Love at a Reasonable Price

We remain convinced that Something Deeperism is the best of all possible philosophies and that it deserves to be taken seriously and incorporated into everyone’s worldview. If we’ve not managed, in essay after self-repeating essay to demonstrate adequacy of these ideas, the fault lies with us. We humbly implore our readership to contemplate the gist of our arguments and discover for themselves that and in what way our claims about Something Deeperism are reasonable.

To that end, we will here try to sketch out the barest contours of our arguments, avoiding as best we can our bugaboo falldown: excessively detailing various lines of argumentation and losing ourselves in the folds thereby created.

Note that with “thought” I’m here pointing towards feeling and ideating working together. Note perceptions are a type of feeling.

Without spiritual insight our ideas and feelings are fundamentally confused because they don’t know what they are to be in service of, or what they should accept as adequately true and worthy. Without relating meaningfully to spiritual insight, ideas and feelings slip and slide, misunderstanding themselves and getting worked up over phantoms.
But spiritual insight is only possible if our inner push towards aware, clear, honest, competent, kind, shared joy can connect us meaningfully to a True Good that can ratify and explicate this inner push. Otherwise, we’ve no system for choosing one thought-path over another that we can really understand, believe in and understand (example: if the Truth encourages cruelty, then the Truth could never connect to human hearts in a way human hearts could understand or make any use of: if the Truth is not Kind, the Truth cannot be meaningful to human hearts and so no real insight into the Truth would be possible for human beings).
And spiritual insight cannot be literal / 1:1 / definitive. We are finite, and the Truth would have to be Absolute for It to be able to adequately confirm and explicate our inner push for the True Good carried out with aware … kind joy. Therefore, we misunderstand the Truth to the degree we imagine we can literally or definitively understand or describe it.
However, a workable path towards spiritual wisdom is conceivable: Something along these lines: there is a True Good within each conscious moment and It can relate meaningfully to ideas and feelings, organizing ideas and feelings around Itself so that one’s conscious space as a whole (ideas, feelings and the True Good all relating imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately with each other) could get more and more insight into the True Good and aware … kind joy. This insight would not be literal, but it could still point poetically well towards the True Good. With words like “The way forward is the live in and through and for the Love that shines within us all and that bids us to treat one another gently, with kindness and respect, gratefully sharing life: the way forward is to follow the Love that loves us all and would have us love ourselves and everyone with an aware … joyful kindness.”
We won’t agree on everything, but we can agree that any worldview that does not ratify and explicate spiritual insight into aware … kind joy cannot mean anything to any human being. And so we should accept those values and work together to keep our focus on the Light that alone Knows the Way. Which implies not a state religion, but a national commitment to intellectual, emotional, and spiritual freedom within the context of a shared acceptance of the spiritual values without which none of our thinking/acting means anything to any of us: “we are all in this together; we must treat one another with kindness and respect; we cannot Know the details, but we can (as whole-beings that point poetically towards this kind of sense of things:) Know that Kind Love is the right direction and everything that lessens our ability to follow Kind Love is an error.”

1) Intellectual coherency: You can’t intellectually understand, believe in, or care about your own thoughts to the degree they are not aware, clear, honest, accurate, and competent.

2) Emotional/Spiritual coherency: You can’t emotionally/spiritually understand, believe in, or care about your own thoughts to the degree they are not aware, clear, honest, kind, compassionate, and joyfully sharing.

3) Communal coherency: If we honestly believed other people were not essentially the same as we are, then we would have no idea what to make of everything we’ve learned from other people. But that’s everything: we learn basic concepts and language via empathy (by interacting with others and mind-mapping their behavior and correlating it with their statements and other behaviors) and atop this foundation we build book learning. Also: if we honestly believed other people did not share our same fundamental inner and outer vistas, we would not be able to stand anything and would cave in of loneliness.

4) Verification: You can’t understand, believe in, or care about your own thoughts to the degree you do not verify that you are not deceiving yourself about meeting the requirements in 2 & 2. But to do so, you need to demonstrate to yourself that those standards are actually correct, and that you have adequate insight into them and how your thinking/acting relates to them.

5) Opinion inadequate: Human logic, sense perception, and emotions are not adequate for the verification step. Together logic, sense perception, and emotions cannot demonstrate whether anything is really going on or really matters. They cannot figure out whether or not they connect to anything that is actually True or Good, or otherwise reliable. And they know this. They know they don’t fundamentally know what is going on, or if anything is really going on. And so if left to their own devices, they just conjecture and slipslide about, by turns (and a turn may last a lifetime) getting hung up on romantic stands about seizing a Truth, and nihilistic pouts about having no Truth.

6) Insight into the True Good: 1-4 implies that the only way our own thoughts and actions can be meaningful to themselves (and us) is by founding our thinking/acting on spiritual insight, on something like a True Good that can serve as an absolute standard for our thinking/acting. And 1-4 also give some insight into what the True Good must ratify and explicate if we are to have any hope for being able to understand, believe in, and care about It: It must ratify and explicate awareness, clarity, honesty, kindness, compassion, joyful sharing, and Itself.

[More on that final point / more on 1-3: The True Good would have to be something along the lines of a Reality that is also Knowledge (allowing no gap between thinker and object into which error could slip; and being Absolute in the sense of being beyond opinion, error, and debate) that is also Truth and Goodness. If Reality doesn’t agree with our inner push towards aware, clear, honest, competent, effective, compassionate, loving kindness and shared joy; then we will not be able to stand Reality: Reality will never make sense to us and we will be forever divorced from It. Human thought cannot understand an Absolute Meaning that is confused, cruel, dishonest, etc: Human thought could have no meaningful relationship to such a Meaning.]

7) True Good airs: We all act like we already think we have insight into the True Good. We all act like our thoughts and actions make sense to us. We act like we can follow our own reasoning and know what’s going on and have good reason to suppose what we say and do matters. We may say we don’t, but that’s clearly just talk: we get up in the morning, we have hopes and dreams, we make plans and follow them, we have opinions about what’s going on and what matters, and we get excited at people who disagree with us.

8) Coherency or Incoherency: The choice is therefore between more or less coherency by either consciously pursuing 1-5 or not. We cannot help to pursue 1-5 to some degree (even when we muddle our own thinking with “there’s no Truth!” or “I know the Truth: It is xyz dogma!!”; we’re still paying some attention to awareness, clarity, … joyful sharing; and also some attention to our sense within that we need to found our thinking and feeling on something that is truly worthwhile, and not just the conclusion of [as far as they left to their own devices can know] ultimately clueless animal notions about how to take in and organize information). So the choice is do we keep consciously working on 1-5 or not?

Also: We cannot help but make decisions based on values; and ideas and feelings cannot adequately demonstrate conclusions about anything important (like “what’s really going on?”, “what really matters?”, “how should I live?”); so why not reach for spiritual wisdom? It is our only hope to make sense to ourselves (because spiritual insight is our only hope for founding our thinking/feeling on values about what is most important to us)

9) Fundamental Nature of Spiritual Wisdom: Spiritual wisdom has to be a fundamental aspect of our being if we’re to have any hope in making progress with 6. Otherwise, even if we were told the True Good, we’d lack the tools to understand It. Also, if our push towards aware, clear, honest, kind, shared joy is not a seed of wisdom; then we have no coherent system for choosing one thought-path over another. Because that is how we are meaningful to ourselves: we need insight into a True Good to found our values upon, and we sense that aware … shared joy is the way towards that kind of insight. If we’re wrong about that, even if the True Good were told to us, we’d have no meaningful-to-us way of verifying and understanding the True Good.

9) Literal Insight Won’t Work: Literal/definitive/1:1 insight into the True Good is neither possible nor usable. The True Good would be an Absolute Standard, NOT ideas and feelings about an Absolute Standard. To the degree we imagine our ideas and feelings literally correlate to the True Good, we put faith not in the True Good, but in our ideas and feelings, which of course don’t really understand the True Good. Even if God came down and gave us a set of instructions, we would still have to interpret them with our own thoughts and feelings; so even if we get literal Truths, we cannot use them in a literal sense. To the degree we try to, we again focus on our ideas and feelings rather than the True Good.

[Note that “I know the Truth”, “I don’t know the Truth”, and “I don’t know whether or not I know the Truth” are literal statements and don’t make sense to anyone.]

10) Poetic Insight Could Work: Poetic, whole-being insight into the True Good is, as far as we know, both possible and usable. Why not a True Good that shines through everything, including a human conscious moment? Why not a True Good that calls us to Itself and can help us to better and better organize the other aspects of our conscious around Itself, so that our ideas and feelings flow off of It more and more adequately? Such a whole-being organization around the Light (aka: True Good) would allow our ideas and feelings to point towards it and react to It better and more appropriately, allowing for poetic statements about our shared fundamental vista: something like “The Lord our God is One. The greatest commandment is to love the Light (aka: Lord our God; aka: True Good) with all our heart and soul and mind; and to love ourselves and everyone else fully and equally, aware that the same Light shines in and through all of us”.

Poetic statements like the greatest commandment are not literally True. A literal Truth could not fit into human ideas and feelings. However, who said we needed literal Truth? What we’ve always needed is poetic (not mathematically clear, precise, and verifiable; but not therefore inadequately clear, precise, and verifiable) whole-being insight (ideas, feelings, and thought-tools like language all relating to each other and the Light imperfectly, although not inadequately) into that and in what sense it is True to say “we are all in this together and should treat one another with kindness and respect and be glad of each other, joyful for the chance to be here, working together, exploring in life together.”

11) We’re all already Something Deeperists.

We all already know both that to the degree we lack spiritual insight (ie: insight that is not relative) into what is actually preferable; we can’t really understand, believe in, follow, or care about our own thinking and feeling. (I know lots of people think they don’t know that, but this is because they don’t admit that they are granting spiritual authority [when one would say: “No but for real! For real!”] to their notions about [note, for example, how sure of themselves the skeptics are].)

And we all already know that ideas and feelings about the Truth would not be the same as the Truth, and that in fact no end of trouble is caused by people confusing their ideas and feelings about the Truth with the Truth Itself. (Again, I can hear people denying that they ever claim insight into the Truth; but that is again only because they lie to themselves about how right they think they are. They may not say “I know the Truth”, but their feelings clench up and wordlessly scream, “I Am Right! This here! This here is right!”)

Philsophical Something Deeperism then is just about consciously pursuing the True Good in the humanly necessary and sufficient way: Following our inborn seed towards aware … joyful sharing; working to organize our thinking/feeling better and better around the Light/TrueGood within; using both faiths and skepticisms in service of this constantly self-reassessing and -revising whole-being effort to grow in aware loving kindness, to consciously sink deeper and deeper into the Light within that alone Knows what’s really going on and what really matters — the Light with which all is OK and without which nothing is OK.

Is that it?
Did we do it that time?
Oh please please please!

Authors: Bartleby Willard with Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson

PLEASE DISREGARD THE BELOW

Well, friends, the essay rambled quite a bit.
Bullet point Something Deeperism would be more like:
But the gist of Something Deeperism is:
We need a meaningful relationship with a True Good (aka: God; the Truth; etc: we’re pointing with words towards a Reality that is beyond but not necessarily cut off from our thought and its tools [like language]) to be able to understand, believe-in, or care about our own thoughts and actions. The True Good would have to be infinite and we are not; so we can’t have literal/1:1/definitive insight into the True Good. But why would the insight have to be literal/1:1/definitive to be adequate? What about organizing our thinking and feeling around a Truth shining within, not perfectly, but well enough that we could adequately translate the Truth into ideas and feelings — similar to how we cannot perfectly translate our feelings into ideas and words, but with awareness, honesty, accuracy, competency, and gentle kindness, we can do an adequate job of translating our feelings into ideas and words. If both the mystics and our own general sense of things are right and the True Good shines through everything, including our own conscious moment, why couldn’t we find enough whole-being insight (ideas, feelings, and the Light [aka: Truth, True Good, etc] within — all working imperfectly but still meaningfully together) into the Truth (aka: the Light/Truth is orchestrating the whole well enough) that we reach a point of adequate wisdom? A point where one’s thought-as-a-whole knew that and in what sense it was True to say “we are all in this together and should be kind to one another”? We’ll never get it perfect, but isn’t what we’ve just outlined the only tenable direction for human thought: to keep working to better and better understand that and in what sense awareness, honesty, kindness, and shared-joy-with-everyone are the Way?

Anyway, here’s another failed synopsis.
Maybe if you could just find it in your heart to figure out a way to make sense out of the above synopsis!

