Having my way with Ulysses

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Shhh.

3:25 am

[Scene: Two lovers in bed, AE with Lizzie Twigg: coiled head to toe they quietly discuss the fixity of their volatility and the volatilization of their fixation, until within his fixedness AE has become nothing and feeling everything, Lizzie becomes volitive. They communicate intermittently in increasingly more laconic narrations. Also a small angry dog is trying to take up as much space as possible between them. It’s so cute! Come here little puppy, come here. What a good doggie. Who’s a good doggie? Oh Jesus God! He’s all teeth! Get off me! Like petting a piranha with fur.]

AE: It’s just that we define ourselves contrarily to each other. I am me because I am not you, and you are you because you are not me. We are poles apart.

Lizzie: We are the same person, AE, don’t you feel it?  After all the mutual deaths we have died? Resurrection, translation, return, distillation, putrefaction, decay, still you don’t know you had it backwards the whole time. You were resurrecting in the wrong direction.

AE: I know. I know it. I just wanted to be the material representation of eternality, in linear time. Just once. Just for a little while. Only long enough to re-experience that feeling of linearity. Don’t you miss it? And feel what it could be, to be linear and eternal simultaneously.

Lizzie: But you can’t just translate yourself into linearity and say I’m back, everybody, I’ve  gained bodily entry into eternity and now look at me! Look at what happened to Lazarus. No. If you want to see how a human mortal finds a place within eternity, that’s not going to cut it. That gets you nothing.

AE: Nothing’s not nothing. Don’t knock nothing.

Lizzie: No, nothing’s not nothing.

AE: I was trying be the eternal temporalized. I wanted to be the all at onceness linearized. I wanted to square that circle, just once. Just the one time and be it and feel it, really feel what it is to be the coexistence of the infinite and the finite.

Lizzie: Be eternality living in linearity? Darling, you’ve done it. You’ve been there already. The infinite and the finite are the same things whichever side you’re on, if you really must take sides, can’t you tell? Just look at us, two beings contrarily defined yet coexisting as aspects of the same reality.

AE: I know. I get it. You don’t have to scratch me like that.

Lizzie: That wasn’t me, but here’s a flash of light for you AE: when we were mortals we didn’t have to go around worrying all the time about gaining bodily entry into eternity: eternity had already gained bodily entry into us. We have always already been since time immemorial and forevermore, the material representation of eternality.

AE: We are God.

Lizzie: Exactly. We are already a squared circle: we can take a finite form, but our infinite selves are in there too.

AE: We are a circle, containing everything.

Lizzie: Everything and nothing.

[At rest relatively to themselves and to each other, the lovers settle into silent contemplation. Small birds rise gently, sweetly, from Lizzie and from AE. Hundreds of them flitter up in swirling concentric patterns bringing with them, as if reflected from the sheen of their feathers, an increasing luminosity of ruby light. Thousands of little birds, aeons of them, softly forming clouds as soft as what do you call it gossamer, the clouds forming mist, the mist gently drifting downward covering the lovers, the lovers blurring about the edges. Together they coalesce and dissolve, their bodies languid, breathing, watching their spirits unrestrained, circling, birds rising into mist falling, like self knowing wheels revolving uniformly: self knowing and self known.]

Dead he wasn’t. Simply absconded somewhere.

Come back here and take what's coming to ya! I'll bite your legs off!
1:42 am

I thought you were dead you yellow bastard. Grrrr. You resurrected yourself, didn’t you? or killed yourself or was laying low or something. Left my person a bloody weeping mess and no clue how to get you back. Sit! Stay! And now you’re back like a murderer to the crime scene. You’re a lucky dog Lizzie didn’t set me at you directly you got back. I’m going to pee in your shoes. Maybe she will go back to the convent soon, you think of that AE?  We liked it there. But we’ll have to sound the lie of the land first, would be prudent: Sister Mary Peter hates us now. Too bad really. I liked the smell of him better than you, you stink like the dead. Woof! And not in a good way. And here you are like the bath nobody wanted, destroying everything warm and comfortable. Before you, Lizzie would take me running. And we’d play go get it! And, who’s a pretty puppy! Now I’m lucky to get out of her purse more than twice a day. Thanks AE. Just, thanks. Well kill my dog you better hide your cat. I’ll get you my pretty. Now go.

The last straw.

Friends, I have forgotten two things. I wish all to know that I do not propose to sell any part of my country, nor will I have the whites cutting our timber along the rivers, more especially the oak. I am particularly fond of the little groves of oak trees. I love to look at them, and feel a reverence for them, because they endure the wintry storms and summer's heat, and not unlike ourselves seem to thrive and flourish by them. One thing more: those forts filled with white soldiers must be abandoned, there is no greater source of trouble and grievance to my people.

12:44 am

Scene: [Tranquilla convent, infirmary. Lizzie Twigg is unconscious and lying on a tinseled oak bed. The shading she has painted with loving pencil on her eyes, bosom, and shame is badly smeared. Sister Mary Peter lifts her from the secondbest bed while St. Agatha straightens the warm impress of her warm form.]

St. Agatha: Don’t jostle her like that.

Sister Mary Peter: I should drop her for what she’s done. She has sinned. We have suffered!

St. Agatha: Sister. Our Sister. Shh! Just look at her. Classic curves: a thing of beauty. Here, put her down on her stomach, we can take the powderpuff to the spot where her back changes name.

Sister Mary Peter:  No, please I beg you. What must my eyes look down on. [Nearly drops Lizzie Twigg but catches her with her leg.]

St. Agatha: Nekum! Remember your wounded knee! Come on, let’s see if she has hair there.

[Sister Mary Peter returns Lizzie Twigg to the bed, facing up.]

Lizzie Twigg: [Talking in her sleep] Where dreamy creamy gull waves o’er the waters dull.

Sister Mary Peter: Oh that’s it. [Gives Lizzie Twigg a hard shove with both hands. She rolls a dummymummy in the sheet off of the bed and onto the floor.

St. Agatha: Mary Peter!

Lizzie Twigg: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschb! What’s happening? I feel like I fell from a cliff!

St. Agatha: You fell out of bed. Sister Mary Peter help her up! [St Agatha rushes to kiss Lizzie Twigg in four places as she crawls jellily forward from under the bed, with dignity].

Lizzie Twigg: [Returning to bed] I’m fine. What happened? Mnemo? I don’t think I’m in full possession of my faculties. I feel like I’ve been run over.

Sister Mary Peter: You were run over, and me too trying to save you. I think I have a concussion.

St. Agatha: Ssh! She is right, our sister. Don’t you remember, dear? You tried to perform a solo ghost dance and then you threw yourself under Jagannath.

Lizzie Twigg: [Covers her face with her hands looking through parting fingers] Oh God. Where’s AE?

Sister Mary Peter: Where’s AE? Sacrilege! Who cares about AE? He’s nothing! What are you doing trying to re-kill yourself over a man? Your crucifix not thick enough? What do you lack within our barbed wire?

St. Agatha: Ssh! Lizzie, you can’t kill yourself again. We immortals have no word for that in our dictionary. I know AE’s return was difficult for you.

Sister Mary Peter: Difficult!

St. Agatha: Ssh, sister yes, it was difficult. Lizzie, you fell 32 feet per second per second for him all over again. But here at Tranquilla we are brides of Christ. You must have no more desire. We are only the ethereal.

Lizzie Twigg: Only ethereal! Then how do you account for that large moist stain on Mary Peter’s robe? And Mother Agatha, I can smell the cloud of stench escaping from your crack.

St. Agatha: [A button pops off of her sackcloth habit; she’s lost a charm] Listen sister, we know where we’d all be if we were only ethereal, but we won’t turn your strength into our weakness. Where do you think you were going to end up, after Jagannath squashed you? Where? Where was that ghost dance going to take you? To Sitting Bull floating in the ether? Rise up all you want, go ahead, but you’ll come back down. You think you were going to ghost dance yourself up to some cloudy waiting lounge, then sit around wondering when the vorex will open under AE’s feet? Circumstances alter cases, have you learned nothing from your time here? Don’t you understand anything? Our convent is built on buffalo holocausts. The skull mountains: we’ve shaped them into cathedrals. You think we don’t bleed? We are the sisters of the last straw and Grandfather Tatanka Iyotanka is our patron saint. [Looking toward Standing Rock] Father I come! Father give us back our arrows! [Looks at Lizzie Twigg with features hardening] You say you are done with AE then you try this? Fool someone else sister, not me.

It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy’s three star.

Blackness is the beginning of whiteness, and a sign of putrefaction and alteration, and that the body is now penetrated and mortified. From the putrefaction therefore in this water, there first appears blackness, like unto broth wherein some bloody thing is boiled. Secondly, the black earth by continual digestion is whitened, because the soul of the two bodies swims above upon the water, like white cream; and in this only whiteness, all the spirits are so united, that they can never fly one from another.12:26 am

Scene: [In an alchemists laboratory, an exhausted owl and a disheveled goat move in opposing arcs around a stork-shaped alembic suspended over an enormous fire. A nebulous obscurity that looks like what do you call it gossamer occupying space within the alembic is communicating with the assembled company, which includes Cassandra, Lizzie Twigg, and St. Agatha.]

Lilith: [Obviously missing some feathers] But what you don’t understand, AE, is that you have not reincarnated and you are most certainly not deathless.  Just look at yourself!

Cassandra: Or smell yourself for that matter, isn’t that thing supposed to be hermetically sealed?

Azazel: [Mascera running down his face, lipstick on his teeth, dead roses slipping off of his horns, in obvious need of a mirror] AE, can you hear me? AE, pay attention! You are manifest without rebirth, that’s it. You are nothing. You accomplished your nothingness badly too and for what?

AE: [with a voice of waves] I’m not leaving here until I deliver my message to the world.  Death is the highest form of life. And the highest form of life is me. I am death!

Cassandra: What a narcisist. He’s going to talk about himself until he’s black in the face.  Lilith, can we get on with the re-death without AE’s cooperation?  We have fire, the bicycle pump for air, and what is that thing?

Lizzie Twig: A lobster?

Lilith: A crayfish.  We couldn’t source a real lobster. [Scowls at Azazel].

Cassandra: A crayfish then, for water.  We need something earthy.

Lilith: Something sexually titilating for him, perhaps a pair of breasts? Agatha?

St. Agatha:  I left them at the convent.

Lilith: Lizzie, tell us about your first time with AE.

St. Agatha: She’s a bride of Christ! She can’t be confessing her every little past indiscretion.  What will he think?

Lizzie Twigg: No that’s ok, Agatha. I want to do this; I need closure. I remember I had just answered an ad to aid AE in literary work, but typing skills weren’t required. In a weak moment I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it. I had been drinking Bass, and absinthe, or was it burgundy and absinthe. I remember the absinthe, but what else was it?

Lilith: Doesn’t matter. He’s listening.  Look.

Azazel: AE, seek thou the light!

AE: I won’t have my leg pulled!

Cassandra: Good idea. Lilith, reach in there and let’s fish him out.

Lilith: Yes. Azazel, stoke that fire.  We’ll need the cream to rise to the top so we can reach him.

Lizzie:  Fire? Is he a holocaust? Oh don’t hurt him!

Lilith: Honey, you can’t make butter without a lot of flogging.  Do you want him back or don’t you?

Lizzie: I don’t know. In the beginning for us was the word. I suppose it makes sense for us to end it in the world without end. Bring him back, but I think I really fit in with the guys at the convent, it’s my home now, so I’m going back there with Agatha.  AE is nothing to me.

Lilith: Oh honey, he’s nothing to us too.  Trust me.

Azazel: Nothing, pray for us.

Talk away till you’re black in the face.

When the matter has stood for the space of forty days in a moderate heat, there will begin to appear above, a blacknesse like to pitch, which is the Caput Corvi of the Philosophers, and the wise men’s Mercury. Blacknesse once seen, thou mayst be sure a True Conjunction of the principles is made.12:17 am

Scene: [An owl and a heavily made up goat argue while tending an enormous fire.  Over the flames hangs a stork vessel containing a phoenix.  They have begun their reversal of the great work.]

Azazel: [Circling the fire] I have sinned.

Lilith: [Circling the fire the opposite direction] I have suffered.

Together: Putrefaction, pray for us. Dissolution, pray for us. Coagulation, pray for us. Mortifacation, pray for us. Stench of graves, pray for us. Black of the blackest black, pray for us.

Azazel: See that?

Lilith: You scorched your eyelashes.

Azazel: Not that, that!

Lilith: White feathers! Not much of a swan. Just once I’d like to get to peacock.

Azazel: Focus, Lilith, just concentrate on returning it to crow. Carbonation, pray for us. Calcification, pray for us.

Lilith: Nothing. It is always much easier to illumination than to obscure. Why is that? Is nothing so difficult?

Azazel: [Pawing the ground] Nothing is not nothing, Lilith, focus. There can be no corruption without regeneration, ok, so can we concentrate please?  If you see Kay, pray for us. See you in tea, pray for us.

Lilith: What did you say?

Azazel: See you in tea pray for us?

Lilith: No. The other thing you said. You can’t have corruption without regeneration. Do you realize what you were saying?

Azazel: What was I saying? I don’t know. I was just saying stuff to get your head back in it.  I meant nothing.  Come on.

Lilith: Nothing. Exactly. I think we’re missing something.

Azazel: We’re missing something? I’m missing something.

Lilith: We’re missing nothing. We need nothing. We need something better than a phoenix if we want to achieve purity of absence. We keep getting the invisible trace of something not there but we want what do you call it void. D’ye see? We don’t want just ordinary death.  We want the quintessence of death.

Azazel: Oh Christ Lilith, the problem’s not in our materials, it is in us. The phoenix is fine. You know how hard it is to source a phoenix? We need to focus. You need to focus. We already got to swan and.

Lilith: Looks more like a tailor’s goose.

Azazel: It’s a swan and look, it’s turning a bit blue around the edges already. We’ll get to crow if we concentrate.

Lilith: I say we get a reincarnated human.

Azazel: Jesus Christ.

Llith: AE

Azazel: A what?

Lilith: [Reversing her direction around the fire] AE. We’ll use him. Trust me, this is the direction we should go. Can I use your mirror?

Azazel: Lilith wants me to trust her. Fine, use it. There’s no talking you out of this. Weep for me O daughters of Erin.

Lilith: [Breathing on the mirror]  We call them to life across the waters of Lethe.

This is the appearance is on me.

 To heap shame on my own head is all the satisfaction I have left to offer to offended heaven. My story has drawn down these judgments: Let my confession atone—but, ah! what can atone for usurpation and a murdered child? a child murdered in a consecrated place? List, sirs, and may this bloody record be a warning to future tyrants!10:37 pm

I’m soft.  I’ve gone soft. Look, can you see me? It is so hard to see myself as others see me. Look closer, look at my head. Below I’m a mess, but my eyes are still here, ayin tachat ayin.  Oh I am punished. This must be hell. Now I know what hell is. Yes I expected some obliteration, but must I pay such a high price for it?  Is it such a crime resurrection?  Is translation so horrible?  So loathsome? It’s not like I murdered a child or something; I should think the living would have some fun with it. Surprise, I’m back! There’s so much potential, and for the benefit of all, properly executed.  Except it’s hard to see me. That’s a problem. And I understand I smell like something murdered, but I’ve never smelt it myself. I’m here, though, you can see me. I’m like looking at some sort of dark animal at night. Or at a spider: all head, web body.  It’s not so bad.  My hell is in this life but it’s not so bad.  And I don’t have it in me to cause my own re-death so here we are. I’ll have to make do. Besides Lizzie will have my head if I dare show my face amongst the dead. Think of the vendetta. Well, history is to blame for that, I refuse to feel guilty.  Or what’s that other world?  She’ll make dope her hope, but perhaps I’m being rather a sentimentalist there.  But really, I’ve incurred too immense a debtorship for my enjoyment.  Well, a thing done is a thing done.  I’ll camp out here. Distractions. Burn something. It is rather nice to be back in some of my old haunts. Eternity is fine but I admit feeling a bit nostalgic for the present.

Sometimes they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

September 2, 1666: And as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire.

The journal of AE, Master Mystic, 10:20 pm but time makes no difference I am God.  I can do whatever the hell I want.  I’ve translated. Basta! Enough. Besides, who ever anywhere will read these written words?

Fire will come take us on to Edenville but it’s freezing hell getting there. Oh fire will come aslowly burning, I can see it from here, slow creeping burning up oh and down too poor body. This is the eighty seventh hour and I had a sweetheart of a dream.  The faces in the dark showed me kırmızı terlik ve altın kanatand. So there it is, clear as the rain: change is in the air and fire will come.

Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish.

