Love at a Reasonable Price

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

“What can we do, Susan?,” asks Amble of his wife, his prayer and its answer, his friend and sustenance.

“I don’t know,” says Susan, her eyes — like the rest — wandering downcast the darkbrown boards of the ancient roundtable.

Tun looks up out the magnificent fifteen-foot windows overlooking what had been the joyfully human bustle hustle of Manhattan and is now a blackcloudsky billowing madcap this way and that, with flecks of ash and soot as a perpetually tossed-about “snow” storm. He says with dry mouth and distant, tired eyes, “It’s within our power to leave this place, this predicament.”

“Yeah, but that wouldn’t be very helpful,” says Arch without looking up from the rich redbrown, brown, dark brown black-bordered rivers running across the tabletop.

“But it would perhaps be no less helpful than staying here and futilely attempting to goad this charred, cold, desolate, life-stripped world into a place where people could be happy, decent, and free.”

“Decency is its own reward,” muttered Tim, lying face up and eyes shut somewhere in the middle of the tabletop.

Bartleby: Decency may bring one a clear spiritual joy. But is helping here possible? And does it require our staying? The good life requires constant pursuit of the blessed joy of working in through and for Godlight. But. Well, … consistent happiness requires safety, freedom, friendship, health, and the ability to be oneself openly and fully.

Amble: I wanted to live in quiet comfort with beautiful Susan. To ply a trade that lifted the whole while coddling the green sunlight-dripping glen where we’d raise our bouncy brood. But who can be anything but guilty and wretched in systems with no place for honest work, honest exchange, gentle kind and clear competent shared decision making, or anything at all that is good and true, that giggles with the innocent mirth of the universe?

Susan: You have to picture it as an infinite giggle. An infinite power that is simultaneously infinite joy, knowledge, goodness, and kindness. It has so much that it explodes all particulars and is only the undifferentiated perfection. And yet it has so much that it is also every possible particular border, configuration, experienceable circumstance.

Bartleby: And so within Infiniti exist two opposing currents: Infiniti as the boundless, undifferentiated perfection — free of all particulars; and Infiniti as the interwoven interrelated cacophony of all particular possibilities.

Amble: From this tension

Susan: Arises an infinite unbroken giggle that creates, explodes through, and sustains all particulars.

Amble: What within our love is real, Susan?

Susan: Is it not written — down somewhere — that all that is not Love dies when the body dies.

Bartleby: I’d turn towards and let my thinking feeling acting flow from the Light! So as to weave the particular circumstances of my life into that within me that is truly me and truly beautiful. I would! I mean to do it! I try to do it! How do we do it?

Tun: Turn, turn, turn.

Arch: Arch into it.

Tun: Break your backs!

Arch: Face yourself, face myself, face ourselves.

Tim: Mmmm, yes, but, well, here we are.

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

I don’t know who’s so evil they’d seek to replace democracy with single-party rule won by twisting local election-laws to ensure national victories while simultaneously disparaging a fairly-lost election as “unfair”.

I don’t know who cares so little about their own soul and the welfare of their children that they’d sacrifice an imperfect but still essentially citizenry-responsive (and thus yet capable of being made more citizenry-responsive) government for a shining blistering hot-potato moment of political power.

I don’t know and I don’t understand how Evil lumbers in upon a few thousand ends-justifying-the-means and isn’t-it-cool-to-be-in-the-club and isn’t-the-other-side-so-evil-as-to-justify-anything?

Soon darkness descends upon the land. The city upon that shining hill — never fully free of clouds and weathers — is now sunk beneath the gray-billowing, lightning-flashing, rains-barfing forever-storms. Similar to the eternal discontented downpour that astronomers once reasoned must hold forth within the stormily swirling atmosphere of Venus.

