herself to guide him ... and so the world kept tumbling round till in one moment it came to a stop ... venus and mars vulcan and the industrialists picked themselves up dusted themselves off and began to inquire what had knocked the earth off its course ... what they came up with startled them all ... a conception higher than olympian ... upsetting ... so they told the king to kill it

HONESTY IN PORN

porn is for substance ... it only gets form of course but it's for substance ... take the dancer solo female ... she can look into the camera if she means to look through it ... her audience let's say single male and she are the only people involved in theory ... but in practice it takes a topnotch performance to pull the effect off ... if it fails it's not much better than other more blatant infidelity in the model's eye she not fully convinced ... or in the wandering eye of the patron he not fully attentive ... better that his model in this performance attend to herself by tending to her body ... and this she does of course almost entirely by hand ... at first at least ... without any mechanical aid or interference ... she pats herself down and almost always finds herself compliant ... no rape this but at best a seduction ... here begins the audio commentary and the john doe unusual in his species turns his ear and not his eye to the set ... and listens in to her conversation ... this though I want it I do not think that I can do ... here and here again I fail ... though here I will admit it was well done ... and here suddenly is the very thing itself

PACRE PERFORMANCE 101

why pray before composing a pacre ... it's discourteous not to and dangerous to the pacre ... besides strictly speaking it's impossible since the pacre a meditation is a prayer ... all you can do is deny its character but that's enough to give you trouble enough ... acceding to the desire of the pacre to be known as a meditation you might still want to deny meditation the status of prayer given this proposed definition of prayer ...that it's a conversation one spirit to another ... you might accept on the other hand that meditation is thought and thought usually takes the form of a conversation if only with our selves ... you might want to take the self as a mental construction of our imagination of our culture or of our thought itself ... but if you can feel an impulse to want more than that for yourself you might well call it a soul and then we'd be in the same neighborhood ... for I take the spirit to be what one soul in communication with another from a simple conversation to a full communion ... and that's why I think it would be dangerous to start a pacre without a prayer ... because you should know your audience

SOME REPRESENTATIVE CLASSES OF TRUTH

truth ... does it have a paltry worn-out sound these days ... is it a small thing like whether or not to use it just now ... is it malleable as if to craft it by hand to put it to good use ... most of all is it ours or does the heart of it belong to someone else ... there is a class of citizens I think who see it as a number ... they are perhaps our oldest class ... from sicili before christ before aristotle plato and socrates ... they are an ancient class ... they may not be exciting at first glance but they are precise ... we have another class who dismiss all the numbers but one because from that one they say all the others come and everything else that ever was or is likely ... but this group ends up fanatically if they take what they say seriously ... then there's the class that makes it up as they go ... which is not the easy thing you may think it sounds ... indeed this is the class that I think must work the hardest ... they have their simplifying slogans but they must put them in the box with all the others and then put the box away to go into the books where they have not so much law or justice and certainly not tradition but a code whose pages fly in on the wind and go out that way too

THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE VENUSETTE IS ALWAYS THE LAST TIME TOO

venusette you're not a woman ... you're not human ... but you look like a woman ... a beautiful woman ... in the right light a woman at the most beautiful point of her life ... a woman who in this moment waves her arms across the horizon and scatters herself repeatedly endlessly seed crying out to seed ... venusette I've seen your foot arch and I've seen it lying its face to the floor where all the others would bend toes to the ground with the rest upright ... I've seen the back of your calf one uninterrupted muscle from knee to ankle ... and your thigh whose smooth skin has no road to travel but along the most graceful arc under the sun or the moon ... while not graceful and never languid is the other line I've followed ... the plunging line the plummet line only always to turn back in and just there tightly in ... I've seen the rosebud melt and take the high ground too ... definition here ranging from the abstract to the particular ... or the corner of the mouth or the flat of the tongue the teeth perfectly white ... but most of all I see the sea above the womb ... venusette

FREUD AGAIN YEARS LATER

if the culture is saturated with sex let it swim ... you don't have to drown ... swim ... there's astrophysics politics medicine art and a series of other things to do with your life but that's career you can make one of them your vocation ... I'm talking avocation ... something like a vocation towards it but never getting there lest it ruin itself fanatically ... never reaching a full-time enterprise strictly amateur ... what sex today should be ... vocations are so cerebral sports are so arduous games require that you think but a woman dancing vertically or laterally that won't do a thing that doesn't pamper your attention ... especially if you're the one she's with ... if only in your mind ... this longing which is also an intention to stop the longing in a belonging is a thing which says I want to come to an end but perhaps not just yet ... give it another five minutes or years or decades ... they're right ... the id wants its pleasure at the tip of a point right there right there ... but the ego wants it spread across the face of the earth ... and the superego agrees with them both

THESE SANCTIFIED FEW

the mind of man ... now there's a phrase you don't often hear ... but it's connected to everything we do and to the most important the most directly ... it means evolution instinct and spirit ... it means reason ... it means meaning ... and has preoccupied its subject here in the west these four hundred years ... and past philosophy alone this mind of man is our entry to heaven and to hell ... it's not the body the soul or the spirit ... it's just the mind of man ... history is its memory science its understanding art politics and morality its judgment ... so we have a pretty good record of its behavior its aspirations its failures ... we have that is a good collection of evidence proving both how little we know and how far we've come ... we may be mostly villains ... for the most part ... but we are minor characters and for this we thank god ... but together we have raised what look like dead devils better left buried ... nonetheless we have raised them ... what can we do to plead a mercy after these but point to others who have fought slavery or murderous tyranny or just the rest of us who always want to go to sleep

THREEDOM

anselm found an exemplary archetypical form a locution a word in the mind of god the same way he found god's existence ... through reason ... and he finds the holy spirit the same way ... the trinity is a necessary truth ... fulness of perfection requires plurality ... especially charity requires more than one says richard of st victor ... he also says equality limits the number to three ... one loves two ... they must share their love with a third ... that does make sense ... we see it in human nature ... two lovers don't live in a world of their own ... they have friends and interests ... now bonaventure adds an agrument ... the generation of the son is the transmission of the whole of the divine substance by way of nature ... and the breathing of the spirit is that transmission by way of will ... we creatures need to share but at our best we want to ... god doesn't need to do anything so he doesn't need to share but by his nature his free will we may say he wants to ... what the trinity does at our best we try to do ... we are never solitaries nor are we an eternal disagreement ... we are creatures ... of creation ... nature ... and will

ONE LAST THING

of these different kinds of being being for me is the least appealing and not for the least reason that it always ends in death ... being for you is better but it's hard to find a platform to work on that doesn't shift with the sand ... I want to sit and see the world in my navel or at least in my nativity ... I want to find a reason for the world to keep me on having thus far let me go on ... I do understand I have to work but I'd like a good job that's fair to work on ... in particular I'd like to work on being as puzzle ... and the best puzzle you have please ... the una sooma res if you will ... the final part rhyming with trace if you have one ... one single singular unique supreme reality ... past person to essence ... or say substance the paradigm the pattern the form against which we are all instances of substance abuse ... but turn me that way I pray that I might see into and through my innards to your outer ... what plot doesn't end your way ... what story isn't just prelude unless it ends with you ... who speaks otherwise and will ever be heard again if he doesn't speak to you ... you final one

GOD AS CONTEXT

what does the trinity mean ... it means says abelard that god is powerful wise and kind ... we might respond to abelard by saying we see the problem of what to say about god if he were powerful but not wise or kind or any of the three without the other two ... the problem we can't figure is the other two ... if the father is all-powerful can this mean the son and the spirit are weak ... is the father uncaring or the spirit dumb ... now to call this way of thinking mistaken because it takes as serious what's rather just word play is not as empty as it sounds ... there is word play involved only it's the highest form conceivable which makes it high enough indeed for us to take seriously ... soccer poker crosswords chess DNA a good move in any of these isn't an event dipped into a peculiar set of rules ... it's that set of rules in motion ... not now one or the other ... rules or motion ... but both in context of the other ... a thing is itself but changes in context because the context changes it ... god's wisdom becomes both kind and powerful but god himself does not change

THE KINDNESS OF GOD AND SPECIES

what if we take revelation as true ... that these premises are true ... what are the conclusions ... that we're made in the image of god ... that god is a trinity ... that we fell and we're broken ... a broken image of the trinity ... what follows ... that form leads you to the force behind it but if you don't first fill the form with love the force will turn against you ... that there's a mechanical system spewing and grinding that you might think that you can tap into ... or direct ... or ride at least part of the way ... the way you're going ... if the force must have its head ... until it throws you ... at which point you're ground just as when you were born you were spewed ... nor does twilight nor sunrise nor light nor beauty shine because the forms of truth and law are accidental reflections and trivial compared to the power resident and regardless of them in the forces of nature ... but if we're broken we're still a trinity ... and if we tend to fly out into a space of detailed distraction when we turn back ... and return we must ... it's not to a consuming unity whether of meaning or its lack but rather to a creative trinity ... creating that is not destroying ... whose essence indeed is terrifying simplicity but whose persons are kinds

VULCAN DISCOVERS THE FLIGHT OF VENUSETTE

the man worked in a leather apron and it seemed nothing else in the midst of the furnace ... what you don't know can hurt you and usually does he said as he swung his hammer to pound his point in ... I wouldn't like to tell you how long I've been stuck in this pit he complained ... but I can tell you I broke long ago into the atom and all I got was a schedule of departures and arrivals pointing me on this way and that ... I knew then I would never get to the heart of the thing and I should get on the next solid appearance and take it as far as it went out of this town ... but ambition and hope conspire against me keeping me here still in the desire of my youth though god knows I am old and older by far ... in the midst of the fire the fire sustains me platform anvil and iron ... I have a thought I'll hammer it in ... evidence too hear my witness ... I can't make the thing itself my way but I'll hammer and tong for those who can ... I ring the chimes in the pit of the bell let those on the rim hear me well ... the flame fires at the center though the walls are iron and brass ... I can't understand though they say I have only to ask ... where where should I look

THE IMMANENCE OF HEAVEN

he's right ... no he's right for the time being ... he's right could mean he's right forever ... whereas he's right now but hopefully will not be for long ... those things which get in the way of the things we want we hope will go away ... and that which is now present and makes the whole series wrong will soon be absent ... and that absence will make everything else right ... we don't want these wrong things dead or put to death we just want them some place else ... for look what it does to a thing to be out of its place ... it's like crossing the belt parkway late at night dressed in black ... or like living your life talking a language no one else understood though it was your native tongue and theirs ... thinking them crazy but now finding out it was you ... you were out of place and not seldom out of line ... the mistake was in assuming with everything in its place perfection would be static and deadly ... in ignoring the distinction between transitive and immanent action ... did you know the root for immanent which means to stay in place is the same one for mansion ... there is a mansion in heaven for each good soul ... one place to stay in perfectly ... unlike mao and saddam ... contentedly

THE MERCY CODICIL

my time is your time and it's all up the dying man heard himself say ... but who was the author ... was it his soul calling out to god that his time on earth was spent or the devil within him to tell him his life and his were both ruined now completely and their hope wasted in this world and the next ... what a pity he reflected that the first choice didn't seem possible without the possibility of the second ... in his lifetime of haphazard thought conversation with the real god had come to depend on how the conversation went with real devil ... it wasn't as if the devil were entitled to equal time nonetheless conversation became almost his monopoly what with the various negotiations it took to keep his minions at bay ... just demands for surrender kept the clerk's department in overtime and now that the war had been lost there were more forms not less to fill out with of course so little time left to do it ... here a subclerk from the annex made a discovery that had been found and lost often before ... a brief codicil but signed with the highest initials ... it said ... time spent fighting the devil counts halftime talking with god

SETTA STEPS IN

venusette or setta as we called her one day stumbled through a doorway that closed behind her forever ... that is she left the world of infinite possibilities and entered the first of many rooms where some things were never done ... now the impossibility of a thing depended no longer on its possibility but on its necessity ... it necessarily could not be ... and its corrolary that all things that were had to be because they were ... the problem sometimes was to get back to where they were ... and this disjointed aspect of creation was another example of the broken images which happened when we fell ... we keep falling ever since and breaking the already petty little pieces into smaller and smaller bits of revenge pride anger lust and general lassitude ... but the pieces of the mirror were no longer seeming to fly off into space ... now they lay around looking at each other and wondering where to fit in ... and no single piece but that it could see another and reflect it to a third ... and no single piece that wasn't vulnerable to the light that made it tremble to be out of place or rejoice in its connection just when it was in

VENUSETTE, HER YOUTH

all in the fifties and sixties she was what they later called goth ... in particular she was worried about schizophrenia ... then in the seventies she discovered multiple personalities disorder and called for a truce in her civil war so that both her halves might deal with what threatened to become mass defection ... from manichaean she fled to gnostic ... from canal builder to channel surfing in a quick decade in a snap ... two were looking for a satisfactory third and found instead many ... once she got to four there was no stopping her ... she spoke to anybody about anything ... the only thing that saved her from being swayed straight to perdition was her failure in perduration ... she would have been severe in any of a hundred misdirections except that she could not persevere in any one of them ... nor on the other hand in any one of a hundred correct or healthy approaches she wound up only tasting ... well to be fair she did try to persevere ... I know this because I've seen her notes both to herself and on the books she read ... in a few instances she went for a year or more daily with an author she ended not knowing

NEAR TRINITY

the hook went deep into his side but he continued to argue ... the rope pulled tight at the base of his skull and his hands were tied behind him but he continued to work ... after being dead for centuries he sat down to write ... it was a question then whether he wrote better dead or alive ... if the membrane round the universe could be fed from outside the universe what kind of food would drop out of the sky ... dreams can be disappointing in their lack of art but they're never bogus ... their claim to be what they are is as good as the rest of the day's ... and all this because we stretch across the dimensions ... an infinite number of variations but a finite number of dimensions ... a very small finite number but enough to father all the variations to minister to them to inform them to be the agent who does these things or that for the sake of whom they are done ... or extension laterally and intension vertically and the cross between them ... or simply the matter form and spirit of creation ... strength intelligence and virtue ... a finite number of dimensions ... a very small number ... but was it three four or five

THE SEDUCER IN SELF-DEBATE AT THE END OF HIS LIFE

magic ... definition ... you discover a technique a formula by which you control the elemental forces of the universe .. at least that's the goal toward which magicians work ... and they're not stupid ... they know it's incremental and collective work ... their abiding hope however is complete personal control ... if the tag has eternal written on it the apprentice will start by being humble but over long stretches of time will become more and more learned ... how long will it be before the magician apprentice rebels against his masters ... to think he must do this forever is to think without hope ... some day since he must strive forever he must win and take control of everything ... unless this definition describes only a subset of magicians the mad ones ... perhaps all the others don't mind paying guild dues and attending guild lectures for all eternity ... perhaps they will not admit this lust for reality ... perhaps they will respond lust though it sounds good is always out of place ... desire in its right place is always satisfaction ... lust by definition fails to satisfy ... you must be thinking of the word lusty ... sounds like busty sexy but you see it's just a word

OF THE MANY THINGS THAT WOULD BE TRUE IF THIS ONE THING WERE TRUE

how would the story of life go if you knew for true god loved you ... some of you are like me at this point saying I can skip the rest of this ... still if it were true ... make believe ... he'd be helping you all the time directly or indirectly ... and I can't emphasize this point enough ... counting on you to do your part ... not just because you're supposed to or it would be worse if you didn't ... but because when you do you're in the swim again and things start to flow ... I don't mean physically though you dance with more skill ... or mentally ... if anything you've got more to do and more energy and more fatigue too and you've got to be up for the fight ... it's like books ... they can look real nice but you've got to get through them to see how nice they can really be ... or like being itself ... you know this ... some kinds of being are better than others and some you don't want to waste time on at all ... and it's like being happy ... it doesn't always make you content but you still know it's all right and as the sage says all manner of things are all right ... which is the point of the exercise ... your cooperation with god is calibrated to your faith in god and the goodness of his creation

NO REST IN PEACE

the elevator would go up and down and correctly stop at each floor but the outer doors wouldn't open on any floor except the first ... so each day the occupants had to come back out having failed to get to work ... and each in increasing fear that the next day on their return the doors wouldn't open on the first floor either and they'd be forced to go up and down forever ... if this did happen they reasoned they would sit upon the floor ... having first insured their load was well below capacity so they'd have room ... and the first thing they would determine was whether they should or should not appeal the eternal aspect of their confinement ... if they determined to hope and only then they would investigate the further conclusion that they did actually want to work ... did that is want to help things work in general ... that they wanted things to work forever as if to pay the fee for their hope that their separation from a meaningful existence would not be eternal ... that they would work forever instead ... continue forever to contribute to things working forever ... in heaven as well as on earth ... strange this ... their hope for doing not resting

HIS THIRD AND LAST DEFENSE

first time then space and now he felt another thing entirely as place began to change ... as if the tavern room were moving through time and space both so quickly that the room itself began to change its substance ... as they moved from place to place by way of the open wall and the narrative thread of the lawyer's story he told them tales of kings and philosophers of plain old men and ladies with the authority of sages or the wisdom of folly ... but he didn't tell one story that didn't have its motto ... or as once we used to say its moral ... and as the hours lengthened and morning drew near they must enter the dead of night and the voice of the lawyer became distant and the night of the wall exploded in battle ... fulio in a foxhole in the middle of the room cried out in despair ... on a mattress in a ward in a hypo of blue 88 ... it was better to be brave than a coward he confessed ... king jihad or crusader ... or better still was the fortitude to bear up hourly the burden and the fear for god's sake and the mission to go on ... for god's sake in the bombed-out buildings it surely had to go on ... the church in the center ... its roof open to the morning

blue 88: truth serum, named for the color of the pill and the enemy's most effective artillery

THE TAVERNMEN OF JUDGMENT

the third lawyer with the brief in his hat came striding into the room long-legged fellow that he was ... he had no clerks just a group of his friends who were themselves lawyers and one large man at least three hundred pounds who was a judge ... fulio was beginning to understand the laws of the new nature of which he found himself a part ... first the old physical laws had become elastic ... both space and time he had seen wrench in the room and in the people he met ... this time it was the table that morphed to fit the new lawyer and his friends in comfort ... though it could attain the appearance of a table of state or a bar at court most often it seemed a round table in a tavern ... or a long bench in front of the fire before which now stood the lead lawyer for this the third part of his case ... but talking not to fulio whom indeed he did not seem to notice but to his friends ... though not as one lawyer to others in summary of a case nor as one maxing an argument drawing a conclusion or supporting a line ... but rather as a man telling a story and invariably a funny one ... just then behind him ... a halo round the fire ... the wall opened out to space

LAWYER JOHN ON THE SECOND DEFENSE: THE AGENT'S RIGHT TO FORM

the lawyer looked up from the brief ... his nose which had been snub was hawklike now and there was glitter in the eye and a firm but almost smiling set to his lips as he said necessary truth form and free will should be our defense ... the pull of the first on the second is irresistible by the nature of them both ... it will be our part of the argument to defend the integrity of the third by the use of the second ... but we must move at the right moment ... we can't wait till the first swamps the second but the third can't bid on the second till we first get an agreement on terms ... the prosecution knows this and will be driving hard for just the same point ... if we make a serious misstep in this stage of the negotiations we will have lost the case before the trial begins ... we should resist any attempt of the prosecution to rush us to an agreement we are not prepared for ... in particular we must use the court's power to subpoena the testimony of reliable witnesses already on record ... it's my belief that only by their absence does the state have a case ... only if the evidence they will give is not allowed will the other evidence bury you

A SIMPLE CHOICE

in the second round of advice there was only one scribe but he had as did venusette the ability to multiform though his power seemed to concentrate itself about the face ... he came with so many books in carts that they couldn't fit in the room and stretched out into the hall and out the door beyond ... he'd refer to these often and had clerks running in and out to get the ones he wanted ... as he shifted from source to source his expression and then all his countenance would change ... sometimes ruddy cherubic other times patriarchal grey ... long faces gravened with worry or talkative impish excited ... more so as the argument developed ... what the argument was actually saying fulio had a hard time following but at the center it seemed to involve a simple choice between one thing and many ... as long as the resolution tended to the one thing the choice was indeed simple but whenever it did an about-face the number of details got out of hand until finally the scribe couldn't finish a sentence without punctuating it with three or four footnotes to reference the nuance and the query ... the nebulae of the noumena they were now forgetting

FIRST DEFENSE: INSIGNIFICANCE

men die it doesn't seem right women console them ... children die it must be wrong men avenge them ... they kill the evil they solve the problems and in between they take their pleasure ... what would you do ... suggest another story ... there is just this one ... that's why we call it humanity ... oh you can switch the casting ... send the men in one direction and the women in the other ... but the deaths and the problems to be solved are never going to end ... even as you push the time and the pleasure between them as far as they can go until the extremes become fewer and fewer ... the only ones we stop are the ones we can replace ... in fact the ones we are replacing as they cycle through ... this pack ... that tribe ... take the big group over there the one that calls itself the nation ... we have plenty where they come from ... whole bins full of civilizations ... indeed buildings full of races ... what's one species more or less that your immortal soul should care for now ... the point is the climax and the decline ... they're the ones that make the story go ... you fulio why should you be blamed when yours is so small a part to play

VENUSETTE

I was supposed to have an angel handle my defense ... yes well all our angels are busy at the moment ... what my guardian as well ... yes well something about a staff meeting ... he's sent you these writers in the meantime ... they'll brief you on our strategy ... which is ... well they'll tell you ... I'll send the first ones in ... the first one in fulio felt he remembered as having something to do with his death ... but the second one in he suddenly loathed there being nothing right about him ... they immediately moved to his flanks ... before he could respond the third entered the room and he no longer felt any concern ... she was so lovely as she moved to the place directly opposite to him ... time here she said so softly isn't like your time ... not the one you're used to ... it will actually take me years to sit down but if I choose it can take me centuries ... and the lifetimes you know I can spin through a series as I turn to sit down ... but I'll spare you the details she cooed coming closer and just give you the outline ... and she did ... suddenly tall heavy zoftik then petite arched brunette then soft blond in the sunshine ... she asked sitting down are you the one I love

vay noo set uh

THREE COMPLETE BEGINNINGS

so what would you accept as complete ... is prophetic access to divinity enough ... or wisdom surely just a little of that is a break in the usual routine ... or any virtue kindness understanding hard work ... what excellence so sharply divides itself from all the others that it must tear the last curtain from the face of reality ... split the atom ... this must have split the universe ... maybe it'll happen somewhere else some time later ... but time and space itself is torn apart in this division ... if I could find fifteen dimensions past the three or four we know I'd have to pick them up in pairs they'd be cut by this distinction ... if this division is complete ... I have a letter it belongs to a word and the word belongs to that which it signifies ... but what was the original obligation that bound the three together ... I have a thought but who can say it's mine to have or how long its truth will last ... unless the last particle in the last quadrant admits this truth ... that creation had two births and waits for a third and final ... first it began ... then one day it began all over ... and on the last day it will start forever

LET'S START WITH THE OBVIOUS

he had to be jesus then to be christ today ... modern man says isn't it lucky you just happened to be born into the one civilization among all the others on just the one planet in all the universe where god in his only begotten form chose to appear and consequently just your philosophy among all the opinions on earth is right ... how fortunate ... how unusual ... how odd ... how unlikely ... and he says this knowing the consequences ... without divine intervention all we have is divine interpretation divine inspiration ... discernment is simple prudence the pragmatic decision to go with the winner ... we call it prediction and reward those who are good at it and call them scientists ... knowers ... the universe is what it says it is ... everything ... all your religion your physics your metaphysics your convictions and your conjectures are parts of the whole and so is god ... there never is an intervention ... where would it come from ... outside everything there's nothing ... all your fables your parables and fancies are mental hijinks rolling on ether ... just the same as mine with greater or less effect ... unless there was an intervention unlike any possible other a complete break in the physical routine

FULIO'S CONTINUED STATEMENT TO COUNSEL

I am an artist but not your typical type ... so what I say about art you should leaven with the archetypical grain of salt ... no later than the first clause I'm running into trouble ... an artist makes works of art ... I agree we share for these works a particular sense of responsibility obviously so when as happens for the most part we must come to claim them if only in a word or a signature we admit as much ... but when you have me on trial for that responsibility my lawyer tells me to plead the first ... both freedom of speech and freedom of religion ... but mostly the freedom of ignorance in both ... what for instance until I did it did I know about death ... and until it happened to me I was most careful to moderate and mediate the evil influences in my life ... insisting if they must move at least let them dance ... and if they would cripple and orphan let them do it in the past under the regulations of history and narrative ... so much for war ... what then qualified me to talk of the devil or true religion destiny despotism or democracy much less wars and wars of religion ... I have only the one qualification ... I am an artist and this god help me is my art

THE SCRIVENER'S DEFENSE

it's a masterpiece it's said ... who's the master ... he immediately raises his hand to go on record ... he says it ain't me ... it isn't mine the master's peace ... I'm the master's apprentice ... I write the stuff down ... I read it ... it means as much to me as it does to you and not seldom less ... but I'm happy to have the job ... it gives me a thing to do ... and I begin to believe what it says when I hear it said just because it sounds good ... it brings a smile to my lips but not the smile you're thinking ... not all the time at least ... not if the smile you expect is one of satisfaction and not made for complicity's sake ... this one is a lie ... you know that don't you ... here the conclusion reached is vile and here the reasoning is foul but if you hit the intonation right and keep inside the rhythm it sounds as if it's right just enough so that we may take the money and close up for the night ... after all the nights do not the morning make ... the morning will bring the sorrows or the noon or the evening ... the issue is never late ... the conversation at night is never false ... it may seem unnecessary ... to be crude or blunt ... these wanderings not to your own known purpose

THE COMPANY WE KEEP

I'm thinking here's a kid whose thumb can almost bend back to his wrist he's so stubborn ... god himself looking over his shoulder to give him a hand and he says no thanks I'd rather do it myself ... grows up saying I'll do everything myself ... but says it in private talking to himself ... at least so he reasons ... in private inside his head who is there to talk to but himself ... but what does that mean talking to yourself ... if you're talking who's listening and if you're listening who's talking ... he begins to get the notion it's not so not-crowded in here any more ... there sure has been a lot of talking going on ... a bunch ... and a lot of it has been inconsistent with everything else that's been said ... who said all that stuff ... forget the long detailed discourses ... who said the short stuff like do it take it say it ... and you do and you find each time the results are incompatible with anybody's good interest forget your own ... qui bono whose good whose interest who profits ... no one ... he has inside him he discovers an instigation for a new logical category the good which is no good for anyone ... well to be honest he wants no part of such a conversation but who's beside him to help him out

FULIO'S STATEMENT ON BEING TAKEN BY THE DEFENSE

I think of you every day ... your site as it were gets a hit from me daily ... I can't get their pictures out of my mind lying there dying ... well I did think of them three times today ... twice in the last half hour ... the lord is with me wherever I go ... I feel his presence constantly ... well no not really ... logically it makes sense at least if I do my part but I can't figure out how to do that ... I don't generally think of the poor the sick the dying ... I figure some generations have to bleed themselves white in war in the course of the history of a nation ... I couldn't care less about the prison population and I pay taxes to take care of the widows and orphans ... even as I understand it some widowers ... so I don't think much of them either ... I get words mostly ... sometimes a contrived face ... but mostly words ... well to tell the truth almost words ...more a languor than a language and a longing to give these flipping ideas a name before they tumble off stage ... I should however also say I do have a knowledge in my memory of reading books of uncommon good sense ... of having knowledge that is of that good sense from which the feelings of wonder and reverence followed

PROVING THE TRINITY

I am no scholar but I want to know how we human creatures participate in eternal truth ... it doesn't seem we can arrive by pure reason at the point where revelation begins ... that god is not one only but also three ... the closest we get by reason alone ... the boldest we can be ... is to start by calling it an hypothesis ... resolving now to call it so we should begin with the evidence ... what could we expect to find if this were a true revelation ... with your indulgence I would like to start in reverse ... not with birth but with death ... not a hospital but a hospice ... doesn't matter take your pick a fifty-year old man an eight-year old boy an eighteen-year old girl ... in the building or just in the system at home ... but not by accident and not suddenly ... this death will be a process like a birth or a wedding ... anticipated arranged provided for and participated in by members of a community caring for each other as it proceeds ... there'll be machines to put in place and people to write up schedules and leave instructions ... and there'll be talk lots of it over time ... and it'll be as nothing if the patient revives and survives another twenty forty sixty years ... it's not body or mind we mean here but spirit

cf Ira Byock, Dying Well, 1997

FULIO'S LIST

this idea of talking through ... is it strong enough to buy me time ... I only mention it because of my friend fulio ... I suspect he postponed to death the big conversation he was meant to have before he died ... he knew his books wouldn't prevent his death ... he knew for example that they weren't always true some not even for the most part ... still they were good for delay ... he knew the thing about humanity was everyone in it being touched by the absolute and then being made to forget it or if remembering then to deny and he tried to do his bit for collective amnesia as well as most ... and so he read ... besides did he have any choice ... he hadn't the courage or the stamina to talk that way ... fulio was despite his learning maybe because of it a man of restricted capacity ... in any case who am I to convict him of a practice I follow myself ... so he delayed with the plausible excuse that he could not hear the word pure but must listen to it through filters ... and so he read ... he kept a punctual list of the books he read over the last decade of his life ... I have the list and look through it from time to time ... I must say he did more than delay ... he dallied ... and if truth be said trifled too ... especially early on ... it's only toward the end of the list the voice opens and whispers a shout

WHY YOU CAN'T MAKE BELIEF

this cosmic card trick as it were kept all the world running ahead of itself and trying to catch up ... being was no longer being but doing or making ... respect even self-respect had to make the same conversion ... which in turn of course made things like disability retirement and helpless dying aggravated assaults on good sense and good taste ... why don't they get with the program and take a quick step to bow out ... but it wasn't the inconvenient person who threatened to lay the concept low ... the rush to the future was made insecure not by what we might meet there but by the pull of the past ... it had after all a sensible caution ... what's your hurry it said ... can't you see the faster you run forward the more quickly you come to me ... and what am I when you've taken all the meaning and run away with it into the future ... what am I now but your present making itself past with all the meaning of the dead ... fortunately ... says the german professor ... things don't work like that ... you can't take meaning into the future and run away with it from the past ... it isn't after all something we make ... open to technique ... but a gift ... open to gratitude

THE BOOK THAT MADE A POPE

did I hear trumpets ... no but I did hear the idea of trumpets ... here's a priest in germany ... a professor in a seminary ... who writes a book the pope reads on the apostles' creed ... the pope likes the book so much he makes the priest a bishop then makes him a cardinal and then the cardinal professor becomes pope ... now the priest in his book on the credo spends forty pages on the word credo before he'll agree to get on with the creed ... and like a good professor anywhere he was right to do so ... before a philosopher can know himself before a physician can heal himself they have to define their terms ... turns out in the case of credo the definition pays a dividend of truth I was not the one to expect ... the world I knew had made the word know a fragile container and then had crammed all its hope inside ... what I hadn't caught was the obvious ... adrift on a sea of doubt and sinking mankind's solution to keep afloat was to paddle so fast into hope for the future just to keep hope inside alive it had sailed right past the shoals of theory ... right past meaning altogether ... into control of the future through technique ... a sleight of hand

Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius Press 2004

THE SECOND VOICE

this conversation can't be a they or an it ... it can't even be an I ... it has to be a you ... first of all you includes it and they and just adds the security of knowing who you are talking to ... when you have proper discernment a sine qua non to the good life and the single characteristic you find in the enjoyment of a good book as well as one of the great hopes for life after death ... the face on the other side of the voice ... the smile behind the word ... all of which being absent I goes tumbling round its unnatural orbit down the slope I slid couldn't breathe or see and then I could but only to cry ... wasn't too long before I was taught to say you you you ... looking for you whenever I opened my eyes ... finding you in substance with my mouth my lips saying over and again your name you you you ... when have I stopped ... name the day I haven't said your name though I've long since forgotten what it means ... where could I hope to be not mouthing your name or trying to resurrect its syllable ... a cryptographer playing with an acrostic ... missing this one last sound ... rolling it over the tongue ... slipping it between the teeth ... chewing on it ... chewing ... oh what a fool ... calling it anything anything to avoid saying you you you

LIFE AFTER DEATH AND COMMON SENSE

let's take a stab at life after death ... when you die what passes ... the mind passes ... the spirit abides ... and how do I know this ... I don't know anything about it because I haven't been there and nobody's come back to tell me ... I've heard about people doing that but I haven't heard them myself ... their reports have the force of rumor only for me ... the most authoritative source I have spoke only of going there and preparing the way ... he did come back but if he spoke about what life is like there it hasn't got back to me ... so what I've got to talk about is what we all have ... common sense ... and if what I say isn't in this sense sensible then dismiss it ... now I know that we've got two parts that fail to be constant ... the body in flux waxes and wanes finally to a complete dispersal ... that's just so plain it's obvious ... the mind as you'd expect is more devious ... on the one hand it proudly claims independence from the brain and then on the other droops into amnesias and senilities and finally just can't stay awake ... no ... the only part that stays is the part that forms matter and mind ... the part that cheers us on

WHY BAD PRAYER IS NO PRAYER AT ALL

you can't say everything we do is prayer unless you immediately add the qualifiers good prayer and bad prayer ... good prayer gets past the self to other people and everything else ... the healthy that is the true trinity ... not the bad trinity me myself and a little peace and quiet away from these two ... the false inside broken trinity from which no true prayer can escape ... some parts of true prayer must be better than others but none is bad in itself ... what makes bad prayer bad then is a misnomer ... it makes prayer bad because it makes it no prayer at all ... the only bad prayer is that conversation that can't get past itself ... that remains an interior trialogue between yes and no on the one hand and please shut up on the other ... now a lot of this bad prayer no-prayer-at-all stuff is formally addressed to god ... you talk to yourself and you pretend to be god ... but after a while it's pretty obvious what you're doing and even you catch on ... the unfailing clue is unhappiness and bad temper ... you're frazzled on the inside because you've got no grace and without grace you can't be grateful and without gratitude you can't be happy

THE CRUSADE AGAINST MODERNITY

there was a pope ... papa nino was it* ... who declared a crusade ... he didn't use that word ... against modernity ... but his crusade failed and in quick succession the world got two wars and the threat of a third ... and pogroms ... civil wars in grand societies in each of which one side had no weapons ... now this I think is incontrovertible ... you would probably do better to switch our focus to the new threat of a third world war ... you might call it a war between christianity and islam but you'd be wrong ... for despite common opinion christians don't fight ... the war would be between islam and modernity ... modernity has the guns ... churches as a rule don't ... no pope or bishop or minister will give even one order to fight ... when they die in this war soldiers and civilians who are christian will inshallah die as christians ... but as soldiers and civilians they will die in a weird way as statistics ... because in modernity that's the way they live ... the ancient pagans had their gods ... modernity has only its numbers and they're all probabilities or just plain dead fact ... no ... facts too are only relatively certain ... in modernity everything is

* No, Pius X, not IX

FIRST QUESTION ON THE FINAL

there was a heretic who rejected or severely modified every dogma of the true church ... he said the lord was not the lord ... morality was expedient and fluid from time to time and place to place ... that god was god but that he was evolving ... that god was god but he was all-inclusive ... that he was god but so were we the more and the more that we acted like it ... this heretic had a wife and two children ... he was faithful to his wife and dutiful to his children teaching them the values of strength and independence ... when he turned fifty his health began to break down ... he fought his various infirmities as his doctors recommended with surgery and drugs ... it took him ten years to die but in that ten-year battle he learned how to pray ... it began as a series of attempted negotiations ... if he did such and such ... he said to no one in particular ... for say a week ... would things improve physically and emotionally socially and productively ... live or die he said ... let it go for now ... at the end of the week would he be closer in his imitation of god or would he not ... more and more of these weeks began to succeed in three of the four categories he proposed ... then he died ... was he a failure or a success

PORN DEVOTEE, HIS APOLOGY

I'm not interested in sex said its avid fan ... I'm only interested in finding Venus ... when they show porn in the dorm my eye excises the men ... when I subscribe to the porn newsletter I click girl-girl or girls home alone only ... I started liking hefty chests ... now I like small ones too ... I started by preferring brunettes but I've seen too many close blond approximations to the one I'm looking for to take that preference as binding without qualification ... in two words paleness and flatness I've come to see the enticement of abstraction ... the dark the latin the asian bring the shadows that give substance and curve to the representation ... a single strand of their hair shows what I mean ... if you take the snow caucasian's hair take it from the brow and make it so light it's a triumph over the dark and gravity too so that you have only the hint of seeing it at all ... elevate your vision above the other four senses ... then find that hairbreath's distance in between what you see and what you can't ... there on the edge of glaucoma you'll find the goddess ... she has no color in the fog ... you might as well be in the dark but for all the light

THE PROOF OF GOD'S EXISTENCE

the trouble today with evil is that most people don't spell it with a d ... why is old nick so persistent in taking his name out of circulation ... as if self-imposed he was a nonperson in a totalitarian state ... I expect he does because he is ... or more to the point most of all wants to be ... a nonperson in a metaphysical state for which he alone is the justification ... but all the time undermining his desire is the knowledge that other things work ... which knowledge in all creatures has the same effect ... which is wonder ... here I am a self-contained world of thought ... he must think ... how the hell can these other things work ... forget that they exist ... they work ... the night follows the day and the sun rises ... I call your name and you respond ... each morning I wake up and I start again to thinking ... you promise to return and five decades later you do ... if A then B ... A and sure enough there's B ... more startling still A is A ... it really is ... even in the midst of the most beclouded declamatory wicked mind there's a look in the eye that makes us smile ... an agreement past reconciliation ... a shared knowledge that things work because they're good and were meant to be

THE CONSTANT DEGRADATION OF THE DEAD

which of the lessons of death is the one to be learned most and forgotten last just before immortality ... my vote is for indignity ... without indignity any death would be just another express stop on the local line with who knows how many others to follow ... without indignity death could be managed demoted from an angel to an event ... but by accident or long process death will leave a corpse ... a putrefaction bag with an open mouth ... please do someone close the mouth ... indignity means shame but not acculturated shame ... guilt is the cause of this shame ... that no matter whatever we did or can say we are complicit in this event ... you can see it on the face ... the spreading horror of that shame ... it's why we cover the face ... the shame on it embarrasses us ... the pitiful shame of the dead ... it's a debt we cannot satisfy while we still live ... a debt that consciousness is always conscious it cannot pay and makes of conscience herself a debtor always living beyond her means until in the end they have so consumed her that she must stay behind for derision's sake ... swallowing both earth and light till she dulls them both in the constant mire of her shame ... oh but if she could just turn away

THE MASTER DEPARTS

the old man ... a child of that rebellious and seminal decade in our nation's history ... now these many years later on the edge of his death ... said there were three things he could remember of his time on earth and they were each a part of our broken reflection of god ... the first was sex a mimicry a parrotry of creative power ... the second was war our ancient right to claim morality ... and the third a distant third his people's love of knowledge ... after we buried him and went our separate ways I retired to dinner and a coffee by the table in remembrance of my old friend ... in age he had become if not bitter a bit sardonic ... that part about sex being a cheap imitation rather than a participation in the creative power for example ... I knew he didn't really mean that ... and for him a practical pacifist a perennial professional civilian to give war a claim to morality ... well what was that but moral cowardice ... unless we could say here as well he was being ironic ... the real spirit of my dead friend was revealed only in what he said last ... for he was always a patron of books ... my dead scholar friend yufoolio

HOW THE IMAGE LOVES THE THOUGHT

there are two kinds of persons ... the imaginative and the intellectual ... the imaginative is a solitary spinning out yarns in color ... the intellectual is a herd'sman following the boundaries of necessity and absolute truth ... yes yes with this qualification and that ... but bound by necessity and absolute truth in the end ... imagination takes the herd'sman's conclusions as sometimes well-intentioned advice to help bide the time in the waiting room ... but it's the room he abides not the advice ... the fox in the fold the herdsman's wolf is always probability ... snot-nosed kid brother to necessity the real killer of contradictions ... probability for-the-most-part-backtracking-certainty just young and brash enough to queer the whole soup up ... doesn't bother the atticmen ... what do they care for in their garret chairs ... only the melody of the lines or the last sad whispers of color before night ... there was always the touch of the finger inside the elbow ... time's smile because it was dying ... blood pushing straining to gets its work done before dark so that each day might end in a one word tribute to thought

NO, WOULDN'T WORK

well yeah but how will you know when to look when he does come if you're not looking all the time ... if the world is just particles and waves and fields of waves you can just wait and one will come by and sweep you up ... but if it's more than particles and waves you might have to act on your own ... indeed your situation may be more dire than that ... you may have to be looking out even as you sleep ... turning over in bed you may have to keep an eye out behind ... and when you're out in public that will be even worse ... you'll be static this and static that ... how will you ever get free to listen and see again ... no ... better to be just alert 360degrees 24/7 and you can't do that with particles and waves or going with the flow ... what you need is vigilance ... you have to be an on/off switch on all the time and there's only one thing that can do that ... it's desire ... you thought wanting meant needing and having to go without ... you thought of course better then not to want ... float above the field in a field of your own ... once again no ... meaning life you really want to want

FORGET ABOUT JESUS

how can you not be a trinitarian when all our most profound categories come in three's ... for example human psychology the id the ego and the superego or what I feel what I think and what I do ... for example I thought faithlessness was a good thing I felt it was a good thing but I did not act as if it were ... for example the religions of the world ... those who worship the god of power terrorists ... those who worship the god of reason scientists ... and those who worship the god of love the only true religions in whatever language they're spoken ... and what better way to tell the powerful truth of this love than to see it assaulted and triumphant ... by its two mortal rivals ... the monotheism of evil or despotism ... psychological or international ... and the heartless despair of a rampant determined dualism as if between god and a rival who had an objective claim to his title ... and as to christianity itself that most trinitarian of all philosophies forget about jesus if he's your stumbled and blocked ... do right he'll find you

WHAT WE REALLY ARE

isn't it possible to act consistently in a way inconsistent with the deepest philosophy we think we believe ... to speak like a christian devoted to the meaning of christ but to act like an atheist being funneled down to his death ... to say in debate we should go for the ideal then spend your evenings chasing tail and your nighttimes getting drunk ... your religion would be a matter of the morning and of regret ... a christian a follower of christ in theory ... a pagan in practice ... in grotto in grove and wood chasing venus and the naiads ... or marching with mars if not to war then to sports or games or business ... aristotle never used the words I think but his is the basis for them ... the practical syllogism ... an argument whose conclusion is an action ... modus ponens ... if you loved me you wouldn't hurt me ... modus tollens ... you hurt me therefore you don't love me ... there's a sense in which we are how we feel but it's not a solitary sense ... we are as well what we think even if we don't believe it ... because ultimately we are what we do in relation to others

STRAIGHT-LEG WONDERS

there's no doubt about it ... she's listening to the good ... or more likely to the goddess ... she lying on her back the goddess lazy deliberate floating up out of her pulling her up as she leaves ... or she sitting up and looking down arguing shouting waiting listening to the goddess localized hammering to get out ... or lounging by the side of the pool under the palms she complaining ... how long will you do this to me before I run out of breath ... even as preoccupied she makes it so but doesn't see it so ... the colors are brighter the skin smoother the water green-diamonized ... all because of this conversation whose tone says no but whose only word is yes ... her syllables are all vowels but she concludes with a guttural consonant an ah as if I told you so and ends with a D to shut duh door ... now in the rest to follow ... now that we know cigarettes are no good ... we ponder twice ... once up north and once down south ... on two-moon planets do all the women have three breasts ... in a world without an ocean would Venus still rise out of the seashell bringing it herself as she does ... the shell and the clear water with it

SYMPATHETIC INFERENCE

you don't have to argue using blunt force trauma to portions of the brain to tell me what it means to the mind ... I take a long night awake and the need for sleep to do it more simply ... you don't have to speak about on/off switches and pools of chemicals and convoluted layers of thought piled up in warehouses of the cerebrum ... from there to the cerebellum and from the cerebellum to the alimentary canal to the plant stem I see the analogy open to the truth as the head of the tulip does to the warmth of the sun ... but over all the fields of the earth I see just the one creature smiling ... they say the hyena's laughing but it's only a bark ... I hear the cat purring but she only means to tell me how she feels ... we'll have no dispute over whether she's telling the truth ... but most of all when I look into your eyes my dear I know the gleam's there on the surface to beguile my own sight that it can go no further ... I come to you I love within you not by observation but by self-knowing

THE BIBLIOMANIAC'S COMPLAINT

the trouble with the two piles of books in front of me is that I can't see through them ... there are only six or seven books in each stack but the principle would be the same if they went from the floor to the ceiling ... I could not see through any one of them and any book is worthless if you cannot see through it ... you might at first put it down to its good-looking nature ... to its being hard-cover illustrated or expensive ... there's no denying the beauty of such a creature open in your hands on your lap ... but that's why we have paper-back editions to hold and handle hard on the beach or the subway ... point is in public and on the move ... making it clear the object is the word and not the page ... and to get there you have to go into the book and under the printing on the page to hear the word spoken to see the idea begin to take form ... none of which is simply given but has to be worked out in honor interest and being a person ... which are indeed the stakes in being here alive ... but even here we fail if we stay inside the book ... indeed stay inside the word itself ... if you don't know who's talking

DARWIN'S SMALL-MINDEDNESS

science of the kind Darwin practised isn't simply an affair that links cause and effect but one which in Aristotle's scheme accepts only two out of four ... when Aristotle said cause he meant it four ways but Darwin accepted only two ... matter and motion ... he would not accept either form as a cause or a guiding purpose ... form he took only as a description and purpose only as wishful thinking ... most particularly as if to consecrate this diminution he extolled the small over the large ... micro now became the very essence of macro ... indeed matter itself he puts out of sight with its omnipresent large amorphous universality and will have in its place motion ... evolution now means that things change all the time so that any boundary any species anything that doesn't change is swept out of deepest reality and put as a figment into our imagination ... thus tables people and galaxies are reduced to elements so unstable they're even now burning out and drifting apart trying if not by design then by the necessities of the accidental to become smaller still

WHICH IDEAL CAN BE NEITHER EXCLUDED NOR DISCUSSED

say soar for philosophy or glide for religion but say heaven both times ... and what a taboo in my community there is against that word ... the old folks they used to talk about it all the time ... just the one man talking and the rest listening ... but the rest of us label it either a myth or a folly giving the first just a temporary dignity over the second ... but what a folly to call heaven a myth as if it belonged to a category of things that could be true or false ... heaven if it's true at all never could be in a category that includes the false ... it's not heaven in a myth that's true or false ... it's all that other stuff ... all the intrigues and adventures all the wars and the murders we used to call purgatory and hell ... point is it's out there on the fringes where purgatory starts letting up that the sacred kingdom begins ... known in my community to be sacred so that we have the taboo against speaking or thinking about it ... known to be a kingdom because all we've done in the history of government is try to imitate it ... its boroughs over the water ... its cities on the hill ... they always show us morning ... over there there is no night

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF

there's only one pattern worse than reading for yourself ... that's reading in neglect of yourself ... the first just means you're selfish ... the second means you're a danger to yourself ... reading all this volatile stuff and so much of it contrary to the good of your nature how do you think it's going to affect you ... at least precede each act of rebellion with a tract of moderation ... each call to alarm give a succeeding prayer of wonder ... and consider for every death there's more than enough birth ... and for every sorrow there's ultimately more joy eternally so ... consider too the nature of this progress from the least religion to the most ... sex science and charity ... each with a grotto of its own but only one of them wider than the universe ... only one of them the path to god truly ... the other two being adjuncts on the faculty ... the least and the less religions trail behind the most ... even as consent and agreement follow in the service of helping your neighbor ... the most is after all the best because it gathers up the most it can get from here to eternity

THE DARWINAN UNMASKED

you say darwinian that you're a realist but the christian he says he is too and a better one than you ... you say you understand how life on earth developed with or without creation ... the christian says creation isn't an incidental ... creation is origin ... you say where's your evidence ... the christian responds the big bang and the little bang ... the origin of the universe and the origin of species here on earth in a cambrian explosion ... you darwinian are amused to ask what is the origin of species ... and it pleases the christian to answer ... species come from phyla and phyla come from kingdoms and kingdoms come from god ... all right you darwinian reply and without god do we not still have species phyla and kingdom ... for what's any one of those but our human way of talking ... what do we ever know of nature that isn't just our human nature's way of trying to figure it out ... and what's the clearest we ever get ... a rule that's generally true ... a law we haven't managed yet to break ... all our certainties are built on sand ... precisely replies the christian ... that's why you're not a realist ... you're an idealist

WHY WE READ

the joy of reading ... what does that mean ... I support the meaning most elevated because I think it is the most necessary as derived from the meaning of the word joy ... which I take at all points to be the most successful kind of prayer ... it's not just being happy it's being happy in all the right ways as long as it lasts ... there are physical and mental forms of happiness but joy is a function of the spirit and spirit is the highest part of the soul the most given the most immediate the most easily taken away ... the body and the mind they may not be in the best condition but on the whole they're more durable and reliable than the spirit ... you may be sixty you may be dying but the body ran a good course ... you may be twenty and know nothing and least of all about the spirit but you're learning ... these are the things with all their terrifying aberrations we rely on for their consistency and longevity as markers pointing to the spirit hidden in full for the sake of the pure ... that's why we read ... the active mind in the quiet body following the traces of the spirit where the language spoken is truth and the answer is joy

ONE WAY IN WHICH WE ARE NOT JUST NOW PLAYERS

you might have an ambition to become a writer so that it's everything you do ... so of course your reading is part of your writing ... you might have friends with whom you share an interest about which you all can read ... then your reading is part of that friendship ... but you might have neither friends nor the ambition to become a writer ... why would you read then ... first let me cheat a little and propose a third penultimate solution ... you might be playing a wargame and want to read a book to better understand the game ... but if we don't have a wargame to intrigue us the reason may still apply in the sense that we still have a game to play which too is penultimate ... this time to life itself ... the game I mean is understanding ... ah then you may say not penultimate to life but to action ... all understanding is penultimate to action if only to moves in a boardgame ... well no I feel obliged to answer ... unless we agree to obscure the issue and call understanding an action which of course in one sense it is but not I think to your pragmatic way of thinking ... the understanding I mean is not that of the active player but of pleased admiration

TO ALL THE HEROES

we live our lives as though we were in charge though we know that's not true ... the truth is it's a bargain to keep the number down ... to start with we have to give a third away or if you're a little hyper a fourth to sleep and whatever kind of thinking we get into there ... the rest of the day we're not so much in charge as in conference ... there's a lot of important things going on if only a foot or two in front of us ... we're very busy but we're never alone ... not even in our thoughts ... around the table our thoughts sit with us powerful witnesses ... a community as yet in dissent ... well then who then must be the one to speak with one voice ... that's when we're in charge ... or so it's said we are ... take a point at that point to turn around and look again at the table ... now consider if you will what original thought you brought to that meeting of minds ... think of all those in your life who have sat at that table ... and don't forget the scribes who translate them to you even as we speak ... the clerks of memory and language you so often take for granted ... now to those of you who can turn around again and simply take charge of things I say how intelligent to know who you are

THE FIRST COMPLAINT AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY

calling it phallic because of its mushroom head weeping in white or its rocket shaft halfway up the arc from perpindicular launching a spray of satellites out into space ... colony scattering as it were ... my thoughts my mind my purpose from here to the end of the universe ... at least back to venus ... ah well pass the tissue ... calling it phallic because of any of this is fair up to a point but after that it loses the point which is no longer a point of origin but of destination ... the alarm that gets the engine ready that's the origin as far as phallic gets it ... as far as implant a little needle in the brain and give it a remote electrical stimulation which sets off a vibration which puts the whole process on the train ... that's all you've got ... just a series of origins ... you have no destination ... you can take all your implants and change a lot of behavior ... mold it if you want to call it that ... but you're still not going any place you haven't been before ... you're going to have a lot to say about who gets to do what ... unless there's a war ... from the people seeking beauty

ARGUING WITH IAGO

so you're watching tv on the pilgrims ... and king james shows up and says he will be obeyed as was the centurion in the bible ... but the king might have remembered it wasn't the authority of the centurion's command that impressed jesus ... it was the authority of his obedience to jesus that did that ... now jesus being the kind of man he was wasn't often surprised ... but the simplicity and efficiency of the centurion's action and thought ... the purity of his assumptions ... surprised him ... must have pleased him ... must have strengthened his hope for mankind ... and this follows because it's what would take place in the mind of any thoughtful man ... and jesus was that ... indeed based on this last most reasonable assumption we can say a lot about jesus and how he might have thought about things not to be found in the bible ... we can for example read what other thoughtful people think that jesus might do ... or we can listen inside instead to the voice of reason always by our side inside our head ... for he's the third one at the table as we sit inside arguing with iago


cf a&e on the mayflower (11/06) and tom wright on luke

HOW VAPID IS THAT?

some things are just wrong like needlessly exposing your flank an army's or a person's ... always wrong simply given a repetition of the circumstances ... I'm not saying that it doesn't take skill and good judgment to figure out the initial patterns and then to recognize them in repetition ... I'm saying when all the subjective pitfalls are cleared and the forms as they truly are are finally set their connections and relations are fixed forever necessary and eternal ... but all this is common sense you say but where's this eternal stuff ... things stay the same unless they change ... it's not even a platitude it's a tautology but who says forever ... perhaps you mean one moment after another without stopping ... time without end ... but what if there were another kind of eternity not time without end because there is no time no change but one big ball in which all that has happened or will is happening now but without the ing ... past tense and participles get shed ... person and point of view as well ... leaving only happen all ready complete ... changeless ... therefore eternally true

THE UNSETTLING RESOLUTION

why read why talk why think but to talk to god about everything ... nothing surprising here and that's my point ... if there is a god and he were personal it follows that any conversation with him would be eternally improving for the human correspondent and of all things the one thing most to be sought ... for all humanity ... is there any evidence suggesting such access ... well that's the problem ... there is but it's contradictory to such a degreee regarding the nature of god that his existence is recalled into question ... we may take it for granted that his grandeur is terrifying to unprepared spectator and participant alike ... though a wonder and a joy to those he has prepared ... the wonder nonetheless remains why he has chosen to prepare such a few or why leaving the rest of us unprepared he chooses to reveal that terror in pain and suffering and death optimally designed it seems to tell us to hang up and clear the line ... unless you believe in retribution and reward after death ... the right kind of retribution if you prefer and improving of course ... that we may learn the language ... that is learn to listen to higher reason

SCREEN DESIRE

how can you miss the obvious ... the purity of their youth of their desire ... see how the angular becomes round ... how they swell when they're near each other ... slow them down and turn off the sound and pay attention to the details ... you might notice first their affection honor respect ... second if not first you must admire the rhythm of their agreement ... they go north together and south ... they rise to midnight and fall into noon ... they flow like honeyed water they hold like jellied wine ... these are the moments of their perfection ... they'll last beyond the end of time ... there's a process going on here ... it has a plot but it prompts a pause for reflection as the light runs down her back ... she's been put the question repeatedly ... at first she frowns ... then she smiles so sweetly ... the answer's come so swiftly ... if she can only hold it as slowly the truth will never leave ... then she recalls she's not alone ... she swallows the breath of the other ... she draws her in ... she holds her close ... she has no thought for another ...but it's the focus by which we lose them ... neither by their intensity nor the fading time

OUR THEME TODAY

truth wonder personal immortality these are our themes today ... take the last first ... why settle for anything less ... why be a drop absorbed by the ocean ... why be a dot and then be erased ... when you can be a person forever ... well maybe because you don't think it can be true ... hmm ... give up the hope of personal immortality because you honor the truth ... that's a good beginning ... you value truth more than you do your own life ... at least you have more faith in it ... though of course it may not be true at all ... your alternative to personal immortality ... suppose it's not and we do live forever ... doesn't that present difficulties too ... one being the quality of that life ... is it to be heaven or hell ... and second doesn't this mean we have a map of the universe in the sense that we know where it's going and we along with it ... to a place unlike any on this mordant morbid earth ... and doesn't this map mean that if we claim to hold it we hold too much ... how can we make such a claim so far above our capacity to know ... and to this much I agree ... the more we take things for granted the more we fear them we lose humanity's mark of truth ... wonder

WHEN TRUTH WAS ... INEXPENSIVE

it's just another custom ... if I had a penny for each time I've heard someone say that I'd be a penny richer ... nonetheless it is what most people today mean ... that is before you hear their paragraph imagine them saying ... it's just another custom so what I say that follows has only a limited shelf-life and that's true for anyone speaking any time about anything ... you can carry truth in a capsule in your pocket and any time you want to speak just spray it on the back of your tongue ... it will last till you stop speaking ... then it becomes true for you and just a few others ... it's outmoded it's low-minded it's false ... it's illegal it's persecuted it thrives ... it's true for you and most everybody else ... it's true ... better hurry up and spray it on your tongue if you want to talk about it ... its time won't last ... it's peace this year but it'll be war next year ... public sex is in this year it'll be out next ... this which you meant as a kindness hereafter never is or was ... truth is what you say and the number of people listening or at least that's what they say ... who am I to know

THE FATHER'S RESPONSE

we have a fundamental disagreement here ... you think all life is gradable when with any two instances one will be higher than the other ... you're a most moderate man and you do your trimming from the edges back in towards the center ... where of course you have a lovely central park ... here on the edges you are right it's cold and almost airless ... there's pain and there's indignity either one given its moment worse than the other ... but you should be careful before you interrupt two people talking ... one of them might be too important that you should interrupt him ... two people talking you think you know the one but you have no clue of the other ... then too some topics of conversation some conversations themselves are too important for you to interrupt ... and you're right ... seen from this distance some words are higher than a world of others and they're out here on the margins ... words you can't understand because you say we mumble ... ways of speech manners of expression you cannot see ... a conversation you're not part of ... just we two ... like all of us ... like no one else ever

Question: Who are 'we two'?

IN THE NEW AGE CHILDREN SHALL ADVISE THEIR PARENTS

come on dad pop out of it we need your room ... it's legal now all you have to do is answer some questions and sign a paper ... it's like going to a home but it's a virtual home ... all right all right you don't have to decide now take a couple of weeks and we'll talk again ... for what is life after all but one force flowing through the stem and each of us a flower on the branch ... flowers open they fade they die ... the sea comes in the sea goes out ... why the hesitation to go with the tide ... how else does the world get on ... take a couple of weeks settle your affairs ... the family will get together ... we'll have a feast ... then we'll see you off in style with dignity and just a little pomp just the way you like it ... what's the alternative ... tubes sticking out and going into places they should never be ... months on your back but worse when you get up ... no time to reflect to put your things in order ... this way you get to wear your suit before the funeral ... hell man it's a hell of a way for a hell of a man to go

THE PACRIST'S POSTED DISCLAIMER

I'm not trying to tell you what to do ... the message can take care of itself ... it's an old boy now and if it's right you'll agree ... as long as you understand ... and that's my job here ... to set each post out as if it were a puzzle in vocal pieces ... trying to keep the number of syllables down in deference to the truth ... seeking some fun along the way through sound and grammar and sense ... striving carefully to come to the right conclusion ... except for the last post which is what I mean by fun in the way of a joke ... it was fun for me ... it's not my job to be overly original as if to pretend to any originality at all when I say upfront that I'm derivative ... well everybody is ... on food and water for instance ... for me it's reading that after food and water sends me to school and work to learn and to think ... and that's the thing that informs the vocal pieces ... which when you've got the rhythm and you follow the pauses come to a conclusion for about ninety seconds ... so you see my stall is off the main thoroughfare and I don't get much custom ... I wonder why ... is it my locution

CONCLUSION OUT OF THE ADOLESCENCE OF SPIRIT

what makes the mind so interesting ... it transforms matter ... what makes the spirit so interesting ... it transforms mind ... by transform I mean give it something it did not have before ... direction ... enthusiasm ... if this is an ascending scale what does the next transformation do ... what can be brought to spirit that it didn't have before ... only one thing its existence ... if this is an ascending order and ascending mind and spirit have already played with and at times mastered universal good and evil what can additional grace add after that ... but simple existence ... to bring order by seeing it first and then bringing it out of chaos ... to find still room for virtue despite the vice ... operations like these cover all that's ponderable ... but derivatively ... you can't shout ... you can't laugh if you're not alive ... what then is life ... just the most advanced form of being ... or just that Being's bare necessity ... that this Being before any quality is is alive ... it's almost creepy this great big eye never blinking always open always watching alive aware while I go tumbling through time

RESURRECTION HUBRIS

this I that's me I can't remember when it first began ... but I find he's hired a score of staff maybe more ... clerks with messages it seems more to them than to me ... so I now sit with the calculator in a backroom upstairs trying together to figure the first one out ... out meaning simply not here now ... gone ... but to others not to myself ... their gone continues while mine will not return ... my gone used to return is in a new sense of now ... elsewhere ... never to return ... and I have gone with it and now I go with my chances ... perchance to meet with what I deserve ... the discomfort or distress the horror or the peace the end ... for either the calculator or for me ... or my perpetual confinement ... or my reward ... neither the calculator nor I can figure out what it must be not to be ... doesn't seem to be a corner we could handle on it so it's only natural to go on instead and figure a new life ... you might get a handle on that ... a new life a resurrection ... and where do we get this natural hubris ... must be in the genes or the chemicals the gift the grace of endorphic hope

endorph = the drug the brain makes which when released precludes panic with calm

THE FAILURE OF FAITH AND REASON

Caiaphas and Pilate how should they have acted ... how could why should this Jesus be spared ... he blasphemes ... he's a handy scapegoat acceptable to both conservatives and rebels ... his followers will not fight ... he is of particular good use to us just now ... the state the religion they thrive ... it's the conclusion we strive for ... how do you explain why they were wrong ... they seem to be political and theological pro's ... what's wrong with that ... the wrong was not in their intention as it is given to us to measure but in the consequent itself ... they killed God ... how do you measure that or we them ... to pass sentence in this case is as much as to judge God ... I'd rather skip that temptation ... if we may not sit as judge may we sit as jury ... no ... juries are judges of the facts ... what then if we are not to judge it are we to do with it this death of God ... understand it ... support it ... carry it your own heavy dark brooding about it and carry the thing itself as the center of civilization because it's the center of creation ... the death of God ... hear it in your mind the final agonal shout from the cross

agonal = the death rattle sometimes exploding in a shout