1) Humans cannot help but accept some metaphysical notions. However we describe what we do or don’t believe, underneath them lie some felt beliefs about what’s really going on, what really matters, and how we should really proceed. This tendency is one of the inborn, indelible aspects of human thought (inborn rules for thinking/acting–for taking-in/creating and organizing information).

2) There’s no possible progress for human beings without internal honesty. Without internal honesty, we don’t admit where we find ourselves and so can’t hope to address our own existential moment and so aren’t even at a starting point. Part of internal honesty is admitting our inborn rules for thinking/acting and following them. The degree to which we follow those inborn rules for thinking/acting, we are present within our own thinking/acting and can progress along with it, traveling along with our own thought and action to our own conclusions. The degree to which we do not follow those inborn rules for thinking/acting, we’re not even at a starting point: rather than thinking and acting in ways that are meaningful to us, we desperately clutch ideas and feelings that – no matter how we try to force things – don’t really make any sense to us, and that we can’t really deep down believe, let alone care about: we willfully ignore our own cleareyed heartofhearts in order to cling madly to haze and maddogfoam.

3) Therefore, we should admit (1) and purposefully seek a clear philosophy (a coherent response to questions like “what is really going on?”, “what really matters?”, “what should I do? No! I mean FOR REAL!”) that fits with our inborn rules for thinking/acting – those inborn senses about how our thinking/acting must proceed.

4) The rules for human thought are something along the lines of (we cannot perfectly capture these inborn directions towards metaphysics, logic, and ethics; but that doesn’t mean we can’t point adequately towards them): (a) We need to think/act aware and clear, being honest with ourselves; (b) we need to seek constantly to move towards the “better” and away from the “worse”, but not just what “feels better” or “feels worse” to me: we must consciously/awaredly move towards what is actually “better”, which implies a standard that we are pursuing: a sense of “True Goodness” which allows us to meaningfully choose between the various possible imperfect candidates for any given “better”; and this implies discovering and relating meaningfully to something like a Wise Light that shines through all things and that knows what is really going on and how we should really think and act; (c) our ideas and feelings can and should relate meaningfully, though not literally/definitively/1:1-edly to the Light (aka: “True Good”) within that alone knows what is really going on and what we should really do; (d) others are essentially the same as we are; (e) we need to treat ourselves and others with kindness and respect; (f) we need to better and better find and follow the Light within that knows that and in what sense it is True to say “we are all in this together and must care for ourselves and one another”, that knows that and in what sense it is True to say “Love is Real and Love is All”; (g) what we need is not to blindly believe a-e, but to find a whole-being insight (ideas and feelings working meaningfully–though of course not perfectly (they are limited, and It is not)–with the Light shining in and through all things)

5) To the degree we doubt that general sense of things, we doubt the only system for choosing one thought/action path over another that we can understand, believe, or care about. And thus we doubt all our thinking/acting. Thus to the degree we doubt that general sense of things

[Explications can be found in “Why Something Deeperism? Simple!]

6) Therefore, we need for the Light within to be real, and not just some animal hoot or holler; and we need to be able to meaningfully relate our ideas and feelings meaningfully to that Light so we can know that and in what sense Love is real. It doesn’t work to force ourselves to believe the undoubtables–that’s just another way of lying to ourselves about understanding ideas we don’t fathom; another way of looking away from where we really are; another way of chasing after grand ideas and feelings instead of staying focused around the Light within that alone knows what Love really is. Instead, we need real whole-being insight into that and how a-g are True (“whole-being” = ideas and feelings working meaningfully, though of course not perfectly [and pretending they are perfecting the relationship so causes so much trouble!], with the Light within and shining through all things). Therefore our only hope is something along the lines of a spiritual path: Get better and better at organizing our thinking/acting around the Light within that alone Knows what is really going on, what really matters, and what should really be done, and that alone is able to guide our thinking/acting in a way that allows them to act Meaningfully (ie: self-awaredly in accordance with the Light/True Goodness/Truth/God/Reality – again we point imperfectly but not therefore necessarily inadequately).

7) But of course, as mentioned in 4c and repeated in 6, our ideas and feelings are limited while the Light – if It is to provide the necessary firm foundation for thinking/feeling – would have to be unlimited (the Light needs to Know the Way – that’s a Godlike capability). Therefore, our insight into the Light will never be 1:1, literal, or definitive. Spiritual success is not an endpoint, but a motion towards better and better arranging our thinking/acting around the Light shining in and through all things, towards flowing off that Light more and more directly.

8) People are things of degrees. The question Something Deeperism invites us all to keep returning to is: “What is the center of my thought/action? Is it Loving Light that alone gives Meaning to both faiths and skepticisms? (Without insight into the True Good, any faith I have is directed at empty ideas and feelings, and not the spiritual object that is alone worthy of my devotion; and without insight into the True Good, seeking accuracy makes no sense and is just another meaningless grab at empty ideas and feelings.)” There’s no perfection. We have to keep pedaling: alone and with others we admit that what we’re seeking is clear effective actually-helpful kindness; that we will never get a bulls-eye, but that we can and should continue to try, try, and try again: pushing out from within, we stand up straight and pray for guidance with one prayer: Please help us to do what is best for everyone: please help us to be aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, and kind; and to live together joyfully, sharing life and Light.

7) Difficulties for your authors are many. For one, how to talk about “True Goodness” and other absolute notions? The best we seem to be able to come up with is to compare such talk to poetry: because human beings are all essentially the same, a well-written poem read with open-heart/-mind allows the reader to share some essential elements within the author’s experience. Likewise, because we all have this yearning towards “True Goodness” inside of us, speaking of it has poetic, though not literal meaning: we point meaningfully though of course not literally/directly/1:1 towards a shared experience.
[That humans are essentially the same is, as mentioned in 4d, an undoubtable: to the degree you doubt it you doubt everything you’ve learned because it is ultimately founded upon interacting with others within the assumption that they are essentially like you (that is why, for example, the sense of the word “ow!” or “pain” can be communicated from one human to another – because of the empathy between us that correlates your facial expressions and actions to those I have or could have), and you also build for yourself a reality you only pretend you can tolerate and participate in. See “How Humans Learn” and “Why Something Deeperism? Simple!” for more.]