Kempt, Bartleby, Amble, Tun, Arch, Susan and Tim sit alone around a round wooden table, drumming their fingers while the storm that never stops ranges on outside the castle walls. Manhattan’s become a mountainous land, it’s people dwelling now in damp-walled mountain grottos as they’d once rested their whiles in brick and paste or glass and steel apartment buildings.

Everyone works in the mines and you can’t go anywhere without bribing party officials, who in turn secure their petty positions by bribing slightly-less petty officials.

The Republicans have won their great victory over US American Democracy, and all — regardless of what they used to call themselves — live in the dank air of a society where lying and cheating are rewarded with riches and prestige and honesty and decency with poverty and prison. Not even those completely given over to the exaltation of their own cynical pouting are able to force out inane chuckles about, “no different than before!”

Things had not been perfect before, but calling Fire when the world’s not actually on fire is an Evil and the handmaiden to many great political evils.

Now the world is on fire, or at least beneath this human-hating storm. And now saying “Fire!” will make you disappear, will plunge you down deep with a (who has anymore the time for metaphors anyway) literal dungeon.

That’s what you get. That’s what you get for refusing to be grateful and seek to expand and serve an imperfect but yet workable democracy.

And yet what is man that he should get what he deserves? For is it not truly said by long-dead great-grandfathers throughout our hallowed New England that “If we were all to get what we deserved, who would escape the hangman’s noose?” And is it not also at least in some sense truly declared by now-vanished grandmothers from our Oklahoma home that “Ours is not to reason why; ours is to do or die.”

Because how good were we any of us supposed to be? And how much could we reasonably be expected to understand, to figure, to foresee?

So what really went wrong? What took the wheels off our great momentum? What is the sickness that turns the churning worm within the belly of a nation?

But then again: How can you echo the lies of a would-be election-stealer (who also spent his first term working to erode counterbalancing powers and otherwise leaning in to despotism while simultaneously pursuing local election laws that will tilt the voice away from all the people and towards a slice of the people and officials elected by that minority — how can you behave in this way and expect everything to turn out well? Representative democracy is there to protect us all. Without it, no one keeps power except to the degree they oppress and hurt everyone else, and everyone lives in a darker, crueler, emptier, and more lonely place.

What is going on in the mind of that other portion of this shared endeavor? The portion I have given up on. Not a mean way. It’s just that meaningful conversation is no longer possible. And pretending it is is more lonely and boring than spending time alone. Something has gone wrong here. To my mind, you have lost yourselves in lies and misplaced foci. You say the same of me. When we had to watch the same news, it had to speak to both of us. When we had to go to the same churches, the preacher had to speak to both of us. When we had to live next to each other and share the PTA and the town parade, we found ways to agree the way people interfacing always do. But that all ended, and now I accuse you of intellectual irresponsibility to the point of political nihilism and ultimately of an evil that, if successful, will lock souls away and crunch bones the same as all other evils; and I have no idea what you accuse me of, since I no longer care what you say or think. This is the way down for all of us. But who will change the course we’re on?

It’s not quite that bad. I still make a little effort here and there. And so do you. But not enough. And the irony is that we agree on the essentials. We all prefer a government that values those values without which none of our individual worldviews are meaningful to any of us: honesty, clarity, accuracy, openness, competency, kindness, shared joy, meaningful win/win synergistic collaboration. But we don’t trust each other to pursue those goods, and that’s when things get ugly: people begin to try to blow past the other side and secure everyone’s safety that way; or, worse, people begin to stop caring about the other side’s safety.

But while we must all accept our role (vague though the details are to all of us) in this great calamity, it is up to you to reject those leaders of yours who are seeking to dismantle our shared democracy by denigrating a fairly-lost election and tilting election laws to the advantage of your side. Because you are inside of this machine. It cares what you say and do. It has already decided that me and my half don’t matter and will be run over if need be, and indeed the need bes. Oh it bes!, It bes!

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

A note on politics: Your authors gave up on it. But here’s where they were with it: Sometime Ago.

So lonely, so lonely, so boring, so tired, so sleepy. I don’t want to pretend I’m a political genius. Would you kindly stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out? The main job of the citizens of a democratic nation is to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in their shared government. We are failing in that role. Why? Because we cannot share a government if we cannot share meaning. How do we share meaning? By agreeing upon what we already always most fundamentally agree upon and refusing to cede that fundamental shared ground to any and all expediencies. I mean: We agree to agree to push gently for more and more honesty, clarity, accuracy, competency, win-win, kindness, and shared joy. But how? How to hold fast to those values without which none of our values are meaningful to any of us? So lonely.

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Timothy air-danced over, “Isn’t that the case! Isn’t that just so! I still can’t believe my own luck! Why does she favor me, I ask myself!”

“You’ve got a girl?”

“Oh yes!, Married nigh on two millennia.”

“How romantic!”

“Yikes!”

“The key is giving each other space. I haven’t seen her in a few years now — though we exchange letters often and are eagerly anticipating our five-hundredth honey moon. Second one at Niagara Falls.”

“Niagara Falls?!? Of all the magical possibilities at your unstoppable fingertips?”

“Gaudiness can be very romantic, if you approach from the proper angles.”

“The falls themselves are beautiful.”

“What about the hermit of Goat Island who, legend has it, would bathe every day in the river above the falls by dangling his lonely form from a branch. Until one day, maybe he let go or maybe he slipped or maybe the branch broke, he travelled with the swift currents over the falls, down hundreds of gushing feet, plunged under the churning fury reception, and was never seen again by mortal sight? How does he fit into all of this?”

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Bartleby Willard is a blue dolphin, leaping carefree over the gently dominoing summer waves of the wide Mediterranean. As he nears the Italian coast, he transforms mid-arching/water-trickling-leap into a white-feathered albatross, eight feet of tented gliding wings, eyes of polished obsidian. Over the sky he roams, cruising towards Roma, the eternal city — trying on various bird forms as he flaps and glides over the rolling countryside. Like you might flip nonchalant from channel to channel while arch-stretching beyond and side-to-side scooting into your lumpy old recliner.

As broad-winged, black-bellied raven Bartleby spies Amble in love with a strange young woman, raven-haired, but skin a soft green and eyes a dark enchanted green. He becomes a falcon and dives, talons stretched, at the back of Amble’s Susan-turned head.

Timothy tosses up a thick stone dome to shield the two lovers who, oblivious to the surrounding battle, lean deeply into the backwards-tilted tombstone of John Keats and one another. Bartleby morphs into a gnat, gray, lean, with a tiny dewdrop head, long segmented-legs, and clear wings outlined and undergirded in black. In a moment his momentum is lost in the now giant and inchoate surrounding airs.

Soon he’s the see-through, thin-limbed, long-faced, flat-chested, slight-shouldered mild-mannered (well, -mannered, anyway) Bartleby Willard that New Yorkers sometimes glimpse in libraries, coffeeshops, parks, or strolling up and down the wave-bashed Battery.

“I was just kidding! I was always and forever going to change into some insignificant insect — well-before impact!”

“Humor my poor nerves,” replies Tim, himself now a giant ground sloth, seated carefully on his great shaggy rump between rows of old gravestones in Catholic Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.

Kempt leaps up, “Bartleby!”

Bartleby nods gravely to the substances as he speaks their describers: “Kempt, Amble, Timothy the Pixie who summoned me and introduced yourself from afar.” He stops mid-nod with his Tyrian (or King’s or snail-snot) purple eyes sunk into Susan’s clover green ones. “And hello, young lady. Allow me to introduce myself. Bartleby Willard,” he grows into a tall 16th Century Castilian hidalgo in soft-blue puffy-sleeves, leather gauntlets up to his elbows, tight-fitting gray trousers, long rapier at his side, leather boots to his knees, and flowing chestnut locks. His wide-brimmed brown hat with long white ostrich-feather he doffs and sweeps across his chest while bowing low, but the eyes — in a sun-bronzed chiseled but youthfully soft face — stay within Susan’s.

Amble looks up with a side-twisted pucker and annoyance-squinting eyes. Susan smiled up, “Hi, Bartleby. I’m Susan.”

“Enchanté! Encantado! Delighted. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

Susan giggles, “Why thank you, kind sir! You flatter me, to be sure!”

Amble rolls his eyes, “Cut it out, Bartleby! Susan is my wife!”

“Really? When and where and by what legal and/or spiritual authority were you wedded the one to the other?”

Amble shrugs a little shrug the best he can given the constraints imposed by backwards-reclining and side-snuggling. “Well, we just met half an hour ago, so we’ve not yet had the chance to formalize our feelings. But our hearts are joined!, so you can make like a bee and buzz off!”

Bartleby morphs momentarily into an angry bumble bee and threatens Amble’s peevishly-twitching nose. And then, again a few paces in front of Amble and Susan, he was Fabio-esque, with Heman muscles, skin a rather too-metallic bronze, hair a soft floppy Prince Valiant blond. “Is this true, Susan? Are you and this such-and-such bonded heart, soul and mind? Or are you, contrary to his delirious, hound-in-heat baying, yet fundamentally and essentially a single woman?”

Susan just smiles and gives Amble a little kiss on the side of his neck, just below the ear.

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Kempt, his sundial folded back into the wristwatch case, squatted down like a catcher. “I’m putting the gang back together, Amble. It is time to once again publish works upon works of inexhaustible Beauty. It is time to once again fill the world’s shared thought with the raucously shimmering droplets of the Great God’s infinitely-delighted and -delightful laughter.”

Amble looked up, squinting in the yellow sun. “Yeah?” Then he turned back towards Susan and nuzzled his nose into the bottom of his earlobe.

Kempt stood up, shrugging as he went. “Susan — tell him — tell Amble that he can’t spend all his time squishing the bridge of his nose into the back of your ear.”

Susan giggled. The angelic hosts filled the heavens with the sweetest, most effervescently tinkly chime symphony. “Well, he can’t spend all his time doing that, but maybe a few days more. I’ve been lonely too. It seemed I’d never find anyone I could share space with. Like I’d never find someone I could just let myself be myself around. It’s such a relief to find love, to be allowed to be all of you: fully mind and heart and yet also fully animal and bite.” She giggled again. I felt my being tingle and shake with bewildered delight — like a puppy greeting its human after a long day of moping around on the floor by itself.

Kempt gave a little knick-nod and began pacing back and forth in the row of trod-down grass in front of the tombstones. He checked his watch again, which this time released a weather balloon. He sat down cross-legged on a little hillock kitty-corner from Amble and Susan, and watched as the weather data began streaming into the flat watch screen (it’s not that he thought this investigation of the weather was needed — it was just that he thought that he didn’t know what to do but he wanted to do something).

Timothy, hovering now a few feet above Keat’s gravestone, angled his wings so as to catch a gust and surf it towards Kempt. Then he dropped down and tread air a little in front of Kempt’s frustration-pressed lips and -twitching nose. “Ever been in love?”

Kempt looked up from the superfluous atmospheric readings. “Sure! I guess. Yes. Definitely.” He looks with scrunch-eyed impatience around Rome’s ancient (well, definitely old) green, gray, and lilac Protestant Cemetery. “I find myself between relationships at the moment.”

“That’s optimistic,” replies Tim with a playful (spritelike) smile.

“What?! Oh, well, hmmmph.” And Kempt returned his attention to details about the atmospheric pressures, wind speeds, and other forces that was then tussling and tangling the air a hundred fifty feet over their heads.

Author: Still BW
Editor: Still AW
Copyright: Still AMW
Reason: Still because because

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

I see them floating in the heavens, strolling hand in hand upon the soft grassy pathways of a New Eden in a New Dispensation.

I see them man and wife and wife and man, hand in hand, cleaved to one another and bound in the flesh but at the heart and through the mind.

Susan: When I was a girl, I always dreamed I’d meet someone. It seemed inevitable. Like my parents had each other and my grandparents and my friends’ parents. I overlooked the many contradictory cases. I guess I felt like I was a someone who would find her someone. But time went on. My relaxed assumption gave way to writhing hopes and doubts.

Amble: I’ve always loved you. But I couldn’t find you. I didn’t know what you looked like. I would make wild guesses.

Susan: Weren’t you ever in love before?

Amble: No. I couldn’t do it. I could only want to collapse upon someone safe and warm and shaped like the rising sun.

Susan: And like a burbling stream?

Amble: Yes, and like a dewdrop dangling about to burst from a downward-bending leaf.

Susan: I love you.

Amble: I love you.

Susan: Why do we love each other?

Amble: Because we fit each other and we know it?

Susan: Because we are shaped to satisfy each other’s needs? But surely there’s other people with similar shapes.

Amble: Because we turned towards each other and so sunk deeper and deeper into one another?

Susan: What is love like this, that makes one shine and glow from the center outward?

Amble: I am scared, scared of failing you, of betraying this gift of love, which no one deserves.

Susan: Me too. What do we do? How do we nurture this magic orb where we are both kept safe within and explode infinitely beyond?

Amble: What is the system I can employ to be what you need, to give you what you need every day over and over forever? I need to be healthy and strong and good for you.

Susan: Tell me why you love me.

Amble: I can’t. I love you because I love you like how I walk on two legs because I’m a person. I love you because your voice, your scent, the nearness of you, everything you say and do is a magic elixir that makes me burst with love and joy and longing. I love you because I believe you exist and I believe you believe I exist.

Susan: I need you. What does that mean? Before I wished for someone, but I didn’t need a husband. Now I’ve met you, and I need you. There must be some confusion, some kind of a mistake.

Amble: Before the searing sore wound winding and writhing through me accepted defeat. It accepted that no one would be able to share space with it, that it would never feel affection, comfort, safety, love. Then I met you and I was so afraid that you wouldn’t let me know you. I didn’t want to disappoint the hope that so rarely dared to show its battered face and that had never before sprung forth with such boundless enthusiasm. Newborns love indiscriminately. As we age, we learn to build walls around our love. We don’t want to either get burned or lose out on a better offer. When I met you every bit of me knew that if you would love me, I could never ask for anything more out of life.

Susan: Where does God fit into all this?

Amble: I don’t know. I imagine God, being infinite and thus without particulars, is always at the back and shining through every particular thing.

Susan: But that’s Godlight you’re talking about. God is more homely than that — God knows a body. If God can know us, how can God be an undifferentiated explosion of joyful, gentle, all-accepting & -uplifting energy? If God thinks and feels, then God must have some specific qualities.

Amble: Yeah, I dunno. But, Susan, what am I to do? I can’t stand the thought of losing you and this love we share. I hurt so much from wishing I could know you better. I feel pulled towards you like towards a black hole. I need to know you better and better and better and always better; to love you better and better and better and always better. It’s infinite, this passion. How do lovers ever laugh? Or is it that I’m not yet able to believe you really love me?

Susan: Take me home. Let our hearts/minds/bodies show one another how we feel. Then our souls will draw near, soul to soul, and everything we each of us ever was or will be — our ineffable essences will smile eye-in-eye.

Amble: OK, sure. Let’s go home.

Author: oh you know
Editor: uh huh
Copyright: AMW

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

“How long have you been hanging out in the Protestant graveyard?” said Kempt, standing over Amble — who’d not bothered to unslouch himself, and was thus looking hazily up at Kempt from a largely prone position, his shoulders and neck resting on the slightly backwards-tilted gravestone of John Keats.

“I dunno. A while, I guess. Who’s your beautiful friend?”

Susan, a typical she-troll — petite, svelte, shapely, with soft light-green skin and raven hair, blinked her large emerald-green eyes and extended a dainty hand down to Amble. “Let me help me up, my knight in tarnished armor.”

Amble took her hand and gave a little start upward as she leaned back with all her rock-lugging might. But then he slipped back down to push the full length of his heroic V-back against the gravestone, and pulled her gently to his side. She spun round into the pull, letting him wind his strong right arm around her narrow shoulders. They reclined cuddling against each other and the name and dates of a great but short-lived romantic poet. Kempt put his hands on his hips in leather belt and khaki slacks and tilted his head a little to one side. I guess he was contemplating this new development — how now Susan and Amble love each other forever and always.

Timothy flutter-drifted over and cleared his throat, but magnified 10,000 times and so sounding like a high-pitched foghorn vibrating this clear late-September day in the Eternal City. “Allow me to introduce myself. They call me ‘Timothy’.”

“Should they?,” wondered Amble, still glutting himself on the nearness of a love, on physical affection and heart-consented devotion so long and so lonesomely longed-after.

Tim alighted on Susan’s far knee (the lover’s backs leaned against the worn headstone of John Keats, their rears rested on the trim sharply drying autumnal grass atop the sacred earth covering the bones of that short- but wide-flaming poet; and their knees were drawn up).

“I guess they should. It’s my name.”

Kempt nodded absentmindedly. “Common usage and common decency agree that, all things being equal, it’s best to call people by their names.” Then, still absent minded, or maybe a little surprised but let’s say not say disappointed since I don’t think that’s at all how things had been heading with him and Susan, Kempt looked at his watch. It took a minute or so. Because the watch folds out into a little copper sundial, about one foot in diameter. “Do you have any idea where Bartleby might be?” asks Kempt of Amble.

“No,” said Amble Whistletown to Kempt Whistletown. Amble kisses Susan gently in the nook where soft slender neck meets precious dainty shoulders. In time Amble looks back up towards Kempt. “That guy’s too much anyway. I just want to feel Susan close to me. Bartleby can turn himself into a great raptor and soar his sorry ass over here — if his inclination carries him hither. But what do we care? Let his inclination carry him thither and thither some more, I say! I have to focus on domestic bliss right now.”

Susan giggled. It was like the rippling waters of the most beautiful burbling bubbling bouncing enchanted stream high up in the green forgotten wonderland atop rugged gray cliffs in the cool mist-covered jungle that overlooks the hotter, sweatier, more dank and active groundfloor jungle.

Timothy flew straight up off Susan’s knee, shooting upward about a hundred feet before falling (wings wrapped around him so he looked like a little missile) down towards Kempt. A dozen feet above Kempt’s head, Timothy spreads his wings and then drifted gently down onto Kempt’s shoulder. Then Timothy spoke: “Bartleby’s swimming through the Mediterranean sea as a blue dolphin. He’ll be here soonish.He was rolling around — all flailing arms and incoherent laments — upon the windy plain of gods-deserted Troy when I summoned him.

“Now why’d you go and do that!” exclaimed Amble Whistletown.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright Andy Watson

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Susan the Troll, Timothy the Pixie, and Kempt the Human met early in the morning to building the flying machine.

It ended up taking ten minutes instead of five.

It turned out that the material latterly invented by the trolls was not quite light enough, or strong enough. The machine, which looks like a big spandex butterfly with two seats in the front and two in the back, flapped and flapped on the rocky, dusty, grass-spotted slope outside Susan’s family cave. But no discernable flight occurred.

Timothy, an A-level faery, and thus privy to powers and knowledges beyond the kens of us mortals who actually die, knew what the problem was, but he didn’t want to throw his weight (about half an ounce) around. But when Kempt finally sat down dejected on the sand, his head tucked between his knees, behind his arms crossed over his kneecaps, and Susan patted him uncertainly with the cup of her small, light-green hand; Timothy broke down and said, “I can fix this, but I’ll have to use magic. I’m sorry. There is not another option. Let me show you the physics.”

Kempt and Susan looked up at the hovering wight and then found themselves on their feet, their minds full of a sketches, equations, and understanding. How? How could they instantaneously grasp the physics of butterfly flight and the impossibility of enlisting the same engineering principles on troll/human scales? But magic isn’t fair, and pixies don’t brag, nor do they follow the same rules of other mortals, who bruise tear slash their souls when they sin but are still able to sin.

Pixies don’t have the free choice to harm another creature. When you and I are tempted to greeds prides cruelties and such, we feel within a NO that we then either heed or not; if we don’t heed our inner daemon, then we damage our soul/heart/mind and slip further from the Light with which all is OK and without which nothing is OK. But when a pixie is likewise tempted, his or her soul/mind/body simply shuts down until they turn away from folly. This is divine wisdom. Nothing with as much knowledge and power as a pixie should be allowed to turn away from the Light.

God’s no different. Except that God is even more constrained: God cannot even be tempted away from the Light. This follows mathematically from God’s Nature. Because God is Light; and nothing, especially not True Goodness, can be anything except what it is.

Kempt and Susan sit in the front seat of the mechanical dragonfly (Timothy loves dragonflies – they are an ancient insect, and though limited in understanding, in time their collective soul has learned much about life and the joy of motion) while Timothy alternatively reclines in the back seat; hovers (his little pixie wings laughing in the fresh spring air) around their heads or a little ahead, behind, or off to one side; or sits on their shoulders, or on the dashboard or on the top of a door or wherever.

“Will your magic hold when we leave the Realm of the Mountain Folk?” asks Kempt with a tiny nervous warble in his generally mellow and by all accounts valiant voice. “Oh for sure!” squeaks Timothy. “Outside of the Realm, everything I do becomes a dream wrapped up and influenced by and commenting upon reality, but not actually participating in reality. There will come a time when the dream must end and you and your friends will have to act for real, but acting before you’ve gathered sufficient wisdom, goodness, insight is folly anyway.”

“And Susan?” asked Kempt with a panicked glance towards his new friend, her long dark hair waving behind her, her delicate button nose pointed determinedly towards the future.

Susan and Timothy just laughed, hers light like the dawn, his gossamer as a beam of light.
“Trolls aren’t like pixies! Trolls are just creatures, like bears, lions, dragons, minotaurs, ants, cats, people, griffins … Only pixies are 100% faey. It’s true that everything loses its magic when it leaves the Realm of the Mountain Folk. But magicalness belongs to the essential nature of pixies, so we cannot really even enter any realm: pixies live always in good dreams; pixies are good dreams. This machine is safe within the dream I live and am.”

Kempt nods slowly, biting his lower lip. “Must be nice.”

Timothy laughs his bright, airy, millenia-old pixie-dust-emanating giggle. “Yes! Very nice!”

Author: Bartleby
Editor: Ambergris
Copyright Andrew Mackenzie Watson

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Bartleby:

“All but the very wisest are only as effectively good as the systems they operate within. And even the wisdom and effective goodness of the wisest people is limited by the space for wisdom and goodness that is available to them.

“Most everyone is mostly evil. Dark cruel sick evil.

“No. But they’re so weak and so clueless and so desperate for safety, love, thriving, respect, a situation, a place.

“And so they purposely bobble their own hold on the Light within each conscious moment. They purposely muddy their own internal waters out of fear that their own inner Goodness might complicate things for them. What if spiritual insight were to prevent them letting things slide towards their gimme gimme gimme apparent momentary advantage?! Oh no! That’d be terrible!

“A key part of behaving well is working to maintain systems that protect and foster clarity, honesty, openness, kindness, fair debate and unbiased law.

“A key part of behaving well is admitting how beholden we all are to the systems, organizations, relationships, etc. within which we live; while also working to make those overlapping, interconnected outer-selves wiser and better: more aware, honest, clear, accurate, competent, kind, joyfully creative and sharing.

“But I’m lonely and lost. I’m all jags and jangles.

“What usefulness is within me? And how can I access it?

“Perfectionism is used by the Evil in both directions.

“Like this:

“Out a corner of the mouth it’s declared that all is hopeless corrupt and that’s the way of the world and you’ve no choice but to choose power and safety — since Goodness and decency are just children’s fantasies.
(Perfectionism used to prove the uselessness of idealism).

“Whilst bold and full-throated it’s declared that our Power is also Goodness.
“And while out the other corner of the mouth it’s suggested that those few broken Laws are really more like laws — or actually rules of thumb that of course don’t in this case quite apply at all.
(Perfectionism used to confuse Power with Goodness.)

“The path to political health is clarity, honesty, fair and measured debate, power-sharing, and open evaluation of leadership’s decisions and actions. The job of the citizenry in a Republic is to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in government.

“But people would rather pout in nihilistic cynicisms and vaunt in romantic patriotisms, which also end up as nihilism.
(Since romantic patrotisms celebrate power, prestige, wealth, and other things no human soul/heart/mind could ever call a True Good.)

“How to make us better stewards of ourselves and our shared resources — including our governments, bureaucracies, relationships and conversations?

“Is there a way through this loneliness?

“Can one so thoroughly through broken connection and disturbed affection perverted from a hale-hearty-healthful course find the wisdom to think and act well?

“For where could I find wisdom but within myself? Within the space where my mind/heart meet Godlight. And aren’t I all tattered and torn inside?

“How can I trust what I find within this mangy mess of fractured pride, displaced trust and frustrated passion?”

Amble:

“Where is my wife? I need my wife.

“I’m just a person.

“I want everything to go well for everyone.

“But all I can think about and feel about is where is my wife and how do I reach her and how do we make it right to be like this — the way we already are: needy, weak, tiny, insignificant, specks of lonely nothing that would join to merge give birth and die, having completed our mission.

“All I can think about is that life is killing me and will kill me and I don’t care I just want my wife because I’m just a man and a man’s not really so important that he needs to last but he does need to be himself even if that means disappearing into his wife and family and those little, meaningless toils whereby he accepts the love that is his and is him.

“He’s not a saint. He’s just a man.

“He should keep his heart and mind turned toward the Light that shines through all things — even his puny conscious space. But what’s the point of pretending he’s a saint, when he’s just some lonely guy who needs human love?”

All Together:

Help us, God.
Help us improve the individual and shared systems wherein and whereby we live and die.
Overlapping systems for overlapping communities: self, mate, family, friends, organizations secular and parochial, governments more and less local, communities big and small, the world and universe, the God and the stars.
Help us, God,
To be ourselves in a way that is good for everyone.

Authors: BW/AW
Copyright: AMW

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

Now is the floor clean, and the hands and cups of all; one sets twisted garlands on our heads, another hands us fragrant ointment on a salver. The mixing bowl stands ready, full of gladness, and there is more wine at hand that promises never to leave us in the lurch, soft and smelling of flowers in the jars. In the midst the frankincense sends up its holy scent, and there is cold water, sweet and clean. Brown loaves are set before us and a lordly table laden with cheese and rich honey. The altar in the midst is clustered round with flowers; song and revel fill the halls.

But first it is meet that men should hymn the god with joy, with holy tales and pure words; then after libation and prayer made that we may have strength to do right—for that is in truth the first thing to do—no sin is it to drink as much as a man can take and get home without an attendant, so he be not stricken in years. And of all men is he to be praised who after drinking gives goodly proof of himself in the trial of skill,[1] as memory and strength will serve him. Let him 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.

Author: Xenophanes of Colophon
Translation from the Greek: John Burnet
Copyright: Public Domain in the USA because of how long ago both author and translator died.
Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Xenophanes

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer