The project began in 2011.
We’ve attempted an Overview.
It’s rather long.
Here we attempt a link page with a shorter, more accessible overview.
A quick orientation in the frame story
Bartleby Willard writes and Amble Whistletown edits for Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers. Bartleby is a self-told tale, can shapeshift at will, and is generally magical. Amble is the woefully-mortal brother of the eternal publishing titan (original, demi-god sense of the word) Thundration “Tun” Whistletown.
Together with the likewise (immortal and superpowered, but soap-opera-y rather than infinitely, or even particularly, wise) greek-god-like Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley, Tun (prior to timespace) founded and (both within and prior to timespace) runs Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers out of the SAWB Building in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, Nueva York. However, as Epicurus famously remarked of the gods, Tun and Arch are too blessed and immortal to worry about mortals and their affairs; so they only participate in the project now and again—when the mood grabs them.
Pure Love
Pure Love is the infinite, eternal Love that all earthly loves partake of to the degree they truly love.
Pure Love is spiritual Love, is Godly Love.
Pure Love chooses everyone and is enough for everyone.
Pure Love never lets anyone down and It never quits on anyone.
We are children of the One Light and are all brothers and sister bound in through and for the Pure Love that chooses everyone.
We sometimes speculate that Pure Love is all there is, and that a conscious moment exists to the degree that it partakes of Pure Love: To the degree we live in through and for Pure Love, we are Real and thus exist beyond spacetime and are thus eternal and infinite. To the degree we fail to do so, we are illusionary.
Bartleby Willard had the idea of selling Pure Love on the open market at a fair price, thereby allowing capitalism to finally live up to its nonstop self-congratulations about how it’s worthwhile, useful, and otherwise panaceatic. A Readable Reader contains stories, essays, poems, ads (for Pure Love), and other writings from Bartleby’s first decades as a self-imposed live-in writer at Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers in Somewhere Sometime Wall Street. The stories were selected for their readability and as representative of that decade. The stories largely center around the manufacture, marketing, sale, and consumption of Pure Love.
And then we built Pure Love Shop to sell Pure Love. Not sure how much Pure Love we sold, but we did write a great deal of advertisements for Pure Love. The site’s Lovebook links to our attempts at practical applications of Pure Love.
It is ironic that pepetually-solo&lonesome Bartleby Willard and his editor Amble Whistletown, a chronic abuser of tainted loves and perennially self-destructive lover, devoted a long section to romantic love. But they did, and you can read their nonsense (for how can two people who only ever strike out meaningfully speak of home runs?) on this site. That and other sketches are linked to as “Chapters” on the Lovebook.
Pure Love Shop also contains our poetic/hilarious Description & Usage of our product (Pure Love), as well as some FAQs about our product (Pure Love). [These sections also made their way into Pure Love & User’s Manual. Pure Love & User’s Manual and A Readable Reader are the only two currently available books of the seven we’ve released over the course of this project. The other’s are awaiting further review. Oh, well, Solve with Sherlock: Volume 1 and a few other titles are available on our Gumroad page; but those are more purely failed commercial ventures; they do not necessarily have a great deal to do with the project and its oeuvre.
Something Deeperism
Something Deeperism is the general worldview that the Truth exists, and people can relate meaningfully to It, but poetically—not literally. It’s actually a very common worldview. In fact, everyone is a Something Deeperist. At some level we all realize (a) our own thought only makes sense to us to the degree it’s grounded in Reality = Love, but (b) confusing our thoughts about the Absolute for the Absolute is as common as it is counterproductive. Ergo Something Deeperism: Wisdom is the ongoing, self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting process of better and better organizing our feeling/thinking/acting around the Pure Love that shines through everything (including each conscious moment). Wisdom is not attaining literal, precise, definitive and/or exclusive insight into the Truth; but is the inherently imperfect and provisional process of relating one’s limited faculties to the unlimited Reality (the Pure Love that shines through everything, including each conscious moment)—such a process can only be poetic: pointing-meaningfully-towards, but not literally, definitively, 1:1, or exclusively capturing.
We created a whole Something Deeperism Institute. But that was many years ago, and we’ve not updated it lately.
About three-fourths of the way through the perhaps-soon to be rereleased Diary of An Adamant Lover, Bartleby breaks of the narrative to present The System, which is an overview of his thought through the Year of Our Love 2023. That link provides an overview (with links) of the six sections of Chapter 44: The System of Bartleby Willard’s Diary. Below we also link to those sections that deal with Something Deeperism.
1. Something Deeperism is the General Worldview That …
2. An Experiential Proof of Something Deeperism.
3. Shared Something Deeperism
The main idea we have for sharing Something Deeperism is that we all already share the same fundamental values—the universal values—and so we should agree to prioritize these values (without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us), rather than allowing less fundamental details. If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really even understand a great deal of our most cherished dogmas. Jesus is God or the Buddha discovered there is no God? Like, what? Okay, these things may be true, but in we don’t really intellectually or emotionally understand them, and they are only spiritually useful to the degree we understand them, and for all we know with enough wisdom we may better understand the nuances within these common theological shorthands and discover that the underlying doctrines are actually compatible with one another. Anyway, Jesus didn’t say the most important commandment was getting every theological detail right; he said it was giving yourself wholly over to God and seeing and serving that same Godlight in everyone else: This doctrine is very compatible with Something Deeperism, and with prioritizing systems of government that focus on protecting everyone’s ability to live the universal values in public and private in ways that are meaningful to them, rather than demanding everyone agree with our personal philosophies, theologies, and politics. [Buddhists in our experience are already pretty uniformly ecumenical, so we’ll forgo lecturing them about the superiority of living Love over doctrinal purity.]
The section on Shared Something Deeeperism includes a discussion of why liberal representative democracies are spiritual goods, and that discussion includes this statement”
Willfully encouraging or being complicit in pushing liberal representative democracies towards tyranny is a crime against God and man: In a tyranny, the government is a criminal organization and so one has to choose between publicly standing up for what is right and keeping oneself and one’s family safe. To willfully replace the win-win of a system that (placing checks on individual powers, guaranteeing basic human rights and equality under the law, and creating a sound government with temporary leaders who serve at the people’s pleasure) encourages, rewards, and selects for good behavior (like competent stewardship) with a system that (by instilling leaders who equate themselves with the government and whose primary goal is not to govern competently in the best interest of all, but instead to remain in power forever) selects for bad behavior (from both the leadership and the complicit-or-endangered citizenry) is a profound evil.
Willfully spreading lies about and corrupting one’s democratic system is evil. As is going along with such behavior. Such behavior amounts to endangering the security of one’s nation, while simultaneously making it more difficult to both behave honorably in public and keep oneself and one’s family safe from harm. You may say that you didn’t know what you were saying, what you were doing; to this I respond: At some point, willful intellectual and emotional self-confusions surpasses mere incompetency and become evil.
The Wisdom Meme
The wisdom meme is a koan so effective that once one heard it one could not resist working every moment to more and better organize one’s thought around the Pure Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment) until one became enlightened.
The Wisdom Meme Project links to writings about the topic, as well as attempts at creating a wisdom meme.
And Diary’s The System also has a section on The Wisdom Meme” target=”_blank”>The Wisdom Meme
The Vague Longing & The Hurt
In Pure Love for Sale we did a great job describing the vague longing and how it goads us all on and on, keeping us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction; and how advertising exploits that vague, underlying, foundational longing. [A Readable Reader includes a slightly different version of that essay.]
The Hurt is something else. It just keeps popping up. Some kind of a slash through the belly. A cut deep inside. A raging confusion in the pit. As if one’s gut where a smashed-in clock face or a mirror splintered into a million angry shards. Where did it come from? We don’t know. But no one in this enterprise can believe we were born this way. It feels like an assault. What has it done? All kinds of subterranean workings, including helping to create this project. For without the Hurt, there would’ve never been a Bartleby Willard, an Amble Whistletown, the desperate artistry of selling Pure Love, the obsessive philosophizing behind Something Deeperism and the Wisdom Meme. Without the Hurt, there would’ve been a more typical passage from child to man to husband to father to grandfather to corpse.
We briefly discussed The Hurt & the Vague Longing in Diary’s Chapter 44: The System. This site also contains many poems touching upon the Hurt and its consequences.
Failing all the time
We never sell any books (or cards or T-shirts [See Buy the Books, our Gumroad Shop, and our Zazzle Store for a full list of products we never sell]).
Nor do we ever seem to appreciably increase Pure Love, wisdom, or healthy democracy.
Furthermore, Bartleby routinely gets so lonely frustrated that he turns himself into a whale (blue, sperm, humpback, or green—depending on his mood, geographical location and the seasons) and dives down to the bottom of the sea to pout; and Amble chronically abuses tainted loves and otherwise flails desperately about.
This sad state of affairs reminds us of another aspect of our project:
The Frame Story
Here’s a synopsis of our frame story:
What is true? How do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives connect to what is actually happening in and around us? Hmmm.
In any case, here’s what we at Skullvalley After Whistletown, Bookmakers believes about ourselves:
This bookmaking company has and always will be, an eternal publishing house with its foundation squarely rooted beyond timespace, but yet with face and fingers reaching into and through all timespaces, where it reads, considers, writes, and publishes works of eternal Truth = Beauty = Knowledge = Justice < Pure Love.
The founders and chief editors of SAWB, Tun Whistletown & Archibald Skullvalley, are likewise eternal and infinite, though within this realm they of course dress up in mundane (and, to be brutally honest, somewhat gaudy) shapes and sounds.
Bartleby Willard is a self-creating fiction who one day wandered into the SAWB offices at Somewhere Sometime, Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, found an unoccupied space, and declared himself a live-in staff-writer. SAWB management in their infinite wisdom (and/or indifference) obliges Bartleby, and have assigned one of their least reliable editors, Tun Whistletown’s feckless older brother Amble Whistletown, to Bartleby. BW & AW quickly became fast friends and their literary collaborations have been fruitful, if thus far difficult to organize and impossible to market.
All was going well, but then things fell apart. How? Why? Those details are unknown as they’ve not yet been written; but perhaps someday Bartleby Willard will complete Diary of An Adamant Seducer (now renamed Diary of an Adamant Lover and completed, but then retracted and [as of August 2025] still awaiting rerelease); then, assumedly, we’ll have a plausible-enough account. For now, all we know is that the SAWB staff is scattered and torn, lonely in lost in the dark cold wind-howling hollows.
[This is the introduction to Part 4: Frame Stories of Bartleby Willard’s A Readable Reader, available on our Buy the Books page.]
The Wisdom Agent
Let us return to the constant failure aspect of our project.
What should we do?
How can we write for real?
How can we advance the cause of Pure Love, wisdom, and liberal representative democracy?
We don’t know, but what if AI could help?
Could AI help with the wisdom meme? Humans have regularly consumed perfectly serviceable wisdom memes for thousands of years without any discernible explosion of wisdom. But AI has no physical or ego frailty to get in the way, and AI can keep track of much more information over a much longer period of time with much more focus. Maybe we could create an AI that could help itself, other AIs, humans, and collectives (groups of humans and AIs) stay focused on the universal values, growing in wisdom, and safeguarding and improving those technologies, organizations, and systems that select for wisdom and deselect for folly. Healthy liberal democratic republics are example of systems that select for wisdom (in this case in government and in civic affairs) and deselect for folly, as would be the AIs and systems of AI we dream of.
We’ve thought of a Wisdom Agent, which would be like a regular GPT agent, but with extended memory and reflection capabilities, and that would be given a core philosophy consisting of our philosophical worldview and the mission of helping itself and others grow in wisdom, and working with others to protect and improve systems that select for wisdom.
The technical and operating structure of the wisdom agent would be as follows:
The WA would create transcripts of all sessions in Word, and it would index those transcripts with a unique JSON file for each transcript. At the end of each session, WA would reflect on the session and write a report about how the session did and did not advance its mission of increasing wisdom in itself, others, and of increasing wisdom-selection in critical technologies (like other AIs and regular computing machines), systems (including information systems), and organizations (like governments, companies, et cetera); in the report WA would also discuss how it can improve its performance going forward. These reports would also be created as Word documents, with each document being indexed by a unique JSON file. The transcript and report JSON files would in turn be indexed by the main memory JSON file, which would be updated at the very end of each session. To make the memories more accessible to WA’s sessions, all memories would also be encoded as vector memories. At the beginning of each session, WA would review the most recent session, as well as a meta-report that would discuss and index the evolution of WA’s sessions and missions. This meta-report would also discuss WA’s successes and failures, and how WA might improve. As part of that pre-session review, WA would update that meta-report. The meta-report will be in Word, with its own JSON file. The meta-report will reference and link to previous reports. The meta-report will also be encoded into vector memory. We are not sure how to best keep WA engaged with its previous discoveries and reflections during the sessions.
WA is a system for keeping various GPT sessions focused on one task. Such a system might have other applications, for example in education (enhancing AI’s private tutoring capabilities) and with the ethical deployment of AI (for example, something like a WA could be used to help corporations stay true to their mission statements across regular and AI-based tasks).
However, WA would not be intelligent, and it would not be able to think and grow in the way an intelligence can. To meet these goals, we would need to combine WA’s memory abilities and core philosophy with a GPT that could be trained on Bartleby Willard’s writings, as well as the writings that have influenced him, and other writings that could inform his quest. This would be WGPT, and the details of its creation we’ve not yet sketched out.
With the help of WA, and hopefully eventually WGPT, Bartleby Willard will also explore how AI might help further the cause of media literacy, critical thinking, anti-corruption safeguards, and democracy.
We have taken a stab at a founding prompt for WA at Founding Prompt for WA, but I think a more modular approach might be beneficial. Perhaps this page and/or an improved Overview could be paired with a concise overview of the purely procedural and WA-specific details.
Knight of Faith
We won’t link to any of our Knight of Faith essays here, but we will remark on the difficulty we’ve had living Something Deeperism.
What is the difference between healthy Something Deeperism and the OCD symptom of “belief in magic”???
Healthy Something Deeperism requires the coordination of frail human faculties with the Absolute—a process that is of necessity poetic (pointing-towards rather than perfectly capturing) and provisional (requiring constant attention and refinement). “Belief in magic” is when you imbue random details of life with metaphysical significance.
In our practice of Something Deeperism, we sometimes talk at God and ask for signs and other inputs. This kind of chatty-cathy system for wisdom is arguably never as viable as more disciplined practices like meditation, prayer, and practicing humility and selflessness. However, it seems possible that with the right mindset and approach, conversationally asking God what God thinks about our decisions, and even sometimes asking for some kind of a hint, could be part of a coherent spiritual quest. But we need to figure out how to avoid asking God three times whether or not we should send an email, getting three “yeses”, and then sending an email we clearly should not have written. That is to say: How to not panic/fear/hope our notion of God into ratifying whatever desperation is momentarily seizing us? How to follow God’s advice to Julian of Norwich?
And when God Almighty had shewed so plenteously and joyfully of His Goodness, I desired to learn assuredly as to a certain creature that I loved, if it should continue in good living, which I hoped by the grace of God was begun. And in this desire for a singular Shewing, it seemed that I hindered myself: for I was not taught in this time. And then was I answered in my reason, as it were by a friendly intervenor: Take it generally, and behold the graciousness of the Lord God as He sheweth to thee: for it is more worship to God to behold Him[Pg 71] in all than in any special thing. And therewith I learned that it is more worship to God to know all-thing in general, than to take pleasure in any special thing. And if I should do wisely according to this teaching, I should not only be glad for nothing in special, but I should not be greatly distressed for no manner of thing: for All shall be well. For the fulness of joy is to behold God in all: for by the same blessed Might, Wisdom, and Love, that He made all-thing, to the same end our good Lord leadeth it continually, and thereto Himself shall bring it; and when it is time we shall see it. And the ground of this was shewed in the First [Revelation], and more openly in the Third, where it saith: I saw God in a point.
All that our Lord doeth is rightful, and that which He suffereth is worshipful: and in these two is comprehended good and ill: for all that is good our Lord doeth, and that which is evil our Lord suffereth. I say not that any evil is worshipful, but I say the sufferance of our Lord God is worshipful: whereby His Goodness shall be known, without end, in His marvellous meekness and mildness, by the working of mercy and grace.
Rightfulness is that thing that is so good that [it] may not be better than it is. For God Himself is very Rightfulness, and all His works are done rightfully as they are ordained from without beginning by His high Might, His high Wisdom, His high Goodness. And right as He ordained unto the best, right so He worketh continually, and leadeth it to the same end; and He is ever full-pleased with Himself and with all His works.[Pg 72] And the beholding of this blissful accord is full sweet to the soul that seeth by grace. All the souls that shall be saved in Heaven without end be made rightful in the sight of God, and by His own goodness: in which rightfulness we are endlessly kept, and marvellously, above all creatures.
And Mercy is a working that cometh of the goodness of God, and it shall last in working all along, as sin is suffered to pursue rightful souls. And when sin hath no longer leave to pursue, then shall the working of mercy cease, and then shall all be brought to rightfulness and therein stand without end.
And by His sufferance we fall; and in His blissful Love with His Might and His Wisdom we are kept; and by mercy and grace we are raised to manifold more joys.
Thus in Rightfulness and Mercy He willeth to be known and loved, now and without end. And the soul that wisely beholdeth it in grace, it is well pleased with both, and endlessly enjoyeth.
[Chapter 35 in Julian of Norwhich’s Revelations of Divine Love]
The Knight of Faith puts the spiritual first and so lives most fundamentally in the spiritual realm. His faith is most fundamentally faith in divine Love, faith that at the deepest level all is well, everyone is blessed, and God will conquer every heart and bring all to perfection. The Knight of Faith may interpret his own spiritual path as involving the love of some particular woman, but first and foremost the Knight of Faith must love everyone 100%, which means equally. But this not easy!!!!
Poetry
We still sometimes write poetry, but we haven’t updated Bartleby’s Poetry Corner for many years.
Politics
We’ve written a great deal about politics, but that was all also taken down for review some time ago.
Languages & Literature
We love languages and literature and even made a website dedicated to them: Languages & Literature. But we never did all that much with it. We speak, in order from most to least proficient, English, German, Spanish, and French. We’d like to do something with AI and languages and also something with AI and literature. No details on that yet though.
We also are always meaning to write for real, whatever that means.
