(A Romantic Love Poem Sneaks In)
I want you to know
that
I love you
that
I need to know you
that
I wish to feel it with you
All through all the worlds
Explode our bones, Boil our blood, Melt our flesh
Join us to us
If it’s okay with you,
There’s only you for me
in this life here
on this world where
I love you
and
I love you
so much
I want is to make it right with you
and have that be good,
be a good thing to do
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
I’m sorry to say that one man on the 7:30AM ferry from Staten Island to Manhattan did not fit in.
Young, pale with chestnut hair, a small skislope-pug nose; dressed in what appeared to be a standard NYC sous-chef outfit, except with both the black pants and white shirt cut too wide, and with the pants dropped down to his upper thighs — and dirty with not the occasional well-formed stains that record a days work moving grease, dressings, diced tomatoes, multicolored condiments, and other foodstuffs a little too quickly from here to there; but dirty instead with days of exhausted, unslept, dirty-finger-smeared, NYC-floor-reclining, all-pervading grime.
His naked arms covered with abrasions — red, round, scabbing, peeling, here and there bleeding fresh and sometimes orange. His blue eyes blood red. Talking by turns to himself and to people he imposed himself on before they fled his proximity (no one gave a word of adieu; everyone simply — wide-eyed and tortoise-chinned, swiveling so as to keep watch on the iffy proposition as they walked — moved silently away).
“Catholicism is not a bad religion. You have to think of what you pray before you pray it. That’s the whole point!”
“Fucking nun! A fucking nun! A nun! Fucking nuns! A fucking nun!”
Of a man resting his palms on the railing while gazing out at the Statue of Liberty in the fresh morning light, to a 50ish woman with a big round face and thick overflowing lightbrown graying hair who stayed longer nearer than most, with lips pursed in concern and blue eyes frogging beneath a twisted worry-brow:
“I think it (the statue of liberty) looks stupid! You could only (like it) if you’re fucking retarded! Look at (that guy)! He must be retarded? Hey, (now to the man alone at the railing) are you a fucking retard? Hey, are you retarded?”
From time to time, the 30ish man, pale with black hollows under his eyes, no real wrinkles on his narrow sharp-chinned face, lips a little chapped and scaling, lies back into a row of plastic scoop-seats, sprawling his thin wounded arms and bulging-knuckles fingers back behind him.
But to return to the Terminal:
Bartleby silently sipped iced tea and ate an orange while a 50ish man with a small, gently-spreading paunch in off-white, beige and blue flannel shirt and tidy blue jeans, spoke to the woman across from him in the metal-mesh waiting chairs. The man was possessed of a pleasing Irish brogue tenor. He felt it was terrible that the security guards aren’t going to do anything but send the guy on his way, and that’s exactly the problem, nobody ever intervenes, nobody helps, they just push these guys off onto the next thing.
Bartleby concentrates on the sweet-tang enthusiasm of the orange mingling with the astringent, law-abiding certainty of the iced tea while the very short, cylindrically-flabby 40s woman in a thin black button-up sweater worn open over a light-brown T-shirt emblazoned with a beautiful print of an evergreen mountainside looking over snowy peaks responds. What does she say? Something that the man can’t quite bring himself to agree with, some opinion on the cause of all societal woes that doesn’t really fit his own theories, something to which he can only tilt his head and change the his leg-cross to the opposite ankle-to-knee pairing.
And the security guards themselves? In bullet proof vests beneath short-sleeved white collared uniform shirts or outside short-sleeved blue polo uniformed shirts. The short one with the dark crew-cut says to the drugged-out fool, “You don’t wanna mess with me today!”
But to return to the ferry:
Another security guard, but big and tall, and with a bushy white mustache and a bald head, as the ferry pulls into port, he and several other guards had been forced to finally intervene. Because the troubled soul had gone from merely importuning people with unwanted observations on what losers everyone to bellowing “ahhhhhh! ahhhh! ahhhhh!” And lurching about, making it scary for normal citizens to make their way orderly to the exits.
The several big security guards had boxed him into a bench near the front (on this leg of the journey) of the ferry. “No! You can’t go until I say you can go!”
After everyone left, they let the beserker go, and he ran through the throng as they made their way through the wide corridor on the western side of the Manhattan ferry terminal.
Where was he going?
Where had he come from?
Bartleby Willard strolls slowly, contemplatively along through the moving mass of morning commuters, wondering if he, Bartleby Willard, had ever mustered the empathy to actually believe that another human being truly existed, truly woke up each morning with thoughts and feelings rising, and went to bed each night in the stillness of a temporarily dissolving consciousness.
Have you Bartleby? Have you ever believed that anyone besides you really thinks and feels from the inside out? Or do you experience them more like the rough outer edges of wind-swept and spray-doused boulders piled up along the base of the battery wall?
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
Do you ever turn into a seagull and float upon the warm air currents rolling off the gently splooshing seas of the New York City harbor?
Do you ever cross from Manhattan to Staten Island as a seagull and then turn back into a mild-mannered, thin, youngish man in an awkwardly-short 1940s-checkered shades-of-tan suitcoat and pants, smart glossy leather briefcase in hand, waiting in the Staten Island Terminal for the Staten Island Ferry to carry you back to Manhattan?
When Bartleby waits in the smooth, shiny, shades-of-gray Staten Island Terminal; sunlight floods through the wall of 30-foot windows facing the water, Manhattan, and the sometimes-glory of the Western World. He is now a businessman with no specific coloring or facial features. His (now) blue, pin-striped suit is so soft and elegant and flows so much like a mountain stream that everyone notices the elegant, clearly-successful young man; but they cannot describe nor recall any aspect of the remarkable fellow, except of course that he wore the most splendid, wonderful, singularly-successful suit.
More than that:
It had never occurred to any of those waiting for the 7:30AM ferry to Manhattan first in rows of interconnected metal, curving-metalmesh-backed chairs; and then upon the glossy floor with the map of the land masses in and along the New York City harbor as green linoleum upon a tamed, daily-polished green linoleum sea:
It had never occurred to any of those tidy, even-natured, happy-in-their-tea-or-coffee commuters; that a business suit could be as beautiful as a virgin hillside where roll great trees oak poplar pine birch hickory walnut maple needle and more in sun-sprayed verdure within fresh pale-blue springy morning air.
Sometimes we don’t think of a possibility and then we observe that unimagined configuration realized in the real, fleshy, undeniable world. How surprised we are!
This suit, this impossibly sumptuous, yet elegantly restrained collection of colors and textures skipped over daydream-mind! It just skipped right over that step and presented itself as a fait accompli to that portion of our thought that’s drawn in real-time by our five-senses-mind!
“Amazing.”
“Hard to figure.”
“But that’s exactly the point!”
One man waiting for the ferry, I’m sorry to say, did not fit in.
Are you sorry to say that? Or do you delight in saying that? Does it thrill you to squish him down in speech and recollection? To gather up your loosely-noticed and scarcely-considered and yet (to your unfair, oh so unfair, human psyche) all-encompassing notion of him; to gather up your story-to-yourself about who he is, and to squish it in the palm of your hand like you would a big fat roach that you hate and in the hating you overcome all your typical city-sissified reservations and you squish that big fat juicy but hard-shelled cockroach in your soft bare tippity-keyboard-tappity hands?
Isn’t that what you really like to do? Isn’t that how you really get off? Isn’t that how you glow when you say that you’re sorry to say that one man there did not fit in with the adequately-hygiened and reassuringly-self-contained crowd?
I’m sorry to say that one man waiting for the ferry did not fit in.
I have met you all. I have talked to you. We have exchanged pleasantries. I know that you are not evil and you are not good. I know that we are all kept safe by a thin layer of regulation, rules, decorum, and faith that the system is more likely to protect the non-provokers than the provokers.
No, that’s not all there is to it. Because we like the gentle pleasant morning float across the waters. We like to see our children playing in the yard. We like to get along with the strangers standing in a very-loose semi-circle around the opening in the glass Terminal wall, and we like to get along with our neighbors stopping by to grab a few tomatoes from our little yard garden (“This is the time! The month of too many tomatoes! Please, help yourself!”) We have some love and goodness and joy in our hearts and there’s recesses within each of our convoluted-cavern hearts where we’d genuinely prefer that things go well for everyone, or at least we genuinely wouldn’t mind it.
And yet.
I have met us. I know there is also that turning screw, that mean panicked hurt, that cutter’s edge. I have seen places fall apart. I have seen the Evil rise up and swallow families, homesteads, villages, cities, nations, so on.
I know the Vikings think they are brave and justified when they descend upon plump, unprotected, sheep- and barely-shores, thrusting sharp swords and blunt members about, slashing taking destroying in the rush of the raid, in the delight of violence that shoots forth like infinite power from you and so builds you up, makes you a god: an infinitely expanding, all-consuming force; but an ancient Greece type god, and so also weaving human-sized jollies into your universal success.
I know, further, that the avenging troops feel all that, plus a great ferocious nobility of purpose while they burn Viking towns, rape Viking ladies, and eviscerate Viking lads.
And so you see, I shouldn’t lie. I shouldn’t say that you are OK. Or that I am OK. Or that anyone is safe and good. Because I’ve seen us in various settings and I know that we are much more dependent on prevailing norms and giddy happenstances than we can imagine. I know how close to Evil we are and how delicate our peaces are.
But this is by the by.
Yes, the blackness of your soul is her mentioned only parenthetically, off to one side, as an aside, like how I couldn’t help observing, and forgive me if I’m too forward, how nicely that shirt juxtaposes your eyes.
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
Bartleby Willard is a thin, translucent man somewhere between 28 and 42.
He stands at the end of the Battery on the southwestern tip of the ancient isle of Manaháhtaan, shorn now of her hills and the hickory grove, once located in what is now the area of Wall Street and high-flying (Icarus?) finances.
Bartleby considers the shagbark hickory. The long, thin, downward-shedding upward-peeling ragged strips of gray bark; the long, sharp-tipped oval leaves that like to grow in sets of three straight fingers, and most of all the nuts encased first in shells and then in round spongy light-green beach balls, which fall everywhere along the sidewalks of some youths spent beside a Great Lake where once various Iroquoian tongues spoke of peace, war, love and play.
The Erie Indians were undone after five years of war with the Iroquois Confederacy. Their language is largely lost to history and her squabbling shepherds, but it was an Iroquoian language and some believe it was related to Wyandot, which one may yet hear in Wendake, Quebec or Wyandotte, Oklahoma; but never along the southern shore of Lake Erie, where yet roll little balls of browning hickory nuts in the minds of many a now-grown and thus wider-wandering boys. They roll along pebbly sidewalks and against weathered curbs where they nestle into shifting beds of drying leaves. Someone picked up a bruised little hickory nut ball and lobs it at a friend’s head, but the aim was too high, and the friend is unscathed and warned of war. Bookbags drop upon dry autumn yard grass. The war between the Erie alliance and the Iroquois Confederacy began in 1651.
Bartleby Willard stands at the southwesten tip of Manhattan, whose name means something like “good place for getting bows (we’re talking about the hickory grove! at the southern end of the island! have you been there? have you seen the great hickories and their supple boughs?!)”, and feels the wind blow.
Normally Bartleby’s hair is worn short and tidy, a cartoon-dollop-part to one side. But now he becomes a barefoot raven haired girl in a makeshift dress of linen cloth cinched about her tiny waist by a thin fraying hempen rope, knotted on one side. For the better to accept the tussling of the wind. The wind pounces on the opportunity: Bartleby’s long hair, her loose, thin-linen dress, and the half foot of cord on either side of the knot all twist and turn, flap and wriggle in the billows.
The sun is low in the Eastern sky over Breuckelen, from the Dutch words broeck, for marsh(not-mallow) lands, and lede, a little human-dug crick (he means creek) in peat (mostly-rotted life resulting a soft, loamy sort of soil). The Dutch settlement of Breuckelen dates to 1646.
It is morning in New York City, once called Nieuw Amsterdam by the Dutch who began to float and build about the area in 1624; but then in 1664 named in honor of the Duke of York, looking beautiful in multilayered, colorful, wide-flowing quilted robe and long luxurious gray curls (a wig). The Duke of York! Soon to become James II of England and James VII of Scotland. But who saw it coming? Because James II / VII reigned only from 1655 to 1658.
The Glorious Revolution, or Glorieuze Overtocht (“Glorious Crossing”) in Dutch. 1658. Jame II / VII, the last Catholic king of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland was removed against his will and replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband, William III (Prince of Orange [in southern France], and Stadholder of Holland, Zeeland, etc etc tidbits of the Netherlands). It had to do with religion. And other stuff.
copyright AMW
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
Bartleby Willard is in Thundration Whistletown’s expansive, hardwood, leatherbound, rhino-hide, ostrich-feather, and narwhale-tusk office.
Bartleby is seated in an ergonomic mesh-backed modern office swivel chair. He is swiveling from side to side, catching and tossing each quarter-rotation with the tops of his feet on the chair legs, which stretch out like open eagle talons from their shared metal-tube base to their separate roller-feet.
Thundration (“Tun”) sits in stern attention at his immense, square, high-back ancient-wood desk chair. A chair decidedly uncomfortable for mortal hacks, but just right for immortal publishing Titans (original sense of the word).
“Bartleby!”
“Yes?”
“You need to straighten up!”
“No, I need to bend slightly forward in this angler’s arch. Otherwise I couldn’t catch the sides of the chair feet with the tops of my feet so well.”
“Bartleby!”
“Yes?”
“You need to pull it together!”
“No, everything in my life is spread out about as much as it should be. I just have to orientate myself better within the layout.”
“Now look here, Bartleby!”
“But surely I am looking there. My body turns in gentle leaps from side to swinging side, but by adjusting my long thin neck, I maintain my gaze upon you, though thus far without much profit. You’re not really doing anything. I could gather more information by casting my vision hither and thither. Or even more by closing my large soft eyes and dreaming out into the infiniti of worlds. But I’m being polite, so I hold dutifully to this info-desert.”
Tun squishes his lips together in a squinty side pout and pushes his intercom’s red top button (below it is a line of white buttons; beside the buttons a lightbrown fabric speaker; the whole encased in an oak frame).
“What?,” crackles the deep, lullabying voice of Achangelbert (“Arch”) Skullvalley.
“Bartleby lacks focus!,” snaps Tom.
“What do you want me to do about it? I don’t live inside his conscious space!”
Now Tun settles back into his thick, right-angles, all-walnut, no-flourishes desk-throne (maybe I was lying about the rhinos and etc) and laces his hands together upon his plankish chest/belly. His speech takes a gentle, musing quality. “Is there perhaps an assignment that would sharpen his focus? Something that would show him enough of life so as to inculcate an abiding respect for its sacred fragility and enchanting beauty, but not so much of life so as to leave him an embittered, cynical, stone-hearted husk?”
A pause. The dull, rhythmically repeating brush, catch, toss of the tops of Bartleby’s detailless soft brown cartoon-shoes on the textured-steel chair feet is all that is heard. Except for the occasional errant crisp-pop of static from the intercom. After a minute of silent (apparent) reflection, Arch’s voice moves again through the intercom, where it flows crinkly within a large swath of scratchy sound. The edges of his low, cowpoke-drawling baritone are made a little sharper, more abrupt and precipitous.
“Back to the Mediterranean, back to The Stranger. Back to the jungle. Back to The Wolverine. Back to the moors. Back to The Secret Garden. Back to the desert. Back to the Bible. And to Achilles and the songs that wafted up through the floorboards during silent-reading time, sometimes even lingering through lights-out. But no, that won’t do, that’s not enough. Send him to the stories that wrote the stories that wrote him.”
Tun leaned forward, elbows on the table, his chin buckling the table formed by his still-interlaced fingers. “They say you need to know yourself before you can know others, that you need to love yourself before you can love others. There may be something in that. But the notion’s been used to justify an awful lot of self-centering.”
copyright: AMW
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
Staff: Bartleby Willard. Amble Whistletown. Kempt Whistletown
Management: Thundration (“Tun”) Whistletown. Archangelbert (“Arch”) Skullvalley.
Babe: Susan the beautiful, fair-skinned, raven-haired troll.
Friend: Frank, the tiny, butterfly-winged sprite.
Other Characters: As needed.
Publishing House: Skullvalley After Whistletown.
It was a cold and rainy night in bleak November.
Bartleby Willard paced the worn mahogany floorboards of the mahogany library that lines the back of some versions of the SAWB Building’s top floor overpeering the southern tip of Somewhere Sometime Manhattan.
Bartleby Willard, some number of plush, lux, deluxe flights removed from grim grimy Wall Street, walks back and forth, alone and uncertain, in a library with books from floor to 40-foot ceiling.
You can walk up the mahogany steps to mahogany landings — four of them — and get at the books that way.
There’s a caterpillar with some kind of a disease that kept him from ever turning into a butterfly, but instead growing oh so slowly over five hundred thousand years. He sits on a purple velvet cushion atop the checkout desk. There’s no checking-out done, since only staff use the library, and none of these precious books leave the library. What the foot-long, four-pound caterpillar does is remember where all the books are, and scold you if you don’t put a book back where it came from. He is very inflexible and surprisingly boring, given the amazing number of years he’s lived, the books he’s read, the stories he’s heard.
I don’t know why he’s a he. But I do have some insight into why he is so dull. He has no passion! Never did! And no curiosity! Never even ever asks himself how it came to be that instead of going into a cocoon, incubating for a bit, and then emerging as a multicolored, gossamer, delicate, wind-swept, sun-lit, and decidedly short-lived butterfly; he just kept growing longer and fatter.
The caterpillar has no name. He never thought of one for himself. Some millennia ago, Tun discovered him while picking orchids from rocky cliffs in junglesides, and scooped the soft-sided little tube into a canvas specimen bag worn like a rectangular purse over his shoulder and banging impatiently against his cliff-climbing hip. At the time, Tun said, “Hullo, Caterpillar!”, but the Caterpillar could speak only a form of Quechua and a few tongues that have since died away.
In time, the Caterpillar learned English, and the ways of bookbinding, but he’s never shown interest in anything except memorizing, repeating the memorized facts, and tsking those who deviate from those facts. Accordingly he was made the official Skullvalley After Whistletown librarian/card-catalog. He seems to enjoy the position. Of course, there’s much to scoff at. For example, the other day, Amble came in twenty-three days after reading a little bit from Kierkegaard’s “Fear & Trembling”, and couldn’t remember — honestly didn’t seem to have a clue! — where in the library’s fourth-upper quadrant that book — which he himself had both removed from and replaced in the bookshelf! — was.
Caterpillar does not seem to notice Bartleby’s duckbacked pacings. Caterpillar is instead scanning the many shelves, recollecting book titles and contents as he goes.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I really don’t,” says Bartleby to himself.
“Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks & Romans, which includes Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius, Themistocles and Camillus, Solon and Poplicola, … ” muses Caterpillar with pouty, fishlike, word-smacking lips.
The giant mahogany double-doors swing open and Arch strides through.
“Bartleby! What are you doing spending all day marching fore and aft in the picturesque Skullvalley After Whistletown library? We need you on the floor. There’s a lot of copy flying about and no one to batten down empty flourishes and grind off ragged refrains!”
“What about Amble? Can’t you see I’m overwhelmed by the worm within the apple, the gangrened stump, the curved, needle-like canines of the night shade walkers?”
“Amble? The poor boy’s drowning in words, grammatics, and punctuation marks! Has lost all sense of inside and outside, has he! Why just now Tun caught him trying to erase part of his forehead!”
“Well, can’t the presses wait a minute? It’s not like anyone reads anything we publish.”
“Oh, so that’s your game, is it? Feeling a little blue about the heart-gills and suppose you’ll take your revenge on us hard-working decent day-in-day-out folk who push through flashes of ache and melancholy — us salt-o-the-earthers who set aside little internal spasms of melodrama and mayhem — us bread-n-butters who toil incessantly to move beyond the rickety confines of the narrow self, to serve — backbones arcing! — the wider space, the higher calling, the deeper truth!”
copyright: AMW
Remember when Bartleby Willard showed up in the Skullvally After Whistletown Bookmakers offices in the SAWB Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, NY, NY, USA?
That’s when Kempt Whistletown was working on his
!Water Telephone!
Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley loved it.
