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