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