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

So says the proud deontologist, exalting the means above the ends, arguing that duty is all, that the person who matters most is the one wearing the eyes and that person should never pull the trigger —

or perhaps it speaks to universal imperatives — absolute rules — and better that there should be one less murderer than one less murdered — the world is a broken, terrible, cruel, and horrible place, and We, the Living, the Most Horrible, the Long Legged Sons of Murder, the Survivors who lived on, munching on the bones of others —

How long ago was it that the Germans shoved my people into trains, people like my mother, brother, and lover, so close that they were standing on top of each, endless torture of endless days, darkness and night, on iron rails to dark gates and clouds mixed with the ash of my people. That is real. That happened. Seventy years ago. Within the memory of those still living. Not once. Not for a moment. For years — to six million.

And that is just my own personal real nature — me and my lover, separated at the camps, never to see her again — watching my father fall beneath their whips as he grows weak — the pain of waking — These are True Nightmares. True Nightmares. These things happened. They were done. Right across the water.

Let justice be done though the heavens fall. After the war, mankind lost its justification for existence. We were tested and found wanting. We should be punished collectively for what was done. All of us — Jew and Gentile, German and American, Arab. It happened, and it was allowed to happen. There is something in the human spirit that permitted it to happen. Something in the human spirit that walks up to two boys on the street, one in a wheelchair, and opens up and pulls the trigger. The single murder on the streets of Philadelphia is as evil as the Auschwitz gas chamber.

We are fragile weak-willed bags of pus and fluid. Easily broken. Worth little. And yet the wailing and the weeping and the gnashing of teeth when a baby is thrown against the wall and his brains leak out. Somehow, we seem to care.

n. The inevitable decay of institutions in late-stage capitalist societies.

See Stephen Labaton and Steven R. Weisman, U.S. Considers Takeover Of Two Mortgage Giants, New York Times, July 11, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/business/11fannie.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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.

I. H/P Goes Walking Down the Road

Do you see him, leaning on buildings, sneaking through alleys, walking slump-shouldered, eyes gray but fired, past the ten thousand sleepwalkers of the sidewalks, following their breadcrumbs to their cubicles and from their cubicles at regimented hours marked off by Pavlovian work-whistles that no longer blow but nevertheless continue to exert their strange tyranny on the vagaries on what was once a human existence, our hero/protagonist, let us name him, here, in this instance, Hep Portgoose, Hep does not hear the whistle blowing, he leans with his stomach, empty, catching the air like a caravel’s sail, pointing onward and upward across vast oceans of monkeyflesh.

He loves the monkeyflesh he does, even when he avoids the grosser specimens reaching out with sooty hands, crying-wailing for help, relief, love — loving the monkeys is the principle requirement of being a hero/protagonist, and Hep, after many long years of bouncing up and down Yggdrassil, has chosen love to be his torchlight.

Still, the things he’s seen — which pale in comparison to the whispered doings that he’s heard of — whole dark underbellies, full of crawling insects and morlocks, or hardened hearts in gray uniforms ripping babies from pianos and dashing their still soft skulls bloody-open against that same sidewalk he now walks — these stories he has heard, all true, he has taken into himself, like the Holy Redeemer of the Nazarenes takes up the Sins of Man, and cries out the bloody tears while he still hangs, pinned against the Hanging Tree — —- —-

He was not born in those days; rather he is a child to their history; nevertheless, he is as monkeyflesh as the rest of them, and having sat in mathematics courses when just a bairnbabe, has balanced the equations and seen that I equals I, the common identities absolute, the domain is the range, divide by zero, do not pass go.

When was he born and why and to who? None still living know the answers to these questions; Hep Portgoose long since being robbed of both hearth and memory by the inopportune falling of a bindleblow across the forebrain. He woke on the mat of a great boxing ring, stared at by hundreds, a man in a suit glaringly apparently angry, not knowing who he was, learning his name from the stitchings on his shorts.

Truth comes in blows, he thought. When Bodhidharma came from the West …

His eye swollen shut as he limped from the stage, his Manager, Bollo Grimacio, took him aside and began to berate him. Hep, not knowing what else to do, listened attentively.

“If you can’t punch, if you can’t hit,” says Old Bollo, “we’ll put you out to pasture, send you to stud or the glue factory. Put yourself back together again.”

