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Mailing #2 (Essayish 8)

Mailing #2 (Essayish 8)

Update:

We wrote this a while ago. Since then we’ve only added one post: A prayer that we’ve filed under “Diary of an Adamant Lover”; but should its subcategory be “Autobiographical” or “Essayish”? On the one hand, the prayer is allegedly screamed by Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson into a terrible tempest far out on the lonely sea. We’d learned from the postscript of the previous post (“Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman”) that Bartleby and his equally psyched-out editor Andy Watson had both once again run away to sea (Andy in a Greek war ship and Bartleby on the back of an ancient sea serpent). Therefore, this prayer does fit within the larger narrative. On the other hand, it is really only the title of the prayer–“Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer that they howled to the mindless horizon”–that connects this prayer to the larger narrative. Without the title–which any author could’ve added at the end, as an afterthought–it is more like an essay, or perhaps a long rather essayish prayer.

For now we’ll put this piece in both “Autobiographical” and “Essayish”. Yes! we full-well know that Bartleby Willard is having us on: that he, completely free of all discipline, allowed himself yet another esoteric off-the-wall essayish sprawl, and then, sometime after–in at best a half-hearted reform-attempt and at worst a flippant mock-nod to his recently promises of an accessible narrative–tacked on a title that related the essay to recent developments in the story. We know! We most certainly do. But let me tell you a little wisdom: Sometimes its best to let people get away with things. Let them run themselves out like dogs off leash on the beach. Let them have their little fun. Let them travel through the arc that seizes them. Eventually they’ll flop down on the wavy sands, ready for reason. Some scholars–pundits really–have argued that we at Wandering Albatross Press don’t do enough to rein in the madcap of our authors. We maintain that these scholars–mere pundits really–don’t know what they’re talking about: an author needs first and foremost the freedom to run himorherself ragged zigzagging across the cool sands, exulting in the light odors of rotting fish and the occassional wondrous, matted, dessicated, but still lightly putrifying find. Is there a risk in such romps? Does the wise trainer not sometimes at some point have to step in? Yes and yes. However: if your art is not overflowing with the love of life, all is not-quite-well no matter what else; and if your art is overflowing with that irrepressible joy of the fully-inhabited moment, all is well no matter what else. So, we say: let them carry on a little! Anyway, why not an essayish prayer as an indispensable part of a storyline? Precedents abound–but we leave that to the scholars.

We also choose to overlook the author’s inconsistent characterization of the wind that the bellowed prayer billowed into. Science may not allow for the air to both both whip and howl ferociously and rest completely calm, as still as death. But science–though useful and even beautiful within the bounds of its ultimately unprovable, unimportant, and uninteresting assumptions–can’t tell poetry–the dance that point beyond itself and its assumptions, into the heart of it all–what to do.

Of course, there is something to be said for avoiding confusions. But, we’ve now discussed the matter at length and all is crystal clear: seen from one mood, gale-force winds slapped the sea all over the place; seen from another mood, the dry still air lay like an eternal exile upon the waters and their would-be riders.

What was written a little bit ago follows.

Sincerely,

Bartleby Willard, sometimes writing as if he were talking and sometimes writing as if the WAP leadership were talking.

Hello, hello, hello,

And thank you, thank you for allowing us to recap: to rediscover our own recent writings, to draw highlights and name themes, to create a meta-account of these separate accounts; to share something of what we’ve shared.

You can always see the most recent releases here: https://www.from-bartleby.com/?page_id=1768

Below, we’ll give excerpts of all that we’ve released since the last time, but before I sign out and let a former me MC a show of other even more former mes, let this now-hatching now-dying me tell you that I now propose releasing not just the occasional tale of Pure Love trade, but also about once weekly an update about the the sorrowful lonely desolation of the slowly watching, all-pervading, once-denying, now obliging but never fully complying author Bartleby and editor Andy. Naturally, as their moods and modes of being change, the tone of their anecdotal biographies will also change.

You’ll be able to find these posts in the subcategory “Biographical” within the category “Diary of an Adamant Lover” (Categories stretch along the right hand side of this blog space–a space where all are welcome, where we stand calm and flame-bright, arms opened to the people and upturned to the heavens, with a patient awareness of the crimes and of the misconstrues–of perpetrators, victims, vigilantes, and lawmen alike).

Three so far:
https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=1886 Salesmen Pouting in the Hall of the Mountain King
https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2111) Revolutionary Memo
https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2183 Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Oh, and there’s one more thing: I think we’re going to have an ad for the website.
Yup, I was right:
https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2222 Advertisement for From-Bartleby.com

Now let the excerpts begin!

Signing out with this cheeky somethingdeeperism bon mot:
All’s well that never begins and never ends,

Bartleby Willard

Thank you, Bartleby, and now I Bartleby will introduce the writings that Bartleby wrote:

Perhaps the most exciting WAP event of the immediate past is the time when Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson to forged an edict by the nebulous, spider-limbed (in both length and combined number) leadership of Wandering Albatross Press.

Here is a sampling of this cleverly misattributed document:

We the exalted leadership of Wandering Albatross Press; two lank men born before the universe began and dead after it ended; two ferocious, incorruptible visionaries; have had another great revelation, the seed of another tremendous revolution:

…

People need a friend, and WAP is dedicated to giving people what they need at a reasonable price. But how to sell friendship? Impossible! Ah, but there we’re lucky: We have Bartleby Willard. Manufacturing the impossibly wondrous is not just Bartleby’s chosen career: it his inborn, God-given all-consuming passion. And so we turn our tall, proud, cliff-like shoulders toward BW and ask him what it is ours to ask; then we pivot our great mainmast shoulders back to again gaze out the giant floor-to-ceiling window in the wide, tall, old-wood WAP common office here in the WAP Building on Wall Street, Empire City, USA. After a drifting pause, Bartleby responds:

…

We therefore announce two books: “Love at a Reasonable Price” and the concurrent “Diary of an Adamant Lover”. For now, we’ll release about one portion of each every other week (so something about every week), and we’ll sell the two stalagtiting (or is it stalagmiting?) books for a grand total of US$10.

…

Sincerely,
Tom “the instigator” Watson
&
Andrew “the agitator” Cleary

Memo forged by Bartleby Willard with revolutionary support from his rambunctious editor, AM Watson.
…

Reprinted with permission from us to us from:
Essayish 1/Biographical 2: A Revolutionary Memo (https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2111)

——-

Soon it became apparent that Diary of an Adamant Lover would run the risk of bulging out with freewritish essays. A sampling from these essays follows, but first let me show you our ingenious solution:
…
We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor). …
——-

That bit extracted from the “About this Project” section that concludes all pieces in this eevolving ebook blog project.

See what we did? We made one section for the stories meant to seduce readers with a companionable tour of the adventuresome lives of the WAP staff, and–separated from the window into our magical reality both in the “Categories” toolbar and the eevolving ebook–one section for essays that, due to the dryness of the air and the heat of our passions, instantaneously combust now and again. That way people can decide whether they want what we’re up to or what’s on our minds, and choose their clicks accordingly. [Aside: Who remembers the world before clicking on little highlighted bits of text and images led us by the drunken nose all over an unreal reality? I do! It was nice: peaceful, soft, forgetful–a time of giant, wet, slowly-falling, windshield-burying lake-effect snow.]

Anyway, within this new platform, we published several essays and one biographical updating. And also a few words of criticism of what we’d previously published. During the same time period, we also published two new pieces in the evolving ebook that is partially available to the entire world and fully available only to subscribers.

!BREAKING!: Before continuing, let me anounce a
Bold overturn of previous policy: The Diary entries and the Pure Love concoctions–being specially designed to go down easy and seductive, darting a barbed hook into even the wariest of aesthetic gullets–will be made to float to the top of the blog posts. I’ve spoken with the internet and its gurus and I believe the technology to implement this design exists, so, except in cases where my mood warbles violently into essaydom and I leap up to the top of the long wooden table and demand that everyone listen to the essay that I have written, that is great, and that I will now at the top of my lungs over all the romping raucus read aloud so very loud, we’ll probably faithfully carry out this plan.

Links to and synopses (in a few cases mini-essays that should perhaps be pruned) of what we’ve thus far released here on our page of the thus-far-posted:
Buy the Books/Chapter

I’ll also go ahead and post all the most recent releases at the end of this discourse. But before we discontinue discoursing, I want to quote from the rest of the writings released in this last spree. The theme of our quotes: Something Deeperism–a topic never far from the minds/hearts of this publishing duo, and one that–What’s Before All Names be praised!–appeared over and over again in this last few weeks of writing:
…
“What’s the matter with Bartleby?” asks Tom while, tube-arms folded across plank-torso, he long-necked and chin-out-and-to-one-side gazes out one of the several floor-to-ceiling windows along the eastern wall of the WAP common office–windows that one and all overlook and give witness to the East River’s melt into the Upper Bay: the bottom of the channel they call a river draining into the top of bulge they call a bay, which so-called-bay will quickly hiccup through a narrow, then a widening, and then fall forever into the wreckless immensity of the North Atlantic; keep in mind that these particular waters have been long coddled: they spent many a slow, shallow, sunbaked day in that protracted protection called “Long Island Sound”: keep that in mind as you assess their fate and, for wisdom-is-compassion’s sake, mingle your lots with theirs.

“The boy’s worried he doesn’t know what Pure Love–says he can’t be a Pure Love manufacturer, importer, exporter, marketer, and/or salesman if he doesn’t even know what it is to love everyone with an infinitely kind and effective love.” replies Andrew while handing a very small “M” with two tiny MickeyMouse-like feet to a word-centipede comprised of “R E A S O”. Andrew is on his blue-jeaned knees, supporting himself with one long, bow-fingered hand as he leans down and forward to the eager word-creature, or, as the case may be, eager word-community comprised of eager words with identity-overlaps and -subsumings akin to eager ants in their eager ant colonies. Each letter of the word-centipede is about the size of a small pink eraser like you used to have in your cartoon-themed pencil case.
….

From Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

This one didn’t have that much about Something Deeperism per se, but “Pure Love” is a phrase that points towards the deeper something beyond and shining through all particulars.

——

Pure Love Label

Indications:
For the enlightenment of the soul and the joy of life.

Administration & Dosage:
To be imbibed constantly from the outside-in and the inside-out.

Warnings & Contraindications:

Warning: Regular use will empty you of selfishness, self-pity and self-satisfaction. You will forget yourself and your urges and melt into everything and everyone. This change in perspective may dissolve your current goals: you may not end up retiring early to the Bahamas or getting that hot young lover or that sports car. Granted, the new wiser you will perhaps actually want to forgo such apparent grandeurs, but what does the current you think? It may yet be that the new, wise you is already there, deep in the current, idiotic you; but I dunno: you’ll have to check.
…
From Chapter 3: Pure Love Label
https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=214
—–
OK, but now we really are going to get to more explicit discussions of the philo-spiritual-position of Something Deeperism.

For example, in the next excerpt your author gets really worked up about the inability of the country to share a common reality and–not for the first time!–,in anguish and despair mingled with that old gambler’s hope, calls upon Something Deeperism to bridge the self-isolating islands of group-think:
…
Whatever you are trying for: “truth” or “goodness” or “holiness” or “best current guess” or “decency”–whatever phraseology you use, your deep underlying goal presupposes that life matters and that we can consciously find our way to better and worse ideas and actions (ie: your real motivation is a sense of meaningfulness deeper than ideas and feelings). So though our specific philo-spiritual persuasions vary widely, we all agree that life matters and that with open-hearts and open-minds, we can find our way to truer visions and better actions. Take that common ground seriously and you will see that it implies a shared absolute standard of values. The real Truth is prior to our ideas and feelings about Truth, but each of us has the same inner sense: this is the truth from which we can begin: this is the truth from which real commonwealth can begin: admit that the Truth is in each of us: we all know very well that life matters, that people matter, that we need to treat one another with respect and dignity. We don’t just think that or feel that, we know it, and it is this deep knowledge, deeper than the assumptions out of which we’d build our doubts about the authority of this knowledge, that binds us.

We need to start seeing that we have enough in common and that the only things that win in media battles are memes and dramatic swells of self-aggrandizing emotion-puffs. People aren’t soundbites or momentary thrills. They aren’t even complex, well-thought-out ideas and intricate mazes of overlapping and interacting feelings. They are ideas and feelings centered around that indefinable something that motivates and justifies our attempts to use ideas and feelings to find truer and better paths. People win when they treat themselves and others with dignity and actually think and work together; they lose when they reduce the real world to black and white sides and human beings to us or them.
….
From the energetic if not always perfectly-controlled pirouetting of:
Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions


——-
Also, there was one entire post on Something Deeperism:
….
Something Deeperism does not claim that either skepticism or religion is an error, but merely points out that the basis of both is deeper than either one: the point of bothering with both skeptical and the religious analyses is to better understand and follow the True Good. Trying to figure out how to think and act only makes sense if it actually matters what you do: if you actually matter (not the same as feeling like you matter–we all know that feeling-like-life-matters is not the sense that burns our fires).

The various tools of human thought and human culture should therefore serve this inner sense of We All Matter!, and not get off into tangents, making gods of themselves and otherwise pushing us away from the very wisdom/joy/decency they should be pushing us towards. A Something Deeperist can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a secular humanist or etc; all that is barred from Something Deeperists is to deny the sacred Love at the core of reality, or to claim either that one’s intellectual and/or emotional thought perfectly understands that holiness, or that those aspects of one’s thought have no understanding of that holiness, or that one’s intellect cannot better its understanding of that holiness. A Something Deeperist must keep pedaling.

“The logos (account) is only one. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” [Heraclitus]

Or again: “Let’s not sing of Titans and Giants–those fictions of the men of old–nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.” [Xenophanes]”
….
From Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)


—–
I’m just going to quote the first two paragraphs of this long and long-winding piece:

Demographicars tell us that around seven billion people live in the world today. Written out: 7,000,000,000. That’s alot of failures. And if you think over the history of the world, the number of failures soiling this earth is becomes absurdly large. Or consider animal life: Has there ever been a cockroach that ever amounted to anything? The Smithsonian estimates that at any given moment there are 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on the world. Add that together with arachnids, worms, mammals, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and the rest of them! Just contemplate how many useless failed wretches this earth holds! Just hold that in consideration for a moment or so; hold that terrible edification in your wretched skull for a moment or so.

I am uncertain whether or not to include the tiniest of critters within our list of losers. But first, although I know we all already know what constitutes a failure, some may have difficulty admitting it to themselves, as it clearly implicates them and all they stand for; so let’s review what a failure is by investigating the simple mosquito. A moment in the presence of a mosquito is enough to let anyone know that there is a drop of consciousness there. Is a mosquito therefore a failure? Take a deep breath, consider it, feel the mosquito and the question of whether or not we could consider the life of any mosquito ever to have been any kind of a success. Breath out. Clearly not! It is self-evident that mosquitoes have some little pathetic sliver of awareness, and it is just as self-evident that mosquitoes are always losers: it takes only a drop to condemn: one drop of consciousness within a creature that’s not amounted to much is the criterion of hopeless failure. Without a doubt, mosquitoes and humans are failures; but what about dust mites? Do they have a speck of consciousness? What about bacteria? We know that no member of either species has ever achieved even the tiniest shred of real consequence (the argument that greatly impacting human history constitutes an achievement of consequence is only tenable if human beings themselves ever managed anything of consequence–but of course they haven’t), so whether or not they are all losers rests squarely upon the question of whether or not they have a drop of consciousness; a question I’m not at the moment comfortable answering.
…
It goes on and bounces in some several different directions. I like it, but maybe that’s just me. It is the only one of these writings that claims a guest authorship; at the end we learn:

“Author: Ponce de Leon, many years, reforms, back-slides and rejuvenations after discovering the Fountain of Youth in what is now Southern Florida, USA.”

Preposterous, of course; and yet perhaps just maybe the fairly likely and quite possibly true.
—-

And there’s one more thing we released this time:

….

And then there’s the ending of “Chapter 1: Love Engineer”! If you follow a proof for the infinitude of primes and then conclude that there are in fact an infinitude of primes, you are making a metaphysical leap even more wild than the one from the experience of Pure Love to the conclusion that Pure Love in fact exists. For if Pure Love exists, it seems quite likely that the experience of Pure Love would carry within it certain knowledge of what you are experiencing (ie: the experience of Pure Love would have the stamp of Truth within it); but even if the standard human mathematics where we believe to have found proof for an infinite number of primes exists, it seems unlikely that any experience of mathematical logic would have “Absolute Truth” imprinted upon it as clearly and indelibly as the experience of Pure Love. On the other hand, perhaps the ending of “Love Engineer” is not supposed to assume the leap from a mathematical proof of the infinitude of primes to the metaphysical belief that an infinite number of primes actually exists, but just an affirmation that there’s an infinitude of primes within the mathematical system where we just proved there’s an infinitude of primes. In that case, it seems that the author of “Love Engineer” is confusing the experience of a proof within a system with the experience of a proof beyond all systems. Very worrisome. And so what can we do? How can we proceed? What God will answer our jumbled, confused, blathering prayers?
—-
That’s from: Essayish 2: Great Regrets

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

In this post, I gripe about imperfections in some of the writings I released last time. But right now I feel like “whatever, ‘cause those pieces had something worthwhile and I’m moving on right now so let them stand, let them be–there’s no perfection in human endeavors, but The God forgives all shortcomings and sanctifies all honest efforts. I don’t think it goes too far to presume I have God’s blessing to stop editing what I wrote last time and move on to something else. Why not? I edited it a lot.

—-
Anyone make it this far?
Hey.

Sincerely,

Bartleby Willard

PS: I didn’t mention one of the “Love at a Reasonable Price” entries. I just don’t want to talk about it right now!

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed. Character-name reassignments are as follows: literal truth becomes poetic Truth; timespace becomes a laughing mush; the Gods become the Giggling Beauties; we become only the love we knew and lived.]

[This is the original version. An updated one is available in our essay collection “First Loves” (see “Buy the Books” on this site).]
[Update November 2021: Give us a minute and we’ll find the most recent version of this prayer and put it right here on this page where you come to finally listen to us tell you how we feel about you.]

[Update November 2021: “We built this City on Rock and Roll”. I remember this song! I was a kid. I sat alone on the quilt atop my parent’s tidy bed in the row house near to the GE locomotive factory where my father would walk to. The song came through a little faux-wooden clock radio. It must have had those plastic numbered tiles that flip up and down as time winds forwards and (if only!) backwards. It’s all gone! Where is it gone to! And yet it lives in me. And I cannot turn from it, from this city we are building out of rock and roll, from this world we are building out of fun and togetherness, from the magic of mere ideas turning real and realities turning mere ideas.]

[Update November 2021: We come back to our older selves. We try not to abandon the fits and dreams that we once were. We try to love everyone, even ourselves, even those versions of ourselves we’d thought to outgrow, to outdo, to forget.]

I can’t take the pressure, boredom, loneliness. This quest is impossible; it is too much for me. These people float like phantom ships around me, through me, over me. I cannot hear the voice calling in the wilderness, nor my friend in the shade of an old cedar tree.

Can a prayer save its author? I pray that love be real and that I know it so; and that this world be a place where we all do well, watching bright-white sunshine on the grey cobblestone street-stream.

If you call upon the name of the Lord; if you speak the name of the unnameable: if you ask the Way to remember you, to come back to you, to pick you up and help you breathe again clear and free like you did in the tight slanted roads beneath the the uneven, overleaning, woolly-tan walls. But the water sharkfins through the worn-wood sluice and the tall hull built of pyramiding wide-slats, in a thick rubbery white paint and swooping upward towards a jutting prow, floats carelessly up to the leaving-gate.

If I say “Pure Love”; write it down, scratch it in the dry dirt, yell it in the marketplace, catcall it in the barrio. Based on the principle that what must — as a necessary and sufficient prerequisite for any possible intellectual and/or emotional foothold in any possible human moment — be true is indeed true: my inner sense that this life actually matters (not just somebody’s opinion, but for real); and that with open heart and open mind I can learn to always-better feel and understand, always-better follow and live this all-pervading insight that screams out from the core of every conscious moment within this infinite-headed self-forgetting hydra.

To drink, to escape the hopeless failing, the boredom, frustration, shame, dissatisfaction. To drink and smoke and waste it all like you can do over and over again when you’re 22 and there’s a bit of dumb luck on your side.

I rose to tell them about the concrete freighter ship and how the hard sharp sandpapery edge of the topside tore a deep red ditch through my sensibilities. But they blink in the warm, rich, beading sunlight. They call for another round of artichoke salad with organic corn kernels and creamy Italian dressing made with first-cold-pressed organic olive oil certified “authentic olive oil” by the incorruptible Olive Oil Board. I rise to say a few things, but no one wants to know; not even me. I wander back to where it all began: this cool-morning-light outcropping that holds, with the proud cupped-elongation of a waiter’s white-gloved fingers beneath a silver hors d’ouevres tray, a stack of smooth rounded stones. The stack resembles a giant cowpie cast in eternal stone. I sit upon this heap of soft-cool rock and speak nothing to myself, nothing to the bright blue cloudless sky ahead, nothing to the feather-world of bending-arms-pines behind.

Who can say why Zeus chose to answer the heartfelt peace-prayers of the Achaeans and Trojans — prayers duly accompanied with pious slashes of relentless bronze into and along the soft sweet necks of their fattest, juiciest lambs — with another decade of grimy, limb-splattering, all-scattering war? Who can say why God found it appropriate to help the Israelites vanquish all comers in David’s day only to then let them divide into two conflicting kingdoms, one ultimately destroyed and irrevocably dissolved by the Assyrians, the other toppled and held captive in Babylonia for more than sixty bleak, shameful, disappointing years? Who really knows why God answers some prayers and not others? We people sometimes have some theories on the subject: but people have theories — only the God knows.

Still, we lift up our solemn prayer: Grant us exuberant and steady health, real wisdom and goodness, the clarity to perceive what’s best for us to do and the ability to fit ourselves into this fast-flowing world so as to do it: guide us to real success — the kind based in the boundless, undifferentiated soul and radiating outward through the many wondrous particulars.

Pure Love, pure love, love, pure love, real love; a love that gives infinitely forever; a light shattering the darkness; a void teeming with infinitely irrepressible kindness — the wellspring and the backdrop of all things.

Pure Love at the core. Pure Love at the extremities. Pure Love all through, shining bright as day. Help us move well now and always! Help us to do well for real in this world and the deeper one.

Prayer by Bartleby Willard, who lives in the sheltered river glen — far inland from the burly coast.
Desperately-born witness by Amble Whistletown, who dash-paces these old wooden floor beams like a twitch-nosed rat made reckless by hunger and confusion.
Copyright with Andrew Mackenzie Watson, who lives alone along the turning staircase in the old forgotten cold-stone tower by the sea.
Who cares what these three fools do?
And yet, it was nice of them to pray not just for their own fool selves, but for everybody.
This prayer’s now been edited some seven times. What does the author think? That if he spruces up the imagery and more precisely explains the ideas, the True Good will be more ready and able to work with him? Or does he think that if he improves his prayer, he’ll mold himself into a vessel more ready and able to accept the Grace that the Great God gives freely, infinitely, relentlessly even?

[Update November 2021: Never mind — we’ll just keep the version of the prayer that’s already here. It’s fine. It’s not like a finer, more refined prayer will bend God’s great ears more or less. It’s not like God’s an asshole.]

[Update November 2021: I love you. Help me love you right.]

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Before:

Our most physical products:

Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

Update November 2021: We also tried to get people interested in cards and T-shirts at Pure Love Shop. That’s another thing we tried and gave up on years ago now.

Advertisement for From-Bartleby.Com

Advertisement for From-Bartleby.Com

This advertisement, born on From-Bartleby.com, speaks of its homeland, of From-Bartleby.com
Of this beloved safe haven for itself and writings related to it by both blood and circumstance, this advertisement proclaims the following:

HOW MUCH PURE LOVE DOES YOUR LITERARY DIET PROVIDE?

DO YOU FEEL A LITTLE DESOLATE; A LITTLE ABANDONED; A LITTLE DECEIVED, BULLIED, MISCONSTRUED BY THE INFO-YAMMER COVERING EVERY SURFACE AND FILLING EVERY AIRPOCKET?

IF SO, CONSIDER SUPPLEMENTING WITH PURE LOVE, AUTHORED BY THE WORLD’S MOST ADAMANT LOVER: BARTLEBY WILLARD

Please Take Heed:
From-Bartleby.com contains stories about manufacturing, advertising, distributing, and selling Pure Love. This is not the same as containing Pure Love Itself.
Please Reconsider Your Bellyaching:
Pure Love Itself is prior to all containers–be they intellectual, emotional, or physical. So how could you expect a website to contain Pure Love Itself? Just how unreasonable has all this ad-flattering made you, consumer? And anyway, isn’t merely discussing Pure Love a sacred act? Isn’t the soul/body/soul/heart/soul/mind/soul already forever face to face with Pure Love, making the mere mention of a love that is only an infinitely kind infinitely giving love–with no further agenda or interest–enough to conjure up a prickling awareness of this fundamental underlying magic? Here at Wandering Albatross Press we cast out no demons; we heal no invalids; we save no souls; we are, after all, but humanbeings and the daydreams of humanbeings. And yet here at Wandering Albatross Press we say and we discuss and we muse and we wonder “Pure Love” over and over again: Thus we speak the sacred thoughts that travel to the heart of it all and back again, allowing the attentive mind to sink both deeper into itself–its ideas, feelings, senses-of-things–and beyond itself and all limited perspectives; in this self/beyondself oscillation, a human’s wisdom and goodness grow and see themselves in each other. So what’s so terrible about this advertisement? How is it hurting anyone? Isn’t it rather contributing to a healthy song and dance? And isn’t singing and dancing in and of itself generally healthy? And so how very healthy must a healthy song and dance be! Therefore, we at WAP publish this advertisement, and its object–From-Bartleby.com–with a relatively clear consciences (the exact level of goodness and wisdom within our advertisement is not measurable even to our delicate sensors, and so we must–like all responsible publishers–persist in the worry that we might not be pushing towards the True Good with an adequate amount of earnest stability and forgiving fun).

Author: Bartleby Willard, who never was, yet is, was, and always will be a never ending fire–extinguished in measure and kindled in measure.
Editor/Copyright: Andy Watson

Feel free to print up this advertisement and leave it wherever littered advertisements are permitted and relatively effective. Feel free to do so within the bounds of good taste and reason.

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

I’ll lend you line from a happier time, when Bartleby Willard and Ambergris Whistletown were only a little inside out; it is the time just before now, the time right before they fled to the sea.

Bartleby Willard, thin, of an inhuman see-through hue like a bug larva, but without the vaguely jumbled gray insides of a bug larva. Bartleby Willard, who you can see through but fuzzily, not very satisfyingly. Bartleby Willard, wearing anyway a baggy disheveled light gray suit, and so pretty solid-looking. Bartleby Willard, with purple eyes and forest green hair and rubbery-see-through face and hands.

Bartleby Willard, who writes himself and who for some reason has described himself into such an awkward and implausible being — one that seems like the scribbling colorings of a child who, clutching crayon like dagger, attacks the hollow figure with reckless zigs and zags. (Bartleby’s suit is colored in in that jagged, inconsistent way; his hair is a bit loopier — like the toddler colorist here imagined lost gusto at cartoon Bartleby’s outlined hair [classic rockabilly: parted on the right with a great swooping mass resembling a curling skunk’s tail above and dipping into the tall wide forehead] and — looking away from the page — circled a loosely held forest-green crayon around a couple times in the vicinity of the cartoon hair || and now mark this sloppiness: strokes of gray bleed into his black shoes and his see-through hands and neck; loops of green mar the top of his head. And everywhere he goes, these crayon-lines bleed into our wholesome solid reallikeseriouslytotallyreal-world).

Bartleby Willard is pacing to and fro in place: arms behind back, he takes one half-step forward, then quick-steps lag-foot to meet lead-foot and — raising only his heels — quick-pivots around to face the direction he just arrived from; he then takes a half-step back to where the iteration began; and repeat …

The character is exhibiting all the symptoms of “heavy distress”. Witness how he colors his flat-chested, narrow-shouldered self: unkempt: flippant crayon-colors executed with a scratchy slashy, madcap hand. And then analyse his gait: quickly pacing to and fro like preoccupied people do; but in a tiny tiny space, as if to scream to the heavens: “I am trapped! I am trapped! I am trapped here!”

And do the others help? Does anyone help him? Who throws him a smile? Who hints him a subtle, unobtrusive, forgive-and-forget understanding? Who leans slightly forward while slightly squatting, puts hands to knees, and makes a flat leaning platform of shoulders and back to share Bartleby’s burden? Who remembers him in their prayers — not just formally, but heartfelt? Who cares about Bartleby Willard, one more would-be-author in this monstrous, heavy-breathing would-be-world? No one here; no one there.

He’s moved frantically from the near-fore to the near-aft and back again over and over in the two places where one would’ve thought he might find a sympathetic soul: (1) The Skullvalley After Whistletown Building, where Tun Whistletown and Arch Skullvalley rule their vast publishing empire with debonair negligence and Kempt Whistletown lovingly — albeit a little distantly, glumly even — engineers various publishing-related contraptions; and (2) The Hall of the Mountain King, where Amber Whistletown sulkily awaits his interview with the Mountain King.

