The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Somewhere, at the end of the journey, lies the undoor, the door that does not open. After long searching, down a deep and circuitous venture into the roots of the mountains, H/P comes to the sealed door, carved by ancient hands. Nothing can open the door — the door’s purpose is not to open. Still, coming to the door, H/P must pass through it. And willing it so, he does — and finds himself on the other side, in a new world that is identical to the old.

He walks out of the roots, up underneath the bright sun, and out into the New World. No one in it knows or believes there was ever anything other than this New World. But H/P knows — H/P knows that he has slipped between the worlds of if, and found himself in a new place, where anything is still possible. Where before there was fate, and the Door, now, there is freedom, and the wide open space of that which is not yet known.

He goes on, not to confront his destiny, but to create it.

After being thrown from the garden at midnight by two strong unseen hands, First Adam wakes to find himself shameful and covered, and looks over at Pretty Evey-baby, whose own figleaf wrapdress only serves to heighten his excitement; under an audience of starsouls shining ancient light, he rustles leaves and plows a furrow and plants two seeds; a gasp and a smile and then a premonition of mortality shakes through Kadmon like a windstorm.

Afterwards, sitting on a hard rock, glumly looking at his helpmate sleeping, thinking back to that applebrandy she’d made for him (had he asked her to do it, he couldn’t remember now, that didn’t sound like something he would do), that forbidden fruit from Etz HaDa’at, No-Longer Kadmon, Simply Madam I’m Adam now, looks out at the long dark cursed land, undone, unmade, no cities, no streets or roadsigns, and thinks of all the work him and his mewlings have yet to do.

He looks back eastward one last time-like, towards Edenville 001, the Old Happy Haunting Grounds, (walking in a dark leafy garden, always feeling like some great raincloud was glancing over his shoulder, whispering at him in capital letters); he can just make out the luminous fireglow that sits between the legs of two mountains framing the pass.

You can’t go backwards, A.K. muses, only frontwards, and he thinks of the reluctant dirt waiting his still soft hands. He thinks of a bed he’ll one day lie in. First time ever, he sits awake all night, first ever insomniac, looking at Eveybaby and crying without a reason.

Everyone seems to misread Plato, taking his Republic for fact when in fact it is fancy, a gedankenexperiment, and what does he build, the broad-shouldered one, after chasing Homer and the honeyless drones from the city?

What is justice, Broadback? Just doing what you do, babyface, do what you do, and don’t do what you don’t do, there ain’t nothing to it; let the trader trade, and the guardian guard, and the ruler rule, and all will be well.

But here are some others, dispensed with by So Crates:

Definition 1: Returning debts.

Giving everybody their just deserts, good to your friends, and ill to your enemy. Socrates disagrees, however, that the just man would do harm to their enemies.

There is more and more of this, but let’s go here to the problem of the Universal Immortal Soul:

saying that since evil doesn’t harm it, it necessarily lives forever; saying that since it is not of the body it doesn’t die; all that and all that is well and well enough alone, but I counter with my own metahpor, saying you talk about IDEAS, Plato, surely you do, well how ’bout this IDEA — you put water, which has no shape, in a glass, and the water now has a shape: the shape of the glass. Break the glass, and the water loses its shape. Now the shape of the water, that’s a thing of the water; it’s not a thing of the glass; Glass is one thing, water another, and you could write things on the glass, or paint it black, or even crack it without disrupting the shape of the water. Nevertheless, the glass is necessary for the shape of the water to exist. Without the glass, there is no shape.

The soul is the shape of the water, our bodies the glass, our minds, the shape of the glass. There ain’t no free lunch, sister, and your soul is not immortal.

A skater in his mid twenties, wearing a gray-tshirt and marooon shorts, hops the long steps of Love Park, picking up speed as he goes, and then spins around the corner out of view.

I sit on a bench and let my eyes drift back to the fountain, shooting up great gusts of water every other second which then crash down with a firm but blurry roar, ten thousand asynchronous crashes added together, solid but imprecise. The white spray hovers around the fountain’s base; the pool ripples with small waves.

In front of me, a girl stands on the edge of the fountain and hesitates, do it, I think, eat a peach, she looks at her friend, and then back at the water, the friend is having none of it, the friend walks off, the girl stays, slips her sandals off and sits. She is my age, I guess, in a gray and rainbow dress. She dangles her feet in the water for couple of minutes, then gets up and walks back over to her friend, redhead in a white skirt, less brave.

I take my tie off and roll up my sleeves. Twenty six years old, I think. More untrustworthy by the day.