Love at a Reasonable Price

We all have notions, but only The God knows.

A true philosophy is a philosophy that is accessible to humans and that, when understood and followed reasonably well, leads to an active insight into the Truth.

We wear philosophies like clothes. When they fit well, philosophies relate the various aspects of our conscious experience (feelings, ideas, and wider vistas [i.e. experiences that are prior to ideas and feelings]) to each other within a workable system for feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.

Something Deeperism is a true philosophy, and it goes something like this:

A person’s feeling, thinking, speaking, and doing only makes sense to them to the degree that they abide by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing), follow the standard spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, study, reflection, fellowship; practicing loving kindness, service, and humility), and most fundamentally organize their whole conscious moment around the spiritual Love that chooses and is enough for everyone and never abandons or gives up on anyone.

[Why do we know everyone is fundamentally the same? It’s another thing the truth of which we must discover if our lives are to be meaningful to ourselves. For one, otherwise life is too lonely and boring. For two, we learn by interacting with others — via empathy (my father stubs his toe, and I map his expression onto my own mind-map and so gain insight into what all those words and gestures mean); and so we cannot make sense of everything we’ve ever learned or thought unless we assume that our inner sense that all humans are all essentially the same is essentially correct.]

And so we start from the hypothesis that the mystics are on to something.

Just because we need the mystics to be right and to gain insight into that and in what way they are right; it does not necessarily follow that the mystics are right, or that we can gain insights similar to the ones they seem to have.

However, if the only way to be meaningful to oneself is to discover that and in what way it is True to say that we are all children of the Living God, bound in and through an eternal, infinite Love; then what choice have we but to seek wisdom?

But what is wisdom?

It isn’t literal knowledge of the Truth. The “Truth” would have to be absolute, unlimited, perfect; and our ideas and feelings are limited and imperfect; and confusing our own notions for the “Truth” (either ideas about or emotions that we somehow trick ourselves into feeling as if they were the “Truth”) makes us foolish, not wise.

No, wisdom cannot be a literal, definitive, 1:1, or exclusive knowledge about the Absolute. Human wisdom could only be an organization of one’s feeling and thinking around the Reality = Love that we posit shines through everything, including each conscious moment.

Human wisdom would have to be a meaningful and fruitful relationship between the Absolute Reality (nothing else is solid enough to serve as a foundation for knowledge that we can truly believe in, or even care about) and our mundane oh-so-human faculties. As such, human wisdom would have to be an ongoing organization of the mundane around the Absolute — an ongoing, evolving, self-observing/-critiquing/-adjusting poetic (meaningfully pointing-towards, rather than decisively grasping, defining, or otherwise capturing) translation of spiritual Love into human life.

And so we can imagine an experiential proof of the existence of a spiritual Reality overflowing with Love, the experience of which could inform our use of the universal values, the standard spiritual practices, and our own ongoing organization around and poetic interpretation of God’s Love.

And we can see that such a proof would have to be a never-ending work-in-progress, and that forcing feelings of certainty onto dogmas that we don’t even really understand is not at all the same as growing in wisdom.

We are all Something Deeperists.

We all know that without an Absolute Standard, our ideas and feelings slip and slide in relative conjectures that we can’t even take seriously. And we all also know that unless the Absolute is 100% Loving and for everyone, we can’t relate meaningfully to It.

But we all also know that our ideas and feelings about the Absolute Reality are not identical with the Absolute Reality, and that confusing our own notions for great Truths (whether we use words like, “Truth”, and “God”, or whether we just feelingly blur our own notions into feeling like “Truth”) is a good way to grow in folly.

And we all also know that our own ideas and feelings only make sense to us to the degree we abide by the universal values.

And we all feel a push towards the standard spiritual practices and the universal values, as pre-established aspects of the spiritual path, concomitant with our push towards God’s Love — a spiritual Love within which we are all equal children of the Light.

And so we all know that the only way forward is to pursue wisdom as an ongoing, self-adjusting organization of our limited faculties around the unlimited Love shining through all things, as aided and guardrailed by the universal values, standard spiritual practices, and the inner sense that we are all God’s children and so should all be treated well.

What does this shared understanding of human nature say about politics? It says we already have the shared philosophy necessary to share meaning, power, and responsibility. It says we can work together to serve as a final check on madness and corruption in our shared government. It says liberal (meaning protections for individual rights, like the freedom to speak without fearing retribution) representative (as in grounded in regular, fair, safe ballots) governments are spiritual goods. Because such governments allow us to maintain an environment where people can search for wisdom in ways that are meaningful to them, and where people can tell the truth and be virtuous in their private and public lives without having to risk the wealth, safety, and reputation of themselves and their family. And because such governments encourage us to work together to select for the universal values (which we all need to follow in order for our own philosophies to be meaningful to us). Separation of church and state is itself a spiritual good because combining them tempts people to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things, and to worship appearances, rather than to work together on the nuts and bolts of freedom, equality, and justice for all.

Come on, USA!
Stand up!
Tell yourself the truth.
It is evil to undermine liberal representative government.
What will you replace it with?
Lies, corruption, might-makes-right, cheating bullying and murdering as accepted government policies, pretending to agree so as to avoid losing your place in line, and other sins against God and man.
Come on!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

Long ago. Before you were born. Before your parents and their parents were born. Before the birth of the old people that the great-great grandparents of everyone you’ve ever met met when they were small children.

And not only that! Before the birth of this nation whose rules, laws, organizations, systems, and notions you live within.

And not only that! We’re talking about a time before the beginning of this English language that your thoughts swim through as if it were mind-water.

But that’s nothing at all! Because we’re talking about a day before the invention of the ancient ancestor of all Indo-European languages; and so we’re talking about a time long before that now-forgotten language evolved into the Greek, Italian (think Italian, French, Spanish, …), Iranian (including also far-flung Sanskrit and Hindu), Celtic (still spoken by a few hardy souls in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), German (English is a Germanic language), Armenian, Balto-Slavic (think Russian, Polish, and so on down the Eastern Block), and Albanian (all by itself these days, like Armenian) language groups.

Actually, that’s nothing at all, because the language that eventually evolved into English was first spoken only like maybe 5,000 years ago; and we’re talking about a day that happened before the first modern human ever walked the earth, which scientists figure happened about 100,000 years ago in Africa, and some Biblical fundamentalists figure happened about 5,000 years ago in the Garden of Eden, which they figure was somewhere in what is now the Middle East.

I don’t remember when this story happened. It happened in dreamtime. It happened in everywhen and everywhere. It happened yesterday, today, tomorrow.

I don’t remember when this story happened. I don’t remember when the crocodile told the alligator that he’ll see you later and the alligator told the crocodile after a while.

There was a mist across the land on this day. And everything was covered in a cool fine mist that felt like a light rain that froze in the sky and became a cloud through which everyone walked.

On this day when this story happens, everyone is gathered together in a picnic on a sunny day with red and white checkered cloths spread out over the bright green grass under the wide broad arms of the old oak tree, with wicker picnic baskets and people in nice summertime outfits sprawled out on them. Nobody notices that mist coating them, nobody notices the dampness in their lungs. Nobody notices the water droplets beading in their hair, on their eyelashes, at the corners of their eyes and lips, on their pretty dresses and smart slacks and dress shirts. Nobody notices that they are laughing and chatting and chomping in a cloud.

From the cave near the picnickers a dragon came rushing. It was a long, wingless dragon with a big mustache like the dragons that dance to gold drum beats in Chinese New Year when it is cold in New York City and you can see your breath and hear the cymbals.

The dragon came rushing on its four legs with its long scaly body shaking from side to side behind its giant head with sharp teeth. The dragon was snorting steam but it looked like the mist that no one noticed and so no one saw it or noticed that it was snorting steam out of its nostrils.

Some people leapt to their feet, either to turn and face the dragon with looks of stern resolve behind their dukes which were up and ready to jab hook and uppercut this great monster back into its cave, or to run away up into the trees or the hills or down to dive into the river and maybe swim safely to the other shore where there wasn’t a rampaging dragon dancing crooked with its long body flying off in various disjointed directions like you see ritually during Chinese New Year celebrations.

Some people just looked up and continued eating whatever they were already eating, be it fried chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, side salad with or without onions and with or without cucumbers, a bit of cheese, a sip of reddest wine, a bit of root beer made from real roots and with no added sugar or artificial flavors or colors, or what have you.

A small boy maybe three years old dressed up in the little white sailor suit his aunt had given him for his most recent birthday and that he doesn’t care about either way; that boy pointed at the rampaging dragon, and he said, “look, Mommy, look!”

But his mother was reading a woman’s magazine about how to trick your family into eating vegetables, how to keep your eyebrows looking beautiful even into your late 40s, and what blouses are likely to go best with what shorts, slacks, and skirts this season; and she didn’t hear him. Well, she heard him, but his cries didn’t register with her, and she kept reading about how best to be a woman in this modern world where God lives mostly in churches and evil exists only in works of fiction like you see on TV or read in a book or hear about from your gossipy neighbor who loves to exaggerate, bless her little heart.

And then I don’t remember. Because surely the dragon, angered for sure but probably for no good reason, collided with the picnickers, and surely that was an explosive, a consequential contact. But I don’t recall. No, I really don’t.

Pure Love! Pure Love! Pure Love for sale!
Pure Love on the open market.

Pure Love organizing your feelings and thoughts around and in accordance with Its perfect Light and harmony:
The first truly useful product ever!
Pure Love as the impetus and organizing force behind critical thinking and decision making:
Finally a reason to be, and a purpose for and a workable system for being reasonable!

Pure Love exploding your own limitations, allowing you to flow with minimal distortions off Its blessed Joy-in-Creating/-Giving/-Sharing/-Lovelifting!
And Pure Love exploding the boundaries between my daydream and yours, allowing us to all think and work together to nudge our organizations, systems, language, laws, practices, and habits towards the better and away the worse!
Finally a product so good and holy we really are obliged to just give it away!

I fret the hangman’s noose.
I sweat the killing juice
that flows in your vein
that shoves you out the stain
that sleeps you down forever
that keeps you in the never never
I was there when Lucy old and hobbled
her moist hangdog eyes scared but trusting
we drove her to the vet
and the vet said we’d made the right choice
that it was time
So by a thin hand in a light-blue latex glove Lucy was given the juice in a foreleg
Then Lucy grew still and Lucy was gone
And it turned out Lucy was eternal, that Lucy was not that long-bodied, short-legged, shaggy-hided, long-muzzled, yip-yapping little machine.

You’ve asked for a business plan,
but I’m afraid that I’m turning to dust
You ask for us to raise on up, hand over hand,
grand empires of industry. But I fear I must
now stagger down into the nil
where there’s not motion, nor will.

A business plan, you say?
We’ll sell Pure Love
I picture a wisdom meme that you can’t resist; and once inside, it blossoms into a self-organization around Pure Love that you cannot help but work on more and more every day, so that your conscious moment flows more and more smoothly off the Pure Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment); and I see us all finally knowing enough to know that we all already know all the same exact thing: There is a Truth, and the Truth is Love, and we can and should admit that we already share meaning and can thus already share thought, action, decision, power, responsibility. I see private and public lives transformed by the Truth that we are all in this together, bound in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone.
But how is that a business?

Brothers and sisters, believe!
Brothers and sisters, believe!
Believe, believe with only a faith the size of a mustard seed, and if you tell those great jagged Rocky Mountains out West to hop into the sea, they will: the will remove themselves — probably create a lot chaos and destruction, houses collapsing, bodies careening here and there (just because we can, it doesn’t mean we always should! Friends, faith is a great power: use it responsibly!) — and go for a swim in that great sparkling blue that they out West — with their laid-back, sun-tanned California-drawls — call the Pacific Ocean.
Yes, these mountains will indeed obey you, if you can merely muster faith the size of a mustard seed!
How do we know?
We know because Jesus said so; and if anyone should know about faith: well, it’s Jesus Christ, Son of the Almighty and Everlasting Lord God!
Amen!

Brothers and sisters, believe!
I know you feel yourself getting on, maybe you think you’re tumbling down, maybe you feel you’re caving in, crumbling down, falling apart. Maybe the doctor’s given you bad news! Maybe you don’t need to hear it from the medical community, maybe you feel from the inside out that your vessel’s taking on too much water, that she must soon flounder, founder, and fall deep beneath the chopping waves and bilging winds.

Brothers and sisters, believe!
Believe like your life depends upon it, because it does!
Because it does, brothers and sisters!

You’ve read the book, you know the score.
Jesus made the blind see, the cripple walk, the dead live!
And that same Jesus is here today with us!
Yes, brothers and sisters, I am speaking of the Living Christ!
Here and now! Yesterday, today, tomorrow, always Jesus lives and Jesus acts and Jesus heals!

And so call on the name of the Lord!
Prayer to Jesus, His Father in Heaven, and that inscrutable but yet somehow metaphysically indispensable Holy Ghost!

Friends, don’t take it from me: Find it out for yourself!
Friends, faith is meant to be lived!
Friends, faith that is not lived is not faith and it is not life: It is nothing, it’s a book no one’s reading!
Friends, open the book!, read the words, let them live in your heart, in your intellect, in the work of your hands and the words you speak!

Brothers and sisters, can’t you — with all that vast conscious space exploding in every direction, and out even into that Reality which exists beyond all times and all spaces — ! Brothers and sisters, can’t you in all that infinite space of your feeling-thinking body gather up one dollop of faith as big as a measly little mustard seed?
I think you can, I think you must!

Friends, your faith will make you well!
If it happened in the Bible, it can happen here and now!
Friends, that’s faith: That’s what it is to believe on the Word of God!
Friends, if it happened in the Bible, it can happen here and now!
That’s the Living Word! That’s the Living Christ!
Stand and walk!
Throw off your sickness!
Rewind your wound!
Rephrase your mind!
Awaken your heart!

Brethren, I say to you, God wants you to be well!
Let the Lord God make you well!

A business plan
We start from the mystic
We start from loving-kindness practice
We start from compassion meditation
We start from the Joy of life, the Joy at the center and bursting forth everywhere and out to beyond all times and spaces.
And we beam out the Purest Love.
We beam Pure Love out into the world.
We beam Pure Love to the heart of every man, woman, and child.
We beam Pure Love to heart of every critter on God’s great green world and in God’s deep blue sea!
We beam infinite blast of Pure Love after eternal explosion of Pure Love, and we toss out wisdom meme after wisdom meme, like litterbugs on the highway as it winds, hot and sparkling, beneath a pale blue desert sky.
And we have the great faith, we accept the fundamental spiritual wager that this existence is most fundamentally a spiritual one, that only Love is truly Real, that everyone is a child of the Living God, is a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, is a part of family.
And this then is business, this then is industry, this then is nice work if you can find it.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson

Arch: Bartleby, get in here!

Bartleby: Yes?

Tun: What is this?

Bartleby: That’s the business plan you requested.

Arch: Business plan! Business plan, he calls it! Something we requested, he informs us! A business plan! On what sun-circling orb? ‘Neath what starry element, ancestral jungle-meets-misty-mountains canopy, or lee side? Under what cheshire-grinning, madhatter-endorsed rubric?

Bartleby: I am not sure I understand this line of questioning. However, I can assure you that this was an original work, without any input from any character from Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Arch: He’s not grasping. He’s not the mental strength to take hold and remain! The man’s a drifter, untethered from the mother ship, spinning through the horribly infinite vacuum of empiest outer darkness!

Tun: Now, Arch, let’s not let a little misunderstanding ruffle our decorum. We are, if nothing else, responsible, respectable, dignified, and otherwise steady-on professionals.

Arch: And he can thank his starry-eyed heavens for that!

Bartleby: What is the issue, exactly?

Tun: Bartleby, did you read this business plan? Could you tell us who wrote it? Arch suspects Amble, but I feel like the tone is that of someone a little less … experienced. In any event, no one would mistake this for a work of Bartleby Willard — self-authoring fiction; a self-told tale as blessedly eternal as a god, and with the easy, black-button-eyed, of-long-and-vaulting-wings self-sufficiency of the wandering albatross, a creature that eats, sleeps, and dreams on the wing.

Bartleby: Well, you see, lately, I’ve begun to bubble over with a deep and difficult animal intensity, a type of frustrated, choked, hammers-smashed symphony in the pit and pith of me.

Tun: Oh dear!

Arch: How now? Feeling your rooster? Wanna crow? Bartleby Willard? Why, you don’t even exist!

Tun: Arch! What he means, Bartleby, is, well, you write yourself into existence, so why not simply edit out these unpleasant and unproductive pings and pangs?

Arch: Duck and cover! The boy’s a steam boiler, and he’s poppin’ his every rivet!

Bartleby: Yes, ha ha, someone call the American Society of Mechanical Engineers — formed, 1880, as they were, largely to address the 50,000 casualties annually caused by steam boiler explosions in this nation alone — oh, yes, ha ha, my all means, tee hee hee

Tun: Well, Bartleby, with your vast resources, I’m sure you can navigate a little human passion. Now, if you would be so kind as to draft a business plan for the sale of Pure Love — the timespace-prior spiritual Love that creates, sustains, shines through, cherishes, love-lifts, and some sense ultimately Is this interconnected tapestry of created minds and matters we call “reality”, or “universe piled upon universe, as they blink in and out of this gauzy daydream”.

Bartleby: Of course. It would be my pleasure. I will gather together a good big pile of words, and then begin moving them around into patterns both existentially meaningfully and economically practicable.

Arch: Now there’s the spirit! No more of this lonely-john, moan-shrieking tom-cat jive, if you please!

Author: Bartleby Willard (he wrote the previous post called “Business Plan” as well! But we couldn’t tell you then! Because it would worry the surprise!)
Editor of both pieces: Amble Whistletown
Copyright holder of this entire website, among many other loose associations of words and symbols, : Andrew M. Watson

Come here I need you here. I’ve business
with you and I believe you know it’s true.
I’m making millions to court and impress
my little darling angel only you.
Don’t care ’bout dough, but moisten I must
your lips with a space a plan a home you can trust.

You wanna hatch and I wanna inspire
But you require a nest to feel all comfy and ripe
So kilns of great industry I light; deep into night they’re fired
That you might relax and open, unfolding life into life.
For this I amass a heaping bucket of cash —
that we might from all clank, crash, and trouble dash

A Business plan.
My plan is healthy, wealthy, and wise
with you tucked safe cozy under the lee side
of some peaceful green mountain that lies
in Quietland, where time drips easy and mild
where children play safe and parents laugh
without fear of or guilt for “the other half”.

A business plan.
My plan is Pure Love exploding out
our bed, through house, neighborhood —
through nation, world, universe a shout
of joy. My plan’s to study the True Good
with you my baby doll and for everyone
to study with us the sacred star, the holy One.

A business plan.
Bottle caps and tire hubs and shiny tinsels
Capillaries and pupils and appendages and sacks of foam
Places where our bodies remember and our smiles don’t lie
A moving of this and that from here to there
that’s somehow worthwhile and not just for show and pocket

But I don’t care about anything except being safe with my girl
But this is not the way life is
For the systems we live within, can lift us or crush us
And the arrangements we arrange can nurture or undress us

A business plan for spinning daydreams of Pure Love
into the world where they guide us alone and together
towards the better, away the worse, towards a democracy that is really
of by and for a people that are really
aware, clear, honest, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing, -caring, -creating, -playing, -growing.

Where’s that plan?
And where’s my heart’s delight?
The wheels of industry
The gears and levers
The steam and the clatter
The driving arm into the wheel
You tell me
how we do this
Please tell me

More words, less meaning
More claims, less truth
More big feelings, less Truth

Maybe we could train AI to fact check and teach us critical thinking skills as it explained how credible, relevant, and useful x given “fact” was. It is not true that truth can be reduced to will to power, wishful thinking, or anything else; and that lie must be called out in general and detail by tedious detail

Seeing everyone in everyone
Pure Love flowing freely through
Good work if you can find it
Let the shoulders drop
Let the clenches relax
and soul unfurl into the Light
like a sail catching the wind
like a giggle filling bright eyes
Light Worker
9 to 5 office and field work
not a bad gig if you can land it
The hurt in your belly opening and accepting
let it go let it be
shining through everyone
let the wrinkles smooth out
let the Light shine clear through
your pretend boundaries
Light Worker
You too are chosen
You too are called
Light Worker
Decent hours and paid in kind delight
pretty good job in any economy

Author: Too sleepy to recall
Production Team: Bartleby & Amble Production
Copyright: Andy Watson I used to know him he was alright or whatever long time ago we were young so I guess we’ve both changed a lot since then, although that childhood face can still be found etched into today’s grown up one

An evil decision by a selfish folk.
But a change in the boundaries of the game’s
not yet a cracked shell and spilt yolk.
So how to batten down what hatches, and tame
we know not what?
How to heal the cut
before the blood flows
we don’t even really know
if it’s so very deep
if the odds are so awfully steep

What’s the essay to prepare us for this squall?
How will it break and where will our defenses fall?

It was your duty to choose honest stewardship
over crimes writ large for all to see
And you didn’t
And so now?
words fail
so many possible vectors
I can tell you that it is poor seamanship to steer the ship at the squall
but what follows I know not and it’s too late the sails to trim; the hull to haul
away, rather than athwart,
the angry billows

What you did is wrong,
no matter how this goes
But how to get you to see our error while also
avoiding the worst and letting democracy live another day?
The system cracks, and the society as well, and together
they come crashing down to founder in sharp waves of their own making?
Or not so bad after all?
I’ve no idea

You tell me that the point of life is worshipping God
But I can’t help but notice that you
are lying to yourself about what God is, about who you are, about what you’re feeling, thinking, saying, doing
So the whole situation is awkward
an embarrassing conversation; the scones grow stale the tea cold our smiles thin

Author: Captain Justin Coffin
Editor: BW/AW
Copyright: AM Watson

By this art I would conjure Spirit fill
all hollows: mine, the rest’s, and our overlapping
awarenesses, centered around shared wills.
Our feet thus catching, and heart-oped mouths laughing,
we hand and hand and side on side a better way
together should weave and wind, bidding each drop of life to stay,
to stretch and grow and hang forever
in the Light through the center, from which we never sever.

And lying knave-thief-cheat who by folly wide
and loyalty love and faith far misplaced
will stand upon the worldly throne and ride
across the sky a chariot majestic and graced
with a special locker for a button red
to turn the earth to ash and put us all to bed
all melted down in our sheets
evaporated and gone from our heads down to our feet:

But this evil choice by a people unable to think
as one and so destined to — sending pouts as votes —
together flail through their gift and proudly sink
beneath tyrannies of their own devising, of their own swells and boasts:

And yet instead that this false king — girded round
this go ’round with denizens or heeled or born
prepared to flout the law we’d all once haply found
ourselves well-swaddled and -nurtured within — scorn
apart government for by and of the people:
Instead he mellow to a task of Light —
a job in a democracy; not the evil
declaration that might makes true and right,
That he’ll joke with Obama and Biden and get along
in the tradition of stewards of this land, learning that strong
is only good in the service of gentle kind honest resolve
that flows and easily towards what is wisest and best for us all.

And, safe to yet here my mind speak and sing
such songs as to fill these open inner plains;
And, health youth and pep by this same starry offering
me surrounding, embracing, up-raising and laying —
as Sleeping Beauty from her thorny bed up-stretched
renewed — upon a bed of clovers and mosses; I up and catch
your slender fingers within my own,
therein rescued, known and safely home;
As children over a coloring book with happy faces bend,
we jointly our happy ending write, and as a letter send
on ahead of us, our futures to assure —
that we’ll be good for us and the world
as we move it be no sin
as we live it be to the gain
of everyone
a win-win
a nice story

And so you can surely see
how very critical it be
that we fire up our Pure Love factories
and finally find the recipe
for a wisdom meme to enlighten us all
in our lonesomes and through the tasks to which we’re jointly called.
And so we plunge like fate into the heart of it all,
into the mystic, where we hope the Godlight heals us,
and guides each conscious drop — even as it reveals us
to ourselves, one another, and the Joy between.

Author: Somebody I guess
Editorial Team: It would have to be Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
End Result: We need to get our Pure Love towers burning, filling clear skies with the rainbowy smog of our great industry; We need to refine Something Deeperism into a perfect espresso shot — the wisdom meme, the delightfully bright idea that burrows deep and widens out, making wisdom inescapable; We need to go into the mystic and work with it to reassemble our project from the inside out.

[Ch. 47 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, The Mat Maker]
[Entry 1 in Bartleby’s Scrapbook]

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity — nowise incompatible — all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course — its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”

“Where-away?”

“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.

“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers — that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

Bartleby: This is for the scrap book.

Amble: Yeah?

Bartleby: We need the part about Fate, free will, and chance.

Amble: But what about the God?

Bartleby: I don’t know. It’s not covered in the chapter.

Amble: But what about when Marcus Aurelius said that of course there were gods — how else to explain that one time?

Bartleby: That can be another scrap, although the gods are not the God. They’re too blessed and immortal to worry about us.

Amble: And The God isn’t???

Bartleby: The God is the Love. The Fate is God’s body, which is to say: All created things: all time spaces, all universes, all matter, all mind, all this interwoven commotion. The gods are incidental. Free will is following one’s truest nature, which is the same as interpreting the God as that Love shines through your conscious moment into feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting. Free will is the poetry of singing the infinite God through these finite modes of human thought and action. Free will is standing up straight within yourself, pushing out from within, and letting the Light flow through with minimal distortions. And so the God — who creates all, including Fate and chance, acts within Fate and chance by being life-overflowing, Love-overflowing.

Amble: I guess so. It was Epicurus who said that line about the gods. That can go in the scrapbook too.

Bartleby: Maybe, towards the end. We will, however, need to circle round and “that logos is self-defeating”.

Amble: Like vultures.

Bartleby: Yes, our heads are bald so we can better nuzzle into bloody carcasses, our wide wings — made for floating — folded at our sides.

Amble: I hate vultures.

Bartleby: They’re just animals.

Amble: I hate chickens more. You feed a chicken, and the beastly little dinosaur almost takes your finger off, and if you can catch the tiny round glassy eyes, this is what you see: “if he trips, I need to move fast so I can get some of that flesh before these other chickens start in.”

Bartleby: All just animals.

Amble: That’s no excuse. Humans are animals. And they are sometimes capable of actions other than waiting around for a weak moment to feed upon.

Bartleby: Yeah?

Amble: Well, sure. Humans are capable of rising above the silly earthy, woodsy game of eat-or-be-eaten, mate-or-fail-forever. In fact, to some degree, they always live in and through and for spiritual Love.

Bartleby: So do chickens.

Amble: Yeah, but just barely.

Bartleby: It’s in them, and they dissolve into it when they die. It’s not their fault that their mental spaces are so narrow and confusing.

Amble: We should grow our conscious spaces, so we can be more free, more one with the Love that choose everyone.

Bartleby: Okay, but what happened to the scrapbook?

Amble: I don’t know. But we’re putting this in. That bit about the loom. I think it points towards some kind of gist of an accuracy.

Bartleby: For sure! We’re in the scrapbook now, and we’ve brought that chapter with us.