Somewhat of an autobiography

More of a guilty afterthought that I should explain myself better

There is no such thing as a personal philosophy, and the autobiography of a philosopher is not relevant to any philosophy he might write; nonetheless, I suppose it is helpful to know something of the intellectual setting out of which the ideas appeared in order to see the passion or lack of it in the words. It should be sufficient to say that I was put together by the forces of the twentieth century. Now that the century is finished it is possible to look and see what came of it all. The problem is that the forces of that century were put together by the previous forces of other centuries and there is no end to it. Let us just say that in my case the primary force was the insistence of the publishing industry that I read all about those earlier forces and they would explain it all to me. I read.

I hung around a university. I wrote then, in my young manhood, the way I write now and that is not academic and anyway I was in love and much too shy to take on the intellectual attacks by those who were so very much handsomer than I and I fled.

I don't know what I was really in love with. I had sublime intellectual proofs of immortality, which I wanted to share with some boy. I wanted to touch his forehead and make him see what I saw. I wanted to lead him into this very real heaven. Love was so entwined with the metaphysics of the One and the many. I was so over-sexed.

It all came to nothing. Nothing has changed. Inwardly, in my thoughts, in my groin, I see no difference now from what I was at fifteen. Though I now am much older and appear so, I am not really worse looking, in my own mind, because then I had acne so bad it hurt and I hid. No doubt, the surges of sex hormones had something to do with it. Looking back I wouldn't have changed anything. The beauty that came to me was startling.

It's pointless to recount my school days. I was in love with every intellectual beauty there was and always some boy who had that beauty smeared on his face and all down along his turning form. I was thrown back. I did my homework reasonably well, but the force of it all fatigued me so much I was inevitably taking one of my afternoon naps. And I went to bed early.

I would tell you about some of the lovers in my life, but there were none. I don't know if I have stopped trying to find one or not. I'm old, but not as old as Socrates, and he caught or was caught by Alcibiades, no mean boy. Perhaps I should say that I have never had a normal love affair, with sleeping together and getting up for the day. I have loved and caught up the other in love, but it was a wild verbal intellectual mystical thing and it was probably nothing. I feel a need to tell you how extremely erotic it was, but to do that I would have to explain to you my whole philosophy and that is what I do in the main part of this book.

I read Plato, the master at putting together the mathematical and the erotic. Therefore I became a realist, an extreme Platonic realist. And I searched out the beloved in all of literature. He wasn't hard to find. I was found hard. I learned the abstract structures of languages. I learned logic and onto-logic and I could see that the things of analysis were more real than the world. The still immortal things, there and in my held breath, finally led me out. I took to walking the hard streets. I traveled the world. I never found anything more or less than I found on the Volga River back in Fayette, Iowa.

Here and there. Back and again. The Unchanging never changed. The sky was ever streaked with something from out of eternity. I once pulled a fishing pole out of the river by the railroad trestle where a boy had dropped it, I took it to his house to give it to him, I never saw him there, but by the river and for many years later he was a god, or was he nymphos. That description will have to suffice, because there are, of course, no English words for such things and I have always resorted to the finest abstractions of Being for my speaking to you of him and of all the others.

I read so much because I was looking for words to speak that thing. I found them quickly, because these matters are easy to speak of as much as they can be spoken of and if the reader has lived he will understand, though of course he and I will always think that no headway has been made in speaking anything at all. So I write on and he reads on also and love comes and goes and inevitably comes again and that's that.

Philosophy has little to say. Like the logic of the One it is hardly more than a sigh. Like emanations and the Scottish moor it is a gentle breathing in and out. Aside from the histories of others who have tried to breathe this thin air there is very little to write about. The others are gone and why waste words on failed words. I write as I breathe.

I took up residence with sufi drunks. The madrasa is the academy is the teke is the cemetery. Around and around and around. Nights outside a gay bar. This god gets around.

I have had no more of an acceptance among gay people than I have had among the scholars. Will heaven reject me next? Who cares! The night has been glorious. The vision was completely mine. I have nothing of myself left. He whispered, "Let's just get out of here."

Profound analyses of the everyday with the existentialists have become so everyday. The eternal forms still encircle the boys' heads encircling me. Pinprick radiations. Unexpected arrivals. Hopeless crossings. Unfulfilled desires to explain it all.

The stuffy presence of what was accomplished long ago leaves me with the need to find a problem here. Have I at least found a new way of speaking the ever-spoken-of unspeakable? Have I shown that I too can pull it off? Has this heavenly boy had his shirt pulled off too many times? Have we all grown ragged? Is the ever-new a little tired? The questions I use to make his head spin topple over. I don't know, perhaps tomorrow I'll feel more lively. My eternal adolescence will return.

Autobiographically continuing, I am pentecostal small town Iowa, glossalalia and grass fires. Here on the rising up shimmering Platonic Prairie I took up apprenticeship with a stumpy old Jew kicked out of his beloved Vienna. He was totally abstract. Bare particulars and an ethereal nexus and of course the ancient universals. Intense. He never knew me. He never understood. Fire doesn't burn fire. He knew only the great institutions of Europe, its academics, its hierarchies, while I was hearing the songs of the open road, the rhythms of the King James Bible, and of course the half spoken desperations of wounded love. The vast pulsating geometry of this place must have somewhat frightened him. He may never have seen the beauty of the tornadic vortex. Or that he was walking among the eternal forms.

The Midwestern prairie has always been wild about the church and the church has been wild in return. I was not the only Iowa boy who went to church by himself after doing what Iowa boys do in bed late on Sunday morning. While the preacher preached I would dream of elaborate systems of piping in all kinds of pop to satisfy my increasing thirst. I watched old ladies. I read the responsive reading with perfect timing and I waited for it all to end. I don't know why I went. Maybe to be fierce with myself. I did learn there and from my Grandmother how to argue theology. That's what got me as good as kicked out.

I eventually came to see the transubstantiation performed daily by the Catholics on the next block as the place of my erotic dreams.

Because sex and love feelings were so strongly in me, I, like so many others, took up with the Beloved of religion. I prayed furiously. Pointlessly. Obsessively. I still do. The end of it all is a mystery, but I demand that He be there. What you want is your business, but I would rather you chose something other, because I know jealousy as much as I know anything.

I am not a socially minded fellow. I am a nice guy, but only as a means of deflection. I have my eye out for what I want. And "if you are not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers, of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?" Eventually all my arguing the dialectics of philosophy is just a ruse to get at Him. Cheek to shoulder and oblivion.

I didn't know anything about ontology then, but I did know that the mere rearrangement of a few atoms of his body should not, really could not, destroy him. He was the very form of beauty, of desire, of those powers that have been flying around forever. He was even the Arranging within every arrangement. And he was the Cut itself that could not be cut. He is even now his own lingering separation from me.

The frailty of the world, that beauty must of its own yield to the slightest, that the pang choking me is relentless, that I must resort always to philosophy to find again that separated, that torn off thing, is itself a frail thing yielding to the slightest disproof. I sat at big tables in the old Victorian rooms of the college library, in paper dust, among long sentences crawling with English rhythm, waiting for the periodos to be completed. The end came fast and I quietly left to walk gaily on acorns and gray cracked sidewalks.

At that time I used to walk out along the Volga and the yellow-white gravel roads and I could see the slightest abstractions of logic, equality and difference and the from-itself. From those old books of English philosophy, maybe through the complexities of Russian grammar, out into the tall grasses, a small globe of entity hovered right in front of me and almost in my hand. In my hand. And later over me on my bed, my eyes looking far back up into my mind. Its necessity and eternity sure.

That these are real beings separate from me, right there, even in the boy's going around, even in his smeared existence and his breaking has never been mere metaphor but the very thing itself that has carried me across. I fell through all the cases and cadences of language. I never declined to be myself declined. I easily yielded. I was propositioned into fact and I was done to. Philosophy came over me.

I walked. And I remember, somewhat embarrassingly, that as a boy, even in my college days, I ran; but surely and inevitably I walked and I walked even daily out into the cold and the dark of the wooded road by the little town, going into the nowhere of my thoughts. In the twilight into the golden, lighted windows through the trees, I imagined smooth flesh in what appeared to be empty rooms. Rich, comfortable sheets. Gleaming mirrors. The breeze on my forehead. The boy, surely there, was, no doubt, the extension of the god out in the moist heavy air with me. I did not doubt. I glided. I walked, I ran, I sat by the flowing river.

But maybe I did doubt and I was so intimate with the doubt that it was just that that I did not doubt. There was surely an uneasiness there. A presence and a tearing away. The boy would not be mine. He would never be mine. But the god, the I-don't-know-what, was mine only because I was his. Something was badly ripped. Or the veil had a run in it. I walked right through it. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't have. The air was so thick I could cut it with my knife.

Late in my twenties, when I should have known better, I gave to a friend, because I had no money for anything else, and because I had learned to truly love what I had thought of giving, and I soon regretted having given, the number Two. In my incessant day and night contemplation of philosophical things I had stumbled on and over and against and I finally fell under the spell of this magical beloved. Which, I'm sure, unless you have also done, you will find absurd. The maidens laughed at Anaximander, who, contemplating the heavens, fell into a well. And as with all the drunken lovers of this boy of heaven I was kicked out of both worlds. Neither consequence means or meant anything to me, but I did regret regaling that one with what turned out to be common property.

It is one thing to casually and in an everyday manner talk about the properties of a thing. And of the connections between things. And of this individual and that. It is another to talk, in the everydayness of talking, the jolting talk of existing, out there, self-identical universals and connectors and particulars, wildly bare. Even the experienced philosopher doesn't know quite what to make of it. Any conversation that might have been in the talking vanishes. A theology of gods appears and the whole thing shuts down. The gods are not only out of fashion; they are creepy to the point of being slimy. The clear and the distinct that we worship is run to instead and an alcoholic swath is used to wash away the pollution. Or do you insist that I overstate my case and that universals and other would-be and erstwhile gods have now been tamed? Perhaps, but the talk, I know, ends. And so I write. I write out onto the lonely ether.

As the years past I tried teaching. I tried to teach English, the same English I had learned to love from out of the King James Bible, while contemplating the surprises of the New Testament. The great rhythms and long complexities held me still. My students were anything but still; they fidgeted up into a great complaint, they grimaced and gently drifted off. Then when I discovered the depths of etymology and comparative linguistics, they stared in amazement at the freakishness of it all. I know there are others like me out there; but, I think you already know, it isn't easy to connect. That is the one nexus easily missed. The oneness of the number Two still eludes me.

So often, out of love, I tried to explain to a boy my ontological ideas. Crazy. He quickly firmed up. Attack. My ideas were pushed back and I got nowhere. I tried again. And again. It's been years that I have been trying. So many boys, so many attempts to advance and then leaving off. I don’t know if they understood or not. I think they probably, secretly, did. We were friends and I could easily have taken them to bed. What's up here? I didn't. Perhaps the eroticism had already come.

All of that seems to me to be easy enough for almost anyone to understand, but I am apparently mistaken. It's like trying to explain "and" to someone. The discussion quickly becomes absurd to the other and a consternation to the stars. But I, only slightly concerned, go on. I thought it was a thoroughly magical thing. It was pointedly treated with contempt, and I actually surprised. I have always assumed too much. I have seen things others haven't. I have seen the most inconsequential things up close.

My point is that I have come to doubt and to believe that few or none will get my point in all this though I have pointedly come to the point on almost every page and it is the common point we all spin on but I have felt it as the sting of love.

The temptation is to not believe. The temptation is to fall in love with despair. One can easily lose faith in his ability to see existence directly, to say without hesitation that all the things before his mind's eye really are there, to feel that he is walking on the solid rock of knowing. One could instead be offended that anyone would consider himself so great.

I have written a philosophy of direct realism, of knowing, of seeing, of feeling, that which was from the beginning press itself onto and into me. I have not been content to sing sad songs about the absence of such a thing. I have not tried instead for the small and the comfortable. I have lusted after the refined joy of the magnificent. I have let myself be laid out. I have believed and accepted.

This is Kierkegaard's Faith and Bergmann's Principle of Presentation. I came to these writers because the Lover impinged himself mightily on my mind and I loved the fullness of Being in return. From Nietzsche I learned that the resentment over loss, the attack on the elevated, and the murder of the magnificent had left us with nothing. Like all three, I may also fail to live up to the words I write, but I was not in love with failure. I did want to fail at being tempted.

These writings are for those dancing boys who stole my heart. If you do not dance with the dancers then these writings are probably not for you. The words you will read here originally came out of great improbable nights in gay bars. Extravagantly beautiful faces. Lithe, blithe bodies. Boy-gods from out of placelessness. Beings made out of light. The timelessness of the timeless.

In hard beat music I thought about universals and place and time connectors. I thought about all the comings and goings of ontology. The boys everywhere around knew nothing of such things and never knew me for what I really was. They hardly knew me at all. In the end I was totally forsaken by Beauty. And thus by God. So I left that place and traveled the world. Now I sit outside the Panopticon with boy Jesus on his solid rock. I often write with leftover words.

Philosophy is war. We serve a war god. His gentle rainbow conceals the bow of his brow casting the ever so literary deadly glances; the poets of his love have always been forced to say so. The arrows of love, I repeat in my turn, strike the deepest. The tempest and the attempt and the changing colors of the bruise of love. Until he turns and the most gentle sets in and down on top of me. Crazy. The lifting up of words.

This liturgy of sacrifice transposes me every time into a sheer transcendence. I sheer off and his weight is numbing and always a gentle sleep. Art and argument and religion. I got it all together. And the god was always there.

All in all, we, that is my family and I, were poor, sort of, I guess, who knows, but there were no books around me when I was a child except the King James Bible, which, I have no doubt now, was enough. And I bought Popular Science and Superboy Comics. I had it all. Later after I no longer was able to stay with the schoolmen and the schoolboys I learned to steal. I was hungry for food and knowledge and I managed to get what I needed. I slept here and there. I walked and I thought. I knew the dialectic. I knew the cold and the blue sky. I was adequate to myself. And I was free. Marvelously free.

The Iowa prairie was vast. The boys were thick and hard. I could argue ferociously. The religious men damned me. City streets quickly ended in a geometrical expanse. And I feared someone would look at me, so I became a showman.

My point is that I became tough. I lost all ability to accept love.

Today I visit the old professors of the Iowa School, who were once so impressive to me, and I see that they are now more concerned with grandchildren and retirement. What a waste. The boys of Kathmandu have a lovely desperation about them and I will go back there.

This is a long writing in spite of its being nothing but short bursts easily lost in that probably unnecessary length. Therefore, someone should cut it here and there, maybe following no more than the suggestion of the copy machine boy. I do think that will make for a work that is easily taken up and put down over a long time. That, I think, is worthwhile in this coming and going world. Furthermore, the meditative repetitiveness of the idea contributes to the smoothness of each leaving off. It is an unending obsession.

I do worry about the way I write. So many teachers along the way and acquaintances have told me that they have no idea what I'm talking about and then, perhaps wanting to say more, they said no more and I wondered and worked at not worrying about that and I kept on. I write the way I write; I can do it no other way. Lack of talent, I suppose. Nonetheless, I do think I have just not met those like me.

Philosophy is difficult and that cannot be changed. It is a twisted kind of thinking and the syntax of its sentences must follow and all the sudden bursts of surreal matter-of-factness must be tolerated. On the other hand, there is no good reason why one should have to do that. Mystical pretensions should not be allowed to spread. Beauty is a difficult child.

The autistic rhythms of writing lull me into another world. And there's the catch. I live here in a social world and if I spy a present beauty and if I think to take him into this enchanted sleep he baulks and like a dog barking my sleep is broken and I wake up alone. Or so it is thought.

No doubt there is enchantment and autism and a sleep that comes over me in this place; but, for those willing to believe, there is to be found the sunlight of still distinctions there. I thus present a terror to those here just as I have found there being to be a non-being here and a greater terror. That you are reading me and following me down this primrose path means that you too are caught. I have written a literary thing and you do love literature.

Philosophy and all of writing is rhythm. In the fullness of time he comes. And you watch. And you are doubled up in enchantment. But surely you do not believe that. Or are you anxious that you may and may have already?

I know that you are a romantic boy who likes to consider himself so materialistic and of the classical non-romantics but you succumb.

I, in this almost lurid description of myself and you, am the one who believes in the absoluteness of the non-unity of the pure distinctions. I have led nothing back in a great reducing to just a dream. Thought and its cutting and building to the sky holds. Order has fastened me to itself in the delight of form. Thus beauty and truth and immortality. It was inevitable.

This is not literature after all, nor the literature of philosophy. By that I mean it does not stand alone as literature stands alone moving rhythmically from out of itself. Rather, aside from these words, hovering, as heat hovers above the highway, and eventually destroys the highway, there is a thing in these words melting them in an act that is criminal by any worldly standard. This is Philosophy itself and that thing is here.

Ho nymphos has long since made me nympholeptos. In a strange marriage of eruption I, now a pock-marked silenius, then found myself at the beginning of my philosophy; I abandoned hope of anything else. He shimmered in the water. He was a boy who lived on the edge of town, the son of a doctor. He vibrated the nearby woods. His family probably never knew.

Because I was a young American student in the late twentieth century, I, of course, had to read the Continental philosophers, not only the Anglo-analysts. The passion of stilled nothingness was akin to the prairie summer heat. The verbal growth was like the weeds along the ditch. The failure was like love. Pretty Aryan madness. White cum sheets of paper. Aristotle falling back into the arms of Plato.

Middle America is big as the wind and flat, like a boy's chest. Little blades of grass creeping gently. Sharp violent down. Run until your feet bleed! It's all right there in your mind, platonic remembering, a self-sufficient musky smell, the world gathered, now spinning from out of a single point. The sutratic sewing comes undone and the boy sows his seed on the back of the wind. America can do anything it wants.

We are the ordinary, the They, the bane of Heidegger, the Knaben of his dreams, knaves with knives. And small town preacher kids, like Sartre. And derridic misplaced car keys left in Elkader, Iowa. The Bandha of the perspicacious Brahman. Here on the vastness of the void greatly lit-up truck stops. Europe turned inside out. I had no trouble understanding them because we were them. And, for me, going to Nepal, where I am now, has been like going to Kansas. It's all an Indo-aryan Semitic fuck-up. In the pretty twilight.

I am of course historically conditioned, though in my growing boyhood I could feel, and rightly so, that my being came right out of Being itself, and I was not just the product of slippery social forces. A paradox. I can live with it. So for the time being, let me speak about the me of time's formations and not my transcendental eternal being so loved by the religious lover in me.

When I was a boy, my Grandmother and I would go out to an old junkyard by a little body of water and search. We found great things. I am still doing that in libraries and bookstores. Nothing has changed. I pick up discarded, damaged things and I know they are treasures. The grime of eternity is on them. The mangled boy, now a god, is in them.

On other days, in the wind, on dry days, in the swirling wind, everything gathered. Different things. The spinning pile. Pilferings of the spirit. Into the book of life. A lifeless Super-life. Transcendence is fine dust. Taken, just taken. Out. Pages strewn. I read a lot.

And the boredom. On the prairie, on the gray of a cold day, the unbearable wet emptiness of numbers, I thought up a philosophy consisting of no more than a belt loosened and my thighs against the weeds. And alternators in the frigid glistening of the mud.

Surely all those things found me. I was the eclectic find. Of the angels that are scrappy things of scrap. Blown. In understandings that come and go. She knows.

The American prairie, especially this patch worked Iowa of seminary colleges and English sensibilities, inherited, quite directly, the forces of late nineteenth century Oxford, Cambridge, and Stratford on the Don. Hellenism, classicism and rustic Arcadia filled the literature that was prized here; and, though I knew nothing of it because I was the son of an ever-moving truck driver, and there was no tradition of university learning in our family, still I did have the King James Bible and I saw the Spirit descend in Tongues and that was enough. The Church was the ground of both my place and of the place of the great schools there. For me and for them it was a gay old time. Forces work underground and under the skin also.

This is also a technologically minded place, reason and logic and system building. The glorious male and mile after mile of Calimus grass. Lonely despair and reaching. And reaching. Until the finding. I found what I longed for. I jumped right off the spinning earth. Fiery breath came around me. Jealousy and release. I spoke directly and plainly what was directly and plainly right there. Rhythm and subtlety were also mine in ever growing eternal rimes to time. The boys here can all play the part of Juliet.