But Thundration “Tun” Whistletown was a little uneasy about the canal blocking traffic.
He wanted to route it through an amiable parallel universe. Of course, Arch wouldn’t sign off on that.
Kempt used his
!Water Telephone!
To talk with sea animals. The sharks scare him.
Arch laughed uproariously as a tall, muscular NYPD officer hands him a collection of citations for building a canal through lower Manhattan without a permit or any kind of legal authority whatsoever.
But Tun (who is SAWB’s lawyer, as well as one of the two chief editors) pulled Arch (who is SAWB’s unlawyer, as well as the other chief editor) aside and says we can have blustering arguments with the police, but please first disconnect those moments from the future, thus removing all legal and moral concerns — it’d save him (Tun) a lot of trouble!
Arch shrugged and was like: OK, where’d I set my rubber stamp?!
Kempt started to wonder where the rest of the SAWB staff is. Excepting for Arch, Tun, Kempt, and sometimes Ambergris “Amble” Whistletown (when he’s in from the sea), there hasn’t been any other staff for several centuries. Tun and Arch had been creating literary movements and countermovements with the shake of their thought. They worried a little that they’re movements helped to foster some unwholesome notions. But the good part was how much tons of money they made.
There were some mice interns, doing all the work of the publishing house and newsroom. Then they started disappearing. They were being eaten by the SAWB cat. When they died, they became mice ghosts in basement of SAWB Building. At some point the cat goes to the basemen and is swallowed by a mouse ghost and floats around in the ghost’s belly, where it experienced visions (drawn psychedellic).
One day Bartleby Willard strolled into the office, sits down at an empty desk and starts writing for SAWB. But nothing he wrote quite worked. The editors called a meeting. It was decided that Amble, still adjusting to life on land, would be Bartleby’s editor.
Job of editor: dietician; philosophical debater; and editor.
Meditation and exercise is part of the job of writer and editor.
Bartleby said all products are evil trickery because their advertisers hint that the product will solve life, but since they aren’t Pure Love, they don’t.
Then Bartleby proposed that they manufacture Pure Love.
Before Bartleby Willard shows Up:
Amble Whistletown in from port, talking to the wind.
Kempt Whistletown building a water telephone with water channeled from the ocean.
Archangelbert Skullvalley planning wants to use the telephone for an expose on Poseidon and to order fresher seafood.
Poseidon’s response to overfishing has been pathetic.
What would Arch like to see from Poseidon?
A response that is heartfelt but moderate, measured but serious.
What is wrong with the seafood market down the street?
The fish are lazy: slack-jawed, silent and still.
Tun is a little concerned about how Kempt’s canal is stopping traffic in the Bowery.
Amble: “Complain, complain, that’s all you’ve done, ever since we lost–if it’s not the crucifiction, then it’s the holocaust.”
Arch: looking towards Tun: How now?
Kempt: “‘The Captain’ by Leonard Cohen, from his 1984 album Various Positions.”
Tun: A good sign — Amble is starting to transition from sea to port.
Tun again: Why don’t we just move the canals to a linked parallel universe?
Kempt: Wouldn’t that be an unfair to the other universe?
Arch shakes his head: Oh man oh man, he just doesn’t get it!
Tun: He doesn’t understand the nature of infiniti!
Arch: Hoo boy! Hoo boy! He thinks we’re dealing with limited infinitis!
Tun: Kempt!, whatever gave you the idea that reality was composed of a limited number of infinites?! I’m sure I never suggested such a thing!
Arch: Infinite infinitis, my boy! Infinite infinitis! Hold to it! Keep it to your breastbone! Swear to me you will!
Kempt (caught up in the patriotic swell): I swear it!
Tun: There’s a good lad! Taking it on faith!
Arch: A man — no!, a Knight of Faith! Watch out Isaac!
Tun: You don’t have to take it on faith, Kempt. You can take it on hand-waving. Someday when we have a couple years to spare, we’ll walk you through hyperion hooray mathematics — then we’ll be able to give you the proofs.
Arch: Wondrous, fantastic, almost fantastical QEDs!
Tun nods: The profundity of mathematics! I always say — the profundity of mathematics!
Arch brings the topic back to the canal.
Yes, they could move the canals into a parallel universe and link it to this one, thus gaining the advantages of the canals while obviating the chance of city sanction. And of course, they could even find a parallel universe where the city of New York would be tickled to have a canal cut from Hudson Bay to XYZ Wall Street (site of SAWB), but he (Arch) for one (fool) invites legal fights with the city of New York — the city’s hometown advantage positively exhilarates him. For waking up and jumping into the morning: next thing to a run is a cold shower and next thing to a cold shower is an invigorating lawsuit.
Tun, who — among other titles — is chief legal counsel to and head legalize writer for SAWB looks a little perturbed, but Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers being a jointly owned LLC, metaphysical adjustments — be they ever so minor and unobtrusive — require the signatures of both of SAWB’s timeless founders and perpetual tyrants (in the original sense of the word).
Kent wonders where the rest of the WAP staff is. AW: “All the rest are dead or in retreat–or with the enemy.” DK: “Same song, same album. That perhaps tells us something of Andy’s progress. But does it tell me where the rest of the WAP staff is?” TW nods. WAP hasn’t had much in the way of staff for a millennium or so–he and Andrew have been creating literary movements and countermovements with the shakes of their thoughts. TW: “We’d hoped the twists and turns within intellectual fashion would draw people into the life of the mind–just as clothing and other consumer fashions suck people into the life of mindless materialism.” DKW: “And? Results?” AW: “You’re giving out some bad ideas, here.” TW: “‘You Must be Evil’ from Chris Rea’s 1989 album ‘The Road to Hell’.” AC: “Stop right there! Those were not our ideas! But–oh! Somebody bail us out! Unclog our drain! Blot, dab, and dry up our spill! (prayerfully, with head bowed) God forgive our role–what we caused without purposing” TW: “Our fashions were sweet and kind; with careful hand, we steered wide of nihilisms and equally so of romanticisms; with sparkling conscientious eye, we avoided the dogmatic as well as the relativistic; I tell you with charging truth: we did dodge all such unbackboned, fanatical isms.” AC: “Aye! With patient love, we kept her–our fleet of story splashes and their mental afterwards–to the center. We did we stayed within the center, where the way is good and true, where the path shines beauty noble in an everlasting light! Virtue our shield, virtue our sword, And yet!” TW: “And yet! Did our intellectual movements play into the general folly? Did our ideas somehow spawn or at least stoke those wicked concoctions? The high falutent chatter of those days! To cast doubt upon human decency while praising brash and selfish talk! Poison to the mind; a sickness in the heart.” AW: “Love, love is all you need.” AC: “Indeed, indeed! All dabs more greedly clutch another; all drips less greedly clutch oneself. Still the account of accountants is not of naught account: wordy fashionistas filled our coffers, their fickled selfly-conscious fingers tossing gold–and where? and where but here? to us, to good old wap, providers of the latest, the most-up-to-date, the most clear and tidy truths sold upon the open street!” TW: “We made a killing. And then, it was–after all, at the end of the day–our competitors who sold those silly brags about Truth’s death and Goodness’s unmasking–!” AC: “Exactly! The best thing would’ve been for the world-circling, sea-mirroring, sky-shattering Wandering Albatross Press to annihilate all comers! Then only sweetness and light–in the most profound sense–would’ve colored the thoughtscapes! I’m telling you, Johnny!” TW: “Yeah, like what? Don’t you get it, John-bo? But (finger-tip to finger tip tap rolling) mmm. But we didn’t–we let the yahoos blend their yodels with our own, and when the mountains rumbled back, what a disastrous unfair din! Had we said nothing, perhaps nothing would’ve come, and perhaps nothing was better than the cacophany that did come, that cackled and like rotting beams cracked the cornerstones.” AC: “No! No! What a blow! Woe to us! Heavy burden! Heavy weight! Ten thousand worlds of guilted grim upon our white-winged shoulders!” TW: “I assure you, Kent; I assure you, Andy: owning and running a publishing house of world-historical importance–nay! of an importance far transcendent of both this world and its history–is a heavy burden.” AC: “Right, right! You think lead shot and marble bases are hefty! You think black holes are dense!” TW: “How do we shoulder it?!” AC: “And at the most fantastic profit margin!” TW: “Amazing establishment, this Wandering Albatross Press!”
[at this point I think it might be good to have a scholarly noting that some sources claim that the answer to that question was different. Then we could put Tom’s pages about the mice interns floating in the ghost cat. In this portrayal Kent’s position is more of a slightly harried all-around cracker-jack business organizer than a dreamy-eyed inventor.]
Bartleby shows up:
It was a glassy glazy
Foggy flowing day
when Bartleby hazy-
stepped his way.
A scraggled wet bird–
Through aged oaken doors,
fell Bartleby the Willard
on pretty hardwood floors
Welcome much shaken fellow!
To this our Wall our Street
hear here our hum bellows
our world-forgiving beat .
Friends, I’m scatters and tatters!
But help me to my sloshy stand,
steady my tremble hand,
remind my mind what matters.
Yes point me to a sturdy chair
a solid desk, a sacred place
where words begin
I’ll write for you–for the fantastic,
world-shaking, universe-creating
Wandering Albatross Press
of somewhere sometime Wall
Street
And so it began. He sat there in a steady old seat at an immovable oaken desk, writing stories, essays, poems, and songs for Wandering Albatross Press. Why? By what authority? With whose permission? He just did.
Tom and Andrew toss a few towers from different histori-spatial moments on top of a geodesic dome that they threw over the WAP roof-top garden. Then they float up to the topmost room of the topmost tower (maybe the stone-walled Tower of London) by shifting around local bits of space, which–at least according to their reading of Einstein’s theory of general relativity–manipulates local gravity.
Tom: It is good to have topmost meetings high up on top of several towers from several different epochs.
Andrew: Huzzah for sure, a gentle, somber, tender huzzah to that.
Tom: And this Bartleby?
Andrew: Beautiful prose–in places.
Tom: Wonderful insights–when they are.
Andrew: A sharp-tipped lance flies through a metal shield and through a metal breastplate and through a chest of flesh and bone and all the more that’s brittle. Straight through–nary a snag! But somehow, upon inspection, the wooden staff shattered and splinters thorough through it all.
Tom: And the cure? or at least the treatment. For a wound that winds all through like some deep and sullen, all-soaking pestilence?
Andrew: Hmmmm.
Back down in the office, Bartleby writes at a beheamoth desk (square pillar legs; the wood slab beveled on the edges and rounded at the corners). He’s at the foot of the far wall of the great common office–opposite and to the right of the door and opposite and facing the floor-to-ceiling windows. Smaller office windows are at his back. The wall to his right divides the common office from the kitchen and the two executive offices. This is the second floor of the WAP building. Below are shops with the clank and clatter of tradesmen and the subsistence-level haggle and hustle of minor merchants. A few desks have been pushed to the two windowless walls to make space for Kent’s giant water telephone which is linked to the outside world by a wooden trough entering through one of the tall windows on the side nearer the door. A rickety wooden Dutch windmill carries the water up from the canal sliced through the bottom of the island. The canal cuts prematurely short the careers of several roads here at the bottom of this busy commercial center. Because of the spacetime melt surrounding the WAP Building, modern day delivery drivers honk their outrage next to eloquently dissenting (with giant gestures) bedouin traders, ebulliently cursing blokes reigning horse drawn delivery wagons, and all other manner of indignantly detained traders.
Kent’s contraption is a big wooden pool filled with water. I believe it is actually a repurposed barefoot-wine-pressing barrel. The bottom of the pool is lined with rocks of various sizes, shapes, and mineral compositions arranged in such a way that the stirring of the water by a big vertical paddle makes the pool works as both a telephone and a multi-species translation device, allowing for serious conversations between humans and marine animals. The paddle is turned by an ox that plods slowly around the pool (I assure you that WAP is in full compliance with all labor laws: the oxen work eight hour shifts with two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch; they are paid as well as an ox can imagine it might want to be paid–which, as Heraklitus guessed–amounts to being given bitter vetch to eat). Kent is still working out the kinks and can only get little splashes of conversation going with the sea-dwellers. So far all he’s learned is that whales usually don’t really like talking on the phone all that much, that most fish are chatter-heads, and that sharks are just as creepy as you’d think.
Typical conversation with a whale:
Kent: Hello! I’m Kent, I’m a human being. What are you?
Sperm Whale: I’m a mighty sperm whale, roaming the sea with the indifference of an immortal of boundless power.
Kent: Yeah, well the sperm whale fishery is outlawed by pretty much everybody now. So I guess–
Sperm Whale: Enough! Your tinny, echoing voice is irritating me. And your manners rot like the sea floor!
Kent: Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean–! Look, we got off on the wrong foot, er tale, er flipper, tell me a little about what it is like to roam the seas all your life.
(Silence)
Kent: It must be amazing to have miles of dark water beneath you all the time!
(Silence)
Kent: And then to dive down into those frigid black depths!
(Silence)
Typical conversation with a fish:
Flounder: Hello, hello! Did somebody say something?
Kent: Oh, hi! Yes. My name is Kent and I’m a human be–
Flounder: You don’t say! A human bee! Never heard of such a thing! And down here in
the water! Amazing! What’ll they think of next! Where are you?
Kent: No, I’m a human being, and I’m
Flounder: Oh, well that’s another adventure entirely! A human being! Yes, of course–like on television! Well, well, well, what’ll the gang think when they hear this one! Me just minding my own business laying flat on the sandy ocean floor and who do I get for a visitor but a human being! Where are you anyway?
Kent: It’s kind of complicated–I’m
Flounder: Complicated! Don’t talk to me about complicated! Have you met my family! My wife–she’s actually not my wife, and last season I had another and didn’t know her either! My children always start out numbering in the hundreds, but right quick the predators and the bad lucks whittle them down to say ten twenty–and most of them don’t grow to be more than an inch or two neither! Course it don’t really touch me all that closely–seeing as I never meet my kids and couldn’t tell them apart from some other flounder’s kids if I did happen across them. Still–I’m sure you’ll agree that the entire thing is rather …
And on and on and on until Kent hangs up or his phone breaks down. Every so often WAP staff takes a trip down to Connecticut where they enjoy fried flounder served with mashed potatoes and canned green beans.
Typical conversation with a shark:
Kent: Hello, hi! Are you a shark?
Shark: Hello? Me? Am I a? Now I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a–where are you? I hear a voice. Sounds like a very nice, tender voice. I’d love to get to know you better.
Kent: Actually, I’m talking to you through an ocean telephone I’ve invented.
Shark: Ocean telephone, eh? How good, yes, wonderful! But the water must link us somehow. Surely there’s a way I could swim towards you and you towards me. I believe in meeting in the middle–don’t you?
Kent: Um, I’m not in the water.
Shark: Oh now that’s a shame! A real shame! Water’s real nice, real comfy. Yes–just the sort of thing a nice, moist young man would enjoy! Why don’t you just put a toe in the–hey, here’s a fun game! You wanna be blood brothers? It’s a great way to bond and be communal–you believe in bonding and being communal, right? You’re not one of those mean, selfish types, are you?
Kent: Well no, I don’t think of myself as that way.
Shark: No! of course you’re not! I can hear it in your voice! Your a sweet, soft, juicy fellow. So here’s how to be blood brothers: first prick your finger with a needle or anything else you’ve got handy–doesn’t have to be a needle.
Kent hangs up, climbs square-pivoting wooden stairways up to his room on the fourth floor of the WAP Building, bolt-locks the scrimshawed whale bone door (made back when whales were an infinite brood of mindless, soul-lesss brutes), puts the dresser against it, draws the blinds, gets in the four-post wooden bed, shudders as it creakily settles, and slowly carefully pulls the patchwork quilt up to his nose.
[here the scholar can note that some say that the story of the ghost mice is a myth and some say the story of the shark conversation is a myth, but all agree that for some reason Kent looked a little pale green queasy, walked with shaky steps up to his bed, and then hid himself under his covers.]
Andy paces by the wall of tall, westward-facing windows, shaking his tanned head, tanned arms behind his back. There’s some trouble on his sandbar brow, some tempest in his dark brown jellyfish eyes.
Bartleby, paler than the white sands of Calais, so pale that from certain angles you see right through him, hunches over a manuscript. His thin shoulders are high and sharply rounded like a bird contemplating flight. His long, beak-like nose and large, wet, runny-egg, squid-like light-green eyes (light green from this angle–his eyes range from coal black to panther gray to caribbean green to welkin blue to puff-cloud white) point with grim resolution towards his written word.
At the moment Kent is neither offending whales, nor hearing fish, nor fearing sharks [nor, notes the scholar partial to the cat ghost account, spooked by cat ghosts]. He arranges stones at the bottom of his telephone, pausing every so often to consult schemas full of math, diagrams, newspaper clippings, drawings and paintings of sea creatures, and magical incantations in Hopi with English, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese translations.
A giant eagle tosses Tom and Andrew through two of the tall windows (another eagle opened the windows seconds before). The two senior editors land on their feet in front of Andy, who stops pacing.
Tom: Andy!
Andy: From this day on until I die, I wear my father’s gun.
Andrew: Bartleby!
Bartleby: No please, not now, exceeding busy, would prefer to be left alone at the moment.
Tom: Andy, you’re assignment is to work with Bartleby. He’s in doleful shape.
Andrew: Exceeding doleful! The kickless colt’s strung out on stuff and nonsense! Swills the balmy brew by the barrel of monkeys! Exceeding tragic!
Tom: Andrew and I blame the foolish Western diet for Bartleby’s outlook. Overprocessed foodstuffs and foundationless philosophizing–the ole double whammy!
Andrew: Exceeding worrisome, this modernity! Exceeding unhealthsome! Merits a tsk!
Tom: Oh, at the very least: a tsk!
Andy: Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.
Tom: There we go! There’s the can do! Here’s the spirit! You’re just the man we’ve been looking for, so come and stand with us: You, Andy Watson, will cook Bartleby’s meals, debate his philosophical positions, and edit his writings. OK?
Andy: Your standing days are done, I cry. You’ll rally me no more!
Tom: You don’t need to know whose side we fought on or what for–it’s not that type of war. Just help Bartleby better shine his heavenly light and let him help you do the same.
Andy: But if a woman take you’re hand, then go and stand with her–
Tom: There’s no woman in this massacre. You don’t have to insert romantic love into every song–that was a weakness of Leonard Cohen’s. Not that I don’t think that on the whole he was a mighty fine lyricist!
Andy: Ruthless compassion for yourself and everyone–yeah it’s hard, but it can be done!
Tom: Now we’re talking! That’s the pep! There’s the way!
Andrew: You hear that Bartleby? We’re making Andy your editor. Even if he wasn’t our only editor, I’ve no doubt he’d be one of our finest. He’s the most paced individual to ever cross my path. To ever hum cross and harrumph recross and crisscross and cross again my path. Rely on his judgement in all things! OK?
Bartleby: The man’s got a jukebox where his heart should be! He’s as hopeless as an oarless raft in whitewater! Don’t even I–a lowly self-appointed live-in staff writer–deserve an editor who can formulate his own thoughts?
Tom: Bartleby! Andy’s transitioning from the sea. He’ll have his own words soon enough. Meanwhile, I suggest you take advantage of an interestingly eclectic tour through the popular music of the last sixty years!
Andrew: Exactly, Bartleby. Take advantage! Turn it to your advantage. Understand and live the WAP fire! Life is a windstorm–the wise are those who learn to ride well. Now lookee here: the wise they just sink their center of balance down over their butts–like so.
Tom: Exactly! Key to wisdom, sink your butt down over your heels, hands loose at the side at the ready, breathing steady and awake from the tandgen
TW and AC explain the necessity of sinking into the moment and catching the flow. How to interact well with the Fates and Furies: feel the kindness within the currents, feel the goodness within the movement beckon, let it lead you as you float down the river of life. Andy says it is not good to make random conjectures about the most sacred things. Kent doesn’t recognize that song. Tom says it is Xenophanes (check)–a good sign; he’s already quoting philosophers.
Scenes of BW and AW getting stronger:
BW and AW eating sweet potatoes, other veggies, dahl, and some grass-fed animal products. And some nuts and fruits. And maybe oatmeal for breakfast. Meditation. Church and buddhist temple. Walks in the daylight.
BW’s essay about the impossibility of either positive or negative statements is forced to examine itself. Is it OK (possible?) to leave ideas in a state of paradox? Don’t they just collapse in on themselves and assume some positive, non-paradoxical statement?
BW’s story about the round-bellied long-striding monsters read carefully by AW and BW
BW and AW doing like gunslingers and secret gardeners–recovering, getting stronger.
But what to do about BW’s idea for making a useful product: PL? How to finesse his crazy anger at the useless product makers?
The city hassling WAP about the canals. Kent feeling guilty. AC laughing them off. Long ago via a secret treaty with AC, TW reorganized parallel universe’s so that AC’s trouble-making is not really making trouble but it still looks like it is.
Some months later:
Kent and Andrew interview Poseidon about his weak response to overfishing and the degradation of the oceans. Poseidon belly laughs and says that he’s not the class president of the sea, he’s the God of the Sea, so it really doesn’t matter what some muckraking journalists say about him. Andrew says he’d simply thought that Poseidon would want to tell his side of the story. Poseidon says he’s a God and doesn’t recognize the opinions of mortals; why would he want to accept the implication that their “side to the story” deserves a response. Andrew laughs. And is there anything that the great God Poseidon would like to share with the rabble? Anything at all? Poseidon says he doesn’t care who knows it, but it is lonely ruling the sea. He’d much prefer to be part of Zeus’s sky court so he could spend his time working and socializing with other Gods. Andrew says he understands. Bartleby, get this down: Poseidon, Lord of the seven seas, indifferent to the media of mortals and homesick for the company of others as Godly as himself. (Andy jumps in, quoting Epicurus about how the gods are too blessed and eternal to bother with us). Poseidon sighs, causing the water to erupt up to the ceiling. When it falls back into the pool, he is gone.
Meanwhile, BW and AW come down, just strong enough to pick some moral fights. BW says that acting like the universe is ruled by humanlike gods amounts to profaning the sacred. He charges Andrew and Kent with atheism for interviewing Poseidon. For what is taking rakes like Poseidon seriously but profaning heaven and disbelieving the true religiousity? AW claims that no one in the group has been a faithful Something Deeperist–that all are guilty of both dogmatic know-it-all-isms (mostly different sorts of skeptical worldviews) Well what do you have to say for yourselves?! Nothing! You got us! We’re a frightful mess! But can two youngish men–even if they are the most maniacal of zealots–hope to straighten us out? Maybe, but they’ll need a great plan: a beautiful grand vision and a matching eye for detail.
Here’s how we’ll fix everything: We’ll manufacture, advertise, and distribute something that is actually useful: Pure Love!
Within all knowledge, thought, and art that’s fit to trot and also forming the nobler aspects of all nonessential consumer marketing/goods shines Pure Love. But the twistings of entertainment and consumption not only marr the final effect, they actually misappropriate the Pure Love. Pure Love is all there really is. Everything that is not Pure Love (100% love: only kindness, giving, holding-up, shining-infinite-light into through and around) is to some degree illusion. But the core of reality shines through all things and so Pure Love lines our every conscious moment. Often our twisted perceptions will catch a glimpse of Pure Love but smush that glimpse into baloney. For example: A gleam of shared selfless effort coopted into patriotic swells that fill you with cold, cruelty-ready pride at the power of your economy, military, culture. For another example: A touch of charmed delight at bodily beauty coopted into a lusty clench in your butt-gut-chest-face-forehead that puts sexual gratification above human souls. For another example: A trickle of compassion for someone in your group coopted into never-ending hate-lust against those in another group. For another example: a flash of real desire to help coopted by professional prides and the corruption of being paid for seeming useful. Honestly, most anytime you feel like you are being good but something besides loving kindness is filling and moving your heart and mind, you are probably coopting Pure Love.
Stand with Andy and I; stand with Bartleby and I; stand, WAP, with us as we drop all this creepy pretend love!
Let’s manufacture Pure Love–it’s easy if we use fictional manufacturing plants.
Let’s market Pure Love–it’s OK as long as we point out that what we are really selling are charming fictions, which to some degree do shine Pure Love and to some degree don’t! Right: Keep in mind that good art captures a whole human moment, which goes from what is prior to all specifics–aka: Pure Love–through the vague mists of feels and notions and out into specific ideas and actions. Exactly!
And let’s sell Pure Love–what’s the harm if we point out that Pure Love is all there really is and you cannot buy and sell the one reality–all you can do is grow in your ability to understand and follow it by constantly working on your emotional/intellectual/spiritual growth.
But how can we justify selling all there is and that we know cannot be bought and sold? Agghh! But we have to sell Pure Love because nothing else is worth making a big deal over! Agghh! There must be a way. Let’s find a way to sell Pure Love while noting that we’re just selling charmingness and that that is a crime when it pretends to be selling Pure Love slash Salvation and it is a boon when it stands naked and so shows everyone that charmingness is art and good art invites artist and appreciator to a shared meditation on the human moment, a moment whose most essential aspect actually does shine Pure Love.
[somewhere we have to insert the Intro to Something Deeperism–otherwise reader’s won’t understand the relationship between the poetic and the literal in our discussion of PL]
So this comic book goes from when before BW shows up (shortly after AW came back from the sea) through the sea telephone, BW’s and AW’s secret gardening, up to the first serious proposal of PL as a product. Maybe the comic book could end with the eerily haunting “Pure Love Factory”:
We own a Pure Love factory. We manufacture Pure Love and sell it on the open market. So what exactly is it that we sell? What is Pure Love? Pure Love is what only gives. Pure Love is what is only kind. Pure Love is what is only wise. Pure Love is what is only good. Pure Love is what is only true. Pure Love is what is only beautiful. Pure Love is what is only just. Pure Love is what is only love.
Pure Love is all there really is. What isn’t Pure Love is nothing much–a twist in the wind. Still much hurts, much drags. We human-types have our troubles. We don’t always get the best. We don’t always give the best. Why is this? Because we and others focus on twists in the wind–I think that’s why.
Many pretend to sell Pure Love. They paint a picture of coolness and/or heart-warmingness, tie it via vague, hopeful associations onto some consumer good, and let everyone’s imagination run wild. Our subpsyches reason: “Maybe the type of life depicted within this ad–maybe this is what I need, maybe this is the one thing the having of which will make all well and the lack of which allows nothing to be well.”
But of course living for and through Pure Love–the one thing that truly is, our truest and deepest nature–is actually the one thing the having of which will make all well and the lack of which allows nothing to be well. And that’s our product.
But how to make what is already the only thing that truly exists? And why bother? We do it like this: through miles of dramatic twists and turns, our giant distillery separates Pure Love from every illusion, every twist in the wind. Why do we do it? But why do we mighty capitalists ever refine and manipulate raw materials? Why do we titans of industry ever bother to create and distribute products? To some degree because we think we’re providing something useful to people and the world, and to some degree to make money. And so yes indeed, we great builders and movers always look out of lofty spacious office spaces with some ambivalence. That’s how it goes when you don’t really know the way but you think maybe you have some good ideas and then off you go and before you know it you’re embedded within and contributing to a system that does some good things and some bad things. God forgive us all!
This factory is big and wide. It spews out jugs of Pure Love. The long arms of our logistics operation reach far and wide. Our marketing campaign blankets the world markets. But I’m here to tell you that I don’t think our product is anywhere as useful as honest and consistent spiritual practice. A big gulp of Pure Love will open your heart enough to glimpse the utter non-existence of all that is not infinitely kind, but soon enough you’ll slip back into old habits. And if you’re not careful–yes, our product comes with warning labels, enough to cover our legal responsibility; but enough to cover our moral and spiritual responsibility?–you’ll just end up appropriating your insight, mixing it in with ego-trip and fear-skip, and come up with a deeper faith in twists of the wind than you had before you almost caught the fire.
We people of action! We busy beavers! God made us. God loves us. But can we step back from the petty what-tut defeats and victories and let God guide us?
TW and AC explain the necessity of sinking into the moment and catching the flow. How to interact well with the Fates and Furies. Andy says it is not good to make random conjectures about the most sacred things. Kent doesn’t recognize that song. Tom says it is Xenophanes (check)–a good sign; he’s already quoting philosopher’s.
Kent and Andrew interview Poseidon about his weak response to overfishing and degradation of the oceans. Poseidon belly laughs and says that he’s not the class president of the sea, he’s the God of the Sea, so it really doesn’t matter what some muckraking journalists say about him. Andrew says he’d simply thought that Poseidon would want to tell his side of the story. Poseidon says he’s a God and doesn’t recognize the opinions of mortals, so why would he want to accept the implication that their “side to the story” is anything worth noticing or responding to. Andrew laughs. And is there anything that the great God Poseidon would like to share with the rabble? Anything at all? Poseidon says he doesn’t care who knows it, but it is lonely ruling the sea. He’d much prefer to be part of Zeus’s sky court so he could spend his time working and socializing with other Gods. Andrew says he understands. Bartleby, get this down: Poseidon, Lord of the seven seas, indifferent to the media of mortals and homesick for the company of others as Godly as himself. (Andy jumps in, quoting Epicurus about how the gods are too blessed and eternal to bother with us). Poseidon sighs, causing the water to erupt up to the ceiling. When it falls back into the pool, he is gone.
BW and AW eating sweet potatoes, other veggies, dahl, and some grass-fed animal products. And some nuts and fruits. And maybe oatmeal for breakfast.
BW’s essay about the impossibility of either positive or negative statements is forced to examine itself. Is it OK (possible?) to leave ideas in a state of paradox? Don’t they just collapse in on themselves and assume some positive, non-paradoxical statement?
BW’s story about the round-bellied long-striding monsters read carefully by AW and BW
BW and AW doing like gunslingers and secret gardeners–recovering, getting stronger.
But what to do about BW’s idea for making a useful product: PL? How to finesse his crazy anger at the useless product makers?
The city hassling WAP about the canals. Kent feeling guilty. AC laughing them off. Long ago TW’s reorganized parallel universe’s so that AC’s trouble-making is not really making trouble. He tries to explain it to Kent, but Kent doesn’t know enough physics.
Some months later: Kent and Andrew are interviewing the sea itself which is and isn’t Poseidon. BW and AW come down, just strong enough to pick some moral fights. BW says that acting like the universe is ruled by humanlike gods amounts to profaning the sacred. He charges Andrew and Kent with atheism for interviewing Poseidon. For what is taking rakes like Poseidon seriously but profaning heaven and disbelieving the true religiousity? AW claims that no one in the group has been a faithful Something Deeperist–that all are guilty of both dogmatic know-it-all-isms (mostly different sorts of skeptical worldviews)
copyright AMW
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
I was just a girl
cutting paper doll chains
and recording mock newsroom interviews on the cassette player
I was just a girl in the sun and the clouds in the rain and the snow
in a small town with small town dreams and small town troubles
But the world was all around, whispering bigger dreams and greater troubles
in our ears, to who we were
I giggled with the best of them
We ran with our bright-colored summer dresses in our hands
We slapped the white concrete with our orange, pink, or green jelly shoes.
We laughed and skipped and our hair was tied back but still it fell down around our eyes and the sun had to dapple through the strands
We were very young
It lasted forever
I always envied Susan, because she was so pretty and all the boys liked her.
Looking back, I see that I was pretty-enough and enough of the boys liked me.
But at the time, my views were very constricted, and I was jealous of Susan.
But not really that much, since mostly we were best friends and we had lots of fun and she was always so nice
Susan and Samuel were always the perfect pair.
In grade school, nobody really went with anybody and we’d have wild crushes on different boys for different whiles, and once in a while somebody would be “going out” with someone else, but it never amounted to more than the occasional walk home and I think I recall at least one example of a couple going all the way to the mall together — driven and chaperoned by one of their siblings.
We didn’t have a separate middle and high school. At seventh grade you graduated from the elementary school and crossed a couple big roads to get to the high school (assuming you came from lakeside of the elementary school; otherwise I guess you had less streets to cross). It was
Author: I forget. No, really, I do.
Copyright: AMW
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
I need to love you, to know you better, to make you happy, to give you everything I am, to make you mine and be yours.
That’s romantic love.
It’s nobody’s fault.
It’s another part of nature that passes beyond nature.
Another part of the animal that slips into the God.
Another part of human life.
Authors: The Usual Suspects
Copyright: AMW
[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]
Hello and welcome to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.
I am your host, Bartleby Willard. And this is our story, the story of the time that Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown couldn’t take it anymore and so they left what used to be called Wandering Albatross Press. They left what is now known as Skullvalley After Whistletown Bookmakers. They were upset with themselves, each other, management, and the general circumstances within which they found themselves.
And so WAP/SAWB/WhateverItWasAndWhateverItIs lost their staff writer and their staff editor. Did they care? But Tun Whistletown and Archangelbert Skullvalley are eternal beings who float though and bend timespace at will. They are too blessed and eternal to care about the comings and goings, the pouts and flurries of mere mortals.
Still there did remain at the SAWB Building @ Somewhere Sometime Wallstreet, Isle & Borough of Manhattos, New York City, NY, USA, North America, Americas, Earth — there did there remain — or perhaps you’ll say linger — one member of the staff who cared.
His name: Kempt Whistletown, youngest of the Whistletown brothers, and who — like Amble — is ensconced in a particular (albeit evolving) timeplace and must live and die within that temporal and spacial cage. This cage is a long tunnel that burrows through the heart of it all even as it winds its empty-headed way across this realm of fleeting happenstances. It is what it is. We can’t all be immortal.
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson