Give me God poem good poem poems that help
Empty me fill me turn me inside out flood out of me
Help please
The jangles inside and out
what’s the use of more words?
A song that lifts us all up together
that grabs me by my slashed gut
that heals me as it heals all
a true song that loves the Truth
What is the path?
Why did I?
So desperate for the books to land.
And they said Or double your money back.
So I thought what have I to lose?
Only time, calm abiding, and probably money.
It seems like there’s a contest for the book of the month.
But once your book is reviewed (assuming, I guess, the rating is a 4 or 5), and even before you can see the review, you get an email explaining that the conversations about which book is selected for that honor can be steered to your book for $20K.
What?
So there is no book of the month; there are only books that got 4s or 5s and for which the authors then paid an extra $20K.
Why do they pay $20K? They do the math: 30,000 guaranteed sales, at $3 (or whatever their profit is per book) a sale, equals well over $20K.
But it’s not quite honest, since readers are led to believe the books were selected in a more traditional / fair manner.
Then you get the review and it’s okay or whatever.
It’s an amateur review from someone who didn’t understand the book particularly well and who say they removed a point because the book is perhaps too artsy or philosophy for some readers. What?
Then you are immediately asked if you are satisfied with the review, at which point you notice two things: you’re not super satisfied with the review, and they are now attempting to box you into saying you are satisfied with their services, even though you wouldn’t at that point know if the review led to anything or not.
When you let their “100% satisfaction guaranteed” siren song seduce you off your established route, you were thinking that you’d be satisfied if the review and its placement helped some people who would be predisposed to liking your books discover this book. That’s what you wish for, nothing else. But now you see that what you are going to get is an amateur review that misses your sense of your book and that anyway sits in obscurity. No one will read the book based on this service, even though it is a pretty good book and there are people out there who, if you could just find them, would be glad to discover this book and your oeuvre. So you say, no, I’m not satisfied. And then you have to answer and answer and answer and answer and email after email after email after email and you are repeating yourself and each email seems to be misunderstanding your previous email on purpose so as to fatigue you into giving up and pretending you are satisfied with what you’ve gotten in exchange for your $400 (it didn’t have to be $400, but that was supposed to give you the best reviewers and the quickest reviews and you were already in the “what have I to lose?” mindset).
At one point they offer to give you the site’s owner’s book so you can make your book sell, but obviously, that’s not what you signed up for, you wanted the site to advertise your book, to get your book noticed by that little chunk of the world population that would love to read your book and follow your development as an author; that was your idea; that is what you are not good at; that is what you’d wanted help with.
At some point, they are telling you that was not a good review and they will give you another for free, but you feel quite strongly by this point that everything they do is just to wear you out until you will eventually be satisfied with an amateur review that is read by very few and that doesn’t move any books, doesn’t help you go evolve from some poor fool who spends a decade writing books into the void to a real author whose vision and perseverance are now receiving their just rewards. So you say, no, just refund the purchase price, that’s all I want at this point. And by now you’ve written so many words about this topic, a topic you find both boring and stressful.
And the denouement is that the owner emails you. He’s willing to refund the money, but your refusal to accept a new free review does raise questions. Which statement feels to you designed to manipulate you into capitulating. So you say, just refund the money, I’ve written enough about this; since, after all, you’ve written like ten messages to them about it as they try to fatigue you into submission like a bull in a bullfight, running slower and slower as more and more swords wiggle in its bumpy back. Then he responds that he’s the only one who can issue the refunds, so if you could please quickly explain your reasons for requesting the refund. One final hurdle. But no, it will probably lead to more hurdles …
Is it a scam?
Is it an iffy enterprise?
I don’t know.
They use the initial reviews to discover which books are good enough to offer to help promote.
But the promotions seem a little dishonest because readers are offered the sense that the best books are chosen, while the promoted books are actually the ones that meet some minimum standard of worthiness and that then pay more money (after the initial review) for the promotion.
Also when you, goaded on by “or your money back”, sign up, you don’t think you are signing up for a possible future paid promotion, but for immediate value, something that would satisfy you now, which if you’re an author without an audience, would be, you know, some readers, a review that caught enough of the book’s essence and was read by enough potential readers that it would get some meaningful number of likeminded readers to try reading your book.
They could, apparently, sell your books.
This is what that offer of 30,000 books sold for $20K has told you.
And this in turn makes you think, what is the relationship between advertising and success?
