On February 8, 2004, Professor Phil Kutzko of the mathematics department at the University of Iowa told us in the Twenty-first Annual Presidential Lecture that academia needed to reach out to the non-academic so that it might refresh itself and advance. No more of the hidden navel-gazing of inter-disciplinary discourse. Therefore I will jump right to it and present The Ontological Boy, a real looker, though he may not be what that socially minded academic had in mind. In this matter, academia is beside itself

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Away from the realities that are the world, the university is a place from where one might safely contemplate those realities. A lovely idea. One might also say that it is in the world but not of it. The implication is that if a person, an embodied person, is out away from the university, he is immersed, drowning in the realities of reality. An uncomfortable thought. None of this is quite true, but it is true enough to work with.

I have studied and written and lived philosophy away from the university. I have been baptized in the real. I suppose I am a frightful thing in that I now have none of the hoary respectfulness that grows on the soul rooted in the quiet, even the holy stillness, of that temple set off. I am seen as a breathless panter. I am flailed by the Wind. Without the staid and calm Lineage, I am adrift up on the thin and stratospheric jet. I am become no more than ionic entanglements. I do not have the gothic rocks. I waft. I suffer the sky.

It's all true. I am that. Except that it is, of course, not true. I have lived in narrow places tucked back in crowded cities. At other times I am placed in big drafty houses next to immense fields. And I am sometimes in the great confinement of high metallic jets shooting through the impenetrable atmosphere. So I am in the forever of being on my way toward my home set in with the familiar foreign peoples. Unlike the university people, for whom travel is such a rare joyful excitement, I have become used to it, and everything is now rather old hat. The sky is up there.

So this is a writing from out there, of course with the understanding that there is no out there out there; but at least I didn't have to worry about whether or not I was properly officiating in the temple and so I did have the freedom that reality was suppose to give out there, now in here in these words.

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The people in a university looking out on the world are like the audience in a play. They fantasize about the strange and wonderful lives really lived out there. But like actors on a stage, who know that acting on a stage is very real world, material work, the workers are not bemused by their ascribed transcendence. Just as I am sure that university professors know finally that tenure holds them suspended in a stifling security. Real transcendence hovers above us all. That professors are bemused by so many out there really believing that is perhaps the real difference. It is because among the upper classes and the academic classes one seldom sees striking beauty. Only on the street among the poor do the transcendent angels appear. They hover on street corners and on back stairs. A transverberating presence.

Academe has tried desperately hard for the last century to overcome its otherworldliness and become one with the working class and its concerns. It has gone so far as to unionize. It wants to speak revolution against the elite, which it was always thought to be the very image of. Therefore, paradoxically, the retreat that the garden of Academos offered to the thinker is now out there hidden in the artificial ivy of the coffee shop where limp-wrested waiters linger and watch. There's no figuring it out. Beauty wanders in tired. This Arcadian orders some Cajun food. His sheepdog friend ogles him in awe. Corydon in corduroys. Nymphoi in the water glasses shimmer. The workers of the real that academic politicos despise.

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Like Walt Whitman, who wrote the vast wide world while in his little cramped room, so I write the infinite open fields that are the Being of Being here ensconced in a tight squalor of books. We both feel the Cut. The High and the Magnificent is here with our insipid food cold on the bed. So I name all the insipid, bland, dusty, tediously monotonous things I can think of with my sexually benumbed mind, hoping to capture that fresh and lithe and supple transcendence. A nettling nexus. A conjured conjunction. A fulsome filling up. A cut written on my silent tongue.

The Garden of Academos is not the Academy of today. That is well-known and often marveled at by well-paid scholars drunk at conferences. The rustic ivy-covered gothic towers of world-class universities have none of the rural toughs so beloved by shepherd boys. Everything is perverted. Far from academe I am in the ancient academy, but no, everything is twisted. I climb the scala paradisi up the back steps where the slender busboys hang out. And I, the lover of beauty, not of the beautiful, use logo-sorcery to capture my prey just as did Socrates – I speak to them in backward thinking of the always enchanting Eternal Forms. Then we clean up. With them I know the hardness of the metal doors, the weight of things to be lifted and put up in place, the heaviness of the time left before we can leave and walk the hard streets home.

I am lyrical where beauty becomes sex and pain is the abstract chaos of cold water. Without quantifying it, we know the magnitude of the floor waiting to be mopped, the volume and mass of the bus tub full of dirty silverware, the roundness of the ass of the new kid. The bare particular. The evening constricts. I go home alone.

I am a closet thinker. The boy knows I have no car for him to ride in, no warm house for him to trash, no tv for him to lounge languidly in front of, no comforting manly arms for him to fall asleep in. I have no one in authority to vouch to him for me that I really am somebody. I am the low, the base, the insipid – I am the bare particular. And I know the immensity of ontological distance between me and him, the delightful and distant form running off into the words of my writing. Thus I am religious. Literature being the last refuge of the gods, including the eaten jesus, and I am obviously dealing in gods here.

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I am now sixty years old. I have spent so much of my life gathering plates and glasses and serving forks, carefully setting tables, collecting garbage, taking down tables, smiling, waiting, looking on, so people could eat and laugh and get fat and drunk. Sometimes I loaded it onto trucks, and I took it to them, in heavy crates, and I brought it back. I saved all my money. I bought cheap air tickets and I traveled over the whole world and I sat in restaurants and I watched boys gathering and taking away the same useless food, smiling at me, waiting for the same tip I waited for, going home. I imagined them sleeping together, because I always slept alone. I was a solitary man doing a boy's work. I loved the boys intently. I think that is why I was always out there with them. In my mind and in reality I was in the squalor of their world. It all became pure form and an expanse to lie on. I had it all. Then I went back home to work some more so I could travel again and be there watching them. They never knew; they thought I was a man of means and position, but I was just as they were and they would have despised that.

Away from the high and noble, things are insipid. The boy is just a rather musky dirty smelly boy. The glamour hovers only in the universality of the scene. And in the regular return of the same. A strange colorless glamour like down on a young tired cheek. His food is nothing special. It hardly tastes like anything. His shoes are just shoes. He lies down and in the dark he jacks off and then he goes to sleep. A tasteless, wafting thing. The particular uniting with the universal. No more than that.

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When Aristotle diminished the reality of the universal in favor of the individual, he started the long slide toward nominalism and representative idealism and the loss of the particular thing altogether. Today in academe, selfless professors serve the Pure Nomina. Graduate students think of the particular, so bare and just itself, as a great abstraction. And therefore, because a universal, an existing Form, is also a particular in itself away from all the names naming it, it too is as nothing to them. And they too are becoming priests to the goddess of the void.

Away from the dame of academe, in the squalor along the far street, I have found my solitary self and the universal Form itself and the bare particular as the expansive magnitude on the thigh of a boy who looked me in the eye. I found the tight thing that is the rhythm of my sentences, the lyrical lal, and the break. I found the particular and the universal and an even more magnificent separating and coming together of the two. I found a clamoring place waiting for the final orgasm of love.

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A lot of what you will read here is of the Christian Eucharist. I'm going to eat that beloved and drink his blood. Which, if he weren't God, would be a repellent cannibalism, but as it is it's ok. How intimate! How historically correct, how centered in our tradition. I am a now-forsaken Traditionalist. Bare with me.

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What I have written here is the truly satyrical. A tumescent hoar gazing at the ephebe. It is the hidden real world, the real of literary realism. And the spiraling concentration of the present vertigo makes it be the sudden rush toward the Real of philosophical realism. The Nexus penetrates. Quantifiers sparkle down all around. The Form of Ineffable Propositions lingers. On your fingers.

All of that will be nonsense to the out there person. And to the academic who sees himself as one with the out there it will be a criminal waist of time. I write an intricacy as ethereal and unapproachable as the most unheard 12-tone music. I want to bring academe back in love with itself. I want that gay otherworldliness of pure Forms hovering. I want a Eucharistic Arcadia with that sweet one as our meal. I want to sigh away in love's anguish and now feel guilty that I have not done my part to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Anyway, from what I have seen, the poor think the visiting academics are jerks.

I am the nowhere man from a long ago that never was. Oxfordian rock and roll. A Western prairie sprite wandering about in steaming Eastern cities. From my Chevy by the levee to Nazar in the bazaar. Oh Lord, at least make my spirit fair, I'm coming undone.

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I have a friend, an aging dilapidated guy, who hands out coupon books on the street corner. He studies philosophy because he is dealing with his extreme loneliness. He has a strong sense of self so unlike those selfless academic officiates serving in the Temple of the Idea. And he has escaped the formalism of middleclass cleanliness. He stands out as a prime example of the bare particular made visible to the naked eye, this very ontological guy. It's a Whitman hermetic thing and very American. In his windowless little room he views the intellectual heavens. Those coupon books belong to the canon of western literature.

