HISTORY AND DRAMA

or so at least one interpretation would have it ... namely the one from across the way on the union side of the wilderness where the rebel howl had all the meaning I have mentioned ... on the other side it meant something else ... there it was no howl at all but a cadence of three spontaneous cheers for lee their commander ... perhaps not welcome to him in the movement by stealth at night to get ahead of the enemy ... it certainly was not welcome to grant when the same thing happened to him and may have added to his impatience which a little bit later led him into a detour which would have got him captured or killed if in his stubbornness he had persisted in that way for it led him into the enemy not around them as he wanted ... the movement of thought and interpretation it might be said was like the battle not given to clarity of understanding ... certainly not to grace of maneuver ... anything but subtlety or sympathy ... just will power and physical force and faith in their general ... unless of course the rebels did howl later ... so it is on drama being accurate ... it just wants to be drama

AND THAT WAS THE POINT

they howled three times into that night from one end of the line to the other across the heart of the wilderness into the mind and heart of the enemy ... saying in context I suspect something like this ... you came into the wilderness a year ago and we mauled you then just as we did yesterday and today and this is what we will do to you every time we meet till you die of it ... or leave us alone ... indeed they had come these blue and these grey to the fulcrum point not of the season or the campaign but of the war itself ... not just the abstract point of the argument where they put the eye in the triangle but of the bloody angle itself where standing on the top of the wall ... then ... the union would jump forward go south and win ... or fall back north and lose ... they did not fall back but the rebellion did ... the union now had it in its grip and grant would not let lee go ... longstreet's charge was lee's last hurrah the day of the night the men howled calling for the point ... the topmost angle the highest peak in the spiritual combat ... the very point for which the heroes had reenlisted

THE NIGHT THE SOUTH HOWLED

first old abe he came out of the wilderness ... then right behind him came sam grant ... but if you think that was easy or the middle of a good thing you've got another thought coming to you ... it wasn't easy and it's not enough to say that it was hard or even to say that it was brutal ... it is of course even on the surface of it a more complicated thing than that ... lots of people involved ... that alone makes motivation very complex ... and when motivation slides into understanding and understanding into judgment and action it takes the mind of a recording angel just to get it all straight ... having said all this nonetheless there is something simple to say about it ... you may say of grant and lee and of their armies what was not evident before the overland campaign ... that they hated one another ... yes ... of course before they had fought and killed each other but this time after three years the north and generals like grant had come to see what lincoln wanted them to see from the start ... that enough was enough and god willing they would make lee see it too ... that's why grant turned in the wilderness and the rebels howled

THE LEXICON'S WORST TWO WORDS

let's look at these pronouns then ... which are more pernicious ... or most blessed ... likely to cause trouble ... liable to begin peace ... seem by themselves to favor the self ... hold it out of the count ... seek to go beyond it ... catch my drift ... I think we know who we're talking about here ... I don't want to point any fingers but we know which little guy is most laden with sin ... we may double the letters trying to spread the guilt out but if all the eyes be covered groupsight can't help ... yet clouded as night it will not hide from us this eye in every storm who claiming the only point of view opens wide innocently to signal who me surrounded by the chaos and ruin it has caused ... no I much prefer the objective impersonal pronouns as insensitive as they can be ... they have at least the purity of new knowledge to attract them ... even if the best they can do is gossip ... the one letter assassin and his vicious little groupie on the other hand they're the ones most likely to do all of us in and would too finally if they could ... if it weren't for the second person whose voice will turn them around and set them straight again they'd go out crooked to the end

THE MORNING WORD

why is a bright new morning good ... is it the light the look the feel the comfort the excitement ... all of these ... or simply the knowledge that this day just now is friendly ... what makes a rainy day perhaps distressing but not usually alarming ... is it the thought this isn't too bad tomorrow will be more inclined to support me ... isn't there in other words something personal about the weather ... not as a pattern that affects humanity or a group of us ... but each of us separately individually personally ... this flutter and buzz behind our ears it really is interference isn't it ... this hum and flurry of flickering motion directly in front of our eyes it's meant to distract us isn't it ... there's something decisive being told to us that part of us doesn't want to hear ... something about the morning that's hidden in the rain ... something being said and shown to us that we see and hear and then forget and then repeated and forgot again repeatedly ... the longer we live sometimes the more likely we are to figure it out ... to have the repetitions set in ... to be able to say a word just the right word to describe what it is in the morning that gives us such confidence ... not I ... but you

THE COSMIC GAME ON EARTH

I was reading some medieval philosophy the other day and I was struck by the answer to a question I should have but didn't think to ask ... the question has to do with how many different kinds of people do you think there are ... I know the number Plato or Aristotle had in mind was two ... one human one divine ... but the medievals had three kinds human divine and angelic ... I'm thinking that's humanity's answer to monotheism confronting and subduing polytheism ... what do you do with all these guys we thought were gods ... make them angels ... and I'm thinking that's the right answer ... because they are angels ... not only mars and venus but planets and ideas at least behind them ... the angel of death of terrorism of tyranny of democracry reason and joy ... one each for the bad ones I'm guessing but whole truckloads for each of the good ones ... and all engaged in a battle which seen only from a specific aspect can be seen as a game ... but it is from a multitude of angles a battle of ideas ... and that's how you game if you will this war of opposite intentions ... good and bad

THAT WE SHOULD THINK THE TRUTH IS KINDLY PALE AND SOFT

he left the house in the morning too ... searching for truth he brought it with him ... couldn't fail to do so because he was the truth and still is ... not just truthful but the truth itself ... good too of course but not goodness itself in the same way he is the truth ... or in the same way as the goodness he sent to replace him after he was gone ... pretty seemingly for good ... not the nice guy is what I mean to say ... pat him or more like pound him on the back and buy him a beer ... how's that job going in the new town ... or could you lend me fifty till monday ... his response being sure or no man I'm tapped out ... there's a reason we're missing nine out of the ten parts in the story he lived and whatever that reason is it's not because he was a good guy ... even a good son neighbor or friend ... there had to be something about him ... figure it was the truth ... to scare the hell out of you ... because that's what he came to do ... though oddly enough seems he could fail at that if we wanted him to ... but don't expect he took the failure kindly or in good part ... his parting from those who chose to go I expect would be terrifying

PROVING A NEGATIVE

you have to be a little crazy on this level ... not insane unsound ... just off balance when picked up and put suddenly elsewhere ... you shouldn't worry though ... spiritually you're only moving millimeters ... though intellectually you're in a blur spiritually you're taking a little tiny step ... take what you just said ... went out to get the truth found it in goodness came back with beauty ... those are the biggest steps that can be taken and that's the longest journey in creation and beyond ... and we know that ... not just me but you too ... truth goodness beauty unity being those are the transcendentals ... unity and being that to which truth goodness and beauty return ... exitus-reditus ... that's what thomas said and you know and I know that he's right ... I'd have you prove it to yourself in reverse since you and I live on this planet in revolt ... take a look at things when they go wrong how they go wrong ... you leave the house in the morning to deal in truth with humanity and to bring home good things for your family and if they are not good or good enough see how ugly things can become

EXITUS/REDITUS

aahh you still have to link desire with spirit ... revolution and frustration I get but you've still only given spirit as an example of desire ... indeed and to be more accurate spirits in the plural as disembodied people ... but to the first problem ... what we call desire of the body as opposed to desire for the body is really instinct ... all the mind can do is recognize the truth in the aim of the desire as it approaches or veers away from its object ... but the wanting the conscious awareness of the need ... in a word the desire ... there's no other faculty in man that can hold it but the spirit ... now as to disembodied intelligences the same tripartite structure holds ... there may be a wanting for the body or an aversion against it but by definition it can't be of the body ... nor is the body anything but a dictum true or false to the mind ... how can the body be anything else to this stranger ... but the spirit is not like that to the body ... to the spirit in health there's nothing finer than the body in health ... to the spirit the body is not a truth to be verified but a good to be got ... and that's the story ... went out to get the truth found it in goodness came back with beauty

REVOLUTIONS ARE FOR SPIRIT'S SAKE

you should do it ... you should not be made to do it ... you should do it ... you should not be made not to do it ... unless the making is the original ... who then is there to say no ... not the culture though the culture will forcefully imply what it means to say ... take the conversation among spirits you mentioned a short while back ... the culture will forcefully suggest approval or not for this idea ... say the culture decides that not is what it will do ... how will it intend to show it ... it may provide you a room to disagree though it may wrap your arms around you ... but no matter if there's enough sense outside this one idea to guide the culture by then the constraint will be for something else ... if you've been orderly for you there's another deterrent and however tender it still must chafe ... however abstract it still must pinch ... however confusing it still must frustrate ... and that I fear is our one common weakness ... some are fearful but many are brave and some have no fear at all ... some are filled with hate some have enough love to yearn for more ... but the one thing we all have and care the least to keep is our frustrated desires

THE SOLIPSIST'S LAMENT

I like the sound of the word ... solipsism ... the slithery smoothness of it with just the hint of a backbone in the p ... but I'm figuring also the idea itself should pop up in the lexicon of the five or six words ... words like gnostic ... that define the culture ... pop up too of course in the unstated philosophy of our time ... in the indignation felt for the perfidy of the symptom-free disease ... where literally is the sense in killing tissue without pain when sense itself is the boundary of the self and the self is the justification of existence ... where's the virtue in justice or law ... an intangible string to link the palpable moments of good or bad sense ... my moments someone else's invisible something ... as if something or someone else made any sense at all ... and least of all a conversation ... first all the talk all those words they will never stop ... and when of course they do it's only the work of exhaustion that the mind no longer hears them being said ... it's only at that point of exhaustion that the silence can seem to be his ... and if there were no time that would be fine ... but as it is it doesn't last ... and the still word begins to sound again

THE GNOSTIC CHURCH OF NO SOBRIETY

so you smoke ... why ... to change my point of view ... to make a calibrated change as you do when you take a glass of whisky or wine or a couple of cans of beer ... we turn the dial on the amount of oxygen in the blood stream to make the mind more wakeful than usual ... and to free the spirit ... that's why you drink spirits ... not that they come in the bottle but that the bottle holds a liquid key to your heart that never fails and morning has broken yet another time ... the king may walk down the corridor in the daytime and you'd better get out of his way ... but at night with his heart open you're in the field with him ... planning to demolish your enemy ... or just trying to figure the stars in the sky ... whether it's pot or hash wine or beer the first thing it does is clear the ear so you can hear the new measure of time ... it clears the air inside the mind by washing it with light ... and it changes the sound as the head bows down ... now the sky has a ceiling ... almost everything does ... this one curves then tapers like the heart of the flame ... balloons out like a bubble ... bursts open like a flower ... and look everything is wet ... so no ... no sobriety ... no sobriety ever ... you can build your church round that

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

your complaint is that men show women respect only as a byproduct of their pursuit to get laid ... but you know this fallen world is upside down so perhaps your complaint is best answered by a consideration of the reverence men show women when they see them naked or parts of them naked for the first time ... wow can I touch it ... are you sure ... it's only later that the barbarians are allowed to take over ... sometimes only a day later or by the next morning ... but later nonetheless ... the normal natural first reaction is reverence ... what happens thereafter is the result of a corruption that went down long long before this poor lad was a conception in the mind or the body of the universe ... perhaps even long before the conception of the first woman ... whatever ... something went wrong sometime near the beginning ... and not just men but women also have been trying ever since to scramble back to that first start when flesh was new as new as skin and light ... and life was abundant because it all had a share in the same good intention and brought the same rich reward ... wonder

DAMNATION

I do not believe in salvation outside the church ... point is I think the church is pretty big ... you might say I'm a member of the Church of the First Tautology ... kind of like darwin's tautology ... only where he says the fittest survive in my church we say salvation is for those who are saved ... you might say as well that our town is a tautological community ... we don't take a dim view I think we take an enlightened view of those outside the church ... I am however worried that we do not take a compassionate view ... indeed I must admit we take rather a dispassionate or bemused point of view ... what a curiosity it is for those who are saved to see those who are condemned ... I do not mean to be contentious ... I mean the great majority of these people know they are condemned though they use synonyms anything but the word itself to describe their condition ... they speak of their world as meaningless ... their origin is accidental but their doom is determined ... they love and hate but only to give fanciful names to a chemical imbalance ... the world has no lasting good ... no guaranteed truth ... no beauty whose attraction is universal

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

any real act of creation is an act of procreation ... do the thing but not on your own ... indeed by your decision but not by your initiative ... we are barren of initiative and pregnant with decision ... the realization of this truth might at first have a debilitating effect so compartmentalize contain the damage to your pride ... play your part and give your lines with decision ... and remember there's a party after the performance and you're invited ... in the meantime enjoy the play ... the fun of it ... now if you do all this does that mean you make of life a comedy ... if it does that's not what I mean ... I mean only what you mean too ... that for every comedy we're given we get another tragedy ... the enjoyment I mean is first an admiration for the character the plot and especially the dialogue ... and finally a humility a docility before the theme and its author ... yes I mean past the fun of it too ... a participation in sorrow ... that's the part of the play if it comes when it comes we don't get to write ... the part where most of us don't get any lines either ... in a funeral there is no applause

WHAT IF ... ?

how is prayer the answer to the divided self ... prayer is communion with the trinity ... now I don't know much about the trinity ... I'm sure there was a time when I knew more ... but I don't know much now ... but I am a past and present master of equivocation so I can speak of some mastery concerning that subject ... not my own but of that which has mastered me ... perhaps you hear the words the divided self and you think that's a bad thing ... but what if it were a natural thing ... in fact what if it were a supernatural thing ... and what if as well there was the greatest simplicity in things ... even in god ... and that it was this ... that everything has something in common with something else ... and that this were absolute not subject to sequence or condition ... it is said with purpose that there never was a time when the divine procession of father to son to spirit wasn't going on ... let's extrapolate a little and say when the mother did not know and love her child ... never was ... because all this happened before time was and is beyond our power to conceive

THE LOVELY VANITY OF TIME

first were the trees their roots and their trunks ... second was the moon ... the thicket was next and the sea of contention ... then the land of milk and honey the honey in the voice ... but the last was best the face and the light in the eyes ... after such a journey what a thing it is to be caught by the hair ... from the oceans of creation to the start of a halo or the midst of the dark strands of night and all the colors and textures that nature or chemistry can provide ... but most is the style ... whether it changes one face between today and tomorrow or frames the face of a generation it's done the same all through civilized time ... in the twirl of a finger it is civilized time ... compare its other-placed rivals all bare five and a half of them and see how the hair crowns the head ... the hair at the bottom of the brow may be a sharp contender at times ... indeed and often arch ... but the hair above the brow has the arch variety to measure the proper distance from the one to the many ... a fiat in the form ... a grace in the variation ... for now a splendor

AND THE MORAL IS ...

guardian angels and muses the real ones and impostors ... ideals and ideas ... if I could tell the difference I'd be home free ... but who has any discernment these days ... it's not that you can have thirty fifty or a hundred choices ... sorting those out can be fun ... it's that you each time have two choices ... is this the ideal or in its service or just another renegade idea ... we creatures of the most recently have very short memories ... I build a wall of darwin books and put them on one end of the room ... then I pace the room ... I keep coming back to darwin ... now is that a coincidence ... I rock my chair in front of the wargames ... don't you think I can tell how they hem us all in ... I put my hand out toward her radiance ... no the angle's all wrong ... lighting where's lighting can we get no light ... indeed that's been the problem all along ... not enough light ... and too much heat ... I can't tell it out it's neither yes nor no but darkly in between ... what a thicket lord ... who can penetrate it ... it's so dark what am I to say ... I appreciate the light more when it does come

PALM SUNDAY MORNING DREAM

what was gandolfini doing walking up to our table sitting down looking at me with recognition smiling saying he'd looked forward to our conversation ... I saw then that though he still looked like gandolfini he was in fact the parish priest but not my parish not my priest and this premise in my mind must have been the support for an unintended superiority in my voice or face ... an oily slickness perhaps ... that said ... and what can we do for you father ... he drew himself in from the gut up and swelled prodigiously and in a voice I never heard on tv said I am a bishop of jerusalem ... impressed I replied what do I call you ... turning from me with a sweep of his huge head to my companion but his eyes still on my face he said bishop ... the voice the word the city his size or all of them together made me call for retreat and I opened my eyes to yet another palm sunday unobserved ... unobserved this time but for his look his balloon-like appearance and the profound solidity in his eye ... it was not his offended authority that stayed in my mind but his authority revealed that warms me still

THE DIVIDED SELF

in the shower this morning I heard myself say I don't know about you but I'm going back to bed which I thought seemed to say it all ... the divided self and its plans for the future ... back to bed and get a couple of good dreams in before getting up again ... I'm sorry to say this is not what we wanted at all ... back to bed get the dreams in ... sorry to say you have just days left to live ... back to bed get those dreams in ... and pray that the dreams be good ... for what's the good I find myself answering if the dreams be bad ... the puzzles are fine the hard work is good but there's revelation in the dreams ... they not only tell you where to go they tell you where you're going ... and they do it all by feel ... you've been here before ... this room this ship this field these people ... you've met them all before ... but something's different ... what's different is the way they make you feel this time ... is this what I've been doing you hear yourself say ... has it come to this ... yes is the answer ... it has ... dreams and the spirit world have all the other worlds have ... process and finality ... but they continue too

WHAT PROMPTED THE INCREMENTALIST TO PREFER HIS INCREMENTALS

which left our incrementalist in a quandary ... well really a quarry ... not so much where to carry his stones ... that was to be to all sides ... that was understood ... but when and in what order they should be laid ... not to give offense here ... to encourage there ... and to sympathize with over there ... hardly ever to argue with ... he was at this stage laying foundations after all ... but with all his good or at least peaceful intentions he could not escape the ruins ... he built as regularly there but never with any assurance ... nor met with much among his closest peers ... these were redline districts too close as it were to the ground and the shore to the dirt and the flood ... or like a dentist capping an abscess he knew whatever help he'd brought would not live long ... and though he tried this realization this area pulled everything else awry ... the infection would spread ... the decay would rule ... the tower and its section of the wall would fall ... ruin would be complete and again the only question was when ... for the wall was only as strong as the first breach ... communication effective till it hit that first gap ... thereafter the abyss

THE TROUBLE

now said fulio we come to a subject dear to my heart the incremental spiritualist or may we just call him the incrementalist ... he will not read one book and pick up another but will read a chapter from ten various for fear that when a good book came to a solid end it would cause him to change what he was doing ... and he liked what he was doing ... building castles in the air one small stone at a time and a wall to connnect them ... why build the castles in the air ... because they housed spirits ... and why the wall within and between each pair ... the spirits of the city trusted and did not trust one another ... were closer to some and more remote from others ... but were all in one way or another connected ... all of which was familiar enough down below on the surface and further down in the deep waters but up here in the sky one thought things might be more relaxed ... but no ... there was something wrong up here too ... some spirit of infection whose every foray was an invasion ... the trouble never was venus she'd tend to you if only she had the time ... was mars each alternate one false

THE SIMPLICITY OF THE ABSOLUTE

let's not blame god then for something that's our fault or at least the fault of our present corrupted nature ... and always given that condition let's try to talk about the absolute and give the concept at least the respect in logic which it commands and deserves ... I say the concept because I would not want to belittle the thing itself by a reference to any respect I might feel for or be able to show it ... and to tell the truth I feel such a conversation on my part beyond a simple warning to be a dead-end and not infrequently a nasty trap ... there may be a point when I talk about me and I hope there's a point when I talk or you talk about god ... but there's hardly ever going to be a point where I talk profitably about my relation to god except to say that I know that he knows that it could be better ... so when I talk or you talk about god I hope we can talk reverently of course but also informatively ... as when we say he cannot make a rock so large that he cannot lift it because at this level can will shall or simply wants to are all simply one

THE POOR RELATION WE SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE

now about getting high a comedienne nailed it in a couple of clauses ... now girls when you're feeling like that you get optimistic ... yes boys and girls she might have added for emphasis that is the feeling and that is what you get ... a close if not a true relation with the best ... at least not true always which is the best relation ... now let's ratchet it up a bit and talk not about the relative best but the absolute best ... you may say what's the point you can never describe that ... and there I think we have a common misconception ... we cannot fully describe the absolute but there's a lot we can say about the stops along the way to such a total description ... we can say god can do whatever he wants but with this qualification whatever he wants is the best ... and if you want to argue that the qualifier makes relative what should be absolute I must answer not if the qualifier itself is absolute ... and the need to add the qualifier I might add is not relative to god or even to our ultimate knowledge of what we call god but is relative to our ignorance

IN OUR END IS OUR ...

well said jack the never married let's leave it at that shall we and stood up ... yes I agreed and I stood up too ... I hope your debate goes well he said and put his hand out ... I will study what you told me I replied and shook him by the hand ... what was it that he said I thought as he left the restaurant and after I sat down again to enjoy another coffee ... he's made love to hundreds of women but was there by my lights any love then with them on the table or in the bed or wherever ... or could there be any love on the screen or in the audience ... if there were how could it get past the form ... what knowledge would permit it when one performer couldn't remember the name of the other ... no what love there is must be for the form ... but what is love of the form compared to love of the soul ... well not too bad a beginning I'd guess ... but a poor substitute for the real thing ... not an end in itself but a beginning ... and in that too is the difference ... the atheists and the pagans know only an eternal mindless process ... only our position has any room for a real beginning because we have real ends though they may plague us

MARRIAGE: THE PROMISE OF A LIGHT ATTRACTION

the form of life itself jack repeated ... what are you talking about ... soul I said the soul ... see how odd it is this disconnect in criticism ... we use the word soulless to describe something monstrous and our sophisticates dismiss the criticism as obvious hyperbole ... but the noun from which the adjective is derived this they will not even consider to argue to dismiss ... the soul is for them a concept without a beginning or end ... at least for any sensible discussion ... and that's just it ... the soul isn't a thing open to division by the five senses ... but it is open to witness by the sixth sense whether mystical intuitive or common ... the sixth sense knows what the other five don't because it takes what together they all imply but none of them singly can name ... the spirit in type each soul in particular ... this is the thing behind love just as the idea is the thing behind mind and the object behind the senses ... an old man can look at his wife and find nothing but annoyance and disgust for her habits and she twice the same for his ... in the midst of their turmoil one light attraction

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