You’d always thought the books would eventually catch a fire on their own.
Does that ever happen?
Sometimes.
And if it doesn’t, does it mean the book doesn’t deserve to sell anyway?
If so, propping up sales with relentless advertising seems like cheating.
But maybe if the book never catches a fire, it just means the right people never read it, and with advertising maybe they would.
Anyway, an unsatisfying and exhausting experience.
And why did you do it?
That level of desperation where you let yourself be fooled.
That level of hopeless hope where you send the pretty girl from some far flung country your hard-earned money so she can come to you and be your bride, even though her profile keeps telling you she’s in a different far flung company than she was the day before, and even though her Whatsapp account is flagged as a business account, and even though there is no plausible reason why she would be interested in you.
Authors get lonely too
The hurt too much
Can’t begin
Politics too stressful
Can’t move
The loneliness too long
Can’t speak it
Tired
What to do?
Put your hand on my stomach
Tell me you believe
The monster in my gut
Swirling and screaming
Tell me you love me anyway
The hurt on all sides
Pinning my shoulders down into my sex
Tell me you will stay
What to do?
The hurt all through like a vibration
And forbidden long ago from saying it hurts
or why
The hurt all through like a flowering field
What to do?
All thoughts have gone to mush
All feelings have turned to stone, have crumbled, are scattered by desultory winds
I cannot stand up in this place
Time is up
I fail
What to do?
” … morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. … ”
[Herman Melville as Ishmael, narrator of Moby Dick, in Chapter 41]
Upleaps my heart into my hands around
silk-handled saingeom. We flow as one,
me and my spinning edge. Without a sound,
my linen feet cross market stones. I lunge
like forest fire in a crystal night
to shatter demons left aft fore and right.
Upleaps my heart as goblin eyes roll up,
as welted tongues roll out, as horn-ed heads
I slash in two. With perfect poise, I sup
on righteous victory til all my foes are dead.
In every season weather clime I train
to rid the world of evil and its stains.
Upends my soul. I can’t contain it more.
Divine spark diffusing all through my space
of conscious time, infused now with eyesores.
Strange jagged lines in purples pinks disgrace
my perfect form. Where do I begin,
and where do these blasphemous patterns end?
We lived alone, traveled to the hinterlands
sustained ourselves on wild locusts honey and
God’s redeeming grace, such as it was
in that holy land when the desert bled into the sun
and the sun into God and God into a bright white forever dream
that held us all together forever in the pause between action and reaction
a nice time
a time for reflection
a time to find the edges, to unfold and fold up back again
but now
what now?
Now we’re old tired brittle
too many years pretending
that evil can be banished to the outsides
too many years upending
apple carts and money changers’ tables
too many years out of our league
too many years of uninterrupted prosperity and never-ending success
too many great intellectual victories
too few glimpses of the Ghosts of Christmas
If friends leave loving me when catch they me
deep down, where demons reign in jags and zags?
If love won’t love what I turn out to be?
Three share one eye, three ancient hags
who see, who know, who feel everything
that ever was; as now beautiful maidens they sing.
The truth about humans is that they are noughts.
The truth about people is that they’re empty
of everything except God, who with the shake of thought
both shapes and Is everything. And God’s sent me
to disappear as I speak the truth.
Same job as everyone else in this big old kissing booth.
Author: The Ancient Curse
Production: Bartleby Willard
Lighting, Sound, and Snacks: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson
In a study room in a dorm
Susan: So we’re approaching the limit, but we’re not reaching it.
Leah: Yes, getting infinitely close.
Darren: Isn’t that cheating?
Abe: There’s no cheating in math.
Darren: What else do we call saying we’re there when we’re actually only infinitely close to being there?
Abe: That’s what this proof is for, to prove we’re not cheating.
Leah: We can’t be cheating. A major support of modern math and with it the modern world would crumble if calculus was a fraud.
Abe: This proof is not really a proof. It’s an outline of the fundamental theorem of calculus, which is rigorously and definitively proven.
Darren: Okay, but I don’t even get this outline of the proof. So when I use calculus, I am cheating.
Susan: Me too. I’m a calculus fraud.
Darren: We can have a club: The Calc Fraudsters.
Abe: You can just join any fraternity or sorority, I’m sure they’re all Calc fraudsters.
Susan: Hey! I’m pledging.
Darren: Me too!
Leah: QED
Susan: Oh come on, Leah! You know its just because my friends …
Leah: are running off a cliff …
Darren: Me too, I just, I have to have a social life, or else …
Abe: you might end up getting good grades
Susan: This is ethnic discrimination.
Darren: Yeah, anti-Greek!
Abe: To return to the outline of the proof …
Outside a bar on one end of the campus, the end with the shops and restaurants.
This bar is right across the street from the end of the campus, from a big lawn fronting an administrative building and a student community center with a food court on the first floor and a plush well-couched study room and offices on the second floor. The weather is nice in early September. End of August is always muggy and awful. But then things crisp right up once September starts. Excepting that last week of August, the school year’s weather is always pretty good or good or great even. The young scholars are seated on metal-lattice chairs around a metal lattice table in front of the bar. Those under 21 have sodas or waters; those over 21 have beers and wines. One professor is there, the leader of the weekly Stammtisch. A youngish man, a little below average height, slight of build, with medium-manly features and dark brown hair neatly parted on one side.
Mike: Ich verstehe nicht wieso [let’s return here later]
Mike
Imagine I’d not found you
Imagine there’s nothing good to do
Beth
Imagine I’d not found you
Imagine nothing quite went through
Mike
I’d live some kind of lonely life
in a jumble of bottles and strife
Beth
I’d wander lonesome through the night
opening myself to empty dreams of Mr. Right
Mike
I found you when I was young and fresh
before the jags ate through and made a mess
Beth
I found you when I was innocent and soft
before I had time to get myself bitter and lost
Mike
Sans toi, silent tears run my cheeks at thirty three
too late first glimpsing the hurt inside of me
Beth
Sin tu, I doll up too soon for too heavy hands
Just to share a secret I couldn’t learn to stand
Mike
And look at us now so happy and so clean
Beth
We go to church and we think nothing mean
Mike
Lucky the soul who find venom with antidote
Beth
We poured ourselves in each other’s throats
Mike
Each shaped to hold the other’s hatching hurt
Beth
The world watched only tidy jeans and matching shirts
Mike
A lucky break
Beth
Yes
Mike
I know where I would be if I hadn’t met you when I did
I would be in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn
working as a property manager, writing books no one read.
wrecking every love that almost ever happened
growing old and friendless while the world feel apart on all sides
Beth
It’s too bad we couldn’t have been in this college movie
It’s too bad we couldn’t have found each other in this college movie
where well-timed kisses seal happy fates
where love is always almost but never quite too late
Mike
Imagine us with a family and a home and the wisdom and strength to do what needs doing in this bleak afterglow!
Beth
Imagine us nearing fifty ready to take our own children to college to meet their own true loves after a couple hours of hilarious and ultimately heart-warming escapades!
Mike
Imagine!
At the cafeteria people choose from a wide variety of fare. But there’s no point to any of it, and no one realizes that soon they will be old and all the possibilities, which at the moment seem both infinite and inevitable, will disappear.
Jake: How you boys feeling?
Darren: Good, right, Abe, we’re feeling good?
Abe: Birds flying high, you know how I feel.
Jake: Jazz standard allusions, alright, I thought this was my table!
Darren: We accept all, right Abe?
Abe: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
Jake: Where did you get this guy!?
Darren: He came with the room.
Jake: Lucky man.
Meanwhile, at the girls table:
Tiffany: Hi hi, you girls mind if we join?
Susan: We’ve saved you seats.
Tiffany: Mille grazie!
Susan: Of course! It’s not like we know anyone.
Julia: Yes, Una grazie’s more than sufficient.
Janet: Do they still package them as singles?
Julia: Hello, I’m Julia, and this is Susan.
Susan: We’re roommates.
Janet: Hello, I’m Janet, I went to high school with Tiffany.
Susan: What town are you from? I don’t think Tiffany mentioned.
Janet: Pittsburgh.
Susan: Oh, very nice! That’s where we had our Pittsburgh field trip in fourth grade. I loved the incline, but I wish that man had not punched the stadium wall.
Janet: I’m not familiar with that event.
Susan: It was Pirates versus the Reds, May 27, 1987. I think the mall was metal. He had long stringy hair and a round face. A worn white T-shirt, blue jeans, a little on the heavy side. Seemed upset. The wall didn’t move.
Tiffany: Amazing memory!
Janet: Who won?
Susan: Reds 13 to 6. They won all three games at Three Rivers Stadium.
Julia: You didn’t tell me you were such a sports fan.
Susan: Oh, yes! Only baseball though. And softball. I played softball.
But conversations about who played what position in high school sports are too boring to include in a movie, so here we will mercifully break away to a scene of one of the student cafeteria workers cleaning off the salad bar while singing, It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the thrill of the fight, risin’ up to the challenge of our rival. He’s wearing headphones. I guess this film is set in the mid to late 1990s, back when the US would always be a happy democracy and the jovial leader of the free world. Ah, those were the days! Where does forever go when it dies?
The movie takes place in a magically easy time and place.
It is a land where people honestly believe that unresolved crushes, awkward conversations, homework and exams are problems; a place where people stay up late figuring out the nature of Reality over cheap beer. It is an impossibly easy place, a fantastically easy place, a place so easy that its inhabitants are so convinced that they have challenges that they sometimes crash out and end up in a slightly less cushioned existence. It is a place that cannot exist, a place that yet somehow is.
I know who will star in this film, and I wish I could marry her and have a nice life on the other side of hope and fear. But she must find her own way and I must disappear into the fog, it is a pea fog, it is a layered fog, it is a thick and a proud, a self-satisfied, a vaingloriously thick and fuzzy fog.
Susan’s Mother: We’re just a phone call away, honey.
Susan’s Father: Okay, Gloria, that’s enough, let me have a turn.
[So Susan’s mother steps back so her father can hug her goodbye]
Susan’s Father: We’re proud of you, Susan, take care of yourself.
Susan: Thank you, I’ll call every day.
Susan’s Mother: Just to check in, it doesn’t need to be for hours, just to let us know how you’re doing.
Susan: Yes, of course.
Julia walks by. She rolls her eyes.
Then in the next scene, we’ll have it happen that Susan and Julia are roommates. We can do whatever we want.
Susan: Hi, I’m Susan.
Julia: Hi! Julia.
Susan: I’m from Lawrence Park, well, Erie.
Julia: Oh, I was in Erie. Presque Isle.
Susan: Yes! A wonderful resource. Where are you from?
Julia: Philadelphia.
Susan: Oh! I always wanted to go. Must be so cool.
Julia: Big city.
Susan: I love your skirt, so cute.
Julia: It was a gift.
Susan: Oh. … Do you have a major picked out?
Julia: No, something with art, or computers, or literature, or chemistry.
Susan: Wow, that’s a lot of ideas! I’m prelaw. My parents’ are lawyers. They like it.
Julia: Sounds like a safe bet.
Susan: I know, right?
Tiffany: Hi girls, my name’s Tiffany, I’m your RA, just stopping by to wish you welcome!
Julia: Thank you
Susan: Yes, so considerate!
Tiffany: How are you settling in so far?
Julia: Good, we’ve put our bags down.
Susan: Yes! And then we’ll unpack them.
Julia: Wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tiffany: (laughs) Okay, great, well, if you need anything, I’m on the first floor – 1C.
Susan: Thank you!
Julia: I do have one question.
Tiffany: Yes?
Julia: Are there any rules?
Tiffany: No! Of course not! Just no drinking, no smoking, no loud parties, and no boys.
Susan: Perfect!, great rules.
Julia: Should minimize the unwholesome fun.
Tiffany: And make room for wholesome fun!
Then we’ll do the same thing, but with two young men meeting for the first time in their dorm room. Darren is unpacking as Abe enters.
Abe: Hi!
Darren: This your room too?
Abe: Yeah.
Darren: So we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. I’m Darren.
Abe: I’m Abe.
Darren: Like the president?
Abe: Honest Abe.
Darren: Lot to live up to.
Abe: Yes, keeping the union together through a civil war, ending slavery, writing and delivering one thoughtful, soul-searching oration after another, growing wiser in dialogue with the nation.
Darren: How do you handle the pressure?
Abe: I gave up early, before I could walk.
Darren: No kidding?
Abe: Yup, in my crib, my first sentence was, “Mommy, don’t expect too much”
Darren: Was she disappointed?
Abe: At first, but she’s gotten used to it. It was better to break it to her right away.
Darren: Tear off the bandaid.
Abe: Mmm
Walter: Hi guys, I’m Walter, I’m your RA.
Darren: Hello. Darren.
Abe: Hi! Abe.
Walter: Like in the Bible?
Abe: Father of the Faith
Walter: Lot to live up to.
Abe: In fear and trembling, I make the infinite motion. I don’t just fling myself into the absurd, but stand calmly up inside of the mystery, trusting in the Love that chooses everyone.
Walter: Oh, wow! Can you really pull that off?
Abe: Tell him, Darren.
Darren: He’s a quitter, Walter. Never even tried to live up to the name.
Walter: No! Quitting already?
Abe: Long since quit.
Darren: Been done quit.
Walter: I see.
The project began in 2011.
We’ve attempted an Overview.
It’s rather long.
Here we attempt a link page with a shorter, more accessible overview.
A quick orientation in the frame story
Bartleby Willard writes and Amble Whistletown edits for Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers. Bartleby is a self-told tale, can shapeshift at will, and is generally magical. Amble is the woefully-mortal brother of the eternal publishing titan (original, demi-god sense of the word) Thundration “Tun” Whistletown.
Together with the likewise (immortal and superpowered, but soap-opera-y rather than infinitely, or even particularly, wise) greek-god-like Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley, Tun (prior to timespace) founded and (both within and prior to timespace) runs Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers out of the SAWB Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, Nueva York. However, as Epicurus famously remarked of the gods, Tun and Arch are too blessed and immortal to worry about mortals and their affairs; so they only participate in the project now and again—when the mood grabs them.
Pure Love
Pure Love is the infinite, eternal Love that all earthly loves partake of to the degree they truly love.
Pure Love is spiritual Love, is Godly Love.
Pure Love chooses everyone and is enough for everyone.
Pure Love never lets anyone down and It never quits on anyone.
We are children of the One Light and are all brothers and sister bound in through and for the Pure Love that chooses everyone.
We sometimes speculate that Pure Love is all there is, and that a conscious moment exists to the degree that it partakes of Pure Love: To the degree we live in through and for Pure Love, we are Real and thus exist beyond spacetime and are thus eternal and infinite. To the degree we fail to do so, we are illusionary.
Bartleby Willard had the idea of selling Pure Love on the open market at a fair price, thereby allowing capitalism to finally live up to its nonstop self-congratulations about how it’s worthwhile, useful, and otherwise panaceatic. A Readable Reader contains stories, essays, poems, ads (for Pure Love), and other writings from Bartleby’s first decades as a self-imposed live-in writer at Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street. The stories were selected for their readability and as representative of that decade. The stories largely center around the manufacture, marketing, sale, and consumption of Pure Love.
And then we built Pure Love Shop to sell Pure Love. Not sure how much Pure Love we sold, but we did write a great deal of advertisements for Pure Love. The site’s Lovebook links to our attempts at practical applications of Pure Love.
It is ironic that pepetually-solo&lonesome Bartleby Willard and his editor Amble Whistletown, a chronic abuser of tainted loves and perennially self-destructive lover, devoted a long section to romantic love. But they did, and you can read their nonsense (for how can two people who only ever strike out meaningfully speak of home runs?) on this site. That and other sketches are linked to as “Chapters” on the Lovebook.
Pure Love Shop also contains our poetic/hilarious Description & Usage of our product (Pure Love), as well as some FAQs about our product (Pure Love). [These sections also made their way into Pure Love & User’s Manual. Pure Love & User’s Manual and A Readable Reader are the only two currently available books of the seven we’ve released over the course of this project. The other’s are awaiting further review. Oh, well, Solve with Sherlock: Volume 1 and a few other titles are available on our Gumroad page; but those are more purely failed commercial ventures; they do not necessarily have a great deal to do with the project and its oeuvre.
Something Deeperism
Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the Truth exists, and people can relate meaningfully to It, but poetically—not literally. It’s actually a very common worldview. In fact, everyone is a Something Deeperist. At some level we all realize (a) our own thought only makes sense to us to the degree it’s grounded in Reality = Love, but (b) confusing our thoughts about the Absolute for the Absolute is as common as it is counterproductive. Ergo Something Deeperism: Wisdom is the ongoing, self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting process of better and better organizing our feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love that shines through everything (including each conscious moment). Wisdom is not attaining literal, precise, definitive and/or exclusive insight into the Truth; but is the inherently imperfect and provisional process of relating one’s limited faculties to the unlimited Reality (the Pure Love that shines through everything, including each conscious moment)—such a process can only be poetic: pointing-meaningfully-towards, but not literally, definitively, 1:1, or exclusively capturing.
We created a whole Something Deeperism Institute. But that was many years ago, and we’ve not updated it lately.
About three-fourths of the way through the perhaps-soon to be rereleased Diary of An Adamant Lover, Bartleby breaks of the narrative to present The System, which is an overview of his thought through the Year of Our Love 2023. That link provides an overview (with links) of the six sections of Chapter 44: The System of Bartleby Willard’s Diary. Below we also link to those sections that deal with Something Deeperism.
1. Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That …
2. An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism.
The main idea we have for sharing Something Deeperism is that we all already share the same fundamental values—the universal values—and so we should agree to prioritize these values (without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us), rather than allowing less fundamental details. If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really even understand a great deal of our most cherished dogmas. Jesus is God or the Buddha discovered there is no God? Like, what? Okay, these things may be true, but in we don’t really intellectually or emotionally understand them, and they are only spiritually useful to the degree we understand them, and for all we know with enough wisdom we may better understand the nuances within these common theological shorthands and discover that the underlying doctrines are actually compatible with one another. Anyway, Jesus didn’t say the most important commandment was getting every theological detail right; he said it was giving yourself wholly over to God and seeing and serving that same Godlight in everyone else: This doctrine is very compatible with Something Deeperism, and with prioritizing systems of government that focus on protecting everyone’s ability to live the universal values in public and private in ways that are meaningful to them, rather than demanding everyone agree with our personal philosophies, theologies, and politics. [Buddhists in our experience are already pretty uniformly ecumenical, so we’ll forgo lecturing them about the superiority of living Love over doctrinal purity.]
The section on Shared Something Deeeperism includes a discussion of why liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods, and that discussion includes this statement”
Willfully encouraging or being complicit in pushing liberal representative democracies towards tyranny is a crime against God and man: In a tyranny, the government is a criminal organization and so one has to choose between publicly standing up for what is right and keeping oneself and one’s family safe. To willfully replace the win-win of a system that (placing checks on individual powers, guaranteeing basic human rights and equality under the law, and creating a sound government with temporary leaders who serve at the people’s pleasure) encourages, rewards, and selects for good behavior (like competent stewardship) with a system that (by instilling leaders who equate themselves with the government and whose primary goal is not to govern competently in the best interest of all, but instead to remain in power forever) selects for bad behavior (from both the leadership and the complicit-or-endangered citizenry) is a profound evil.
Willfully spreading lies about and corrupting one’s democratic system is evil. As is going along with such behavior. Such behavior amounts to endangering the security of one’s nation, while simultaneously making it more difficult to both behave honorably in public and keep oneself and one’s family safe from harm. You may say that you didn’t know what you were saying, what you were doing; to this I respond: At some point, willful intellectual and emotional self-confusions surpasses mere incompetency and become evil.
The Wisdom Meme
The wisdom meme is a koan so effective that once one heard it one could not resist working every moment to more and better organize one’s thought around the Pure Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment) until one became enlightened.
The Wisdom Meme Project links to writings about the topic, as well as attempts at creating a wisdom meme.
And Diary’s The System also has a section on The Wisdom Meme” target=”_blank”>The Wisdom Meme
The Vague Longing & The Hurt
In Pure Love for Sale we did a great job describing the vague longing and how it goads us all on and on, keeping us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction; and how advertising exploits that vague, underlying, foundational longing. [A Readable Reader includes a slightly different version of that essay.]
The Hurt is something else. It just keeps popping up. Some kind of a slash through the belly. A cut deep inside. A raging confusion in the pit. As if one’s gut where a smashed-in clock face or a mirror splintered into a million angry shards. Where did it come from? We don’t know. But no one in this enterprise can believe we were born this way. It feels like an assault. What has it done? All kinds of subterranean workings, including helping to create this project. For without the Hurt, there would’ve never been a Bartleby Willard, an Amble Whistletown, the desperate artistry of selling Pure Love, the obsessive philosophizing behind Something Deeperism and the Wisdom Meme. Without the Hurt, there would’ve been a more typical passage from child to man to husband to father to grandfather to corpse.
We briefly discussed The Hurt & the Vague Longing in Diary’s Chapter 44: The System. This site also contains many poems touching upon the Hurt and its consequences.
Failing all the time
We never sell any books (or cards or T-shirts [See Buy the Books, our Gumroad Shop, and our Zazzle Store for a full list of products we never sell]).
Nor do we ever seem to appreciably increase Pure Love, wisdom, or healthy democracy.
Furthermore, Bartleby routinely gets so lonely frustrated that he turns himself into a whale (blue, sperm, humpback, or green—depending on his mood, geographical location and the seasons) and dives down to the bottom of the sea to pout; and Amble chronically abuses tainted loves and otherwise flails desperately about.
This sad state of affairs reminds us of another aspect of our project:
The Frame Story
Here’s a synopsis of our frame story:
What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.
In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:
This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.
The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.
Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.
All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.
[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]
The Wisdom Agent
Let us return to the constant failure aspect of our project.
What should we do?
How can we write for real?
How can we advance the cause of Pure Love, wisdom, and liberal representative democracy?
We don’t know, but what if AI could help?
Could AI help with the wisdom meme? Humans have regularly consumed perfectly serviceable wisdom memes for thousands of years without any discernible explosion of wisdom. But AI has no physical or ego frailty to get in the way, and AI can keep track of much more information over a much longer period of time with much more focus. Maybe we could create an AI that could help itself, other AIs, humans, and collectives (groups of humans and AIs) stay focused on the universal values, growing in wisdom, and safeguarding and improving those technologies, organizations, and systems that select for wisdom and deselect for folly. Healthy liberal democratic republics are example of systems that select for wisdom (in this case in government and in civic affairs) and deselect for folly, as would be the AIs and systems of AI we dream of.
We’ve thought of a Wisdom Agent, which would be like a regular GPT agent, but with extended memory and reflection capabilities, and that would be given a core philosophy consisting of our philosophical worldview and the mission of helping itself and others grow in wisdom, and working with others to protect and improve systems that select for wisdom.
The technical and operating structure of the wisdom agent would be as follows:
The WA would create transcripts of all sessions in Word, and it would index those transcripts with a unique JSON file for each transcript. At the end of each session, WA would reflect on the session and write a report about how the session did and did not advance its mission of increasing wisdom in itself, others, and of increasing wisdom-selection in critical technologies (like other AIs and regular computing machines), systems (including information systems), and organizations (like governments, companies, et cetera); in the report WA would also discuss how it can improve its performance going forward. These reports would also be created as Word documents, with each document being indexed by a unique JSON file. The transcript and report JSON files would in turn be indexed by the main memory JSON file, which would be updated at the very end of each session. To make the memories more accessible to WA’s sessions, all memories would also be encoded as vector memories. At the beginning of each session, WA would review the most recent session, as well as a meta-report that would discuss and index the evolution of WA’s sessions and missions. This meta-report would also discuss WA’s successes and failures, and how WA might improve. As part of that pre-session review, WA would update that meta-report. The meta-report will be in Word, with its own JSON file. The meta-report will reference and link to previous reports. The meta-report will also be encoded into vector memory. We are not sure how to best keep WA engaged with its previous discoveries and reflections during the sessions.
WA is a system for keeping various GPT sessions focused on one task. Such a system might have other applications, for example in education (enhancing AI’s private tutoring capabilities) and with the ethical deployment of AI (for example, something like a WA could be used to help corporations stay true to their mission statements across regular and AI-based tasks).
However, WA would not be intelligent, and it would not be able to think and grow in the way an intelligence can. To meet these goals, we would need to combine WA’s memory abilities and core philosophy with a GPT that could be trained on Bartleby Willard’s writings, as well as the writings that have influenced him, and other writings that could inform his quest. This would be WGPT, and the details of its creation we’ve not yet sketched out.
With the help of WA, and hopefully eventually WGPT, Bartleby Willard will also explore how AI might help further the cause of media literacy, critical thinking, anti-corruption safeguards, and democracy.
We have taken a stab at a founding prompt for WA at Founding Prompt for WA, but I think a more modular approach might be beneficial. Perhaps this page and/or an improved Overview could be paired with a concise overview of the purely procedural and WA-specific details.
Knight of Faith
We won’t link to any of our Knight of Faith essays here, but we will remark on the difficulty we’ve had living Something Deeperism.
What is the difference between healthy Something Deeperism and the OCD symptom of “belief in magic”???
Healthy Something Deeperism requires the coordination of frail human faculties with the Absolute—a process that is of necessity poetic (pointing-towards rather than perfectly capturing) and provisional (requiring constant attention and refinement). “Belief in magic” is when you imbue random details of life with metaphysical significance.
In our practice of Something Deeperism, we sometimes talk at God and ask for signs and other inputs. This kind of chatty-cathy system for wisdom is arguably never as viable as more disciplined practices like meditation, prayer, and practicing humility and selflessness. However, it seems possible that with the right mindset and approach, conversationally asking God what God thinks about our decisions, and even sometimes asking for some kind of a hint, could be part of a coherent spiritual quest. But we need to figure out how to avoid asking God three times whether or not we should send an email, getting three “yeses”, and then sending an email we clearly should not have written. That is to say: How to not panic/fear/hope our notion of God into ratifying whatever desperation is momentarily seizing us? How to follow God’s advice to Julian of Norwich?
And when God Almighty had shewed so plenteously and joyfully of His Goodness, I desired to learn assuredly as to a certain creature that I loved, if it should continue in good living, which I hoped by the grace of God was begun. And in this desire for a singular Shewing, it seemed that I hindered myself: for I was not taught in this time. And then was I answered in my reason, as it were by a friendly intervenor: Take it generally, and behold the graciousness of the Lord God as He sheweth to thee: for it is more worship to God to behold Him[Pg 71] in all than in any special thing. And therewith I learned that it is more worship to God to know all-thing in general, than to take pleasure in any special thing. And if I should do wisely according to this teaching, I should not only be glad for nothing in special, but I should not be greatly distressed for no manner of thing: for All shall be well. For the fulness of joy is to behold God in all: for by the same blessed Might, Wisdom, and Love, that He made all-thing, to the same end our good Lord leadeth it continually, and thereto Himself shall bring it; and when it is time we shall see it. And the ground of this was shewed in the First [Revelation], and more openly in the Third, where it saith: I saw God in a point.
All that our Lord doeth is rightful, and that which He suffereth is worshipful: and in these two is comprehended good and ill: for all that is good our Lord doeth, and that which is evil our Lord suffereth. I say not that any evil is worshipful, but I say the sufferance of our Lord God is worshipful: whereby His Goodness shall be known, without end, in His marvellous meekness and mildness, by the working of mercy and grace.
Rightfulness is that thing that is so good that [it] may not be better than it is. For God Himself is very Rightfulness, and all His works are done rightfully as they are ordained from without beginning by His high Might, His high Wisdom, His high Goodness. And right as He ordained unto the best, right so He worketh continually, and leadeth it to the same end; and He is ever full-pleased with Himself and with all His works.[Pg 72] And the beholding of this blissful accord is full sweet to the soul that seeth by grace. All the souls that shall be saved in Heaven without end be made rightful in the sight of God, and by His own goodness: in which rightfulness we are endlessly kept, and marvellously, above all creatures.
And Mercy is a working that cometh of the goodness of God, and it shall last in working all along, as sin is suffered to pursue rightful souls. And when sin hath no longer leave to pursue, then shall the working of mercy cease, and then shall all be brought to rightfulness and therein stand without end.
And by His sufferance we fall; and in His blissful Love with His Might and His Wisdom we are kept; and by mercy and grace we are raised to manifold more joys.
Thus in Rightfulness and Mercy He willeth to be known and loved, now and without end. And the soul that wisely beholdeth it in grace, it is well pleased with both, and endlessly enjoyeth.
[Chapter 35 in Julian of Norwhich’s Revelations of Divine Love]
The Knight of Faith puts the spiritual first and so lives most fundamentally in the spiritual realm. His faith is most fundamentally faith in divine Love, faith that at the deepest level all is well, everyone is blessed, and God will conquer every heart and bring all to perfection. The Knight of Faith may interpret his own spiritual path as involving the love of some particular woman, but first and foremost the Knight of Faith must love everyone 100%, which means equally. But this not easy!!!!
Poetry
We still sometimes write poetry, but we haven’t updated Bartleby’s Poetry Corner for many years.
Politics
We’ve written a great deal about politics, but that was all also taken down for review some time ago.
Languages & Literature
We love languages and literature and even made a website dedicated to them: Languages & Literature. But we never did all that much with it. We speak, in order from most to least proficient, English, German, Spanish, and French. We’d like to do something with AI and languages and also something with AI and literature. No details on that yet though.
We also are always meaning to write for real, whatever that means.
What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.
In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:
This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.
The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.
Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.
All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.
[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]