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I do not denigrate thought as the mere image of the more real material world. Thus the loved object is not, in these words, to be seen as really a sensually material thing. Nor is the mind in loving its physical appearing as heat. The object, the loving, the spirited mind are there in their fullest strength when freed from matter and its being that thing right there, just lying there. The body, the desired fullness, the tumescent desire itself, the worked conclusion, in themselves, are all away from the material world, more agile than its lethargy and sleep would allow. The material world is the mere image. If the material world is the heavy lion, love and its object in their spirited Form are the gadflies that anger him, or if the householder they are the street urchins that irritate him, or if a great corporations they unloved hackers that hold them up. Wild boys on rollerskates. But who am I to speak? I agitate myself, I am in the ever in-between. The gleaming, ephemeral night of still Being, of Thought's reaching and finding.

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Out here in the rush of things one is always looking for the nexus back into the quietness of thought. Yes, I know that in academe the operators of the recursion machine generating ever more far reaching forms themselves feel the need for the final thing and the quiet, that they too are looking for ideal out in the rustic fields of Academe, that the state university is not that, that the nexus, to them, is also sought. But out here the dreams of academic security and freedom to think are lovely. How do we get there? Those professors who have the idea of reaching out to the workers of the world, the rustic boys, don't understand. They don't understand what we workers want him to be. And that we do understand that he cannot be that. That we and he and the rustic boys are not at all what we seem. Perhaps we are gods.

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Philosophy is never going to appeal to the man on the street, and the word ontology will seldom if ever be on his lip, still philosophy, even ontology itself, can be charming, so pretty and sexy and luring, dressed up in street drag and made to dance. N(a)&D(a). The bare thing a has the Form of Night and (the same) a slips into the Deep beyond every a. Suddenly the night is, and in its depths we almost see lovely things looking back. And the almost of the mind's sensorium shimmers. Philosophy beckons. The man on the street looks worried. He quickly hurries home. Bare particulars, Forms, having and the slipping into, and the demure wallflower "and". Lovely and delicate things for those so inclined to thought's immanent giving-way. Inwardly the "same" clamors to be understood.

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The story is told by a philosophical gossip how Plotinus was professionally incensed on hearing it said, in a formal gathering, by another philosopher, that the young student, the boy, should yield to the sexual desires his teacher. After that one imagines Plotinus as a lifeless old curmudgeon. Just as we, along with Kierkegaard, wonder how Socrates could have been so cruel to Alcibiades after having been so wonderfully seduced. Both philosophies are vitiated in the act.

For all that, however, I do reluctantly understand why Plotinus and Socrates are so terribly right. Philosophy cannot be transported to earth without the holocaust. The cross and the hemlock and the sufi bloody head rolling along. Philosophical love is other. It is the vision of a god present. It is not to be made familiar and comfortable. It is not mere sensual release. It is not a gentle human love. Or if it is, it is not philosophy.

Uranian desire is at home in the logos. It is solved in the twisting of dialectical thought. It is high in the abstract coming of the spirit. It is too intense for the material body. It is a breaking out into the apophasis of the empty sky. It is the closed-mouth telling of myth. It is of nothing at all when here. It couldn't possibly be something materially present. It is a frightening phantom erection.

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There is always the question in these writings – or perhaps more reflectively I should say that I have in these writings – of whether or not they are about me and my confrontation with philosophy and the things of philosophy or about something that they as theology or devotion gaze at with the articulate eye of language. Are they about me or a god? Modern thought wants to say that all writing today is about the self – no theology, please. But modern thought is shaking ever more violently, perhaps because a god is approaching.

I have come out of the philosophical tradition concerned with grounding the logical form of the world. Seemingly a most non-theological thing, but of course, it isn't. A consideration of the elements of logic has always led the mind into transcendence, stellar chaos, pure beauty separate. The hammer that makes tough minded scholars crack.

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These really are erotic writings, but in the sense of the Platonic Eros, not in the modern understanding of that word. Eros was the child of poverty and plenty. In his physical form he was without beauty, without means, without praise. It was in the sorcery of words with which he mesmerized his beautiful prey into stillness that he possessed the riches of Being. Eros distracts with logos seduction. Eros speaks. And, of course, Eros today writes. His grand philosophical analyses entertain and hold for a while but then they grate. He is intelligent enough to sense that and he jumps aside from that also. At last he fails and the beloved leaves disgusted with his bewildering intellectual explanations of nothing. Did he also see his lack of beauty? It was his own unbeauty that drove Eros into the hope of sorcery. A faint hope. Only successful in the far places.

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This is not a book of lust. Of course it isn't. Every description of sex here is excruciatingly chaste. The object of desire is a Form. It is the appearing of God. The boy is as abstract as a geometrical curve. He is possessed as one possesses the conclusion in a geometrical demonstration. He is worked as one works a proof. The beauty and the heaven are of the timelessly Real. The heart beats a transcendental beat. He loves in return in the same perfection with which heaven answers your anguished prayers for his ethereal presence. The answer is difficult to find and dialectical inversion becomes thought's refuge. The boy is as pure as his forlorn state on the hidden streets. He looks at you and he knows your anguish for him. The giving is instantaneous. The family man sees nothing.

Worldly sex is gloriously lustful and reciprocal. That is the way of the world. To mistake the world for transcendence is a grave ontological collapse. To try for heaven here is to fail the needs at hand. To take one earthly way there is forbidden. I write the ethereal and the abstract. The fine pleasures, even the most sexual of pleasures, there become as nothing here. I write for the few.

Esoterically speaking I do not write the esoteric. I write the flamboyant. I write the Real. I write the explosion.

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This academic philosophy far from academe is thus far also from the world merely outside the physical walls of the university. It is far from the world's society. It is in the Pure Forms of Being. It is of my gaze at beauty. It is a worthless thing here. But it is captivating to some and it is to be avoided altogether by others. It is Philosophy inside the Garden of Academos. It is the one and the many that runs through everything.

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A philosopher contemplating the Forms, gazing on Beauty, is himself neither in the heaven of Forms nor in the complex nodes of social life. He is in the badly shaken nowhere of the questioning and the forlorn. The beloveds of both worlds escape him. He is without a self and he is not of the Self; which knowledge he knows is fraught with paradox. So it's the paradox that becomes ever more darkly glorious and tedious. It's all been done and said and abandoned before, so many times before.

This particular so heavily this particular lying against me is the same particular that has lain with me forever. The particularity of the particular comes. It is destroyed in self-denying conflict. He leaves again. That one, that very one.

And the Form, this Form, now so smooth and coming around in perfection, has the bare presence of all ontological things and its sinking down into the nexus is just that.

Contemplating all this, I am, rather quietly, away from both the outer world of building and the inner and academic world of taking apart. I am by myself, devoid of self. I wonder. I wander. I am the Meander of dry desert beds. But I have the sorcery of words. I die with the jesus-logos and I am eaten. And I am drunk.

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The feminist critique of philosophy and philosophical literature is (but who am I to say?) that it has cast women in the role of goddesses, and therefore also demons, when in fact they are just plain ordinary human beings, just as the men are, and they come in every variety imaginable, just like the men – or something like that. I have here made boys, in a strange nexus, into both ordinary boys and gods (and sometimes a part of the demonic nature of God). I suppose the critique will fall heavy on me. Let it fall. The dialectic is difficult, but I also suppose that they will shout, The dialect be damned! Women will protect the boys from me. My goodness, do we have to totally get rid of the divine in order to protect our plain ordinary boys? Is the divine so mad? Maybe not, maybe the divinity of God is dead, and God is sociably human now - if he is here at all. But I doubt it. Feminist critics are anti-gay.

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It seems to me that every gay person, man or boy, has seen an Eternal Form and he has fallen in love with it. It is a particular thing, that Form, which is before him, and in him and all around him. It is the rhythm of his life. Here the separating of self and non-self is difficult. And the I that is me and the seeming and the cultural being of the word "gay" and the quotes are all so very difficult to think. The very being of being gay is a difficulty. A lovely unease. And a fright. A god is present. His Form shines.

Thus, as something different from other ways of thinking, my ultimate goal, in these words, is not to sink into the feminine ocean of Being. The soul of "my people", so racially begotten, in not my worry. The Void of the womb waiting to generate a new world is for someone else. The pain of Longing is not my lover. I am attentive, rather, to the exquisite Form of Being, a present thing, and eternal.

God is large and there are many separated realms within that Great Thing. Including, I must say as a terrible qualifier to my words, the paradox of that, therefore, also not being so. The thinking is difficult and it is mastered only by The Boy. A tyrannical mastery that I must call up.

None of this, it seems to me, can be denied. It is a necessity beyond seeming, it seems to me. Therefore the Uncertainty is certain.