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

Take the plots of all the great road movies, and weave them together, with Huck and Jim and sometimes Tom in fast cars and nice cars and hitchhiking and stranded in highway resttops and stuck on top of mountains and staying in cheap motels and scoring dope in random cities and waking up in strange places and searching always searching for Old Man Moriarty or the Great Big Pooh Bear in the Sky, or Nobody or Nobodaddy or something or someone new or old or precious that never ever changes never ever changes and then lay all the tales and stories and scenes and set pieces in a row from end to end cut up and reconfigured on transparent tracing paper with the light shining behind it and then let it circle like a kaleidoscopic toy windmill in the hand of a dark-haired child and the story is not seen or read or understood but experienced, absorbed, like blotter-paper  this is my body on the tip of my tongue —

Little bits of me, ordered on magnetic tape and summoned forth through transistors and logic gates – could be anywhere — the epiphenomenon divorced — the sensate separate from the substrate — and what is it — records, bones, fossils — the mineralization of the space that’s left behind after even bones are gone — what Jack Horner will climb these Black Hills with rockpick and paintbrush and discover my sleeping thunder-lizards?

Once upon a time dragons walked these lands —

Three years here, now gone. Two loves here, now gone. Affection remains, always I suppose. Then I was a nothing, my head all full of stuffing. Now almost an officer of the court, my office to uphold – went from mid-twenties to late twenties – gained five pounds — no white hair to speak of. I can still dance. Still party like the best of them, when the spirits move me.

I am a Sleeper. I have slept much and often. Always longing to go back to sleep. To hit fast forward and zoom past the boring bits. Not enough fun. Not enough. Left with my minor madnesses, who sit around me like members of the War Cabinet of my Soul. They do not control, but they do advise.

Half a thousand words. Trace of a picture only. What’s a movie worth, I wonder?

I started this on Day 9077. Today is Day 10,057. A thousand days of life. A slice of life. New Yorker neorealism? The last lyrical snarky gasp of youth? This — call it the Final Resting Place of Life-Imprisoned Darlings —

Reaching. Always Reaching. Reaching out to Ever Distant Others. Ever Distant Other Times. The Endlessly Advancing Future. Woman, I commend my spirit to your arms. Kissed by the water and held in your mother’s arms. Never again will I have the experience of being held in the arms of a giant goddess who loves me with all of her being, who will commit to protect my every need for as long as her power lasts — and her power, her great power, the power of gods and creation, has only waned to the extent that my own has waxed and now am the possessor of that same power —

To breath upon the waters, and change the very fabric of the world.

Waves dance, flames leap, winds play, trees whisper, stones witness.

– FELIPE FERNANDEZ ARMESTO, IDEAS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD 18 (2003)

from Wikipedia

Gyrovagues (sometimes Gyrovagi or Gyruvagi) were wandering or itinerant monks without fixed residence or leadership, who relied on charity and the hospitality of others.The term, coming from French, itself from Late Latin gyrovagus: gyro- (circle) + vagus (wandering), is used to refer to a kind of monk, rather than a specific order, and may be pejorative as they are almost universally denounced by Christian writers of the Early Middle Ages. They were denounced as wretched by Benedict of Nursia, who accused them of indulging their passions and cravings. Augustine called them Circumcelliones (circum cellas = those who prowl around the barns) and attributed the selling of fake relics as their innovation. Cassian also mentions a class of monk, which may have been identical, who were reputed to be gluttons who refused to fast at the proper times.Up until the time of Benedict, several attempts had been made by various synods at suppressing and disciplining monks who refused to settle in a cloister. With the establishment of the Rule of St. Benedict in the 8th century, the cenobitic and eremitic forms of monasticism became the accepted form of monasticism within the Christian Church, and the wandering monk phenomenon faded into obscurity.

Legacy
After the eighth century, the term Gyrovagi was sometimes used pejoratively to refer to degenerate monks within a monastery, or to travelling salesmen.