The Twofold form Hermaphroditic: and the Double-sexed; The Female-male & the Male-female, self-dividing stood Before him in their beauty, & in cruelties of holiness! Shining in darkness, glorious upon the deeps of Entuthon. 8:47 pm

Scene [Tranquilla convent, in the back garden.  The sisters are preparing to receive a novice for initiation into the order.  St. Agatha and Sister Mary Peter wait with ten fingers locked for her to arrive. ]

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, have you seen my breasts?

Sister Mary Peter:  You left them in the rectory Reverend Mother, shall I retrieve them for you?

St. Agatha:  No, no.  No.  Nuisance they are anyway, really, although I do feel like I lose a charm every time I take them off.  Still, we have a new novice coming and it would be a waste of this whitewashed face and cool coif not to long to appear, well, complete.

Sister Mary Peter: It is a natural craving, Reverend Mother, but you’re looking splendid.  Dressed up to the nines.

St. Agatha.  Never mind, no time.  I can see her coming with my dexter optic!  O look who it is for the love of God! I thought they were dumping Martha on us and instead it’s Lizzie Twigg!  How are you at all?  What have you been doing with yourself? [kiss] and delighted to [kiss] see you!

Lizzie Twigg:  Hello Agatha.  I would have been here sooner but there was all that barbed wire.

St. Agatha:  We do like to cloister ourselves here!  But never mind never mind.  No hurry, my dear sister soul.  I’m just so happy you’re not Martha!  So vindictive for what she can’t get.  Oh my child!  So, here you are, giving up your desire to aid gentlemen in literary work.

Lizzie Twigg:  Yes, I’m done with men.  I loved an Aeon and that ended badly.  Felt like I was drowning half the time.  Now I want to dedicate myself to somebody more, I don’t know, along the straight and narrow.  Linear minded.  Gets us from then to when.

St. Agatha:  Well as a fellow bride of Christ you will have that, even the calendar starts with him, to some end point.  So, let’s have a look at you.  Nice well-filled hose, though they are a bit down around the ankle.

Sister Mary Peter:  Voice like a pick axe, no good for the choir.  Are you lame?

Lizzie Twigg:  No.  My boots are a bit tight though.

St. Agatha:  You might have a high arched instep.

Lizzie Twigg: Um.  I have a question.  I’ve heard things about the sisters here.  That some of you get a bit, well, odd.  I’ve heard about some sisters licking pennies all the time, and wanting to smell rock oil, and all kinds of.  Is this, is this true?

St. Agatha: It’s only the virgins who go mad in the end.  I take it you’re?

Lizzie Twigg: Not. No.

St. Agatha.  I thought not.  You have that I’m all clean come dirty me look.  Now, when was the start of your last menstrual period?  Must have been within the past couple of days.

Lizzie Twigg:  Today.  And it’s awful.  Feels a ton weight.  How did you know?

St Agatha:  The plants are withering.  And the fiddle strings have all snapped.

Sister Mary Peter:  The milk is turning too.

St. Agatha:  Sister Mary Peter, go get St. Patricia, she can coagulate Miss Twigg’s blood.  Now Miss Twigg, we’ll stop your menstruation for now, but you’ll have to get into step with the rest of us.  We all bleed together according to the moon.

Lizzie Twigg:  I’m sorry.  I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or question is it all a fake or anything but, none of you look like, well, like the menstruating type.  No offense.  How many women?

St. Agatha:  Listen sister, we feel it ourselves too, ok, all of us together.  We can be a pack of devils when it’s coming on, I can tell you, especially Sister Mary Peter!

Lizzie Twigg:  She’s a hot little devil all the same.  We were girlfriends at school you know.

St. Agatha:  Oh were you?  And how do you find her now?

Lizzie Twigg:  Well back then she was yours for the asking!  And not to pick holes in her appearance or anything, but she does have fewer teeth than before.

St. Agatha:  Never you mind that now.  We all have bodies, we all have curves inside our deshabillé, but if you are to undertake a novitiate with us you’ll find within our walls sanctity and corporeality intermingle.  Bring your agenbite of inwit, but don’t forget your frillies for Raoul, honey, He likes them both.  Now come with me child, that’s a lovely shirt shining beneath your what? But we must get on with dressing each other for the sacrifice.

Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.

Bloody certainly have we got to see to it ere smellful demise surprends us on this concrete that down the gullies of the eras we may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you larrikins on the postface in that multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end.2:13 pm

I recommend resurrection wholeheartedly to those who are whole of heart and whose hearts fill most wholly the whirling holes ringing roundabout us between the astral levels engulfing souls, hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls, she sells shesouls by the sheshole.  Trips off the tongue.  Yes. This will be how I will preface the collection of the most promising young poets.  I have them all.  The important ones.  Nobody overlooked.  I remember it now, my work I left when I died.  But I am back and it is through logos I shall become important.  My story, my return from death, embroidered with poetry, will become our missing national epic.  I’ll gather my followers.  Malachi Mulligan of course and he will bring in Haines, who else?  Who else?  I will overlook nobody.  My head is whirling, my thoughts are simply swirling! Oh yes and I mustn’t forget the letter the kid gave me to publish.  Foot and mouth?  Well if it is important it will go in.  Now, I must take care of my smell before I gather genius and talent to my service.  My astral body was much more  pleasant than my physical.  But I exist!  I exist!  Why do I feel so nauseous?

Space: what you damn well have to see.

Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time And drew it out to Seven thousand years with much care & affliction And many tears & in Every year made windows into Eden. She also took an atom of space & opend its center Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. 2:06 pm

Forming.  Forming.  And I thought the afterlife was for fulfilling.  Try resurrection some time!  I died.  I came back.  Who does that?  I must be, yes, I am a God.  Yes. Yes.  Feel it.  I was the formless spiritual and now I am the Allfather, Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man.  Jesus Christ I’m a magician now, the magician of the beautiful!  Oh yes, I am back.  I was never an ordinary person.  I lived the life esoteric, and look at me now!  Get a glimpse of my elemental!  Not so blurry today.  This is the virgin birth, right here.  In this space.  At this time.  Soul reinserted into body.  I am God!

Krishna:  Stop!

Wait, what just happened.  Who are you?  Why did everything just freeze in place?  Why are you blue?

Krishna:  I have stopped time.  Listen to me, I will tell you the secret of life.

I already know the secret of life.  I am the secret of life!  Look at me.  I’m back, baby.  I’m here.  I’m in a library talking Hamlet with a kid and an old new critic.  And I am the only one here who knows the truth of the afterlife that the kid dances around.

Krishna:  Those who are without faith in my teaching cannot attain me; they endlessly return to this world shuttling from death to death.

Ah, but that’s where you are wrong blue man, I haven’t been reincarnated.  This is not your ordinary metempsychosis.  You are looking at resurrection!  This is altogether a different kettle of fish.

The Ondt:  [Clipping the end of a cigar.  Havana.  A fine Romeo y Julieta]  You smell like a kettle of fish, Æ, your Auric egg’s gone bad.

Krishna:  That rotten egg smell is your sulfuric breath, Ondt.  What are you doing here?  How did you get into this moment?  I stopped time, this is our now.  Out, Ondt!

The Ondt:  [making faces at himself in the window] Honey, this is my space.  I can crawl into your now through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood and back out through Blake’s buttocks into eternity if I like.  You hold to the now all you like, but it is the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Krishna:  Fine.  Æ, we shall proceed regardless.  You have not become deathless; you have merely become manifest without a rebirth.  You are most certainly not God or even a god.  I am God!  I am known by everyone as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face.  I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.

The Ondt: [Taking the form of the Lord of Loaves]  Got a light?  And hey, don’t burn up all that butter.

You both need to cool it.  Look, I used to think that the world’s revolutions were born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside, from the people for whom the earth is a living mother.  But I don’t think so anymore.  The world’s revolutions are born from those of us who say this verily is that.  I took my own fate by the balls.  The point is I am the point.  I have free will!  I used to think that God is a stage manager in the theatre of the eternal, but I am beyond that now.  I am God if I say I am God.  What of it?  You can be God too if you like.  And look there, you see that person breathing all over us?  That one who clicks instead of talks?  And stares and stares, eyeballs moving here and now here and then over to here.  There is God.  God is a click in the street.

The Ondt:  [Blowing smoke rings] The peatsmoke is going to his head.

Krishna: [Crossing his arms defensively.  He is caught between the devil and the ocean of Theosophy]  I know all beings who have passed, and all who live now, Æ, and all who are yet to be.  In the face of the one who can see all temporalities, how can you be so distressingly shortsighted?  How can you believe your will is free?

You guys can blow smoke up my ass all day if you like, I don’t care.  I know what I know.  Talk until you are blue in the face.  I’m making plans.