Newly named Hep nodded, and looked up, into the bright lights of the arena, and the slobbering fat faces watching hungrily, their eyes on the sweat-stained floor, their fingers clutching at the thighs of their dates in lemur-fur dresses. He looked across to his opponent, three heads taller than himself, arms the size of oak trees, his pale face soaked in sweat, eyes unfocused. Hep heard the other one moaning softly.

“Go out there,” says Bollo. And Hep walks out, lights from cameras flashing, the other rising too, closing in, Hep moves to the left, the other follows, feints back, comes in, swings — silence for a second —- pain, terrible pain, and a load crash, and the floor is flying up at Hep to add some insult —- Hep is down, he stays down, blood drips from his lip, a tooth falls out of his mouth, his right is swelling shut but he looks down again at the stitching on his shorts, Hep Portgoose it says, Hep Portgoose.

Afterwards, Bollo walks up, looks at the broken sack of man, Hep is newly born maybe, but Bollo had known him for awhile, wasting years of investment, money, time.

“Sad man,” says Bollo, “what good are you now?”

Father Grim, Old MP, tells the story of the time, when as executioner of mus musi, he lost count of the iron-wire spring traps he had placed in strategic locations around the house. Someways like the Spartan Threehundredhead, perhaps, missing that goat trail —

several weeks or moonmonths later, Grim is moving the ceiling tiles and discovers the preterite zogreion. Peering closer, he just makes out the thinly etched dark outline of some small thing, caught, like the flashbang silhouettes on the crumbling walls of Hiroshima —

While we awaken into life in medias res, and are actually created by a nine-month journey in a dark and gentle womb ocean, contrariwise, the endings of our books and our movies, cognizant of what is coming, move at breakneck speed, one step in front of the large Indiana Jonesian boulder and progeny, et al., that are chasing right behind  —

While plot thickens. to be true to the spirit of endings, tales will switch back and forth, this way and that,  touching at decay, decadence, planning great and vain rear actions by our heroes, temporary retreats as still unknown enemies come ever closer — not just plot should reflect these last efforts — language, narrative,  and pace should likewise break down, leading us (the gentle reader, the silent watcher) to yearn and fear for endings, fallings, no easy revelations — circuitous — first giants, then heroes, then mere mortals, crushing under the weight of all that’s come before —

Dripping, slipping, down the birth canal, the head gets stuck, and Doctor pops me out and lames my hand —
beginnings and endings —— what child ever wanted the womb to end, to be yanked screaming into a cold word where sparrows must feed themselves?

Turning twenty six, half way to fifty, my strength leaves me, my heart fails me, everywhere and when I go, I see glassy eye people, their now-visible-to-my-mad-eyes genii digging graves and grinning. Their charges aren’t grinning, they’re frowning or crying, searching around, dreamwalking, dreaming of driving, searching for brakepads, an escape route, on the count of three, jump, tuck and roll, disappear into the hedgegrass along the railroad tracks;

Away we go into the brush, in an alternate worldline I am laying on a couch in Greensboro | there are other alternates | in this world I am in love | but my heart is heavy from work and not-so-early rising | trains and autotrains and at the end of the day I am tired but even then I refrain from sleeping —

walking around in lalaland, white ipod, give me your ipod or your life, says Horatio, says Mercutio, twirling, dancing, thought makes cowards of us all, true story, stinking rotting Philadelphia eating its own, break off into the ocean and drown I say, no dinner, no happiness, no nothing for me — Max, You Wild Thing, Dance Till the Cows Come Home — cliches are dead words, twice dead, even as we speak we suck the life from our words like vampires, always hearsay, all ways second-hand salvation army what is truth, asks Pilate, two plus two is sometimes five, says the Great Enemy Absolute Moral Relativist —– Love your neighbor’s wife, says Buck Muck Finnegan, take a mulligan Joyce, Lady Joyce, Lily, dancing, love your daughter, flauntleroy, wordgirds break down, the understructure is shaking, the white noise is rising, there are signals in the architecture, two shots, two guns, dead dead on a street in southwest Philly, who will sing for the Slain, who will sing for the Slayers —

Homer you blind bearded barbarian, sing to me of the Spear-Throwing Achaens, and of the long-suffering Penelope waiting still in Ithaca — Christ remains on the Cross, time is an illusion, oh but it is an illusion with teeth, no illusion, the absolute trueness, absolute reality, the lion in the room, dark, hot breath wet against your face —

Scream it, scream the fear, the fear is always with me, always with me, always with me