[LONG EXPLICATION OF OUR THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE (Kind of Inappropriate in this bullet-points brief)
In general, we’ve sought to show that human thought has both literal and poetic aspects, and that these aspects can and should relate meaningfully to one another, but that part of them relating meaningfully to one another includes an understanding of the limits of this relationship: it cannot be literal/1:1/definitive, but is a pointing-towards that can be more or less adequate. Rather than a theory of knowledge that builds from intellectually-provable atoms to a purely intellectual edifice, or a theory of knowledge that asks intellectual thought to turn itself off at some point and merely accept on faith xyz ideas, we propose a theory of knowledge where intellectual thought makes sense to itself, but part of that self-understanding is the insight that intellectual thought doesn’t matter to itself unless it is founded upon a meaningful sense of True Goodness, and that intellectual thought cannot attain and does not need a perfectly clear intellectual understanding of True Goodness, but that it is both sufficient and necessary for intellectual insight into True Goodness to be a part of whole-being organization around True Goodness, which organization self-reinforces by allowing True Goodness to steer thinking and acting more and more towards Loving Kindness. Basically, we believe that human beings need spiritual insight to understand, care about, or believe in their own thoughts, but that these insights don’t need to be, and in fact cannot be, literal.

Our preferred model of human knowledge is that a Light shines through everything, including human conscious spaces; that this Light is both Reality and Knowledge, and so lacks any space for error and is thus truly reliable; and that this Light is also the True Good, and so truly knows what is going on, what matters, and what should be done; and that this Light ratifies our inner sense that we are all in this together and that compassion and kindness are the Way; and that this Light can relate Itself meaningfully to our ideas and feelings to the degree we think aware, clear, calm, joyful, kind, loving bright. This model cannot be proven intellectually, but seeking for whole-being (ideas, feelings, and the Light interacting imperfectly but not therefore inadequately with one another) insight into that and in what way it is essentially correct can be intellectually motivated; as can the notion that we should all accept the gist of items 1-6 and this theory of knowledge as a shared-philosophy (because if something along these lines is not True, no human worldview has any hope of guiding any human to adequately meaningful thoughts and actions. About this last point let us stress that we are not suggesting a state religion or a culture of Something Deeperist fundamentalism, but merely a general working agreement that we are not going to abandon aware, clear, honest, kind, joyful, considerate, loving thought and action for anything; and we are not going to pretend that ideas and feelings either Know the Truth or are so cut off from It that we cannot meaningfully talk about spiritual values like awareness, clarity, honesty, kindness, competence, and shared joy (Yes! Those are all spiritual values! Because we mean, “actually honest, kind, and helpful!”, not just feels or seems that way: we mean our goal is not seeming to xyz way of looking at things kind and helpful, but actually being kind and helpful; and that implies spiritual insight, wisdom, a working knowledge of Pure Love).
END LONG EXPLICATION OF OUR THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE]

8) Another difficulty has been the question of how to know how well one is keeping the Light at the center of one’s thinking/acting. One angle we’ve tried is this analogy: feelings are wider, deeper and vaguer than ideas and many ideas are – as we think them – wider, deeper and vaguer than the kind of precise ideas we can fit into words and other symbolic languages; yet we can still meaningfully think about feelings and talk about both feelings and ideas because all these aspects of our experience are happening together and can relate meaningfully to one another; furthermore, the more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, and kind our thinking, the more accurately we can translate our feelings into ideas and our ideas into words. Likewise, if there is a self-aware Light shining through all things including our consciousnesses, why couldn’t that Light relate meaningfully to our ideas and feelings? The story of mysticism seems to be the story of such a meaningfully relationship, and there example, as well as our own inborn sense tell us that the way to better translate the light into thoughts/actions means following the same rules we sketched out for better translating feelings into ideas and words: aware, honest, clear, accurate, competent, kind, joyfully present – that kind of thing.

A tricky part with this answer is how do we know when we’re thinking aware … joyfully present? Don’t we – through some mix of corruption and madness – constantly deceive ourselves about these matters? Theoretically, the Light could help guide us towards better and better following It and better and better thinking/acting aware … joyfully present. But it doesn’t take long to think of examples of religious fanatics who’ve convinced themselves of their own righteousness but who are behaving terribly.

So what are we to do?

And the matter becomes even more difficult when we move from individual to shared Something Deeperism, because then people are busy deceiving not only themselves, but others as well.

We authors see in Something Deeperism a philosophy that can unite everyone. Because it does not ask people to replace their own religious and philosophical positions. It understands no set of human ideas and practices is the Truth, and that includes Something Deeperism itself. Accordingly, Something Deeperism just requests that it be brought in as a sort of shared corrective: We can all agree that to the degree any human’s thinking/acting does not keep the Light of Loving Kindness at the center, that human’s thinking/acting is meaningless to that human. We call agree that to the degree a human is not thinking/acting aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, joyfully present; that human’s thinking/acting is meaningless to him or her, and rather than living inside of it and moving along with it, s/he is lost to the random rattle of clueless ideas and feelings lurching dangerously about in accordance with clueless animal whims. Therefore, we should all be able to agree on the need for aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, and joyfully present public debates; and on awarding power and respect to clear honest competent kindness, and removing power and respect from ego-driven bear-paw swipes and powerplays; and we should all be able to agree not on a name for the “Light”, but on a respect for that spiritual dimension: the one that says “no but for REAL: we really should treat one another with kindness and respect, and put compassion and loving kindness first and ego-tripping last.”

But even supposing people would sign onto such a universal doctrine. Even supposing everyone says, “well, of course my own dogmas fit with this way of thinking/acting and I agree that while diversity in thought/action is good for humans, we should keep to these shared principles – the ones that make any thinking/acting coherent to any human”. Even supposing such wonders, what would it change? Don’t people lipservice such values all day long already?

Maybe it could help to motivate a push for safeguards against idiocy and corruption in government. Since from Something Deeperism it follows that our main and our shared enemy is corruption within individuals and groups: the easier it is for an unaware, a confused, and/or unkind thought to win out in an individual’s constant internal war of “which of these many competing notions should I at this moment choose?” the more corrupt that individual’s thinking/acting is; the easier it is within a group for people following such impulses to win power and prestige, the more corrupt that group’s thinking/acting is. In both cases the remedy is two-fold: you need the right attitude, but you also need to take practical steps to keep temptation at bay: we should make it hard to cheat, and as cheating evolves (I am thinking now of a lobbying-funded election cycle), we need to make the rules evolve with it – to push against cheating and towards a setting where aware, clear, accurate, competent, kind thinking/action have more power than their antipodes.

Maybe part of our problem in the US right now is that people with different metaphysics are forgetting that all meaningful metaphysics (everyone has metaphysics – see point 1) share these core values and so we all share core values, meaning that while we won’t agree on everything we can and are indeed duty bound to work together to make the government more beholden to our shared values.

No! We’re not suggesting Something Deeperism as a state religion! Quite the opposite: separation of church and state is an important anti-corruption: combining church and state prompts politicians to lie to themselves an others and voters to ignore the actual issues and actions of their representatives.

So what are we suggesting?
Hmmm
That people consider these ideas and agree to agree where they agree and not let where they disagree keep them from working together where they do agree.
That we as individuals and groups agree that the only way is aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, joyful sharing compassionate loving kindness; and we just keep starting over and over again, trying our best.

But we ourselves falter so much and the salty breathing light-whirling waters have splashed us so far afield.
Hmmm

BW/AW
Copyright AMW

The Hurt keeps coming on long legs,
tossing itself across the spaces.

The Kind Laughter too:
it too flings itself across the world
on longest legs.

Strange creatures;
strange situation.

I can’t find you here.

BW/AW

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

I was colonized so long ago now
Can’t hardly recall it nowadays
Been mostly speaking this tongue for nigh a millennium

I don’t want to justify or fight or fuss.
But I do wanna say: let’s not throw out babies with bathwaters.
There is within Christianity–so long as one remembers that no dogma clutched literally can keep one’s consciousness facing the Truth (which is of course beyond mere dogma)–the possibility of a coherent path to the Truth.
One doesn’t have to be a Christian to find an effective spiritual path, but it goes too far to lump it up with the smokey violence that Christians–being humans and so not too awful much like God in any weather–sometimes reach for.
Liberal representative democracies are the best thing going right now. Let’s work together to safeguard, spread and interconnect them. Let’s not pretend they’re one more hopeless failure among an undifferentiated mushy pile of hopelessly corrupt tyrannies. They have a chance to better and better unfold their promise, and we humandrops with them.
Let’s dig in to our moment, push out from within, and move towards the better hand in hand. There are other options, but they all taste like dirty dish soap. (They taste like that, but are actually worse than that; that they taste that bad and not worse is due to human foolishness.)

Author: Lonesome John, last of the Edinburgh/London/NYC/Paris/Tokyo Highlanders, dropped off near the bus stop, speaking a most polished English and a serviceable French.
Editor: BW
Editor’s Editor: AW

A government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Or a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists?

People shouldn’t self-defeat; from this principle arises Something Deeperism:
Literal beliefs and doubts about True Goodness just confuse our paltry human feelings/thoughts/actions: what we need for our own feeling/thinking/acting to mean anything to us is to center ourselves around the Light of True Goodness shining through each conscious moment, a Light we can relate our ideas and feelings to it meaningfully, though of course (the Light being infinitely bright and our feelings, ideas, and actions being woefully limited) not perfectly/literally/definitively/1:1. [a longer discussion of Something Deeperism is contained in two square bracket asides at the end of this essay; for anyone who’s not already heard all about it so many times they can’t even stand to talk to me anymore.]

Governments shouldn’t self-defeat; from that principle arises a little commentary about recent US obsessions with a couple amendments, that lately seem to overshadow the whole constitution, leaving us all rather in the cold dank dark.

Free speech is there why? So that we can meaningfully discuss ideas with one another, and not have to fear persecution for our ideas. What is unlimited campaign spending there for? To bludgeon the electorate with images and soundbites scientifically and artistically crafted to get us to vote a certain way, think a certain way, believe a certain way, feel a certain way. The constant ad cycle riles us up, hardens our positions, and—because thought dies in equal proportion as incensed certainty rises—turns off our critical thinking, as well as our ability to meaningfully engage with others. How is that helping free speech accomplish its goals of allowing us to meaningfully discuss ideas with one another, free from persecution? It’s not. It is working against that goal. Setting a cap on campaign spending and a moratorium on political ads (for say three weeks prior to election day) would not silence anyone’s voice. The campaigns would still be getting their ideas out there much much much more than any of the rest of us. And it would have many salutary effects: decrease the power lobbyists have over the legislative process; give politicians more time to actually focus on ideas and governing, and decrease the corruption riddling their beings (caused in no small part by their attachment to lobbyists and their money); turn down the fever of the electorate and allow them to think more carefully and relate more meaningfully to their fellows; and even reduce the amount of idea-based persecution within our society, which is artificially high at the moment due largely to the sickness within our democracy, a sickness grown of many errors, including the erosion of trust in our government–caused partly by the influence of lobbyists on elections and politicians–and the inflammatory ad-cycles themselves.

But how exactly would this work? Since even if you tell a campaign, they can only spend X amount of money, there’d be all these other boosters who’d run ads for the candidate. And they could also run ads that agreed with all the candidates platforms and their style but stopped short of naming the candidate–right? Money is power. Build a think tank to give your ideas an intellectual veneer and to scientifically craft talking points candidates and advertisers can use for free. Buy ad time. Pay for lobbyists that both constantly remind candidates that they are beholden to your money for their election and to help candidates draft legislation the way you want it. What do we do? Because monied-interests inevitably twists the rules to their self-entrenching advantages. How to push back on that? Huge wealth disparities are not good for democracy. A wealth tax and an inheritance, oh, pardon me I mean A DEATH OOOH SCARY AND GRISLY SEE HOW WORDS WORK TO MANIPULATE OUR PERSPECTIVES? tax could both keep money from concentrating too awful much and fund things like critical thinking programs in schools and anti-ads–ads that teach critical thinking skills. To return to the worry about people outside a campaign funding ads that basically supported the campaign: what to do?

Let’s read the Second Amendment.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

What does that even mean? Because the states in the union need to be able to protect themselves, they should be allowed to keep a well regulated militia? And so the federal government should not restrict the rights of people in the state militia to have weapons? That’s how it was read for a very long time, before the NRA began it’s push for an interpretation that changed the reading to mean something more along the lines of: the federal government can’t infringe any citizens right to bear arms.

Let’s let both of those interpretations evolve to their logical extremes. In the former, things are a little weird, because California could conceivable stock up nuclear weapons and point them at Nevada. But the latter interpretation is even weirder: not only can state weaponry grow unchecked, private citizens can have any weapons they want, and they can form private militias with whatever weapons they want–even if the States they live in are opposed to allowing private militias patrolling the streets with loaded machine guns. Taken to the logical conclusion, any reading that forbids government oversight over how people and groups of people arm themselves effectively cedes the government’s status as the primary arbiter of violence. What use is “you can have machine guns, tanks, what not – you just can’t use them”? People use the weapons they have, and, if everyone is allowed to run about with any weapon, chaos ensues. Gangs and rich private militias rule the streets; the government is too weak to defend itself; the warlords buy the government completely off; the whole point of gathering together to form a government is undermined.

The amendment made some sense when it was created, but that sense has been lost. When it was created, the various states were more like little countries than they are now, and so they had reason to want their own armies to be able to stand up to the federal government, and therefore it wasn’t completely unreasonable to demand that the federal government not interfere with their militias, which were made mostly of private citizens with their own weapons. The available weapons were relatively weak and inaccurate single-load muskets and single-load cannons. That’s not very much how things are now; but it made a reading along the lines of the former interpretation reasonable-enough. The latter interpretation never made any sense–the whole point of government is keeping chaos and mayhem low so people can focus on things besides fighting to the death.

Indeed, what is more ironic than an amendment intended to protect states’ rights being used by a section of the federal government to strip a state’s ability to control violence within its communities? Picture NYC with people carrying loaded weapons on the subways. This destroys order; this destroys NYC. Do you want to seal yourself up in a little metal room full of people carrying pistols? And New York State has no right to protect its citizens and itself? And this abrogation of states’ rights based upon an amendment about how a state’s right to maintain a militia should not be abridged by the federal government???

If an amendment allows for no reading that is not–when taken to it’s logical conclusion–compatible with the rule of law, that amendment should be taken with a grain of salt. It should be given the least self-defeating interpretation possible, and handled with extreme caution. This is the situation with the Second Amendment, and as technology improves that will be more and more the case. Yes, it would be good to change it, but we shouldn’t have to to avoid turning the US into a gangland fire: laws are there to help govern better: if an interpretation of a law undermine’s one of government’s primary functions–such as maintaining order by removing the ability of non-government actors to behave with a violence that rivals the local authorities–that interpretation has just proven itself self-defeating and thus wrong.

Strange literalisms, pumped up on lobbyists money: that is the problem here. If an interpretation of an amendment leads to national self-defeat, that interpretation should be avoided.

Well, there’s also the side-effect of a push to fill the court with judges who will overturn Roe v Wade. But I don’t understand: the beef with Roe v Wade is federal interference in local laws, and forcing NY to let people walk around with pistols is federal interference in local laws. The impetus behind overturning Roe v Wade is avoiding the deaths of unborn children, but gun violence is killing futures of all stages of development.

Everyone agrees that the SC was right to declare separate but equal unconditional, but with abortion, gun control, and political advertising, there are large factions that think the SC should stop acting like a king, twisting the Constitution to his dogmatic will. Maybe the SC should be demoted – they can be the final word in the courts, but if Congress votes and the president signs (or finds his veto overruled) the ruling can be overturned. How often could an SC ruling or the overturn of one be challenged? Once in the first four months of every new House. As it stands now, the SC has more power than wisdom and the SC justice selection process is damaging the larger political process. Also, term limits.

But it seems that no matter how we organize power, the abortion debate will continue to harm the larger political debate until a compromise is found.
Maybe leave it up to the States but if they outlaw abortions they have to pay for transfers to artificial wombs and all related expenses before and after the birth?
I see no perfect solution.
Both sides have a point: neither rights for unborn fetuses, not rights of women over their own bodies are crazy ideas.

Author: Dr. Brian Stormun, Professor of Hey Cool it! Just thinking about the shapes of the moments! If passionate intensity were a wise council, polar bears would rule the world and rutting wild boars would be the foremost authorities on God’s Truth!

See notes on Something Deeperism below (I mean, if you want to hear more about it – you’ve probably had enough by now)

[Can we relate our ideas and feelings meaningfully to a Light shining through each conscious moment? For all we know we can! And examples of clear-eyed kindness (both as little happy accidents within our own putrid selves, and as more sustained accomplishments in holy people like the Buddha and other storied Love-firsters) exist to point the way.]
[Can’t we know literal things about the True Good? Like that it literally exists, and maybe further details like Jesus is the Son of God, and all this is blessedly assured to me via divine revelations mediated by the holy fire of the Holy Spirit and sanctioned by the holy seal of the Holy Father?? No, we can’t have literal knowledge of such notions. Our ideas and feelings don’t even know what any of that means in a literal sense – they are limited and faulty, whilst the True Good — for it to be of any use in our quest to be able to believe in, understand, care about, and follow our own thoughts — would have to be unlimited and faultless. Second, even if God literally appeared to us and explained the literal Truth of Reality, while simultaneously allowing us to experience that Truth, our ideas and feelings are still not tools wide, deep, clear, reliable, or fathomable enough to really understand the Truth of Reality. But in our normal daytoday lives, we’d still have to rely on our ideas and feelings to remember, understand, and apply the lessons learned from God. Either doubting or believing literal notions about the True Good exceed human capabilities. We know poetically that there is a True Good, and we relate this poetic knowledge to other religious and philosophical ideas, but they too are held only poetically. And the poetic knowledge we need to know most fundamentally — again, for own feelings/thoughts/actions to be meaningful to us — is that we should be aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, joyful, and kind; and centered around the the Light within that alone knows that and in what way it is True to say “we are all in this together”. That’s the point of Something Deeperism: not to get us to throw out our various poetic notions about Reality, but to remind us that we don’t literally understand ideas about Reality (but can only have literal grasp of literal concepts, which fit only in reality — in a self-declared set of unproven and unprovable assumptions there only to help us organize our thoughts and actions within those mere assumptions [ie: we don’t know if “London” exists for Real, or, if it did, in what sense it would be “Real”, but we don’t need to know that to fly into London, hang out, make friends, etc; same with science, math, etc — their relationship to a Reality is unfathomable, but they are still coherent, usable, and beautiful]); and to also remind us what our most fundamental poetic insight must be if our thought is to matter to us (and therefore be usable to us; and to be able to inhabit our own feeling/thinking/acting and travel with our own ideas to our own conclusions). Human thought is a thing of degrees, so none of us are ever a 100% failed Something Deeperist or a 100% successful Something Deeperist. Something Deeperist isn’t about 100% Good or 100% Bad, but about gently pushing towards the Good — towards keeping first things first: journeying deeper and deeper into and flowing more and more cleanly off of a whole-being insight into why Loving Kindness is the Way.]

The Stolen Child by WB Yeats

Rhyme is abab aabb aabb (the bb is unusual: first b has a rhyme word rhyme at the end; second b is much longer than all the other stanzas before finally landing on rhyme.)
Where dips the rocky highland u/s/u/s/u/s/u 7
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, u/s/d/u/i/s 6
There lies a leafy island u/s/u/s/u/s/u 7
Where flapping herons wake u/s/u/s/u/s 6
The drowsy water rats; u/s/u/s/u/s 6, 3 stresses
There we’ve hid our faery vats, u/i/s/u/s/u/s 7, 3 stresses
Full of berries ls/u/s/u 4, 1 real stress
And of reddest stolen cherries. u/u/s/u/s/u/s/u 8, 3 stresses
Come away, O human child! ls/u/s/u/s/u/s 7
To the waters and the wild u/u/s/u/ls/u/s 7
With a faery, hand in hand. ls/u/s/u/s/u/s 7, 3 stresses
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. ls/u/s/u/s/u/s/u/u/s/d/i/u/s 14, 5 stresses

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

Publication history (says Wikipedia):
December 1886 Irish Monthly in December 1886.
As part of Irish poets Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland in 1888
In Yeat’s first collection of poetry The Wanderings of Oisin in 1889, when he was 24 years old

Rhyme is abab aabb aabb (the bb is unusual: first b has a rhyme word rhyme at the end; second b is much longer than all the other stanzas before finally landing on rhyme.)
Where dips the rocky highland u/s/u/s/u/s/u 7
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, u/s/d/u/i/s 6
There lies a leafy island u/s/u/s/u/s/u 7
Where flapping herons wake u/s/u/s/u/s 6
The drowsy water rats; u/s/u/s/u/s 6, 3 stresses
There we’ve hid our faery vats, u/i/s/u/s/u/s 7, 3 stresses
Full of berries ls/u/s/u 4, 1 real stress
And of reddest stolen cherries. u/u/s/u/s/u/s/u 8, 3 stresses
Come away, O human child! ls/u/s/u/s/u/s 7
To the waters and the wild u/u/s/u/ls/u/s 7
With a faery, hand in hand. ls/u/s/u/s/u/s 7, 3 stresses
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. ls/u/s/u/s/u/s/u/u/s/d/i/u/s 14, 5 stresses

.

They lent their lives at gentleness
that it may come to pass.
They spent their light on’a simple wish
that light itself might last.

Come you children of the forest
you who prance upon the sea
You creatures who ignore us
Descend!, but peacefully.

Oh to spend ourselves on living
not bitter incomplete –
for the God to guide our giving –
sun sprinkles dancing feet.

BW/AW

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

We wanted to keep all these updates somewhere; this is the where.
Here’s the current “Buy the Books!” page.

In Summer & Fall 2019, we plan on releasing the following books:
“Love at a Reasonable Price, Volume I: First Loves”; “First Essays” (essays written while working on “First Loves”); and “First Super Hero Novella” (a silly novella about a pair of superheros trying to make things better while not making things worse).

We’re making the “First Loves” Landing Page now (July 2019).

Previous updates trip over each other below:

Update June 2019
We want to release “First Loves”, “First Essays”, and a yet unnamed novella by the end of this summer. This site will have intro blurbs, samples, and a place to buy the books.

Update November 5, 2018:
Early 2019. We hope.
And it’ll be fine.
We’re also heading off into other ventures, which will also be fine.
It’ll all be fine. No need to worry.

Update October 8, 2018:
It doesn’t matter. Maybe we’ll release the book this Christmas, but it doesn’t matter. The book is OK. Overrrun by philosophical asides and a little dull even in some of the pure fictions, though still probably on the whole basically worth reading and in many places entertaining. Still, whatever. It was to be the first of many volumes of “Love at a Reasonable Price”; we’ll see; whatever. The path is pathed out today and tomorrow’s just a word for “get up at 7am, at the office by 9am, work until 5:30pm, back home by 6pm; look out the window until 9pm at which point you head towards bed, reaching it around 11pm; then of course the next thing you’ll know is 7am”.
These are men who can’t
Why can’t they?
Why won’t they?
Why don’t they?

Update December 30 2017:
So we might have a book ready Spring or Summer 2018. You’ve waited six years–what’s a few more months?

Update April 14 2016:
I am lonely and don’t know what to say about the years that bob and dip beneath the bridge on the quick clear creek flow. How can I go forward for real? Anyway, now I think I will make “Love at a Reasonable Price” a finished ebook of somewhere above 100 and somewhere beneath 200 pages, and I’ll sell this book of fractured attempts at a decent steady hearty wholesome love to the world at a reasonable but still hopeful price (US$5).

[Update September 2016: I hope I’ll release the first part of this giant ebook by December of this year. You can write to Bartleby@WanderingAlbatrossPress.com and ask me if I’ll ever do anything or not.]

But the larger topic, the deeper drill with the sharper bit is “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”. An account of the current climate and happenings at the Wandering Albatross Press Building in Sometimes Somewhere Wall Street. No one is there! Nothing is happening! There’s no one to talk to at all: Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson couldn’t take it; they split and left. Kent felt sorry for the rift between the frames and so he asked the Mountain King for an interview, thinking that that stodgy old loner of a monarch might know the way to Bartleby and Andy. And there the story’s stagnated like–if you will remember because I oh so much very much do!!!!–the clam-ridge-shaped scum and the white fallen fluffies and the twigs and leaves by the grate of the shallow narrow little slip of a creek that started in the pipe draining from where they made and froze a pond in the winter, flat-trickled past the playground with the graffiti-scarred and urine-perfumed rocket ship (it housed a ladder that led to the tall slide) on one side and the tree-edged yard and the long rectangular slightly sunken encurbed parking log of the old brick school house on the other side, and ended in that grate by the street, under which it snuck only to appear again in a little dense, fat-vined wood on the far end of the yard of the whitevinyl Catholic church and then continued through a wooded corridor where the long yards of houses facing one way faded into the long yards of facing the other way. That ebook will still I guess start evolving again at some time. Access is sold below.

sigh,

BW,
with the worried support of AW,
here alone
in the old snow drifts
by the side of the cemented cut-stone wall

On forest-green tube bike he wobbles near
Sharp short pale grass and windmill petals thin
in purple pink and white. The U-bar steers
Around and pointing straight in right at him.
Together fall young boy and bike on path
Cement, pebbly worn — neighbor’s walkway where
He fell forever onto flat round poke.
Time drained away as handlebar all air
Removed. A moment outside time provokes
A still wide patient quiet; life’s on hold.
The heaving pain will come but not til the secret’s told,
Not til the answer floats with forever with the forever slow-approaching pebbly-rough sidewalk
Next to the step-up and the low flowers in loamy bed and with the dry light green grass and softblue sky all around and through as witnesses to what?
Some riddles only expand explained to mortal man.

AW/BW, copyright AMW

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

Hello and welcome to today’s meeting of the Mystic Rationalists. We thank all who’ve ventured out on this cold and slippery night! Please help yourself to some treats in the kitchen, where my mister, a great thinker and greater cook, has spread a feast of roasted veggies and carefully prepared beans, with a delicate pine nut and cherry dressing that he invented himself way back in his bachelor days studying in old Germany, being then and there a theology student, and beliking himself to a more critical and compassionate Faust, did bend his head over the ancient tomes of yet more ancient Wittenberg. And again, thank you for joining us. We know that your lives are busy and that even in the fondest weather our mountain cabin beneath giant evergreens and tilted—not, we hope, to precariously!—over a winding river that yet moves beneath a sheet of hardened snow: I say, we know that even in summer’s richest patience, this is quite a trek; and so we again thank you for your attendance, for your effort, for enriching this fellowship with your own.

The business of the Rational Mystics is always the same: to advance the only cause that can truly help: the cause of wisdom. Too long have reason and spirituality considered themselves at odds; too long have they mistook one another and themselves, attempting to live apart and justify themselves without the other’s company. What folly! The old Latin-weilding theologians perhaps did humanity a disservice when they reasoned that revealed wisdom and reasoned wisdom must exactly coincide. From there we slid into incoherent notions that science somehow agreed with the details of middle ages catholic theology, which of course soon sent well-intentioned seekers reeling in confusion and eventual rebellion. The misunderstanding was two-fold: both the reach of revelation and science were oversold, and the necessity of experienced spiritual insight overlooked. Regrettable, to be sure.

Mystic Rationalists take another approach: for our thoughts and feelings to make sense and matter to us, they must be intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually coherent; but the way to achieve that is not by demanding the intellect, emotions, and spirit understand and agree in a completely literal, systemitizable way, but rather that they agree as a whole and understand one another adequately for the spirit—which is wisest and best—to guide the intellect and emotions, which lack the completely unassailable wisdom of the inner Light, but whose clarity and coherency we nonetheless need to relate meaningfully to our own ideas and feelings. The path is therefore not an argument for why God exists and agrees with xyz theology, but merely an argument that points out the need for the inner Light to relate meaningfully to one’s ideas and feelings, the possibility that such a meaningful relationship could proceed in a poetic though of course not literal sense (for the infinite Light could conceivably make itself known to finite thought and feeling, but of course not in a literal, definitive, 1:1-translation sense), the method that would have to work for the result to mean anything to us—namely thinking and feeling aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, and joyfully generous (unless that inborn sense of how meaningful and worthy thinking and acting is satisfied, we are divorced from the only path we have towards thoughts and actions that mean anything to us, or that we can even stand)—, and the guardrails that would also have to be kept within for the results to be worth anything to us—”How much do I love the Light within with all my heart and soul and mind? How much do I know and treat everyone as I treat myself? How much do I know and live within the understanding that we are all of us in this together? How much am I ruled by kind compassionate joyful generosity rather than greed, spite, meanness, anger, contempt, cruelty, egotrip, and all the other nasties?”

Mystic Rationalist let us pray together, practice together, study together, grow together. How can we really help one another, our groups, our neighborhoods, townships, communities, nation states, our world? What does it mean to live well? What is joyful decent creation? What is a beautiful dance—given what we are, creatures of body, mind, heart, and inscrutable but still very felt and to some degree relatable soullight—? Huh? What is the way forward for everyone????

Authors: AMW/BW, copyright of course AMW, as BW is only an imagined friend and has not the legal right to hold a copyright

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

A poem we’re writing on the occasion of Oliver’s sixth birthday.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
Much overawed, the monster paused
And swailed a measure back. [sit on one’s swooping tail]

“Yon vorpal sword you nimbly strusht [to strongly push with a wooshing rush thrust]
But Jabberwock has eyes of flame –
And claws that crash and jaws what crush! [drip + gore]
Why speak not gentle first your claim?”

“My father dreams a gleamide rail, [gleam + wide]
That goods may cross this tulgey wood.
Or else, he thwail, our business fail; [thunderous + wails] [worries + sulks]
So slay you says I should if could.”

One two and two and threw and threw
Their scoopfling claws much earth can throw. [scoop + fling]
The path they tore links plain with shore:
Three hundreds feet from head til toe.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

“I have not slain the Jabberwock.
With beasties of a manxus stamp,
From meadow high to low down sea,
I’ve wuilt a winding ramp – [willed + built]
For shipping intermodally.”

And now sail wares of Carrol Shares
belound the tulgey wood in where [below + around]
sit he and Jabberwock
in uffish, well-lit thought,

‘templating the heavly Forms, [heavy + heavenly]
that never die, that cannot lie,
that nourish kindly human norms.

Bethinking Infinite Eternal Form
of Goodness True and flowing fair,
Insight moves heaves and spreads
in sacred, solemn, mirlithe care [mirth + lithe]
until there’s nought to dread.

’Tis brillig, and the slithy toves
yet gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy shakes the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabed.

Authors: Lewis Carrol, BW, AW
Copyright insofar as one can in this instance (ie: of course no one has the rights to Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwock): AMW

End

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]