Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amble: From this tension

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

Amble: What within our love is real, Susan?

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

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

Tun: Turn, turn, turn.

Arch: Arch into it.

Tun: Break your backs!

Arch: Face yourself, face myself, face ourselves.

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

Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AM Watson

Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer