The Act

This is a Platonic work, but I am going to use an Aristotelian idea to describe the Narcissus boy of philosophical dreams. This boy who is an end in himself. The entelechy of the reflective gaze. The Form lounging with itself. The Act. Rising up tight push. Out there. Two one crotch nexus mind gorging self, head back. This is logic logicizing. Finished. I do not write the white lace of decay. I write the slickness of white skin full flesh three-dimensional. The Itself itself.

The first principles and the first things of Being. The object of the philosophical gaze. The articulate boy. The eudaimonia of looking. Unattached. Immortal. The Sun. Entelechies lounging on the Isles of the Blest. A gay aristocracy. So unwelcome in this workers' state. Finally not here at all.

Freedom! But higher than that, the absolute enslavement by desire. The boy looked about, unsteady. Resurfacing from the dream is momentarily unsettling. His head slightly lowers and he remembers where he was and knows how close it still is. Surely this boy has more to offer himself than the dead undesirous ones do. Sweet reaching. Sweeter still unattainment. He attains. Only God can have it both ways.

The perfectly free entelechy is a questionable thing. Satisfaction in the absolute of the unsatisfied. The mind reaches itself. It creates itself in its not being itself and, in that, arriving at itself – of course it does, the logic of the knowing act requires it. The Act. An audacious thing. The very pure itself. The world is born in the soul that has become as nothing.

So I desire. And if my desire is strong enough to annihilate all undesire, and I am nothing but a reaching (quite literally a nothing at all for myself, a magical thing) then the Form enters into my long lengthening out and I become that. And more than the Form, I am the unformed thing of that which holds the Form, the bare thing, the particular particular. And I am the unspeakable intimacy of Form and that bare thing. I am the holding of beloved by his lover. I am the end of desire in desire, that impossible unity. I, by my being pure desire, am that. The words pile up.

Where to begin? With the questionable and the audacious. I will begin with The Phaedrus.

"When the lover sees a godlike face or the form of a body that is a good imitation of the beautiful, at first he shudders and some of the former awe takes hold of him; then, as he looks at it he reveres him like a god and, if he didn't fear that he would be thought completely mad, he would sacrifice to the boy as though to an agalma and a god." Phaedrus 251a

Plato is usually thought of as denigrating the senses as giving a weak and distorted image of the real. But in the Phaedrus, and not only there, he writes of an earthly vision of divine beauty. And, instead of a sluggish response, the one who sees this thing with his eyes answers with a shudder of holy awe (agal). This is the Theoria of philosophical contemplation. I write of that. I have been overcome by that thing often in my traveling life and I am goaded on by my own unease to write it into this place, these words, as my public accounting.

Any such confession is troubled by the unsettling fact that upon seeing this awesome thing one is instantly thrust out of familiar territory into another place and thought searches for a way out of its bewilderment into ordinary understanding, but it finds none. The way from this certain and vigorous thing back into everyday uncertainty and weak shadows is gone. The way back from the Plato who sees the Real with his senses to the Plato who writes of shadows is not written down in any of his dialogues. And modern thinking has been too frightened to admit that this other thing exists. Today's thinkers deny the Forms and simply insist on the shadows. They are comfortable with the shadows. Or is it that the theoretic, the philosophic, spirit that "sees" is a freak? Made mad by the heat of a foreign sun.

Caveat - Before the Light comes. Before the vision shines. Before the god appears, there must be the Fire. The heat. The Tapas of meditation. The burning must rise in the soul of the one who would see. The friction of repeating repeating repeating the blessed words must set the scene ablaze and burn away the world of undergrowth. The water from underneath must rise up and call down the fire, the blaze from above. The devastation. The vast openness. The smooth shimmering ash. The dusky effulgence. The twilight god.

These divine visions that Plato writes of are, it is true, hardly ordinary. They are something other that has invaded the ordinary. It is as though a rigid formal thing from an apocalyptical writing, a jeweled magical being, stands, leaving the skin of the out there broken. It soon vanishes and all the shining holiness that was on the boy is washed off by the whisk of the everyday. Still, it was there clearly visible for a moment. The eyes did see. And then they become as though full of a compacting fluid seeping into the brain leading to a bellowing headache.

So now we, you and I, must search for the meaning of holiness. The Agh, the Awe, the Unapproachable. That agalma was there. The effulgence of lightening, the stun of thunder, the striking, the slaying in the spirit, heady stuff for us in this Theoria. Hardly more than a momentary gap in the awareness of others. When you meet such a youthful beauty, as you must eventually if you haven't already, that boy will cause you to be still and look at him only glancingly. You do understand even now. The intensity assails you. It crams in. No other thoughts are possible for the time being. That is Plato. That is Platonic love. It is not that weakened sexless soul-mate stuff spoken of in magazines.

It is an otherworldliness that is sometimes right here. It is a foreign thing attacking directly on. And it is of course a challenge to those other would-be beauties here that vie for man's love. Such Platonism is denied place and reviled and finally forcefully ignored because it gives place to irresistible competition. The arrestingly beautiful boy, if allowed to stay, causes the family business to remain undone and he is a home wrecker. But no worry, he will go of his own accord very soon. There must be a strict separating of the sacred from the profane - I speak as an anguished lover.

"… the charioteer sees the face of the boy which is flashing like lightening." Phaedrus 254b

I would add for myself, "… and my own blood pounds like thunder in my ears." In the astonishment and effulgence I rear up. And I want to sacrifice to the boy. But what do I sacrifice? A mere libation seems so meager. I think of something Christian. I think of the dying god. And I want to eat him myself. And drink him in. I want that stern thing in me.

So there is more than simple theoria at a distance. Like a Dionysian maenad, I dream the fine dream of eucharistically devouring this holy flesh and blood. Thin spirituality shimmers over my body. My dialectical lust rises. The delicacies of apophantic deconstruction. I swallow the holy thing. I regurgitate the Light. I write. I meet my desire.

But I only write. I imagine my physical mouth bleeding from the constraining bit. I deliquesce uncontrollably into calm and lucent rhythms. I pray I do not forget and die into a dead unmoving academic prosaic mass.

I begin my approach with a few simple questions, to him, from the Dialectic. What is mind? What is time? Impossible questions. Thrusting questions. Into the outer places. Away from here. Into the presence of aporetic swirling gods. The boy is nowhere and unable to find an answer to these questions. Face to face with himself, he falls into the sheen of his own skin.

So I begin by taking the boy out of here. I present to him quickly disappearing pathways. He is stopped still in nowhere. Religious things rise up. It's inevitable.

Dialectics is the approach to the gods. To the far places. To the loud roar in one's own ears. To dry swirling dust. And to the Jolting and the Sudden. In the dark unseeing, He has seen. Silence. At last the boy must try to return home to give form to that silence in words.

Then the difficulty. He is the turning that has gone back into himself. He has become the universal form. He isn't. God is. The Boy is Himself. Agh.

Again and again. Like a Dionysian maenad, I dream the fine dream of eucharistically devouring holy flesh and blood. Thin spirituality shimmers over my body. I write down my dialectical lust. The delicacies of apophatic deconstruction. I swallow the holy thing. I regurgitate the Light.

I meet my desire. I only write. I imagine my physical mouth bleeding from the constraining bit. I deliquesce into calm and lucent rhythms.

When I was a young college student, hardly more than a boy, and I was being imbued with the mathematical, and the spirit of the abstract was skimming me across the countryside, I took out along the Volga River of Fayette County. Walking, almost gliding, down sunny golden gravel roads I had visions of pure forms hanging before my eyes. Perhaps it was my hay fever, but I was in love. I remember so distinctly seeing Equality itself right there. I called it that, but maybe it was what Plato called The Same. Two that were one. This is the heart of repetition, I see now. It is the secret of the theoria of universals. Repeating repeating repeating. The Heat of the eternal day. The Blaze. The Light. The vast thing. And the devastation of one's life after.

My philosophic theorizing was always with me. Over and over. My mind grew hot with the friction of dialectical separating. Peel off this, peel off that, and then the precious thing would appear. I walked the halls going over the forms, again and again. And then the vision. And then the face of a real boy would beam up. The god. And desire, hot desire. Love. Light. Until eventually, back in my room, sleep.

That is philosophy. Philosophy is not the recounting of a grim human comedy of errors that the smiling, would-be wise try to publish.

Such a philosopher, such a lover of Saphes the Clear, rides above the horror and the tumult of life. At least while he is in the presence of the beloved he can think of no such dark things. But then again, perhaps it is the close presence of such disturbing things that thrust the young philosopher out to this other place. Such psychologizing does have its place, I suppose, for those who make a science of the displaced or for those who relish the delights of literary thumping, but I am here speaking of the real, not of shadows.

Anguish pales over the thoughts of the one returning. I knew that I would never make my way with ease in the world. I was an inhabitant of that other place. In books I saw the outlines of an otherworldly topology. The topography was often strangely incoherent, but I made it cohere by the stickiness of my constant pressing on it. I have spent my life at border crossings. I have never had to bribe my way through. I simply came and went. Few took notice, which is as I wanted it.

Though I write of pain and paradox, of anguish and unanswered questions, of blindness and blanking out, I have not written any less than the joy of love. There is nothing of final despair or ultimate death. There is only terminal happiness. Thus I have failed to achieve a worldly seriousness. And literary depth seems to have escaped me. I write the boy of light, not the tomb of regained sleep. There is a tumescent erectness in my final thoughts. The wane and ebb of lumbering death does not excite me. At last there is only the plenum. Being is.

The Forms are known through erotic intuition; well, yes that is well known by those who can read and have read Plato. But, though they also read there that the dark horse of desire finally leads the charioteer of the soul to bloody exhaustion, that is forgotten. The Forms are close, too close for comfort. Like the men of Sodom we want to take and know them intimately, but No, we can't. What to do? The struggle is intense. Still, without the vision, which inevitably leads to such an end, there is no knowledge of the Forms. Desire and its exhaustion are an essential part of the contemplative enterprise. We philosophers are all men of Sodom. The angels of the One are desirable.

There are, of course, those who deny such matters. They say that there is no intuition of such things. That only a sober non-erotic analysis preserving the well-ordered decorum of the ordinary world will lead to knowledge that is useful. In that they are correct. Usefulness is not a part of divine theoria. Or it’s a twisted transcendental Using.

So now, here I sit bloodied and humiliated by my not having the courage to take as mine the spoils of philosophical war. The beauty got away. Or in my purity I let it go. What good is purity? Or is it other? Have I not overcome that sense of the Mine and Thine? Have I not lain down in the dust of universal Being? Have I not gained the transcendent Beauty more intimately? This blood is the eucharist of my own destruction. And now … or I am an ordinary failed sodomite. Why did Socrates refuse to take Acibiades when he had won a place in his desire? The one who will not take what he has won is despicable. But I am and Socrates was a bloodied thing and who could tolerate the sight of that in the beloved's eyes? Eros plays rough with me. And I am thee.

The fact that language has come to us to be possessed by us, that with it we can now reach out and hold on tight to what is not actually there, that possible worlds appear and glance at us, that, strikingly, the first world-creating existents existing display themselves before us even into non-being itself, and that with it we grasp the world as a lover - all that should not make us forget that we and language are two and not one, that the fusion of thought to word has left a scar that we softly stroke in our sleep. And yarely cozen wisdom from nightmares. Buckled up, we speed on.

The fact that, armed with language, we become fiery imaginings rising into the far sky of thought. Colors and sounds now unhindered by dull matter. Ethereal fragrances. Twilight lips with their threatening touch. A tongue that speaks. And thought. Thought, language and image – that fact reveals three, not one – a trinity derived from raving Being. Subtle distinctions in my roving metaphysical mind. Careening wildly in this intellectual night. A god is with me. Things come undone and analyze themselves perfectly.

The great mathematical arches, the Sky, the Boy splayed out as though on a cross. I imagine. The boy curled up in the going inward, on his bed, he flies. I watch. He lies still. Numbers coalesce magically. And displace themselves into a higher order of things.

Such erotic intellectual thoughts seem so adolescent. They are adolescent. They are the glory of literature. To be able to take them as one's own is audacious. The questioning will have long stopped. You really have no choice. The gods never grew up.

When Philip of Opus declared that it is in the contemplation of the Sky that we see the gods, he spoke the Iowa countryside of my youth to me. Empty and brilliant. Under the slow circles of the night in the agile dancing fire of sheer disorder. Under the wide breadth of noonday light. Clean and pure colors. Gentle risings and curious fallings. I arch up and I liltingly tilt down with the expanse of the full heaven, I heave in its arms. I endure the vertigo. It ends in the nowhere. I curl up waiting for his return.

This is the philosophy of those places far from the city and far from the hemmed in valleys where the cities crouch. Here the land opens out wide. Slopes of long white roads rise into the sky gently. The sun beats rhythmically. The eyes burn. And at night glimmering specks of light in the distance. The incessant drone of cicada. Warm legs under green dashboard lights.

In the twentieth century we became suspicious of our own mind. Before that century of chaos, we knew to be suspicious of how well our thoughts matched outer reality, but of our own inner world we felt certain that things were what they seemed to be. When we felt such and such a feeling we believed that we really did feel that feeling. When we thought such and such a thought we believed that we really were thinking that thought. It could very well have been that when we felt hot it was because of some external cause other than external heat; we might have had a fever or been hypnotized or been dreaming. We were sure that we at least felt hot; no doubt about it. And it could very well have been that when we thought it was raining outside it may have been because of something we were hearing on the radio or because of a dream from the night before that was seeping through or even because someone else said it was, but we were very sure that we did think the thought that it was raining outside. With the coming of the twentieth century and Nietzsche and Freud, we came to think that our own judgments about our own feelings and thoughts were perhaps wrong. Cartesian infallibility of the mind knowing itself was gone. We saw that when we were being magnanimous and loving we were really being petty and resentful. When we felt fear, we were really feeling love. By traversing a hidden path, our superego found a way for us to unfeel and unthink the love and resentment that we somehow knew we should not feel.

And so philosophy came into disrepute because it had relied on a supposed clear view of the phenomena that had appeared before the mind's eye. The mind had thought it had seen a world that was full of colors and sounds and shapes and quantities and fiery feelings and thoughts and time's passing. After the cataclysm of discovering that we didn't really think what we thought we were thinking or of feeling what we thought we were feeling (you must remember that it is not here a question of our thoughts and feelings matching outer reality) – after that cataclysm we came to see that we were in fact under the control of dark horrible forces. What to do? Do you think you see a world? You don't really think you see a world. You have deceived yourself into thinking you see a world. Do you feel a desire for sweet apple pie; you don't really feel that. Does your foot hurt? You only think it does; there is no feeling of hurt there. You are not really thinking and feeling at all. You are .. well, we don't really know what is real behind this self-deception. In fact, the only true thing we know is that all is self-deception. And that all so-called truth is untruth. You are a block of an unknown thing that feels and thinks nothing; in spite of the illusion that you feel and think you do. Don't get me wrong, even illusions are an illusion; there are no illusions. That is the chaos of the twentieth century. And so now there are those poor fools who attempt to write a defense of the given as though there were really something given that we might ponder. Self-deception Self-deception Self-deception.

Or have I deluded myself into thinking I have understood? Not only into thinking I have understood, but into thinking that I was thinking and trying to understand. It's a lovely game. It's the game of love. Our God is the god of love. A wild and terrible thing. And it is of course true that the twentieth century has discovered nothing new; it only thought it had. Lovers have known of this forever.

I write the Plenum, the Boy so impressing his form on me, the gods clamoring and the Beloved entangling himself into me. Where is the emptiness that so eerily works the hands of modern writers? I do read the moderns and I do find pleasure in them; but it is the pleasure of a respite from work. Soon I am back at my own attempt to scale the high shoulder of this god that I must call mine. The refreshing absence of God is not here. David wrote, " Oh god, depart from me that I might know gladness before I depart and am no more." Gladness is also not mine, but a hot ecstasy is. And the bearing down of immortal life is all through my religion. I know the high and the formal. And though I write in a seeming informal and personal way, I am really writing my undoing. And the inevitable undoing of these words. Otherwise they are a rotten mass.

I have written out on the open, wind-blown prairie. The rising sky above. The great grid laid out by a repeating repeating geometry. A droning unquiet. The countryside is a massively stuffed emptiness. The void is replete. Here raging ocean waves are stopped in the still sculpture of the land's broad masculine chest. This is the place of gods. The dainty ladies of the city teach philosophy in salons.

Overhead mountains move across the sky. Cumulous turbidity. My mind's dullness. Deserts follow. And parched knowledge of far places. The breath-taking Overhead. Boys dance on green lawns below. And fall between themselves. There is no let up.

The falcons and the sky here are the archetypes of pale boys rustling in the High Church, pages turning, droning rising intonations, the blinding bell swelling up and up across the radiant face of the Son. Until these suns of the Sky swivel about into the glistening moon faces of the night. Milkweed kisses. Erogenous sores. Soaring out the windows of starry wind. Falcons bite. The sky impinges. Pale boys fuse. Pages burn. I do not write of absences. But of abscesses on the face of a sexual boy/god. I am intimate with this one.

Philosophical beauty is not ordinary beauty. It is a holy thing, but what can I say about holiness that would make you and me understand? Holiness is more than un-understandable; it is contrary to the understanding. Such beauty is not beautiful. Desire for it is undesirable. Its attraction is repulsion. Its being is negative. But that's not quite it either. This unbeauty is inside its ordinary beauty – simple ugliness and the simply plain are not philosophically beautiful. And the un-understanding is inside the very clarity itself of understanding. The repulsion is the excess of attraction. And its negative being is super-being. Something ain't quite right here. Perhaps it is mere philosophical mystification.

The boy arrives out of nowhere. In a sense that statement should be taken literally. The uncaused is always creepy and holiness is what makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Moreover, the boy will probably be merely ordinary; still there will be something about him that … what? You want him. The vertigo sets in. Nothing comes from nothing. You have fallen into his nowhere. Perhaps you should just get back to work. He laughs a lot and what is that?

Holiness is an unseen beauty. It speaks but always its speaking is unheard. Its touch is entirely inward to just itself. And it smells of outer space, far places, difficult logical argument.

It is the forbiddenness of forbidden sex. Thus it is not sex, but … I don't know. I shudder with delight as though a wanton spring breeze has cosseted me.

Perhaps the boy is a witch. Perhaps the angel of inhuman flesh. Perhaps your death. Perhaps he is God toying with you.

You tell no one of it.

This is the energia of Nous. Self-contained, self-caused, useless, enjoying itself. In this world, I write that I might enjoy myself in another's eyes. That thing does what it wants. A transcendent immorality. But what is that!

The gazing back from the one being gazed at is the beauty of pure timeless, placeless mind. The gaze gazing is the end of the gaze. Entelechies full of the vastness of the Vast. The boy is the image of the inwardly self-sufficient. One thing tumbling tumbling tumbling into itself. The many become one. The one mirrored in the eyes of another one just like him endlessly repeated. One thing. What can I say? Pop! He's nowhere in sight. He is only your own looking looking looking for yourself/itself. You are your own object, my dear. I know you. I have been watching you for a long time.

In theoria, in the Gaze, the world is summed up and held as one simple thing. The mind is one; the world is many. The one simple thing that is the thought of the whole world, without ontological parts, a universal thing become the particular thoughts of the many, lies in unextended extension across the world, and I am that. That one ontologically simple thing is in its own gaze and it is its own end.

The philosopher is an otherworldly fellow, but perhaps there are times when that same fellow wants to come back to live in the society of thisworldly folk. Should he be welcomed? Does he have anything to contribute to society and those who must live within it? He should be welcomed by the folk here, but maybe not by the Society itself - if there is such a thing. In fact this society is boring, exceedingly so, and it does exist. Without doubt the good people in it need some relief. The problem is that otherworldly things are disruptive to society, passionate things do not thrive here and the language here is not conducive to speaking of such things. Conflict.

"For passion, like crime, does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life; it welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself." Thomas Mann

Without passion, without the paradoxes of thought, without the unspeakable and that frighteningly alluring other place, so close, this world would be surpassingly inhospitable.

The theoretical mind, the contemplative spirit, the philosopher alone with the Abstractions is a welcome thing here because he is so destructive of this thing suffocating us – Society. He comes with his ragtag back of wild boys, visionary angelic formulae from another place, sets fire to the dry sticks and grass of our imagination and, in spite of our complaints, makes us smile. The excess clarity of the Light is a dark thing. True, I suppose, but there is still the nagging feeling that it is a mere literary oxymoron. And maybe society is more grown up and shouldn't we want that? Peter Socrates Pan is … what? Dialectical aporia. Passion for passion's sake.

But who am I to talk? I have quietly sat and read my books, unhindered by this ravaged world. Society has been sort of good to me. Perhaps it senses that still, unseen disruption that lies close, and it waits for me to speak. I'm afraid, though, that it knows I have little, if anything, worthwhile to say, and it is all so literary. I write the adolescent dreams we all ever are, I write from out of that high godhead.

I am writing the far stretches of philosophy. The insubstantial and the vague. The twilight places. The thinly diaphanous. The attenuated. Thought gives out. Existence stands alone. Simplicity is just simplicity. And the fact of the world breaks with the bliss of facticity. Therefore I write without an authoritarian air. I will not give you the hard rock of objectivity to break against. Nor will I give you a tough prose style to chew on. I will dilly-dally with a rambling cadence. I will speak of very formal things in an easy informal manner. My breathing shall be a gentle in and out and only afterwards will it be apparent that I have reached the winded end. The sheer drop off.

This is most certainly not psychology. Just why or how I or you or another thinks is of no concern to me. I will not comment on what the secret meaning of our thinking is. It's of no use in our understanding of That. Nor will I mention that so and so has said such and such already. It's all been said by so many unknown to any of us here that to attribute it to just one or two would be an injustice to those of centuries past and at home in places not of our neighborhood. That godless god of ultimate things is without any of us. He is the barren windy places of the godhead. The forehead of that boy shines with an uprightness. And his voice has a melody too sweet to hear. A ruthless and cruel perfection. The only hope that we have that we might write the end of thought. Little remains.

It's rather difficult to find the far places on the surface of this sphere of the One when its center is everywhere … . The right here is the farthest place! Surely this is the wind from there blowing right through us. It is difficult because it is too easy. Divide by zero and all things are yours – and nothing. So I dilly-dally willy-nilly. Lavender green, lavender blue. You are my spleen, I am your shoe. … And nowhere.

The Act. The entelechy. The self-sufficient. There are phenomena, but there are no epiphenomena; the phenomena do not ride, there is nothing to ride upon. There are only the phenomena and the awareness of the phenomena and the awareness of that awareness as itself phenomena. And a strange, incomprehensible constancy of one thing enduring infinite change. The phenomena come and go, but are always just there. The one constant thing never comes and goes, but, it seems, – should I say, phenomenally? – not to be there. My thoughts are as twisted as my sentences.

Berkley denied any material basis to phenomena; they had as a base only mind. Nagarjuna stepped out farther onto the philosophical porch and denied even mind as a base; then he and the phenomena lay down together, but only momentarily, on the windy flow of time. In these words, however, time is also to be denied. Time is only the provisional substance of this fine and substanceless world. There is finally no time, but the phenomena remain. And the awareness of them. The Act. The entelechy. The boy and his mirror.

His gaze is always the same. The shudder goes through me. He was the –less in the middle of my vision of substancelessness. A refined, looming thing. A tall and proud thing. A striking beauty. The world rests on him. An epidermal shine. A scandal to serious thought. But I climb up.

Between the world out there and our awareness of it there is a thin film of reality. The skin of that body. Shimmering desire. Flush with the dawn. He glares back at me. The night is almost over. Fingers pull me close. Rubbed and flayed and played with. I have nothing left to lie on but the divisions of analysis. Will I and this impossible dialectic ever be friends?

The mark of the out there real seems to be that we know it only indirectly. We know it only through an intermediary. Through a go-between. And uniting with it, if ever that is to be, is to be with the help of a matchmaker. We know our lovely god only by inference. And we work day and night recursively to make our way to him. He is not here, but sometimes we sense that his fingers are on the door handle. He will soon come into the room.

It's loves anxiety. We hang on the cheek of his night. Substancelessness abounds. I am only epiphenomena over him. I do not exist. Lovers understand. Even those others who wanted, so unphilosophically, to ride on matter.

You and I are not now engaged in a technical struggle. I am not now trying to show you that I can build a wonderfully engineered verbal bridge between here and there. I have not built, with these words, a house to attract you and your friends the gods. Nor is this a set of literary rooms in which you are to judge my exquisite eye for interior decorating. Balance and composition, while they are everywhere, are not the point. I have written a shattered vision.

I have been searching for a metaphor to help you anticipate the ways of this long writing. I could say as others have that it is a walk through the woods. That somewhat suffices in that it is a meandering with no external purpose. It would be enough if reading it was eudemonia for you. Surely there are also thickets and sudden open spaces, disappearing paths and light streaming down through the dust, shimmering with the nervous leaves. But this is also an evening's drive out on the mostly empty country roads. A corn pollen high, the droning, hanging haze. It is a stopping and a rummaging through a roadside junk shop. Musty broken things. Or again it is a simple country dump yard –wet and ghostly half things rising up in the summer heat. Rising up. Schoolyards will appear and we will gaze about in the country twilight. We will ride on a teeter without a fulcrum. Swing high on a swing with no chain. And round about low limestone cliffs will dangle in the encroaching space. They will have cool recesses and warm hard surfaces to lie on. We will do all this for the sheer pleasure of it. Nothing will be accomplished by it. We are entelechies spending an afternoon in a sun that is sufficient unto itself, content in our own looking at things. This is Theoria. This is the energia of Nous at work . I write as a boy who works to set things up and then waits to see it all fall down. And again. And again. And again. I will repeat and repeat and repeat his useless balancing himself on old wooden fences. We will watch him hang there and jump before he falls. And we will walk on and drive and look into the otium of the infinite. Then later we will do it again headed in some other direction. But it will all be the same. The same and the same. I hope it is a dignified writing.

The metaphors don't work. Or they only partially work in that they do let you know not to expect any finished product on my part that you might admire or scorn at. The words go on seemingly forever and get nowhere. And you could rearrange the pages in any order you want. Let us say that all that is my great failure. I have been staring too long at the form of the unformed God all around us, and I write that.

As for my paragraphs, each in itself, I cannot grasp what their form is except to say that they rise and fall with my breathing. Perhaps they have the broken form of a mitigated migraine. They are my mind as it boggles. I write my desire. And my desire attempts to take on the form of its beloved. Of which I have spoken ad nauseam.

Philosophy - everything that can be said at all can be said in three words. Timing is everything.

Metaphors, however, will not do. The very metaphor of metaphor is misleading. It assumes that there is something there that can only be indirectly gotten at through representational thinking. I have not been that oblique. I have gone always directly to the thing itself. Still, metaphors do have their place as long as they don't crowd out everything else. My writing is my writing; it is not a country drive, a wooded walk, a clamoring over cliffs; but it is pleasant at times to think of it as that. It seems odd to me that I should have to say that. Why do we so hesitate today to believe we can have non-metaphorical thinking? Surely you are intelligent enough and experienced enough to take my style of writing as it is and not have to be led by the hand and spoken to as though you were a child. Still, childhood does have its place in the adult mind. I am not really against metaphors, of course I am not; the Form itself is pleasantly hidden in them. The representation is a real presence. And we are free to look directly at it there.

Thomas Aquinas said, if I am not mistaken (one can never be completely sure about another's thoughts nor even about one's own), Thomas Aquinas said that we have no direct knowledge of God and that we know of His existence only through inference. The same could be said of physical Matter, or whatever the name of that beloved thing of the physicists is. The ground and ultimate cause is outside our ken. And so we make representations of it. Bad philosophy quickly follows.

While I do believe that there are things to which we must make our way by means of inference and representation, those things are not of superior being. The ground of what we know directly is directly known as well. We know the Red of red things. We even know the Existence of existing things. And we know directly the tie that ties together the many grounding things into a complexity. There is no need to seek refuge in the dark and mysterious. I do understand that some would find such a thing to be rapturous and others would find it restful. But it isn't an ontological necessity. I am one who glories in the light, in broad shouldered masculine openness.

Do you have a favorite theory about the fundamental structure of existence? I have a friend – most certainly not a French intellectual - who uses his thumb and first two fingers to form a center of three vectors all at right angles to each other. And then he explains how vastly differing views of reality intersect and one world, our world, is built. It's an elegant and simple explanation. It is a timeless Form he has right in his hand. He takes great pleasure in delving into the intricacies of it and he makes others feel it too, or he could if they would but take the time to walk with him along the paths of that timeless world. He is doing philosophy. No one has been more or less successful at it than he. But what is success compared to the pleasure and the anguish of the walk? The mind is at such timeless times sufficient unto itself. Right then, I would say, along with Aristotle, that it is groundless and eternal. I don't know if my friend has thought about his own doing or not. Can he fit his magic hand into his own hand's pointing and centering? I don't think so; I think he has become a transcendent thing right there. He doesn't fit into this world well. But then again contemplatives seldom have.

Scattered all throughout my book is the transcendent. My book. I am the main and only character in it. Except for Him. My book. But, of course, it is not really mine, hardly even in an ordinary sense. I wrote it, but what is that? The Ideas came to me. From the Transcendent or maybe just from the library, sometimes I stole them out of stolen books. The Transcendent. And the style is His style. His rhythms push it along. I have been effectively shoved out of the way. Don't get me wrong. Lovers and beloveds are used to such abuse. They call it love play. And it is. Or you know nothing about love. I demand that I be baffled and cut off. The status of the torn apart shall be mine - body, mind and spirit; or I will fail at becoming the absolutely nothing. My book. It looms large. I serve it. I cringe at being forced to call it my book.

The sense of being Mine is of the Dasein, and that is not mine. My life and my death are put together out of the My and Life and Death, great transcendent things. And that gathered complex is now mine, but that makes no sense. It is thus mine. Except that the overweening dialectic of the simple-complex butts in and … well, a shapely butt has always been an attraction to me.

So this is a story of me and philosophy trying to get on together. And of its abusive ways. The still, magnificent, eternal things have not behaved well when we went out together. I was often left in the lurch. I was his lunch. He became my eucharistic delight. I quietly play with the entanglements of the world's logical form. Sempiternal seminal droppings. Transcendent ooze. The mind's sheen. Love's machine. I have worked hard to make this book come. Slam bham, move in. Closer. Not much of a story at all.

I lived the normal life of a young, love-stricken going-to-be intellectual. I had no idea I was going do be an intellectual. I only wanted to show the boy near me the wonders I had found in philosophy books. I saw things. I had possession of the deep things of existence, rare jewels; I could prove the things the others only wanted. I could prove his own devastating beauty. I could demonstrate the never-ending light. No one sat with me long enough for me to get started well. Sometimes if I caught one of the beautiful ones off-guard I started in the middle. I would have talked to anyone. I was the Philebus boy, but with a mission. I would save these boys from destruction. Even from her.

Those boys must have felt trapped when I hounded them and tried to round them up into heaven. I didn't want sex; I wanted to give salvation. Maybe I did want sex, but I just didn't think of it. I was too much in love. A strange and deadly transcendent love. I went on and on.

That is my my my my life. Hardly a life at all, it was and is Life itself, almost a criminal thing. And will be. I do not feel sorry for myself. The Form of Being controls it all. It is that that I love. A jealous thing. I roam around inside that Entelechy, that Act, that necessary existent. It is mine. And so those quotes were not about me but about me overcome by Being - That. Do you see how I can prove immortality quite nicely? Do you understand why none of them listened? Being is the criminal act. I was over-sexed. Ein Überknabe. The Cause.

High academia is inevitably oxy-philo-sopho–moronic. Its heavy opacity is nothing more than the everyday garden of perspicuous desire. Its clear forehead of thought is petroleum jelly – how did it get up there!? Its disdain for the ordinary world of business and builders is the inverted reflex of the lithe abstractionist to curl up and dream of the broad-shouldered worker yielding. Its coming together of opposites in a dialectical third (a blithe ménage a trois) ain't going to happen – but one of their kind will, no doubt, be that to himself when he's alone. Philosophy is a solitary thing. The philosopher sleeps with his own existence. Inevitably he pulls himself into existence out of nothing.

It is part of the great Protestant tradition, and not only of that but also of the Catholic, that our experiences piercing to the innermost places of the spirit, of the soul, of the mind, of the selves of the Self, of that greatly layered thing that the "I" is, that I am, that those transcendent feelings are Truth shining forth in propria persona. Well, maybe. For my part, I have spied Truth coming at me from outside. The radiance of beauty on the face of a boy and down along his form, so infuriatingly other than I, that was the pure thing I ran after. Yes, I suppose I did later lie on my bed and think and dream and try to pierce through to that otherness or to ever so gently let it come, cut, pierce, into me. However I did it, it was a thing not me, not my soul or spirit or mind or self of my self. He was that thing, not I. That finely formed form was against me. I reached out to something else.

Thus that diffuse wave of Being, that indeterminate radiance, that infinite and simple oneness, that sweet unity of all things, that superlative emptiness of the mystics, was not mine. I had instead a shapely shape and a precise this. The presence of another thing, not a majestic absence in me, was mine.

But you knew, no doubt, that I would say that and you wonder if I have not, thereby, lost any seriousness and depth to my work. The great poetic tragedy of life has passed by me. I am Abraham to whom Isaac has come back and the night is over and forgotten, of which there is no poetry written nor can there be. This is the Platonism of Presence. I have lost seriousness and depth and I have gained gaiety and the heights.

Philosophy is a falling in love. Eternal Forms dancing all around you. They dance; they don't just move. Not even in great majestic circles. They dance a true dance, not the sweet, light-hearted nothing of commercial kitsch. It is violent movement in a back-twisting suddenness. It is robust head jerking. It is sometimes the chaotic dance of the Maenads; it is then the openland sacrifice extra muros. It is the boy-god torn apart and eaten and blood-drunk in the cold night away from the civilized cooking stove of the city's public altar. It is a delirious Christian orphic sacrifice. The skin crawls from out of another world. A head spinning upside down agitated licking tongue of unhearthen fire up the coccyx. Hieron osteon. And you cannot move.

Eventually you blank out. You are slain in the spirit. You fall back into the oblivion of God. Later you try to write words back into that nothing. You fought your way back into existence, only to remember That.

Christianity is the uncivilized thing at the heart of civil society. It is the tearing on the skin of my smooth articulation. It is the bite of his sweet kiss.

Treble voices crawling up stone walls of sweetly buttressed cathedrals. A loveliness within the burning. A cut that heals over instantly. Ever virgin. Boys at last giving birth of God. High theological dialectic. Only I have been true to the tradition.

It is possible that both a and b exemplify the same Form. Such is the homo-ness of this homosexual writing. And there is a mind contemplating that. It is, of course, a very complicated ontological construction. The logical elements of 'both … and' and 'the same' are in one fact. The mode of possibility and the nexus of exemplification and the set of "a and b' crowd in there also. The Form stands strongly at the emphatic end of the thought. The bare particulars glare at us. All of that inside the one thought that "It is possible that … ", leaving us to analyze that 'All" and 'inside' and 'one thought' in a seemingly unending entanglement of ontological things and non-things. What to do? The homo-ness that we are contemplating makes us reel.

Suffice it to say that in the Act we see that two things have the same form. We could even say that two things suffer the same thing. The two are passive to that Form. It becomes that and that under That. Or it would if I let my analytic mind wander. Suffice it to say that in the Act we see that two things have the same form. And that we philosophically contemplate that Act and the very Form of Act itself.

These musings are the homosexual philosopher's escape from the world. The entelechy that he is, enjoying himself in contemplating also himself as of the form of the form that he is contemplating, is free. It is in the essence of the entelechy that it and its object are two and not one. He is, therefore, also not himself; perhaps he has become also his beloved and his lover in the Act. Of their being both the same. Always removed. Thus every a and b that has ever been or will be. The pull toward ontological analysis is incessant. The loveliness of it demands attention. There is tension and contention in my intending.

Aristotle eventually tried to turn philosophy into a spectator sport with the Entelechy as the great spectator. The theorists became the laid back judges. The rest of us were always under their scrutiny. Philosophy students have it all over us. I, the banaunos, the supposed builder, the weary technician of this awkwardly strapped together philosophical writing, I am the one now suffering their critical ablations. I am not receiving their oblations. Nor is the boy present in these words.

The philosopher is not judge of the truth of other men's sayings; he suffers Truth as it seeps into his own word wounds.

The Entelechy is more properly seen as the god of Being viewing himself all around as the lovely god of Being. The Prince of first principles at the infinite point of unity with himself. A clast and clone to himself, consorting alone with himself, in the broken multi-verse. Trapped in my prosaic verseless verse. I watch myself and infinitely judge. I sublate myself sublimely. I am He. I suffer his climbing into me.

The act of thought is mirrored all along the form of love's body ever turning and returning into itself. Because that act is ever in motion, never still, still moving after aeons of My Beauty, you are the dawn itself! Because you have me in such agitation, I have become Fire for you, only you.

The qualia of thought are fine and invisible to all but the most refined.

As my caress inevitably comes back to the beginning and I begin again, my paragraphs arrive finally back at where they started and nothing much was accomplished in them, if anything. The act leaves no trace. If you have never seen love naked, you do not believe in mind and its pointless retracing of loves going. Since mind and love are one, since logic and the erotic and ever intertwined, since spirit and the blanking out of orgasmic interference abut, the blandishments of non-existence in anything ontological are no more than occasion for a knowing smile. Thought cancels itself out in its doing. As though it were nothing, nothing at all. Less than nothing. No wonder the materialists wonder.

And so my thinking writing ever mirrors my writing thinking.