Browsed by
Author: Bartleby

Another day

Another day

Well if I’m in the wrong from when I was where I was when I was way back.

And what can one say now? The fir pines circle round and the leaders wear white. I cannot see their faces. It is dark. A certain certainty seeps into the political climate. The crack and see in the morning light that the old flake-barked mountain pine has been split down the center, long winding limbs drooping defeated, pencil-sized needles holding tight in tassle-clumps: hopeless, looks hopeless to me. That kind of pine always lives in the dry air in the blue sky when you are a young boy with springy white-soled sneakers walking up the criss-crossing dirt path to an easy summit, canteen and cowboy hat in tow–envious of a cousin’s Bowie knife in a black leather scabbard (with a rectangular pouch on top for the sharpening stone).

I’m sorry, but you can’t come in. I’m sorry but we can’t complain. The lower-middle-squeezes resent the hand-outs of the impoverished. The impoverished are afraid to work because if they do what squeak-by they get will be self-righteously wrenched from them. The cities have gates of stone and the enemies carry doomsday powder in their long pockets. We are so rich in this place, a deceased great Aunt’s giant green painting hangs over the yellow soft-leather couch in a living room where nothing matches anything else. The picture is a hundred swooping compartments drawn by random slashes through through the canvas (white scars on the arms of a Nordic warrior, some old Viking who finally got his). Then inside all the compartments, shades of green. Mason Profit sang country rock and made an album and wore the outfits and did the kicks forty years ago; now, turned into digital pinpricks held in a little flat silver-backed rectangle, they travel through wires and make cones shake, and “So today the evil in men is sparked in self-destruction. From the fires that … if we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving.” A tiny boy runs laps around the downstair circle, his long blond hair flaxen mud-flapping behind. And his white sweatshirt is decorated in green dinosaurs, his pink pants–made apparently of fleece–are decorated with fiddles and other stringed instruments. He runs nimbly, just as his thin father previously bragged. Why is he walking on all fours now?

Introduction: Love at a Reasonable Price

Introduction: Love at a Reasonable Price

Bartleby Willard has decided to move into The Wandering Albatross Press Building and begin writing for Wandering Albatross Press. We at WAP are extremely busy capturing, reflecting, and refracting the infinite worlds swirling outside and inside of us. As such, we do not have the excess time, energy, and focus required to explain to Bartleby that you cannot just walk into publishing houses and declare yourself a live-in staff-writer. Also, on the whole we find him pleasant. Furthermore, since he sleeps on the WAP premises, it is easy for him to have the coffee ready when the rest of us arrive at about 8:00 a.m. sharp each weekday.

Finally, he is very tidy and has adopted the kitchen and library, making these two ancient and wise rooms (if places can be considered “wise”—and why not?: what’s a human being but a place for the Something Deeper to live in and through?) sparkle with a youthful and nearly (I said “nearly”!) sexual vigor. I hasten to add that he’s achieved this sparkle without compromising either room’s fundamental decency. Kitchen and Library now have more energy—giggles bubble up more often; and the infinitely expanding and all-enveloping universes born of these giggles pop with infinitely long elastic/filmy/wet kisses with a louder and fuller “smauack!” than before—but their essential kindness remains very much intact.

Bartleby is writing a series of short stories entitled Love at a Reasonable Price. He’s become interested in a kind of funny idea: manufacturing Pure Love (love that is prior to feelings and ideas and that infinitely accepts, lifts-up, cares-for, helps, and gives) in a fictional factory, transferring that Pure Love into reality, and selling It affordably yet still profitably on the open market. “And voilà: the first truly useful business in human history!”

We at WAP understand that you cannot manufacture Pure Love in fictional factories, transport It into reality, and then market and sell It to other people. Additionally, we are not even sure that if you could, you should. But! of course you can’t. Anyway, Pure Love already gives Itself infinitely to everyone and everything, so selling it is even more ridiculous than selling air or that delicious self-dom sensed as you gaze out at nothingmuch, watching your own watching grow quiet and sharp.

Does Bartleby know all this? Mmm. He seems to consider this project of his a joke. However, he takes jokes amazingly seriously, so seriously that one is tempted to say, “That man believes in jokes! My God! He really does!”.

Let’s you and I resolve to be reasonable, to let him have his fun but hunker way down into the wholesome knowledge that no one—not even the elastically spinning Bartleby Willard of the poignantly explosive Wandering Albatross Press—sells Pure Love.

But what wares does Bartleby, with his face soot-smudged and his old tin cup looped into his thick leather belt, peddle? Some stories about manufacturing, marketing, and selling Pure Love. And some other stories. And by “stories” we mean whatever Bartleby means by “stories.” And Bartleby Williard is not much of a literalist.

Bartleby will write what he writes and we’ll keep a running tally in the “Chapters” section.

….

And so it began, years and years ago now. I kept falling this way and that, but–one end of a thick, scratchy, fraying rope around my waist and the other anchored to a vaguely evolving plan–my staggering went round and round this project, winding me into it more and more; and now it’s time to push my long imaginary hands against the rusty iron bars (square staves twisted like drill bits) and shudder as the forgotten manor gate swings wide open with a piercing shriek or a mournful, yawning three-stage creak; or just squeaks a little forward and then, overgrown with vines not just emotionally but physically as well, bounces back at me.

I hope the project goes well. I hope it is good for writer, reader, and the space between. I appreciate you spending money, time, and focus on this book; I’ll try to make it worth your while.

Best,

Bartleby Willard
June 17, 2015, 7:35pm
Midtown Manhattan Library

PS: I think I’ll alternate stories of making, manufacturing, advertising, and selling Pure Love with stories about my life and times at WAP.

Oh, and this one more time:

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.

…

Afternote: What is this? It is an introduction to the “Love at a Reasonable Price” blogbook project. The bulk of it was written ages ago–absolutely lightyears ago! And then BW tacked on that extra bit while pausing his commotion at the Midtown Manhattan Library some gently warm June eve. Originally, it was just in the evolving ebook, but now it is here up on the worldwide web for the widest possible audience. We’re slowly putting together two ebooks titled “Love at a Reasonable Price” and “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”. Access to the ongoing attempt can be found here: Buy the Books. For a list of what we’ve currently posted in “Love at a Reasonable Price”, go here: Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price; for a list of what so far constitutes “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”: Intro to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.

Werther 1

Werther 1

Erstes Buch
Was ich von der Geschichte des armen Werther nur habe auffinden können, habe ich mit Fleiß gesammelt und lege es euch hier vor, und weiß, daß ihr mir’s danken werdet. Ihr könnt seinem Geist und seinem Charakter eure Bewunderung und Liebe, seinem Schicksale eure Tränen nicht versagen.
Und du gute Seele, die du eben den Drang fühlst wie er, schöpfe Trost aus seinem Leiden, und laß das Büchlein deinen Freund sein, wenn du aus Geschick oder eigener Schuld keinen näheren finden kannst.

Was ich dir nur sage will! Was ich alles mit dir teilen will! Wenn ich nur irgendwie deine Augen sehen könnte, dein Laechlen–gross and breit, verwirrend wie das Zittern eines Insekten auf einem kargen Zweigchen das kalt und knotig dem Winter gegenüber steht–wahrnehmen, noch einmal erleben!

Aber nein und niemals; das Schicksal oder die Schuld erlaubt uns nur eins: das grosse Vergessens, das ab und zu mit einer nebligen halb-Erinnerung zerstreut ist–zerstreut wie das blaue Arizona Himmel gelegentlich von einer langen, dünnen, feinen, sich-auseinander-wie-cotton-candy-in-haenden-eines-ferienspaziernden-
kindes-ziehenden Wolken gestreift ist.

Am 4. Mai 1771
Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin! Bester Freund, was ist das Herz des Menschen! Dich zu verlassen, den ich so liebe, von dem ich unzertrennlich war, und froh zu sein! Ich weiß, du verzeihst mir’s. Waren nicht meine übrigen Verbindungen recht ausgesucht vom Schicksal, um ein Herz wie das meine zu ängstigen? Die arme Leonore! Und doch war ich unschuldig. Konnt’ ich dafür, daß, während die eigensinnigen Reize ihrer Schwester mir eine angenehme Unterhaltung verschafften, daß eine Leidenschaft in dem armen Herzen sich bildete? Und doch – bin ich ganz unschuldig? Hab’ ich nicht ihre Empfindungen genährt? Hab’ ich mich nicht an den ganz wahren Ausdrücken der Natur, die uns so oft zu lachen machten, so wenig lächerlich sie waren, selbst ergetzt? Hab’ ich nicht – o was ist der Mensch, daß er über sich klagen darf! Ich will, lieber Freund, ich verspreche dir’s, ich will mich bessern, will nicht mehr ein bißchen Übel, das uns das Schicksal vorlegt, wiederkäuen, wie ich’s immer getan habe; ich will das Gegenwärtige genießen, und das Vergangene soll mir vergangen sein. Gewiß, du hast recht, Bester, der Schmerzen wären minder unter den Menschen, wenn sie nicht – Gott weiß, warum sie so gemacht sind! – mit so viel Emsigkeit der Einbildungskraft sich beschäftigten, die Erinnerungen des vergangenen Übels zurückzurufen, eher als eine gleichgültige Gegenwart zu ertragen.
[…]
Die Stadt selbst ist unangenehm, dagegen rings umher eine unaussprechliche Schönheit der Natur. Das bewog den verstorbenen Grafen von M., einen Garten auf einem der Hügel anzulegen, die mit der schönsten Mannigfaltigkeit sich kreuzen und die lieblichsten Täler bilden. Der Garten ist einfach, und man fühlt gleich bei dem Eintritte, daß nicht ein wissenschaftlicher Gärtner, sondern ein fühlendes Herz den Plan gezeichnet, das seiner selbst hier genießen wollte. Schon manche Träne hab’ ich dem Abgeschiedenen in dem verfallenen Kabinettchen geweint, das sein Lieblingsplätzchen war und auch meines ist. Bald werde ich Herr vom Garten sein; der Gärtner ist mir zugetan, nur seit den paar Tagen, und er wird sich nicht übel dabei befinden.

Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin! Bester Freund, was ist das Herz des Menschen! Dich zu betrügen, meine Hoffnung zu missbrauchen, deine Augen mit Schlamm zu verdecken, dreckig, ungleich und Trocknen geknackt wie die Haut um einer Elefantenauge! Und dann die arme Leonore! Aber was sonst? Man muss was fressen–sozusagen. Ich war einsam und gelangweiligt. Und das Beduerfnis war bei mir immer so gross–so krankhaft gross! Aber naja, die arme Leonore–sie wusste sowieso was ich imstande zu geben war; wusste sowieso dass ich weggehen würde, und dass ich Kinder mache, dazu aber niemals was hinzufüge.
Ich will, lieber Freund, ich verspreche dir’s, ich will mich bessern, will nicht mehr ein bißchen Übel, das uns das Schicksal vorlegt, wiederkäuen, wie ich’s immer getan habe; ich will das Gegenwärtige genießen, und das Vergangene soll mir vergangen sein. Irgendwie muessen Männer Kinder zeugen; irgendwie muessen Frauen Kinder kriegen. Das ewige Schicksal findet immer einen Weg–was können wir dafür oder dagegen? Die Leonore und ich sind beide Fliegen im Spinnennetz–die Welt nennt mich “schuldig”, nennt sie “ausgenutzt” aber in Wirklichkeit ist nur das Schicksal schuld: das Schicksal nutzt uns beide aus. Naja, bester–du weisst das alles. Ich weiss dass ich mich nicht vor dir rechtfertigen muss! Und so spreche ich nicht weiter davon. Deine Schwester ist ein süßes, ein mildes, ein liebenswürdiges Geschöpf–und dabei nicht besonders blöd: sie wird sicher eine glückliche Lösung treffen. Wer weiss–vielleicht wird ein Kind gut für ihr sein–vielleicht ist das genau die Motivation ihre lange aufgeschobene Reifung braucht.

O aber wie viel ich wünsche, dass du hier sein waerest! Oder dass du wenigstens diese Herrlichkeiten durch meine Augen sehen könnten! Die Stadt selbst ist unangenehm, dagegen rings umher eine unaussprechliche Schönheit der Natur. Das bewog den verstorbenen Grafen von M., einen Garten auf einem der Hügel anzulegen, die mit der schönsten Mannigfaltigkeit sich kreuzen und die lieblichsten Täler bilden. Ich fließe und ströme über diese Hügel und in diesen Tälern wie Wasser; und am liebsten sammle ich mich hier in seinem Garten–ich mich hier in blühenden halb-wilden Gärten sammle wie Wasser im Steil einer grossen Blume. Und hier mitten riesigen, überwucherten, in Seiten der Hügeln eingelassen Pflanzentöpfen überlege ich. Was überlege ich? Hauptsachlich Herrlichkeit im allgemeinen Fall. Man kann die Herrlichkeit weder mit Ideen noch Gefühlen fest begreifen–und so sitze ich hier im bewunderstwerten Gärten am Rand eine kleine, nichtsbedeutende, hässliche Stadt und überlege ich das enorme, vage, Gedanken- und Gefühlen-Nebelflecke. Wie schön! Wie unheimlich schön sich mit Herrlichkeiten so zu verwirren!

Aber schwierig bleibt es das Getränk zu vermeiden. Meistens nachts. Als ich allein im dunklen Zimmer sitze, neben meiner flackernden Flamme. Ich sitze im Übergrößen Samtrobe, meine nackte dünne kalte weiße Knien wie von einer hoffnungslosen Ferne betrachten, denke an Leonore, und wünsche dass die Welt anders wäre. Naja.

Von: Bartleby Willard
Copyright: Andy Watson

Produkten:

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

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

[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.]

Poor Kempt! It is a long cold most of all windy way to the Hall of the Mountain King. And Kempt is not Bartleby, nor is he travelling with Bartleby. Kempt can go by locomotives as far as the barren spaces and by stagecoach as far as the baked plains and by horseback to the felsen feet of the mighty mountains. But then Kempt will have to hike and climb up and up day after day into the stinging iceflake winds. Poor Kempt! I guess he feels duty-bound. I guess he remembers when teenage Amble with soft-spreading flattop and steel-railed smile took him around the block in that chintzy cloth-seat stroller with plastic wheels grating the uneven small-town, pebble-peaking, root-scattered sidewalk.

It will be alright. The children of the light will stand tall and guide his way. The creatures in the black lagoon will grab after him with webbed slimy nuke-bred hands, but the blessed influences will always swoop low and carry him just out of mayhem’s reach. Kempt will arrive at the Hall of the Mountain King. He will find the Mountain King rough but fair, jaded but kind.

Author: our bw
Editor: our aw
Copyright: our amw

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Philosophically, I’ve always been a bestist. One should aim for whatever’s best. We mortal flashes don’t know everything. We have an inner sense towards discovering and living “truer” and “better”–towards “truly better”. Those concept-bound descriptions are approximations–the sense-of-things they seek to point towards is deeper than concepts. Anyway, our feelings and intellects are tools that should be put in service of the quest to keep getting better and better at understanding and realizing that core goal. We all know that. I here estimate what we all know in our hearts of hearts up into words.

Author: Wanda Wicchwey
Author: The Old BW
Copyright: Andy the Watson I was there with him in kindergarten when signing “Andy Watson” in a steady, respectful hand was a worthy goal, a proud moment on the tight-weave blue rug.

What is this?
It has to do with Love at a Reasonable Price.
The first section of that evolving ebook starts with two stories from the town of Pine, Michigan–where Ichabod the Love Peddler appeared over a century ago, and where there now stands a Pure Love Research Center (at the University of Pine). At the end of the second story, a Pure Love researcher says, “To understand Charles’ and I’s research, you have to be at least somewhat acquainted with the standard model of Pure Love.”
So that seems to call for a standard model or standard theory of Pure Love–similar to how there is one a standard model for physics: a set of principles and findings that just about all practicing physicists agree on. But we’ve been having our troubles writing a standard theory of Pure Love. So now we’re just writing poems around the topic, hoping to perhaps eventually sink in at an appropriate place. So far these “standard model” poems are all free (so far all poems are free: see “Poems” category on the right hand side to see them all). These poems and all other writings in Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price

Access to the whole evolving ebook, along with Diary of an Adamant Seducer for sale here:
Buy the Books

Wandering Albatross Press’s most physical products:

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

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

[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.]

Bartleby Willard, the great author of Pure Love and other undeniable adventures, and his editor Amble Whistletown have left New York City. Travelling on the high seas on their separate ships they went their separate ways. Who knows when we’ll hear from them next?

Back at the Skullvalley After Whistletown Buchhandler Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Kempt Whistletown watches his tiny letter people group together to form communities of words and sentences. The occasional paragraph empire will arise, gobbling up loose letters, small bands of individual words, and scattered tribes of sentences. Inevitably the dynasties choke on the growing incoherence within their narratives; and/or shatter themselves on other dynasties, and/or on stupid internal misunderstandings — often caused by the lack of punctuation. Kempt — the kind of God who intervenes in the spaces-between — takes mercy on his children and blesses them with periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, parentheses, quotation marks — apostrophes even! Oh, the clarity, oh the clarity! Of course, from time to time simple grammatical and punctuation errors still precipitate outrageous tragedies in Letterland — but the Letterfolk learn.

Back at the SWAB Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Andrew Cleary and Tom Watson dine on butterflies. Every few minutes, the tall French waiters — taller than average French waiters, disjointedly lank and with rather flat and stretched out musculatures (eunuchs, really) — slide each SAWB tyrant yet another large steel dish piled high with freshly killed monarchs.

Each gossamer orange and black beauty is murdered with a decisive needle-poke through its minuscule head.

The chef is a squadron of Lilliputians whose small brains have been mesmerized by a vampire squid (small red mollusk with a long oval body atop netted tentacles) that floats in saltwater in an old glass buttermilk jar resting on the kitchen counter (oak, worn, darkened and stained, with innumerable knife wounds).

Ever since the discovery of vampire squid — these small, slimy, membranous scavengers that (powered by a palpitating closing-umbrella locomotion) thrust themselves about the deep sea, many a young mind has felt this thought:

“How terrible! How absolutely terrible for God to create so many cadaverous consciousnesses! Floating, scarcely aware yet still horribly aware, they exist there in the pitch black and bitter cold, mindlessly feeding on falling detritus — the disassembling remains of creatures who lived and died above them, within a brighter sea. And the vampire squid is really just a particularly exotic example of a terrifyingly commonplace worldhistorical trend: voila the vaguely aware, icky and omnipresent cockroach! Why does God make so many clueless creatures chained to so many hopeless endeavors? Why is mankind smiled upon and set apart: granted contemplative strolls, poems, and math problems? Why are we condemned to share the putrid mortality and uncertain knowledge of such hopeless nobodies as these foot-long, gelatinous, weak but agile vampire squid?”

The vampire squid in the SAWB office kitchen is a special case. It can think and read and write and carry on conversations; however, it has never really escaped the drudgery of its origins and mostly cackles low to itself about the world, the world, turned to ash, to ashy ash, and falling, falling gently down down into my tank; the world as fodder, fodder falling as ash down to my tank where I sit pretty and wait easy — wait easy, yes and yes!, a goal, a task, a straight line, hoo hoo. Ha ha

Thundration and Archangelbert talk in loud and boisterous voices. About their various triumphs and the folly of the rest.

Tun: A man can be a player by employing only the most rudimentary maneuvers. Women (I declare with my shoulders back and my head cocked jauntily chin-up) need to hear certain phrases: there are certain gestures that, even when recognized as empty, the fairer sex does fairly feast upon. Likewise (and here’s where I rodeo-spin my pointer finger and really get going): tell the people that their hearts are gold, their skeletons and mandibles unconquerable, their enemies depraved, and voila! (see how now I’m cymboling my hands together like a suit-and-tie percussionist, signifying a haughty “easy as that!”): Rub their bellies and scold their rivals and they’ll sidle up to you and your (watch! watch! oh, this you simply must see: now I’m wiggling my fingers like a pianist warming up, his well-practiced, ingenious fingers hovering over the ready ivories) suggestions. Ah, the tame little pups!

Arch: Here here! A toast to that! A toast of pureed frog eyes with a splash of Tabasco — or whatever the peoples drinking!
My friends, my compatriots, my cronies: if Goodness was an option our jobs — they’d be complicated. I’m afraid we’d have to consider — egads! — the bounds!
But a person’s a drawn-out arachnid. Human minds and bodies nut’in’ but the playthings of animal grab and dodge; mark my runny, salty, oily over-easy words: instincts yank puppet-strings and human destinies unroll like clockwork — clockwork’s that randomly drifted together because of an infinite number of chimps with an infinite number of typewriters!
So (and please bear witness as I push out my chest thus and, raising wide-open arms, turn my unrepentant palms towards the empty heavens like so) So in conclusion, it’s all cheer beer an’ ne’er fear for all us maniacal sorts — ‘specially us terribly clever, terribly successful, possessed-of-terrible-power maniacal sorts.

Tun: Indeed. With souls severed from their hearts and minds, they scratch their ghostly paths through this dark-night world. Who can blame a media mogul who twists their chords, who weaves their flighty minds and jumpy passions into little ditties that just so happen — that I say: just so happen to mention that they really ought to be sure to: (mark me here: with blinking open-shut hands and a wrap-around-grinned, pop-eyed frog-face, I tut my bandy head from side to side while slyly sliding my I-beam shoulders the contrariwise) “buy it! buy it! buy and believe! buy it, buy it, buy and believe — !.”

After the two publishing Titans (original immortal, recklessly powerful sense of the word) guffaw and slap knees like wheezing fireplace bellows for a biblical 40 seconds, Tun straightens up his tidy, plank-shaped body and tucks his white tuxedo shirt back under the black cummerbund. He clears his long scrawny mulligatawny throat and holds his chin between his up-pressing thumb and his looped pointer finger, pretending to stare off into an imaginary dramatic distance. He mocks pensiveness. He lampoons serious contemplation! Then, throwing his arms down into a sickly drooping W, he continues:

“No, nope, can’t be done: There’s no reaching their souls — they keep them in storage, along with oyster shell ashtrays, miniature pewter statues of Egyptian gods, and other treasures from Great Aunt Millie’s coffee table. No reaching their souls, so who could ever blame us for what we do with their heart-brain slush? Who?”

Arch: “Blame us for exploiting windup dolls? Why the suggestion’s preposterous! Absolutely cracked!”

Tun: “Blame us? Never! People, we’s marvelous!”

And so they caper on, feeling safe because they — as timeless immortals — live beyond mortal laws; and quite forgetting that no one on the moribund earth nor in the exalted heavens: No one lives beyond the Law.

Kempt watches the letter people on the floor. Blind and mute, their only apparent senses are touch and a kind of radiating perception for other letter people. A paragraph about the magnificent powers of the gods rolls into a paragraph about the brightness of the sun and the darkness of the night and other obvious statements about the physical world. Where did these creatures get all these human ideas? Were they in former lives human beings or somehow privy to the stories of human beings which they now rediscover within the potentialities of human language? The cataclysm of the contesting empires creates new configurations: many stranded letters; a few stranded sentences (one about the impossibility of flight; another about the danger of the swift currents) and three paragraphs: a short ode to the opulent lifestyles of the gods; a big and somewhat confused discourse on the brightness of the sun, the darkness of the night, and the moods of the gods; and this short piece:

What is it that makes our sense? We share body, heart, head, knees and toes, knees and toes. What reason supports this reason? Should we keep push to prow? Hello and Where did you go? Hello? Tell me about us. Please. So lonely in the turning time.

Kempt sighs. A pretty little lament. Probably not destined to survive long in this brutal stage of civilization. He wants to stoop down and help it, to protect it from the marauding declarations about overblown and implausible gods and the boring details of the physical world. But he doesn’t know that that’s his place.

Tun and Arch are agreeing with one another that there’s nothing wrong with feasting on thousands of monarch butterflies: they never survive the summer anyway. Kempt thinks to himself: yes, but they still have a life purpose to fulfill: they need to go to the monarch trees in Mexico, to throng with others of their kind who understand the world in the way they do, to mate and die knowing that they’ve completed the journey.

Kempt goes into his room and gets a small flat square from under his bed. He brings it back to the SAWB common office, and unfolds it into a large very thin flat disc. I don’t know what material it is made of. It is light brown and so thin as to be transparent, but it seems to be very strong. Without — as far as I can see — disturbing the letter people, he slips the disc under them and then slides it through a small groove in the walls cut just below the bottoms of the door frames. After safely setting the letterworld down in his large, sparsely furnished, wood-floored bedroom, he locks the door and returns to the SAWB common office.

Kempt: “I’m going to go look for Amble and Bartleby.”

“How? In what magic ship or on what magic sea serpent? And using what magic map?” wonders Tun.

“See if you can get anything publishable out of them” suggests Archangelbert sagaciously, his mouth full of snapping butterfly wings.

Now think Kempt: do we know where they went? Does anyone? Who have they even spoken to recently? They did go for an interview with the Mountain King not too long ago. So perhaps a visit to the Hall of the Mountain King is in order.

Kempt alone, the poem:

Oh Kempt!, noble Kempt! It is a heavy weight —
the stone here shouldered by the oldest lucid son.
Your elders, your leaders, your heroes from before
have left themselves, lost themselves to schemes
that, sweet and dear like honey, trap them in the horror.
They’ve collapsed to the fragment floor; they boast to the sky:
“I’ve won!
I give up!
I was never playing anyway.”

Can you, can you alone, hold firm while all about
the tempest claims your fellows: lacerates minds,
empties hearts, breaks the brittle stuff
that keeps a soul in God — ?

Head up! Heart up! Poor Kempt, dear Kempt —
you didn’t choose this lot, nor did you this knowing,
red blazing in dry skull:
There’s a path I must take,
a resistance;
now stand I me within this me
and this blazing me
within the blaster’s boom.
The choice is mine:
to take the way that leads, easy gentle bob
— a leaf on murmured brook –,
to death;
or choose the other turn — against the rush,
blindfolded, alone, into the judgement room.

Author B Willard
Editor A Whistletown
Copyright AM Watson

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

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)