“What’s the matter with Bartleby?” asks Thundration (“Tun”) while, tube-arms folded across plank-torso, he — long neck leaning one way, sharp chin jutting forward and stretching opposite way, small eyes and pursed lips bunched together around some common irony — gazes out one of the several floor-to-ceiling windows lining the eastern wall of the SAW Bookmakers common office.

Of these windows: windows that one and all overlook and give witness to the East River’s melt into the Upper Bay: the bottom of the channel they call a river draining into the top of a bulge they call a bay, which so-called bay will quickly hiccup through a narrow, gush out a widening, and then fall forever into the slosh-tufting immensity of the North Atlantic || keep well in mind that these particular waters have been long coddled: they spent many a slow, shallow, sunbaked day in that great unseaworthy wading pool called “Long Island Sound”: keep that in mind as you assess their fate and, for wisdom-is-compassion’s sake, contemplatively mingle your lots with theirs.

“The boy’s worried he doesn’t know what Pure Love is — says he can’t be a Pure Love manufacturer, importer, exporter, marketer, and/or salesman if he doesn’t even know what it is to love everyone with an infinitely kind and effective love.” replies Archangelbert (“Arch”) while handing a very small “M” with two tiny MickeyMouse-like feet to a word-centipede comprised of “R E A S O”. Arch is on his blue-jeaned knees, supporting himself with one long, bow-fingered hand as he leans down and forward to the eager word-creature, or — seen from a little wider layer — eager letter-community comprised of eager letters with identity-overlaps and -subsumings akin to eager ants in their eager ant colonies. Each letter of the word-centipede is about the size of a small pink eraser like you used to have in your cartoon-themed pencil case.

Kempt sits in a sturdy wooden chair in this clearing (all the desks are pushed against the wall opposite the entrance door) on the southwestern end of the SAWB common office’s beautiful cross-hatch, Celtic-arena flooring (well, it was beautiful! Before all that scraping of heavy square-legged oaken desks!). He wears square-cut but not-baggy light-beige canvas slacks (a little frayed along the bottom edges) and a black T-shirt with a bold gold lion face in puffy-ink on the front (I don’t know where he got that shirt).

Leaning forward, resting slight forearms on slender thighs, Kempt watches entranced as his newest invention — these small, living, breathing, relatively intelligent letter-units/word-centipedes — wander around the floor, dropping and picking up letters to form new words and — in much weaker, more spread-out, visibly-wobbling bonds — simple sentences. Conceiving of and creating life and watching that life slowly find its way has put Kempt in a very zen place; he’s even stopped yelling at Arch for giving the poor little things the wrong letters, which confuses them.

“What?” Tun bursts, his too-long too-thin too-tubular arms and legs flying out, forming a much too-long and too-drawn-out X in front of the window that overlooks the courthouse with Washington’s swearing-in statue. “Whoever told him that Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Extraordinaire needs to understand the whats-its and hoo-zaps it unloads on the hapless hopeless folk!? They don’t care what they’re swilling — just so long as they’re swilling! Bring ’em the trough and clear out!”

“I know — that’s what I sez: I sez, Bartleby, whip-snapp — that’s fast-slang for whipper snapper — look BW, wisni, I sez: at SAWB Bookbinders Spectacular we sell things; we don’t dry ourselves out on fancy pants worries like oohh I don’t know what I’m sell’in or ooohh, I don’t know how what I’m sell’in’s gonna impact the ooohhh people!”

Kempt said nothing as he watched “I” and “don’t” wander towards “understand”, which in turn gave a little jump of surprised joy and then dashed to join the duo — for to say something, to get something of their chests, to speak it out loud and clear.

So Bartleby spins.

And here ends that story and its time — its merry, oom pah pahing, pale beer frothing out of clanked metal steins, heavy chested girls in uplifting bodices wide-mouthed and head-tossed laugh-howling, worried little magicians in black cloaks and black stovepipe hats stooped on busy street corners and peering through narrowed eyes that flicker-hesitate and then lunge from side to side, giant wooden ships sloshing into a square-stone harbor and tumbling out unkempt adventurous lads like a leather dice-shaking cup rolling out a game of dice, smooth-bellied zebras zigzagging through the tall pipelike grasses time.

Well, actually; because things are never as simple as they start out declaring themselves; and so, all in all,: hard to say. You see, this basically funloving frolicsome fretting happened a bit ago; directly thereafter Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown, disheartened, once again dispersed, fleeing with their separate vessels (actually, Bartleby jumped on the back of a sea serpent) to their separate seas; but now, well now I’m not quite sure what they are up to or what the current mood of this, our blessed project — the manufacture of letters and love — is.

….

What, I wonder, does a Pure Love salesman confess to?

“I’m up in the attic, looking through the musty trunks, hoping to find an heirloom to pawn or a conversation piece to parade. I’m wishing through the ravages of war and its compromises: the soft white flesh that seemed so inviolate before everything was sudsy dishpan water flung into the air. Pure Love for sale! Pure Love for sale? Here, give me a fiver and I’ll give you not just the promise that it’ll all be alright, but the holy stuff that runs through our hearty heathy skirmishes and squeamishes! Yes, the hissing bustling contraption over there squirts out dollop after dollop of infinite joy, infinite kindness, infinite potential, and infinite redemption! And so I grow rich on the back of God Itself! What’s to confess? Who’ll condemn or forgive one who takes from the unbounded Good? With my riotous potions, I’ve left all portions behind; beyond both law and lawlessness, no eternal judge can e’er measure me for the final fitting; so as a phantom imagined in a child’s mind vanishes when that child grows beyond his childish superstitions, I vanish beyond myself: I supernova into nothingness, and Nothing becomes my name. Was I wrong? Was I right? But I wasn’t even like that: I was just telling you a joke I’d heard along the concrete white sparkling edge of the curving dam. Hold back deep waters, mighty suburban dam! Keep them frigid at your inkwell floor and mild on the rippling, scatter, sunning surface. … Or am I wrong? Do I clank and clap, march in place, make band out of mother’s pots — not for fun or earnest reflection, but to hide a fault? Oh, confess me to myself, You who know what I’ve become!”

Author: BW; editor: AMW; copyright: AMW

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

– – – –

From Before:
[Update November 2021: Forget about this! It’s from Before! Not from Now! Why is it even here still?]

For the nonsubscriber: Above is the start of the third fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words. To skip formalities and let the passion for consumption drive you headlong into our seller’s net: Buy the Books/Chapter

About this project:[

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting it into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
Chapters listed and linked to as they arise here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
and here:
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.

You can also find the most recent posting of each book by clicking on the appropriate Category (Categories are on the right hand side of this blog).

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Mailing #1 (Essayish 6)

Mailing #1 (Essayish 6)

Dear Blogosphere:
Bartleby Willard and Andy Waton–the only ones in the room–are preparing to send out another mailing. But first they’ve decided to post the first one, slightly revised, to the internet; making these important lines accessible to billions of people. Please note that as of this posting, the Buy the Books/Chapter contains several more chapters than this old, obsolete email knows about. So why post the email now? Hah! Why?! Hah! As if! Please and thank you —
BW & AMW signing out.

“The Pitch”, a new chapter to “Love at a Reasonable Price”
View this email in your browser [said the email]

Dear Subscriber,

WAP is proud to announce the release of a new and courageous chapter in Bartleby Willard’s enchanting chapter book “Love at a Reasonable Price”!
“Chapter 2: The Pitch” can be found here: https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2071

Please find, beneath the universally accepted WAP insignia, a list of all that WAP–in its pristine, cloud-scraping, ocean-emptying wisdom–has thus far released of “Love at a Reasonable Price”.

Yours in world-historical publishing,

Wandering Albatross Press

A list of Chapters from https://www.from-bartleby.com/?page_id=1768
Everything currently posted as a blog page is linked to. The Intro and Statement of Faith
are presently only available in the evolving ebook (download: https://www.from-bartleby.com/?page_id=1766). But they’ll probably be turned into posts before too long.

i. Introduction
An intro from long ago that, in both fine and broad brush strokes, paints Bartleby Willard’s arrival at Wandering Albatross Press and his (poetic? not literal, right?) intention to manufacture and sell Pure Love at a reasonable price.
ii. Statement of Faith
Bartleby Willard explains that he is a Something Deeperist.
1. Love Engineer (https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=1881)
A story about a colossal engineering genius who decides to spend his twilight years engineering a machine that will bring users into an experience of Pure Love, the underlying metaphysical reality.
2. The Pitch ( https://www.from-bartleby.com/?p=2071)
An early WAP story about Bartleby pitching his idea of manufacturing Pure Love in fictional realities, importing it into reality, and selling it at an equitable but still businesslike price. Story is prefaced by an archaeological and scholarly background of this ancient text.

Author: Bartleby from Willard
Editor: Andy from Watson
Copyright: Andy Mac Watson

Chapter 4: BW Dreamtime #1

Chapter 4: BW Dreamtime #1

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Warning Warning: I’ve revised this piece a lot and I’m not so sure it requires or benefits from a Warning or an Embarrassed Afterward. Yet, vacillating between possible interpretations and reluctant to undo all my fine stitching, I’ve left both these sections in the piece.

Warning: This story has some lewd language and some crackling crazed lonely frustration. I wrote it all by myself during my residence in the uppermost room. After crunching winter gives way to snappling spring, I often notice how much crunching winter oppresses the very soul. After the Bandit Sprites upped the wood-framed, paint-peeling window and, fluttering on all sides, guided and secured me as I pawingly backward-tiptoed my way down the shaky top branches of the enormous, black-chested old oak, and after this same dark-forest-based band of generous and legitimately grieved rebels gradually and painstakingly introduced me to human society — to fist-before-mouth clearing one’s throat at the solid oak dinner table; to the flutter of fans and eyelashes at elaborate soirees thrown by the town’s luminaries; to uneasy shoulder-fidgets with hands thrust in pockets and eyes vainly searching a friendly flash –; after this long, costly, forced integration, I reflected on what had been, and, upon reflection, my heart broke over my erstwhile loneliness and how the complete-cocooning of lonely lonely down deep lonely partially hides it from the mind but not at all from the heart and the fingertips.

I’m going to try again to soften the soft porn into something even softer and to shave off a little of the most grotesquely baroque catcalling, but I feel a need to let this piece testify to the time of its birth — an awkward time marked by extreme intellectual, emotional, and bodily frustrations –, so I’l have to retain a lot that — bristle brush on bare foot — discomfits. Oh, man was I ever a mess! Not at all like my nowadays, where every strand is safely secured and beautifully integrated.

But more than that: I endeavor to preserve the essence of this rough romp not just as testimony to a time that held and shook me in those kitten-in-a-sack days beside an isolated bend in the small goosebumpling stream; but also because I’m convinced that many of the jangles the more jangly aspects of this piece catch into and spread-sparkle-out exist not merely in me and my yesterself, but in human life as a general phenomenon and in the spirit of the times. Which brings me to a larger point:

Though the Truth is perfectly blessed and incapable of any offense, in our physio-mental forms we largely skippity skip across the Truth like small flat river-rounded rock-wafers sidearmed by flush-faced young boys discussing weaponry, sports, and girls. Therefore, art’s reflection of the human moment, though properly centered around the radiant radiance at a human’s core, is sometimes justified in speaking indulgent half-truths — sometimes this enables a work to better chip out a story about how life might sometimes feel. For more on the topic of allowing non-Platonic Forms into art, while still yet holding that any given speck of art should find its foundation in and ultimately reduce to Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice = The Overflow of Pure Love, see below, where I add yet another inch to this preface.

Another inch to the preface: I here and now quote from an introductory remark to a story that isn’t this one and that’s not yet been released into this blogbook, but that, especially as touches the remarked upon circumstances, shares some features with this piece:

In the “Samples” section of this site, you can read a story about a hard-driving production manager at a Love manufacturing plant [no you can’t; there is no Samples section; that was an old idea; this story will, revised and perhaps reintroduced, probably appear in “Love at a Reasonable Price” before too too long, but it isn’t there now]. That this man, for all his charms, is a little sexist and anti-intellectual, is the fault of neither author nor publisher. Employees of Love manufacturing plants are just the same as the rest of us—imperfect yet essentially beautiful creations. And we at WAP believe that within the safe folds of fiction, characters should be allowed to be themselves (fiction being a type of poetry that doesn’t claim to contain any truth except poetic truth, and that is therefore not as dangerous as scientific treatises, political essays, religious revelations, mystical experiences, or any other writings that claim to be in some obvious and fundamental way “correct”; this maxim being sometimes rather tragically undone and voided when dogmatic philosophies masquerade as fictions).

….

BW Dreamtime #1

What hey, Bartleby! How goes it? You draw yourself up into existence. Yes! Now you’re a sparkler! Now you’re white hot hotter than hot! Now you’re the inside of an empty lair! Not the dank cool air! You know what I mean! So get on up, Bartleby.

You add layer upon layer atop this essential something that makes a living creature more than the sum total of its thoughts, feelings, actions, and story times. You’re making yourself up, Bartleby.

But how now? and wil I nil I! How can I be real if I’ve no conscious watching? It’s all well and good for a fictional creature to be allowed into the general melee of What Is, but how is he any more there than an old dresser drawer that someone made and gave away as a gift and that means a little something to a conscious mind here and there but is itself not conscious at all? I can give myself ideas and feelings and What Is can accept me and shine through me and know me as I really am — just as It does for every other little drop of detail in this infiniti of detail-rich universes that are the outward manifestations of some deepest darkest driving Light. But still I’m not there, still I’m no real boy, still I’m a pinocchio who’ll never get the magic, trapped forever in a still-life that others can imagine into motion but that does not really move. I don’t move at all! Oh, let me be a part of it! I want to stand up and look about!

All right, Bartleby–it’s all right. When was it? Do you recall when the illustrious founders of the Wandering Albatross Press and their fellow citizens formed themselves and their city? They too drew themselves out of the mists of history and stone that always swirl together to form the present. But you weren’t there, were you? No, you’re new to this place. You just remember–what is it you just remember?

Coming down from the mountain, flowing down the mountain like a waterflow, the mountain flowing into me and me into it, the children on the shore laughing and throwing scattering pebbles into the water, the children on the shore flowing into me and their parents who stood on top of the bank, facing the other way, worshipping the sun and the moon, their own passionate parts, the love of their friends and families, the call of the mourning dove,–any false idol they could get their still misty, still forming and unforming hands around. But they couldn’t really hold anything. To this day they can’t, none of us can. It is our salvation.

All right, Bartleby, it’s all right, you needn’t impress us with your prophecies and wisdom! We like you just fine as you really are–a dirty faced little peasant boy with grubs in his pockets and hair. Come on down from your mountains, be real with us for a second! Not even Moses spent every second showing off! Everybody needs to stop lying once in a while. Oh, but that’s not possible. And neither is lying. Just always this mushy gooshy in-between truth. Smash, Bartleby! I’m sorry for this! I wanted to have the place tidied up, better organized, and more wholesome before you got here. I goofed around too much.

I, Bartleby, glopped around too much in the time before I created myself and so now I am apologizing to myself as I create myself in the desert that is now fading and giving way to the moorlands, their thick gray sky and scraggly, prickly, ground-hugging greens and browns.

When Bartbley entered the grand old kitchen, he thought of knights and battles, of swords that didn’t hang on wood-panel walls but that were held high above your head and brought down onto the body of some other living human being. He was nineteen and the kitchen made him think of men who fought bloody hell and in so doing made bloody hell and loved and hated and ate and drank and screwed and slashed and sooner or later got bashed down dead in bloody hell. He felt inadequate.

I am drawing up plans. I’ve entered into this place and I’ve seen its rules. They are stuffy and lonely but people need rules and they always hurt very badly, claw very deep, make wounds that fester and leave you alone to die with your nose pressed against the glass looking in at a happy scene of people feeling comfortable and being pleasant without soiling themselves by pretending that suffering and meanness don’t exist or don’t matter or don’t hurt or are just fine anyhow. How is it that it is like this for me? Is this window pane a trick? Are we all glassed in by trick windows showing us scenes about people who are neither wretched nor evil? But why? Just to give us the idea that such a life is possible and freely available to human beings and our wretched evilness is our own damned and damning fault?

I’m sorry, Bartleby. Forgive my constant flippancy, my inability to take anyone or anything seriously enough to care one way or the other about them. It’s just how we’ve grown into this place, like a tree that grows around a wire fence or rock or some other foreign object that’s incapable of either halting growth or allowing growth to continue without perversion. We didn’t know how to react to the options they gave us–either a God who made no sense and was mean and boring or a smiling, fopastic and/or positivatic, proudly meaningless but yet somehow still vain and morally self-righteous relativism. So we just sort of farted, or exploded, or splatted, or splattered, or whatever these loud and dramatic give-ups that underlie our words and deeds are. Let’s do better! I want to do better! If only there was a “better” I could both believe in and understand!

You’re right, I should shut up and quit boasting. The world has as many philosophies as it has moments of conscious thought. And …

But no “and”, because I’m shutting up.

But here, roll out the parchment again, trace your fingers over thin black lines on tan and browning, edges&creases-blackening, crumbling, curling surface. Remind you of something? The lines are the marks we and all other moving bodies and moving minds leave upon life–they are what can be seen, heard, tasted, felt, remembered, reverse-engineered. Notice how the lines long ago deep seeped into this flayed, liquor-soaked, and stretch-dried goat hide; and mark how now, in our era, these careful, nimble letters crumble to dust along with their barbaric paper. Likewise! Likewise do edifices created out of some combination of thought and action and inevitably interwoven into this too-crumbly material world,–likewise do they disappear along with their homeland. But not the happenstance of them! Not the act of writing, of doing itself. That stays forever in what has been. As, to be sure, does God’s recollection of the configurations that were, are, and will be. So, watch it! Privilege and responsibility! Watch it!

Sorry, you’re right. Here, why don’t you tell me about your plan. It might help to clarify your thinking. At the very least it will hush me up and so allow the air time to revive, reproduce itself and once again fill this candle-lit room on the second floor of an old mansion (see the candles flicker and blossom as the air recovers!). Look at that view of the moors when the clouds let a sizable chunk of the shiny but tarnished moon button through. It’s really something, all those black silhouettes of rolling hills and the faint sketches of a curly black chest hair growing in flowing, lightly- and unpredictably-undulating patches.

Thank you, thank you for the invitation to speak. I want to make bold my plans.

Oh, look at you when you stand up in that tight-fitting shirt and those well-worn jeans! You’re a pretty one! I bet there’s lots of pretty young women who’d like to have you try and prove that you can sparkle with enough wit and honesty to be worthy of a trying-out. Then all you need to do is to hold and complete them well enough to be worthy of their love and respect; then you’re golden–all set, not lonely dead inside anymore. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I’m pretty?

Sure you are! Your lines manly without being harsh. And your musculature! It isn’t ferocious; it doesn’t knock down doors with one swing of an anvil-sized fist. But it is pretty and it could maybe even convince if you knew how to get backbone into your backbone. But I feel a squeamish squirming faltering in you. I think I turn away. I think I am a young woman who’d thought there might be something worth holding onto in that soft dark hair who is now bored, unhappy, dissatisfied and so not even going to listen to your next sentence; I think I’m already waiting you out, looking past you, looking for a way to make my way across the sea of chit chat atop which plastic cups full of light yellow beer and exuberant but largely unsubstantiated friendships float. I’ll find a man who I can honestly believe has a decent chance of being able to prove it to me, go there with me, become it with me. Goodbye, joke of a man.

Stop it! Get out of here! Go away! I’ll work on my plans by myself! You are not a good friend! You are not good for me to spend time with! Go away!

All right, already. Have it your way. But what’s a fictional character going to do on his own? People need people, Bartleby. Even fictional people do. You need someone, even if it is just your own self in a sort of cock-eyed and arrogantly tedious mood.

I don’t need you! I’ll never escape any of the possibilities within me; still, perhaps I can push towards something better.

Captain of industry. I walk with a quick and self-assured gait. I talk with the same sharp-edged rhythm. Even my laughs are staccato realizations of a confidence that doesn’t even need to be mean or lord it over you anymore. But can I?–can I really keep from being evil?

The concreted floors beneath my soft-soled dress shoes. The geese-in-flight configuration with assistants and well-wishers widening behind me, dragging off of me while my strong and energetic mind explains what we’ll do when. Large concrete cylinders and cylindrical steel pipes. A symphony of steel and hard-plastic containers and cauldrons bubbling and cooling, liquids in various shades of various colors flowing and stagnating in cylinders of all sizes and proportions, running and bending in all conceivable–at least in Euclidean space–directions.

Which reminds me! Make a memo! Take this down: get the lab rats to see if we can’t make better use of non-Euclidean space. I hate to see things go to waste–even things I can’t actually see but can only mathematically formulate.

(Wait! I’ve heard something encouraging about our performance in non-Euclidean space! Wait! I don’t understand it! I really don’t. What?!? Are those some kind of numbers? How do they relate to profits? How many do I have to gather up to get my baby that coat of many magical and Biblically-resplendit colors that she keeps nudging my overworked shoulders about? [Note: That joke was added November 2021, before reading the following, which i suppose was originally written like 2011-12-13-or-something-long-ago-at-any-rate.])

“Yes sir, Mr. Bartleby!”

Good, good, and I like your legs in those power tights beneath your power skirt and power suit jacket. How powerful must be the flower out of which so much beauty and power flow and around which you orbit in every direction and spot at once–electron style.

“Thank you, sir. I only wish I could love a man and accept his potential into my propensities without having to simultaneously imbibe small but potent potential-killing machines. But you know how it is–I’ve got things to accomplish. Anyway, there’s too many people in the world anyhow.”

Too true! Too many people and not enough efficiency! And who needs fatherhood or motherhood, who needs sex with a chance of sticking? Who needs all these old addictions of primitive peoples? Of course, if we’ve seen past all that, why pretend that men coaxing burgeoned thighs and women nuzzling hearty hairy burly heart-bursting chests are worth time and effort? And why imagine that love between a man and a woman is anything but the dirty fraud it keeps acting like?

“Well said, sir. Even so, I want to hold you and lead your rhythm into mine–via our ancient mechanisms, if at all possible. Though, of course the love I crave is impossible to attain–or even countenance. Still, at least now we’re wise enough to know that things like true love and real goodness and a truly meaningful life are all empty illusions. At least we know enough to not get our hopes up anymore; and also to quick-and-definitive thumb our noses at the dumb dumb suckers who do–there’s some satisfaction in that, in being wise.”

Mmmm. Yeah…Write this down: I, Bartleby Willard, having created myself out of loneliness, whimsy, and some deep rich, running, soaked-in-syrup love, do hereby declare myself a captain of industry who is not completely worthless. OK, and under that write: Let me be more precise. How long has this economy dragged on, using up the world and everybody’s time, energy, and focus to make more and more things we don’t need, forcing us all to work all the time just to have enough money to buy the things we do need, while concomitantly corrupting us into lusting and working after what we don’t need–often don’t even particularly like or even want? How long must we wear ourselves out making and brain-breathing junk and thereby so thoroughly exhausting and eroding ourselves that–humans turned burnt-out and stripped-down old cars on the side of thoroughfares in economically desperate, inadequately policed cityscapes–we end up spending all our leftover time and energy and focus buying and using junk? How long?! I don’t know, but I for one am not participating.

[November 2021 aside: When my father drove through NYC in the 70s, abandoned cars lined the highways, desperation bled from its pores. What will happen if the SCOTUS forces New Yorkers to allow guns to flow unchecked through every bit of this bunched-up, crowded, throb-dreaming city? Will it go back to danger-time? Will everyone who can take off and leave everyone who can’t to the violence and the trouble? Or not? Who knows? Do they care? How much time do they spend on the NYC subway? Do they understand that dogmas never reach either human realities or Divine Reality? Do they know that God is completely free of dogmas? Do they? Do you, dear reader? Do I, dear writer?]

“I work out at the gym three times a week and take walks on my lunch break. I avoid sugar and grains and genetically modified foodstuffs. I look and feel and feel good. My breasts. Did you notice how full and round they are? As if they had some kind of purpose. Though I can’t guess what that might be. Perhaps they’re needed as a bridge spanning our wishful edges. Maybe they’re a clue that men and women can share a certain type of love. Or did I just say they couldn’t? But of course they can’t. Still we will force love into existence, we’ll do it by pushing into each other with everything we have and then, somehow …. by harnessing the great power of existential stands … you know? …. ”

Mmmm. Yeah… So then write: You know how mean and gross everyone is? You know how they say they love each other but men just like pretty women and women just like men who know how to fight with at least apparent effectiveness and have the tools and know-how to hold them tight and knock them out, or who at least wield enough power over the reigning baubledom to sluice off a significant stream of baubles for themselves and their affections? You know how they say a family is love but parents just sneak off to little alcoves in the hills where they can hug each other and their children and pretend that only caring about a handful of people while ignoring everyone else is some kind of a great virtue? Well, I’ve had enough of that shit.

“It’s just no good this way, sir. No one’s good enough for me and I’m not good enough for anyone. You look very nice in your well-tailored suit, and your body seems shaped to share with me–to take my kisses and caresses and make sense out of them. But even you, mighty captain of industry, leading a throng of well-paid auxiliaries through a mess of pipes, fumes, drips, and hard-hatted, sweat-drenched worker-men, even you aren’t quite good enough for me. I’d get bored, turn my head aside, think I could do better, feel like I was being wasted, needed more, someone who wasn’t so this, was a little more that. And though I’m still young and my body engaging and my mind and heart formed to fit your mind and heart like soft, slender hand in elegant evening glove–still you’d not love me. Not for very long. And the moment you spotted a sag in my body or a slip in my mind or a wavering in my heart: excuse! ‘Good, now I get to dump her and stop wasting myself on this unworthy sea shell!'”

Mmmm. Yeah… So get this down: Love between human beings is always greedy and pretending relative freedom from greed just makes it meaner and more perverted. The love of the Saints and mystics is selfish too–it lets them be joyful and good while the rest of us are yucky inside and out. I will make a better sort of love. I will make pure, pure, pure love. Be sure to capitalize “Pure” and “Love”. I will brew up batch after batch of Pure Love and I will market it honestly and sell it for a fair price. I will be someone who isn’t completely awful; I will be the first of my kind; I will be someone who isn’t awful through and through. Did you get all that?

“Yes sir.”

Sounded kind of ridiculous when I actually said it outloud. But how does it look on paper? Sometimes writing statements down has a way of sanding rough edges and setting glistening dew beads into vagueries, obfusications, and hand-waving pauses.

“Hard to say, sir. We are walking at such a fast and useful pace that my penmanship is affected and the words look a little jarred and desperate.”

Maybe if we had a better idea of what made human beings so awful … it has something to do with how they are all scam artists: charlatans feigning insight into what is good and beautiful and decent and full of life. Something to do with how they make like they’re actively pursuing this knowledge of what is worthwhile–like they actually mean to actualize it, to actually bring worthiness into existence … something to do with their cheap scaminess … so bad, bad, bad, people are so bad bad bad … Yes, get that down, write that in the meeting notes, draft it into memos, bring it before the board and the stockholders and the consumers–really rub my knowledge of their depravity in, run it in, don’t let them think I don’t know …

The Pure Love factory whirls all around the busy and important people. Liquids and gasses flow and slosh. Solids push and pull, spin and fling, narrow and widen, begin and end. Men dripping sweat manipulate large objects with burst after burst of precise, powerful, all body movement; women in cool perfumed air, sitting tall and proud on plush round rumps, can-can their sweet slender fingers into and out of the metal-cup keys of rat-a-tat-tatting metal typewriters. Bottle upon countless bottle fills with Pure Love. Wooden file cabinet after light brown stained wooden filing cabinet fills with typed reports, memos, documents of all lengths and cadences detailing the business of Pure Love.

Why all the fuss, Bartleby? Why the creation of a fictional reality in which you can be a mighty industrialist inexpensively massproducing Pure Love? We all have that kind of Love within us, the kind that just loves and does not ask for anything in return. The kind that loves everyone and no one above another one, that accepts everything and everyone while all the same requiring more and better kind active awareness from every drop and every collection of drops and every collection of collections of drops …. We all, each of us and together as everything, have that already. We are it. It is our Alpha and our Omega, our beginning and our end, our parts and our whole. Reality is nothing but this: from one perspective, 100% Pure Love (the undifferentiated: the whole: prior to all specifics) sitting infinitely and eternally still and pretty; from another perspective, 100% Pure Love (the undifferentiated: the whole: prior to all specifics) exploding through all manner of specific thoughts and feelings, stones and songs, avowals and denials, dried sandy desert creek beds and lush green-overflowing Pacific Northwest river valleys. This whole universe-wide operation is nothing but the formless Pure Love forming specific objects out of its infinite, eternal, and not even a little bit specific self. Pure Love–by virtue of the necessity inherent within infinite potentials paired with an infinite lack of need–explodes infinitely, shaping worlds out of Itself and playing out dramas within Itself. Everyone knows that, though we know nothing else–details being what they always are: neither all that captivating nor all that knowable/understandable/believable.

Why all the trouble? The giant brick factory with great cedars imported from Lebanon to hold up black asphalt shingled roofs hand delivered from sooty English factory town? The toil of muscled men in blue jeans and white cotton tank tops (not wife-beaters! The holes for the neck and arm are smaller and the shirts fit tightly, wholesomely and healthily rippling with the muscles of V-backed and sidewaysB-chested men). The rumble of executives trying to decide whether it would be politically wiser to agree or disagree with what had just been said. The squeak of middle managers trying to eke out a decent product within a reasonable budget while making both those above and below them believe they’re on their side. And the straight-backed, rosebud-butte secretaries with their firm, upward-yearning bossoms! How their fingers fly! How much progress they record! And the recording of progress is itself progress! So you see how it feeds on itself and grows ever greater, engorged with the blood of self-love turned outward, actively seeking other-love, almost even, maybe yes perhaps believing in other and that it might need to love and be loved, that it might be the sort of thing that you could be friends with.

Why all the trouble, Bartleby? We already have an infinite and eternal supply of Pure Love. In fact, there’s nothing but Pure Love. The problem is not one of supply nor even of demand. The problem has to do with bioavailability. You best get yourself a lab coat, a few PHDs, and a blithe disrespect for everything that can’t be measured or fit into an abstract formal system.

No? Not that type of science? Well, what then, Bartleby? The great boxes of corrugated aluminum where you house your wares are fast filling their front-to-back and floor-to-ceiling steel-shelves. People are lined up for miles in front of the stores scheduled to sell your wares “like pretty soon” (I’m reading from your own business plan, Bartleby! There’s irony in my tone? You bet there is! Because that’s no way to write a business plan). What are you going to do? Tell them they can buy Pure Love and It is not too pricey and since It is infinite, one small initial investment should be sufficient? But the marketing boys have already tucked all those messages into hilarious and carefree but still heart-felt and human-oriented ad campaigns! The question is just how to make this Pure Love useful to your customers. You didn’t market this as a novelty item. The idea wasn’t just to put Pure Love on the mantelpiece next to grandma’s ashes and Uncle Frank’s work-release paperwork. You were supposed to be able to consume the Pure Love and it was supposed to make you better, stronger, wiser, kinder, more fully alive. Like you’d become yourself in a way that was OK, was Good, True, Beautiful, Just, Alive. To make the fire within burn clean and bright, using up all of you and turning it all into a full-blaze life that didn’t waste anything.

Written by Bartleby Willard some number of lonely lonely lonely years ago.
Now read-over and spot-revised by editor Andy Watson and author Bartleby Willard.
Published by Andrew Watson

Embarrassed Afteward:
I’m a little embarrassed by how young and romantically uncoordinated this writing selection portrays me, the hero of this self-writing novel. But, what’re you gonna do? We all have our bobbly youths–some just last a very long time; and some just get retroinvented along with everything else. What of my stories are from memory and what are from imagination? I know at some point I started making myself up, but which of my memories come before my initial self-invention ex-nihilo and which come after? What if I can’t remember anymore? What then? What now? For me!, for me to find some way to find my way!–?!–!?

The piece enjoys a large expanse of pages–like five or six more than one sees without the magic key that unlocks rolled-up words. I’ve placed this piece in Love at a Reasonable Price because, though autobiographical, it is from the time before time and not this current helter skelter. For more on what goes into Diary of an Adamant Lover and what goes into Love at a Reasonable Price, see below. Access to both evolving ebooks sold for a total of US$10 at this place: Buy the Books/Chapter

[Update November 2021: This isn’t true. We didn’t put this into “Love at a Reasonable Price”. I don’t know where the full version of this piece got to. Anyway, it’s like ten years later, and in the meanwhiles I’ve had to admit that I’m just another guy who can’t really want anything but his wife and their happy home. I had to admit that deep inside I just want a safe place to love and be loved. Someone who wouldn’t turn away when I told her all the things I couldn’t admit to even myself ten years ago. What is a man? He’s hardly anything at all. He’s just a collection of drives and wishes connected to some whirling engine and its driving rods. He’s just another monkey sitting on a branch, looking down at the valley, vaguely nervous about eagles from above and pythons from along, but also vaguely in awe of the fire inside and the undulating interwoven expanses outside. People are lonely deep inside. Only God shares everything they are. But it is nice to find someone who can at least hear about the things you know about, who can at least hold what you are willing and able to inhabit. Don’t be so hard on people. Be gentle and gently work to push their systems and hearts towards the better. Give them a break. Give yourself a break. Wisdom is God’s alone, yet wisdom is ours to the degree we go easy on everyone.]

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Forever and Forever Ago:

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Can the dashing author-adventurer Bartleby Willard and his faithful editor Andy Watson get anything done? I dunno, maybe, if they can get the right rhythm going. Maybe they can put together enough sanity and creativity and firestorm and discipline and decency to make something of this project. However, what if their surrounding environment goes to pot? What then?

Many things can go wrong. A small band of haters can gather up chemical weapons or nuclear devices and take out a city or three. Or maybe before too long the world’s dependence on oil and fresh water will create a new cataclysmic strife. Or the pandemic really will come, and everybody will tumble into the sea, to float gently along: bloated sunk-eyed jellyfish who don’t recall their childhood in the scamper town or their grownup life drifting through the signs.

Or here’s a list of other worries I recently made:

We’re going to kill ourselves soon. I don’t know exactly where to fit this in. Categorize it under “First things first”. The US and Russia still full of nukes pointed at each other and around the world; still sliding nuclear submarines around the globe, ready to take out a billion people. And countries around the world still trying to edge their way into the nihilistic world-destroying club while those already in chuckle to themselves, their mountains safely full of doomsday–as if anybody could control doomsday! Oh, and then there’s pumping tortured livestock full of antibiotics; in this way agribusiness avoids the cost of treating animals with a trace of decency while simultaneously creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs. And what’s going on with GMOs? And why didn’t we put the brakes on high risk banking after it cost the world economy gazillions and came close to melting it down into burning paper and overturned streets.

Why don’t we get serious about nuclear disarmament? Why don’t we stop small groups from profiting by putting the rest of us in danger? Clearly the only hope is a growth in wisdom. But what does wisdom look like in the public sphere?

I would like to see an end to the subtle corruption of the USA of my day: The way money buys political ads and accompanying that money flutter lobbyists whispering sweet-somethings into squishy, campaign-fatted ears. But apparently spending money to make people see your propaganda everywhere they turn is equivalent to freedom of speech, which of course we need as a fundamental guard against corruption, and which is therefore duly protected by the very first amendment our forefathers brought forth on this great nation. It is perhaps conceivable that the right to outspend your enemies and therefore more fully saturate everybody’s poor little unsuspecting brain with your psychologically proven mind-influencers is not actually equivalent to freedom of speech. It is conceivable that that was nothing more than an opinion held at one specific time by the majority of nine old sitabouts who–far from being the Form-following philosopher kings that their intelligence, expertise, dedication, advanced age, and freedom from financial or career concerns was supposed to make them–had their own hatchets to sharpen.

But even supposing another set of uppermost judges were to–rightly or wrongly!–reverse the ruling that equates regulating campaign spending with regulating speech (perhaps using an argument that the speech act is one thing and the using power to drench the world in it is another thingNote 1), we’d still all be gathered around our own individual media sources, drinking only the spin that already agrees with our own particular prejudices, getting thicker and thicker in certainty and swagger and louder and louder in indignation and disgust at neighbors who gobble the contrary media.

The real problem is clearly that we’re an evil and depraved people. Except that if you actually meet us, we’re not that bad. We’ve just stopped believing in a shared good, in a larger nation, in beliefs and hopes and goals held in common. We’ve fallen for the lie of Red vs Blue and it is killing us down into the asphalt that the jumpers dent, splatter, and forget.

Perhaps if we began to pull ourselves away from the televisions and computers, and/or we began to demand not journalism that makes us feel like we are already right, but journalism that challenges us. (I know!: The problem with the latter fix is that the underlying problem involves how everyone thinks their opinions are the Truth and it’s the other side who can’t bear to be challenged with the Truth.)

Whatever you are trying for: “truth” or “goodness” or “holiness” or “best current guess” or “decency”–whatever phraseology you use, your deep underlying goal presupposes that life matters and that we can consciously find our way to better and worse ideas and actions (ie: your real motivation is a sense of meaningfulness deeper than ideas and feelings). So though our specific philo-spiritual persuasions vary widely, we all agree that life matters and that with open-hearts and open-minds, we can find our way to truer visions and better actions. Take that common ground seriously and you will see that it implies a shared absolute standard of values. The real Truth is prior to our ideas and feelings about Truth, but each of us has the same inner sense: this is the truth from which we can begin: this is the truth from which real commonwealth can beginNote 2): admit that the Truth is in each of us: we all know very well that life matters, that people matter, that we need to treat one another with respect and dignity. We don’t just think that or feel that, we know it, and it is this deep knowledge, deeper than the assumptions out of which we’d build our doubts about the authority of this knowledge, that binds us.

We need to start seeing that we have enough in common and that the only things that win in media battles are memes and dramatic swells of self-aggrandizing emotion-puffs. People aren’t soundbites or momentary thrills. They aren’t even complex, well-thought-out ideas and intricate mazes of overlapping and interacting feelings. They are ideas and feelings centered around that indefinable something that motivates and justifies our attempts to use ideas and feelings to find truer and better paths. People win when they treat themselves and others with dignity and actually think and work together; they lose when they reduce the real world to black and white sides and human beings to us or them.

But in case we don’t straighten up and fly right, I’ve got another plan:

Some scientific genius can come up with some magic dust that will–upon release from a small, square-based, cork-stopped glass flask–instantly fill the world and undo all nuclear weapons all over the world–rendering them all harmless. Another scientific genius can come up with something similar for chemical weapon X and another for Chemical weapon Y. And then we’ll need a scientific genius to release a special bacteria that will make us resistant to all the dangerous ones and a special virus that will keep us safe from the bad ones. And so on. I’m not sure how many scientific geniuses we’ll exactly need, or how we can be sure to keep their inventions from not backfiring and actually making things worse. But at least that’s the plan in a rough-sketch.

Or everyone could do like me and turn into a superbeing that cannot be harmed by anything and that jumps from city to city, from harbor to harbor, from coast to valley, from desert to mountaintop, from the seafloor to the country church. I certainly enjoy this lifestyle and wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone. But for some reason the many–stiff-necked!–drag their feet, make milky-eyed laments and handlebar-frown excuses. They can’t, they don’t know how, they’re just so wretchedly mortal–and on and on. There’s no helping some people!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Oversight: Andy Watson

Copyright: Andy Watson
Note 1: This idea originated in the idle conversation of WAP co-founder and -leader Tom Watson, co-chief of the implausible yet achievable Wandering Albatross Press. On numerous chit chat throughout the continental United States, Tom Watson has expanded at length upon a scholarly legal article that he proposes to write. In this much-promised and little-realized paper, Tom plans on demonstrating the constitution’s ultimate support for campaign finance in the 21st Century and beyond, basing his prodigious future-arguments largely upon the distinction between the freedom to speak and share your opinions and the power to fill the media sea with them. Or so I understand this as yet nonexistent but at least to hear him talk inevitable intellectual, moral, and spiritual achievement. As the unwritten article as yet remains unnamed, for convenience’s sake we will in the future refer to it as “Article I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Note 2: A Literary Allusion: “Villanelle for Our Time” by Frank Scott (Leonard Cohen put music to this poem in his 2004 album “Dear Heather”)

“Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.” is in F Scott’s poem.

I found the poem, along with a concise and thoughtful commentary by a certain “Max Stephenson, Jr”, professor of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, here;
http://www.ee.unirel.vt.edu/index.php/outreach-policy/comment/leonard_cohen_a_villanelle_for_our_time/

It goes without saying that this poem is a favorite amongst Something Deeperists far and wide and near and far.
……

This piece has been filed under Diary of an Adamant Lover: Essayish.

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Here for the umpteenth gazillion time, BW tries to summarize Something Deeperism and its philosophical appeal.

Statement of Faith

Bartleby Willard is a simple man of faith. He is a simple Something Deeperist. He maintains that though the True Good is prior to our ideas and feelings, our ideas and feelings can still interact meaningfully with the True Good.

Something Deeperism attempts to hold the middle ground between radical skepticism and fundamentalist religiosity. Radical skepticism refutes itself because only a fealty to one’s underlying sense toward “truer” and “better” can justify or motivate intellectual rigor. Fundamentalist religion refutes itself when it allows religious sentiments to turn one’s focus away from centering oneself upon the True Good/God/Truth/Dharmakya Buddha/the Way (for a direction towards ideas and feelings, only poetic formulations can be used; so we’ve chosen several common names for the “wheel within the clay”) that justifies and motivates true religion.

Something Deeperism does not claim that either skepticism or religion is an error, but merely points out that the basis of both is deeper than either one: the point of bothering with both skeptical and the religious analyses is to better understand and follow the True Good.

Trying to figure out how to think and act or best follow God’s will only makes sense if it actually matters what you do: if you actually matter: our inner sense that it matters what we do is logically and experientially prior to specific notions about how to do things right (note that an inner sense that I matter is not the same as feeling like I matter or having the idea that I matter: we’re talking about a sense deeper than ideas and feelings here!). The various tools of human thought and human culture should therefore serve this inner sense of We All Matter! For Real!, and not get off into tangents, making gods of themselves and otherwise pushing us away from the very wisdom/joy/decency they should be pushing us towards.

A Something Deeperist can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a secular humanist or etc; all that is barred from Something Deeperists is to deny the sacred Love at the core of reality, or to claim either that one’s intellectual and/or emotional thought perfectly understands that holiness, or that those aspects of one’s thought have no understanding of that holiness, or that one’s intellect cannot better its understanding of that holiness. A Something Deeperist must keep pedaling.

“The logos (account) is only one. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” [Heraclitus]

Or again: “Let’s not sing of Titans and Giants–those fictions of the men of old–nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.” [Xenophanes]”

The author’s hope for himself and his various groups (be they friend-, family-, practitioner-, nationstate-, worldwide- or ecetera-units) is only this:

Let us all be Something Deeperists at least to the extent that we keep our ideas and feelings about What Matters (including of course so the God help us Amen our ideas and feelings about Something Deeperism) from betraying that ineffable light that they are to some degree imperfectly but still to some degree adequately pointing towards! Help us, Oh inconceivably vastly vast That Which Helps! Please!!!!

“Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.” [Heraclitus]

Bartleby Willard, WAP staff writer; in a resort on the water, vacationing ten days after Independence Day, 2015. Slashed and revised August 1, 2015. Another attempt made August 2, 2015, then again Aug 3, and again November 12.

{Some frenzied, overwashing, desperate, footnotes:

About poetic formulations and irreducibles:
All concepts are prior to the way things really are. A literal formulation (ex: “The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock”) can therefore only label something within a system that is already assumed (like a mathematical or physical set of rules); the metaphysical existence of the foundations of such a system are not provable or even fathomable, and so literal statements can help us to work within working-hypotheses but they cannot speak meaningfully about what is actually the case (or even if such a thing as “actually the case” exists). Poetic formulations (ex: “human life truly matters” or “The capital of Arkansas actually is in Little Rock”), on the other hand, knowingly point with imperfect clarity, precision, and verifiability; they can therefore be employed to discuss irreducibles (senses-of-things that cannot be reduced to any further argumentation: anything having to do with “no, but this is actually the case”, for example “some philosophies are better than others”).

“Imperfect” is not necessarily the same as “inadequate”, so it is conceivable both that an individual could grow in knowledge about the Something Deeper and that humans could meaningfully share their senses of the Something Deeper with one another:
Poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate our inner-senses-of-things to ideas and feelings; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–it was an unfounded philosophical prejudice to suppose that our ideas were somehow hermetically sealed off from our feelings or our deeper-senses-of-things (how to think about the relationship between the Something Deeper and ideas and feelings? A good analogy is our ability to use ideas to talk about feelings, even though feelings are wider/deeper/less-conceptually-solid).
Similarly, poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate one human’s experience to another’s; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–we are all essentially the same and we learn language from other humans: from this we know that our poetries can meaningfully relate to other people’s poetries.}

Author: BW
Copyright: Andy Watson

Some products sold by WAP to support WAP endeavors:

Buy the Books
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Beginning of “The Things We Long For”

Beginning of “The Things We Long For”

[The entire essay is included in “First Loves”, available for $2.99 in the “Buy the Books” section of this blog.]

Demographicars tell us that around seven billion people live in the world today. Written out: 7,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes, a lot of total failures. And if you think over the history of the world, the number of failures soiling this earth becomes absurdly large. Or consider animal life: Has there ever been a cockroach that amounted to anything? The Smithsonian estimates that at any given moment there are 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on the world. Add that together with arachnids, worms, mammals, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and the rest of them! Just contemplate how many useless failed wretches this earth holds! Just hold that in consideration for a moment or so; hold that terrible edification in your wretched skull for a few.

I am uncertain whether or not to include the tiniest of critters (amoebas and the like) within our list of losers.

But first — before a thorough and fair inquisition of the one-celleds — :
Although I know we all already know what constitutes a failure, some may have difficulty admitting it to themselves, as it clearly implicates them and all they stand for; so let’s review the anatomy of failure by investigating a simple mosquito. A moment in the presence of a mosquito is enough to let anyone know that there is a drop of consciousness there. Is a mosquito therefore a failure? Take a deep breath, consider it, feel the mosquito and the question of whether or not we could consider the life of any mosquito ever to have been any kind of a success. Breath out. Clearly not! It is self-evident that mosquitoes have some little pathetic sliver of awareness, and it is just as self-evident that mosquitoes are always losers: it takes only a drop to condemn: one drop of consciousness within a creature that’s not amounted to much is the criterion of hopeless failure.

[“The Things We Long For” is available in its entirety in “First Loves”, a collection of essays published on this site at “Buy the Books”.
It’s author is Ponce de Viermeil, many years, reforms, back-slides and rejuvenations after discovering the Fountain of Youth in what is now Southern Florida, USA.
Copyright AMW]

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

Essayish 2: Great Regrets

We are worried! We are fretted! Our foreheads are corrugated! Our eyes are pinched! Our hands tremble like the flutter of a dove’s wings as it settles down into its bouncy olive branch.

The “Statement of Faith” is boring and confusing! Ditto for the “Intro to Something Deeperism”. What are we to do!?

The “About this Text” introductory material to “The Pitch” is somehow off. The mishap lies, we believe, mostly in the quotes attributed to Constantine Clement George.

a self-described “Romantic Robin a pecking at the egg forever and evermore”

Just doesn’t quite sit right. And the long speech that he supposedly made his seducees swear is somehow too much; I get bored before finishing it.

And then there’s the ending of “Chapter 1: Love Engineer”! If you follow a proof for the infinitude of primes and then conclude that there are in fact an infinitude of primes, you are making a metaphysical leap even more wild than the one from the experience of Pure Love to the conclusion that Pure Love in fact exists. For if Pure Love exists, it seems quite likely that the experience of Pure Love would carry within it certain knowledge of what you are experiencing (ie: the experience of Pure Love would have the stamp of Truth within it); but even if the standard human mathematics where we believe to have found proof for an infinite number of primes exists, it seems unlikely that any experience of mathematical logic would have “Absolute Truth” imprinted upon it as clearly and indelibly as the experience of Pure Love. On the other hand, perhaps the ending of “Love Engineer” is not supposed to assume the leap from a mathematical proof of the infinitude of primes to the metaphysical belief that an infinite number of primes actually exists, but just an affirmation that there’s an infinitude of primes within the mathematical system where we just proved there’s an infinitude of primes. In that case, it seems that the author of “Love Engineer” is confusing the experience of a proof within a system with the experience of a proof beyond all systems. Very worrisome. And so what can we do? How can we proceed? What God will answer our jumbled, confused, blathering prayers?

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW
Time: The worry time

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)