I have not written here a marginal piece for queer times; I have written the main drag traffic of classical Platonism for our time. This is the analysis of Realism done properly. I stake my flag in the middle of the Great Battle itself. I am High Church right here on the wind swept steppes. I see the Aegean and the far Aryan plains right off my left shoulder.

At the end of the nineteenth century, England, at the same time as it was flirting and fighting with the dandies and the aesthetes was embracing and running away from the Real, the out there, the logically difficult. Mathematics and the pointedly strange. Imperial peregrinations. The adolescent boy femme fatale. Arcadia redux. All a reaction to uppity women.

Kim in India, this scotch-irish boy among the Indians – it's all the same. Boundaries crossed. Identities melting. Charismatic visions. The jump to transcendence. Wet dreams.

It's all so literary. We sigh, we dandies of the intellect. Prissy critics of our butch God. There's no one else here. Drown in the Cam, be reborn along the Iowa. Writers trying so hard to be writers in the school of writing. To be dead in the Kyber pass along Highway 80.

And so I am a believer. The Great Game and the erotic transmission of messages between here and There will never stop. Which boy is more languid and lovely? The Christian or the Islamic? On which will the emanations of the One fall the most blithely? They're coming! The empire will be taken! Churchly banter. But the Real!

The language oozes out of pimple-faced boys. This language will always have its say.

The rising and the falling of the fields, the incessant swelling of the Aegean, the dreary rain that does not let up over the ever deep English countryside, all the same, all an evocation to go out to the One, the Ever, the Forever. The monotone of philosophy. Failed difference. Numb ciphers. Seeping through the silent stone of thought. Soon the season of comfort will be here. Thick blankets and fine cotton sheets. The late rising sun. The early folds of threatening night. Iowa roads lead to muddy Canterbury. And to Ionia. Alike and alike. All the Aryan colonies are alike in spirit. And the Semitic Fire has burnt us all.

Order is gone and we hitch a ride with the Altaic shamans on the wind. Rising and falling rising and falling. Orpheus and jesus. And Cambridge Platonists walking among the sleeping boys.

In my time literature has reached for the concrete, the bold, the strikingly human. It revels in the sensual and the sexual. It confesses a love of the strong emotions. It tortuously describes the loss and the finding of the most valuable. I suppose it does sometimes contain analytical statements such as these, but it wants to quickly color them up with stories rustically told. And because I don't have such stories and such color I leave my reader with the bare emptiness of the most abstract. And, of course, my many sighs over having nothing but that.

I do have the hard push and the disheveled presence of the rustic boy, the sliding grace of the languid boy, the fine points of the refined boy, but it is all so much pure form, never colored in, that I am still in the most abstract, and little else than a soufflé of the heavenly breeze on the white china of logic.

It seems to me that you should not read this book looking for a great progression of the whole. As far as I know there is none. I wrote it myopically. That is to say I concentrated on the sentence and then sentence after sentence until the paragraph tied itself off and stood there a separate unit. That unit was the only whole that I saw or felt. Even the page, which is somewhat of a unit, is only a collection of paragraphs that for the moment is the shadow of being one thing. Thus forget the overall idea and pay attention only to the sentence you are reading. The next will follow quickly and properly and soon the end will come. That end will be complete philosophy. There is no more to it than that. As Wittgenstein said, Everything that can be said in philosophy can be said in two or three words. Thus the intensity. And the presence.

These paragraphs are a mystery to me. I don't know why they end. But then I don't know why orgasm ends the way it does. Something other is there. Not an ordinary thing.

Thus a sort of incarnation has occurred here. The meaning of this philosophy, Philosophy Himself, has not only been indicated by signs and traces within the constructions of a rather lengthy and abstract human dissertation; but it, He, has become flesh in the flow of the rhythmical inversions of syntax through the reader's body as he reads. But I speak the Unspeakable. Scandal and myth and anathema to serious study. I am not taken seriously. I am a case. Whatever is the case. The Forms constitute. The diffuse and feminine Whole has given way to the pointed presence of the upright right here. I came to the point.

The goal of these writing is a vision, a seeing, an intuition. The beginning of each attempt is the prospect, the anticipation, the knowing that that desired thing is close. I have been at the goal, held in love's gaol, many times, in the One More Time that lures and enthralls. This philosophy is not just provisional, but the Vision itself. It is not the inevitable limpish foreplay of science; it is the Peak. The Ever Again. Thus it is a theology and its beatific excess.

It is strewn. There is no order here. It is chaos. It is the night sky. It is the throw of a dice. It is the chance meeting. And the sudden loss. Pathways are lost. The discrete discretely and demurely is never there, only the escape under the wall that was never taken, or maybe it was, or both. Logic breaks, the ontological forms break out of the bonds of fact and the Great Pile of Things that is Being lights up from nowhere. The Nowhere glares. And who ever wanted order anyway when you could have this?! And you let yourself come undone.

This writing is long. I have come to see that it is necessarily long. It is not what I had intended, but philosophy is complicated, very complicated. Thus it is more suited to the long figuring of a monastery than to the snap judgments of the city. I will always assume that my reader knows at least as much as I, and I am very well acquainted with the world's philosophies. Moreover, because in these pages I have followed the paths of love I know the most subtle intricacies of thinking against one's own thinking. So, this is also a puzzle. A Chinese box built by Norwegians. A secret way out. And a hope that in the long night ahead you will take up the argument with me. Always the orgasmic tension and release. Once inside this monastery you will see that there never was to be a way out of the way out. The writing will not stop.

These writings came ultimately out of the rage of jealousy, and as far as I can tell that Sapphic delicate fire still runs under the skein of these words. I know that "ultimately" if not the right word, because I am, after all, stylistically digging out God and the soul. Still I will use it. That God is a jealous God may account for both His popularity and His unpopularity. What is is.

It is very difficult to directly write about the Μανις, Der Mut, the Mood. The harshness and the hard-edgedness of it escape our genteel language. And it prevents the words from coming at the moment of its presence. To write about it after the fact is to write out of blessed relief. Perhaps the meters of poetry can somewhat bring it on, but only in an enchanted way. These writings have come out of the rage much as the still Apollo came out of the horrible Dionysian wheel. Beauty is the image of something very unbeautiful. And vice versa.

And the repetition. That it always comes again is the divine, which is to say that it is also that hellish thing, that that was also made, or unmade, by divine love, and I write this daily Eucharist lyrically.

I sing here of the madness. Of Achilles, of Othello. Of what I think was probably my Father's, but how can a son be sure? Surely of my own mad jealousy – there is no other. Thus these words will be held within the droning and groaning stare out into the buzzing night. The articulate nerves are shot. The one more time is unbearable. The break and then, but it has not been a quickly arriving thing, then, it is over. And Then I write. I write Him. I write That. The trembling has only just stopped. I float on the delicate stillness.

We are friends because I am made out of the same stuff you are made out of. The same terrible stuff.

CAVEAT

What I have written here is not what I thought. I had intended to write something that would help my friends see their own transcendent beauty, to see the overpowering in their own lives, to find the eternity that was properly theirs. Instead I find that I have written something that is philosophically far too difficult for any of them to understand. That is not really surprising, considering that I have spent so many years pouring over philosophy books of every kind, learning assiduously as much as possible that I might speak the marvel that I saw. In the end I learned too much and the others now cannot follow me. I wonder if even the philosophically learned will spend the time to try the path I have here laid out. Probably not or if so I may never know it. I find all this extremely depressing. I am despondent. I see no way out. It seems that none of this should be so, but the facts militate, and I am left alone.

Or so it seems. The truth is far different. Much learning accomplishes nothing. College freshmen understand philosophy. My being assiduous was no more than me sitting on my ass for a long time. I was even more assiduous lying on my bed. The real reason I am unread, despondent and alone is that only I can see the sprite in these words and he turns me on. To the others they are just meaningless. Unless ….. he also comes in them. I sometimes do surmise that there must be those others.

It is our constant temptation to fall in love with pain and sorrow and to sing sad songs and there is no end to it. It is the purpose of religion to try to save us from this. I must constantly remember.