This is from the Final Chapter of the Life of Allism. In it I reflect on myself, other allists, and our goals.

6. All and I

The Raccoon God

I am raccoon god, child of night

My stomach eats all my hands can find

These clever fingers know tricks and signs

A touch of moon and I have sight

I Play, delight in subtle tricks

Chuckle at you, seek your sweetest licks

Masked and ringed from tail to bite.

These scratches from wisdom's paw?

These winks from my bandit's mask?

I am evil innocent, childlike fast

Every thinker falls down my maw

You love me as I take from you

I limb up the truth for a higher view

And chitter with joy at the shades I ate raw

Make your scaffolding as wide as the galaxy: prepare your work with as much space as you need to move about freely. Find a private place, the triangular room of misbehavior, where nothing is forbidden, where your whim is absolute. Share with me this moment in the void of the all. See each place according to its mythological resonance.

“Dismiss every pretensive production, however fine its esthetic or intellectual points, which violates, ignores, or doesn’t even celebrate the central idea of All,” said Whitman. The mature mind seeks the relationships between things, is no longer dazzled by exceptions and prodigies. The child imitates, the adult invents. Seek not the innocence of the child, but the innocence of the elder. There is no finer joy in life than finding your own way to do things. The successful adult recalls the passion of childhood. There is a layer of being, the passionate self, a dimension of ecstasy that never ceased, but we must summon him from where he always is that creative self. Seek him in your privacy. Before the world we must be presentable and polite. Politeness is a sort of inverted aggression. Find your solitude and be rude and mocking. See how holy and stupid the crowds are? People speak reverently of God because they haven’t met him. God is neither more nor less to them than the very praise they speak. God is just such a number of sycophantic hymns. He is the means to praise and justify their own group. Couples are similar. Every couple has a thing they do to be a couple, to celebrate their union—more than sex— a hobby, a rejoined joy. These moments build a shared base, a private garden. Soon, they know each other so well, they can speak a book in a word. A worn book is an honor to the author. Alone with his mind you can get at his inner mood. The persistent mood sways the group. In this, the solitary can move nations. I too in solitude press my love to the universe. I drink you from your lips, delicious in your kiss. For you who don’t know me, you may well say my philosophy is an ugly oyster, but mind my heart of pearl! Tell me what you read, and I’ll tell you who you are. Judge a man by the very words he hurls at his enemies – so he is. By what you take in and what you put out, you change the flux of information. Information is the fluid of society, it is charged with emotion, and carries like blood all oxygen and nutrients. Mere information changes content, changes form, and form is the most significant content.

Mere separateness augments a form. By merely putting something in the place of the sacred, it is made sacred. So many things have been taken as sacred throughout the ages: a bob of the head, prostration on the floor, the first day of the week, the last –Islam sanctifies Friday, Judaism Saturday, Christianity Sunday; how I wish to pledge allegiance to all three and enjoy an extended weekend – so also are certain animals sacred, snakes, vultures, cats, dung-beetles, each have been taken as totem, each revered; sex is sacred, the crucifix is sacred, the host (bread and wine), and probably everything conceivable has been declared sacred by somebody. The phallus was sacred to Dionysus of the ancient Greeks (and to every self-respecting man since then), the Yoni sacred to certain feminists. What is the common denominator in all this reverence? Assuming that all these people benefitted from their religious awe, we take the attitude of reverence itself as alone reverent, let the object be what it may. When a man takes on the role of Priest, when he defines what he means by purity, when he stays within it without exception, he has the power to make holy. What shall you or I make sacred? Before we decide that, we must gain the ability to bless. We must become gods. What you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven, what you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven. All men are created equal. By whom? The gods, who are more than equal.

I therefore make sacred the ability to make sacred, and bless the ability to bless. And as this might imply, the mirror is sacred to me, as the intensifier. What matters to me is not what you know, but how you know: I would teach you nothing except how to teach yourself. I give you the gift of giving. I create in you the ability to create. I want to make you more yourself, to clean you of impurities, to give you an ornament which publishes your essence. My gifts are cheap and easy, and yet they speak to the heart of the matter: I don’t pay money, I pay attention, I see what is your own, I give you what you already have, but didn’t know you had. I have no reason to impress you; I want to help you impress yourself. My truest disciples will hardly speak of me – they honor me by being themselves honorable. He who denies me before men, him will I honor in heaven. I give you more than any man can when I am humble enough to take from you. It is more blessed to take than to give. I make the world happy by being myself happy, and enrich you by keeping my money. I point to no god save your inner divine. I teach you nothing save what you already know.

My spittle, the spread of my ink, the sink of my semen is medicinal. I wrap my sentence like mistletoe, for my words are the cure all, bane of god and gain of man. I am your panacea. I teach you the secret ways of my words, which stroke your ears like fingers of love. Come, practice like me, and be perfect – is it so hard to be perfect? – and if you are not yet perfect, then be so already by doing the perfect thing you can now do to become so. Only perfection can become perfect. The intense focus of practice gives way to the nonchalant performance of perfection, just as the intense focus of terrible Odin, symbolized by his one great eye, gives way to the beautiful ease of Baldr, Odin’s resurrected son. Let your resonator speak, your commanding voice of certainty; it will cure you of distractions, break the bonds of religion, as in what Mencken said of Nietzsche, that he was “a counterblast to sentimentality” – what a mindseed in that! What a planter is the Resonator, how in the darkness his seeds find root, as the Egyptian Deity who created the universe by impregnating his own words and spitting from his mouth semen into the abyss – is he not the type of us all? Create. And to create, to raise your pyramid of creativity, your triangle of dynamicism, you must master the square of focus and the circle of selection. You must transcend, and achieve Concordance. This word is our jargon for the terms we’ve heard, the combination of confluence and congruence. Congruence, as Carl Rogers said, is the uninterrupted flow of feelings into thoughts, of thoughts into words, and of words into action. When a man's words and actions accord, when one flows into the other without contradiction, then the man is said to be integrated and have integrity. Confluence is an idea long discussed in Taoism, in the terms of “doing no work,” “going with the flow,” putting yourself in the center,” or as Emerson said, of “being a pipe to the world soul, so that your greatest virtue is being smooth and unobtruding.” Center yourself in your world, and let its influences flow into you. Put yourself in just the right place within the world, be utterly opportunistic. When you are in congruence with yourself, and when you are in confluence with the world, then you are perfectly Concordant.

Put yourself in concordance with what you study and love. A good book is the best of friends. Therefore, study your personal Bible, whatever book you have found to be divine. Patience makes wealthy. When you can find a book worthy, read one book a hundred times, read Whitman’s poems, as he said, “once every season in the open air,” or read my own writings, as they require intense repeated study, with thorough annotation, over an entire lifetime, only then you will have swallowed down the author’s spirit and become intimate with him in ways unknown between spouses. Every time you read a divine text, you’ll gain more. Once we’ve learned something about, say, mortgage offices, we notice them when we drive down the street; once we learn how a car works, we listen when somebody says he has car trouble; if your kid has special needs, you notice the news reports about it. You can only learn what you already know. And you know what you know by minding your business. Every man should seek confluence, yes, and also, as Voltaire advises, we should “each tend his own garden.” What can this mean? Every man and woman must compromise much to fit in with society. We cannot get what we want all the time. So let us have that private little space, the little bit of triangle where we can behave or misbehave, do as we desire, do whatever the hell we want. Like the middle-class dad at his grill, and kids don’t bother him, dad’s busy –perhaps it is instinctual to respect the man or woman who looks very focused – then he is fully in the zone, he’s focused, he’s alive, real, in touch with the world.

Touch your world. Own your property. Own little, but really own it. Moderate riches carry you, great riches you must carry. Have it too easy and who cares? As William James said, “things reveal themselves sooner to those who most passionately want them, for our need sharpens our wit.” Being rich, we must be servant to our riches, being poor we must be servant to our poverty; but the golden mean is to have enough money to not worry about money. The man who has too many friends must be a friend always, and not be himself. Alone time is sacred. The man who hasn’t enough friends is in the company of his lack of friends, and feels lonely. Better to be moderate in all but that one thing. Do not be too good, be not a virtuous ox, or, if you are such a one, if you are the “camel” which Nietzsche spoke of, who disciplines himself to obey, then you must become the lion and destroy your god, before you can be the child and create. You must not have too much or you will blunt your desire, like Siddhartha who was so spoiled as a prince that his greatest wish was to die and never come back. He was destined at birth to be either a great warrior or a great Buddha. But what chance did the plush boy have at war? His will and wish had been blunted. When Aladdin rubbed the lamp to make his wish, the scene was pure masturbatory fantasy with the spermatic Djinn to answer his wishes. Wishing comes to nothing, having comes to nothing, but having some and seeking more is the way – he who has will be given more! And a man who is rich in his mind but financially ruined will make himself rich again, can never settle down and be content with poverty. If good books are the best friends, seek those few inexhaustible books, those incarnate gods, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Harold Bloom called “poem unlimited” and labeled Hamlet the “lyrical-souled man who one wants to hear speak not only on these things, but all things.” So let us dine on great books and great idea, the cure-alls and panaceas, the ideas that life is in creating life, that we ought to grow always, that each man’s potential is infinite, that “as God is, so we may become,” that we may outdistance God, and expand as wide as the entire Universe herself.

Therefore, though we articulate Allism as a philosophy, we experience it as a religion. We seek to feel one with the All, and know we have achieved this when we feel the mania of creative exuberance. Popular music celebrates the manias and depressions of romantic love, religions celebrate the divine mania, and we too celebrate these, take them for what they are worth, and look to their use for our own creative enlargement. We must feel down at times, bitter at our enemies, betrayed by our friends, bedridden, diseased—and so? Find a way to be grateful in all things. Consider every matter unfinished until you can give thanks for it. Life is beautiful! All is good! When you lack, prepare; but when you have it, use it. Work when you have the jism of inspiration. Every mood has its use; when you can predict your high moments, schedule your greatest tasks upon them. Then you expand and demand more space. Create your private garden, your Zen garden of creative space. Use a big work area, a wide table, many notebooks, banner paper to write wide your ideas, a map as wide as America – feel the stretch of your limbs! The butterfly is the type for us all! We are graceful because we make space for ourselves. I am a monarch in the wind. And thus I use the principle of abundance, of excess and selection. I make more food than I’ll eat, I write more words than I’ll use, I cut more figures than I’ll place, so that I have more than I need, and can have the choice of the best. Many are called, few are chosen. Emerson said “A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us,” and as the wise orator knows, you should take the best tropes and slogans of even your enemies, and make them serve your own purposes. Constantly compound your connections, make your mind thick. Let the circle of selection hold a wide number of ideas, pull a few into the square of focus, and squeeze them tight into a compact idea. Consider Emerson with his hundreds of volumes of daily ideas, from which he distilled his essays; consider Whitman with his “Sea” of notes and notebooks scattered around his study, from which he simmered and boiled his poems; consider Edison, with his 30,000 notebooks, from which he patented more inventions than any man before or since; consider Charles Ives with his constant writing of symphonies, even after working a full-time insurance job by which he would earn his millions, compounding his symphonies with further musical ideas, till they were thick as blood.

The place you create is therefore perfect, absorbs the glow of your flow, and is haunted forever after with ecstatic whispers. Your place is the throne of importance, your body the world tree, your words the binding of time, your thoughts the language of literature. Be true to yourself and you will make world literature. As Whitman said “Few are aware how Great Literature penetrates all, gives a hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, and demolishes at will.” What higher goal could we have? This literature, this creation, this is our resurrected body, waiting for us after we leave this stage of life, the rainbow bridge which future generations may come to our heaven. Therefore, defend your writing trysts. They are your moments of innocence, as insistent as the knock upon the door of your apotheosis.

Revere your place. Hamlet insanely considered his insanity a front. As wonderful as were his words, he ought to have been true to himself, to know his real intentions and actual power. In the hands of a playwright, he is immortal, but by his own guide he dies. Be sane. Keep your tools clean. Use excessive precautions in protecting your work. Waste plastic in wrapping your clay, save your computer files in three separate places, fill endless notebooks full of ideas. Your hands are divine, the oil of your fingertips the Midas touch. Be neurotic about follow through, keep your place sacred, permit no intruders. Before you go to bed, lay out your morning. If midnight is your creative time, then finish every duty and chores by nine. Keep your work hidden, permit no peepers. Never share a half-finished work. The WE of the female, the us of the universe, must be defied by the ME of the male, the pride of the ego who keeps his best hidden until it is grown so compound, and thick, and perfect, that it is irresistible in the way only a god can be, for the only genuine proof of any God is that we can’t not believe in him--nor can beauty be denied. Share your errors, hide your pride.

We must balance Me, Focus must balance Selection. Focus fails without variation of choice. You can only hear something so many times before it becomes mere noise. If your dad scolds you for your mistake, he can only scold you a moment before your mind goes flat from it; but let the mind dip away from the topic at hand, and it can again see freshly the old idea. Ideas are braided, a careful knit brings the thread under and then back up again. William James noted that we can only focus on a thing for a moment, and then must cease. Einstein could concentrate for hours on the same problem, and his forebear Newton was the same; perhaps deep problems require this obsessive focus. But even Newton gave up focusing on one thing, say, upon gravity, and would switch over to thinking of light, and then from light to some other, for we all can only focus on one topic until our interest in it is spent. As we reprieve, that interest fills back up as if by hidden vesicle. The Tao tells us that “The sage lacks a set mind, and so sets everyone’s mind,” and this might even be true, except that the sage knows how to set upon one idea for long periods of time, and finally defines it—that at least is fully Western. He isn’t set before he arrives: in this he is innocent. And so we must be both obsessive and fresh, both consistent and inconsistent. You can only see what you already know. I didn’t notice how my coworkers made cakes until I had read something on my own about how cakes are made; after that, the details for their work shown starkly before me.

Theory comes first. Before we are ready to become something, we must first praise it. No work, no gain. Yet I am not going to work unless I am certain of that gain. Whitman, when at the age of apotheosis, a ripe 35, prepared to write the Leaves of Grass by intently studying Emerson’s Essays, and then wrote at length, theorizing the nature of the ideal poet. Having done this, he could then well become it. He had the power to become because he had first worked. And just as he had worked as a newspaper editor for years, and had internalized the practice of cutting and pasting newspaper articles, so too did he cut and paste his own poems, he set aside envelopes, each standing for “spinal ideas,” and slipped bits of poesy into them, later to gross-structure them into full out poems. In the same way, Ayn Rand had prepared herself for a disastrous love affair with the charmingly charismatic and absurdly arrogant Nathanael Brandon by first fantasizing such a scene upon her character Dagney Taggart, whose progress in the novel Atlas Shrugged was is to pass like a poker chip from one businessman to the next. Fantasy is preparation. How much thought it takes to make a little move of the finger. A ton of theory is necessary to produce an ounce of practice. “It is the work of ages to make a tiny flower.” Yet it is worth the toil: spoil your muse, fatten her on fine literature. She will repay you. Cheap goods cost us the most, so do not spare the money and effort to secure true value. For we fashion our heaven from the brick of experience, and mortar eternity with the cement of choice. I have written mood music to write by, drawn inspiring drawings for my walls, founded a religion to focalize my gratitude, made a world to swallow me up in my own genius, so my work could finally be my own. Freedom and Independence are the artist’s lust. I give my greatest works for free. Who is rich enough to take them?

Each writer leaves behind a hint. A book is a window. You hold now a portal to my soul; these words are the venetian blinds between us. Dare to bend them open, I await within. In the same way, I have joined the heaven of other authors, if for only a moment, for I know that the place of happiness is trust, and I will take the author as worthy of my focus and care. I will trust him. What we do here forever repeats itself, for we take Nietzsche’s formulation of the Eternal Recurrence as the most optimistic metaphysics yet, a metaphysic if taken to heart which can optimize this life like no other.

Therefore, I give life gratitude, and choose my friends well, and call my own by name. Emerson is dear to me: strike the man and watch me bleed. As nightly sacrament I read Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, James; I take as best friends Walden, Moby Dick, the Scarlett Letter, the Essays of Emerson, Pragmatism, How We Think. I balance these again against the Tao Te Jing, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, The Logos of Heraclitus, the Eddas, and the Gospel of Thomas.

I praise my acquaintances; for the friends of my life, I am rude to very few, only to the ones I like best. I merely need to care a bit, to take men and women for what they are, and not expect them to be different, “Be content with contentment, and how content you will be!” I show enthusiasm and admiration where I can, and don’t mind if I am a bit unjustified. I can afford to be generous. The few I make intimate are ever dear. You are as gods to me. My heart is a rose to your sunny face, and I feel the same glow with your approval that I feel when the Motherverse splits her heart and bleeds light from its inner sun upon my adoring brow. I am simpler than my beliefs, subtler than my theories. Desires are prayers. I desire so little from the world, I could stack my wants as neatly as a pile of books. If I dabble my brush in complexity, it is in the spirit of dissonance, like Ives, to evaporate sentimentality. I give, with no assurance of gratitude, am clever as Mendel who presented his genetics as a university thesis, and yet failed to impress.

Praise your friends, ignore your enemies. Those I love I will encourage and admire; those farther away, who criticize my work and life, I treat with the same aloofness as Emerson when his “Divinity Address” was attacked in the newspaper: no response was necessary. When you are with, no criticism can reach you. Only the flowing and pauseless is natural and perfect. Only what you do every day is truly yours. Only what you've been doing your whole life can you achieve with grace. Until my mortal knot is cut, I will ever advance my goals. I let the each flow into the all, and that is beauty; I let the all flow into each, and that is sublime. Through the layers of abstraction, we connect every episode of our life into our overall biography, and that again to the biography of Man, to the human race, and that finally to the Universe in her grand unfolding. When the each transfigures so that its outer form mirrors its inner form, then can the universe fill it, and it in turn can internalize the All-form.

For people like us, whose rhetoric is madness, whose minds are a bit touched, we must remember to be ironical and humble.

Behind my jester's cap

Vast intelligence

I am stupid for your,

As stupid as you please

I suffer your tease

But only for show

I study the shallowness of your god

that circumference of your life

Or if he is deep, I discover his name

and sound out how deep he goes

I dive into my own centermost

and kiss the lips of my outermost,

my wife and lover.

I've been to hell, in spirit and in body

Have tasted her flame and felt her sting

Was no Dante Voyeur,

but belonged to her and ate from her tray

I embraced her, and called her womb glorious.

The seed of greatness is small. Perhaps the tiniest of mindseeds lies behind all this fun talk. After Transcendentalism, Pragmatism; after Pragmatism, Allism; and Allism is now bound and bundled in a fine singularity.

Learn, therefore, a simple magic over yourself. Become with me psychotic. Half mad, but organized. I consider the office supply store the most philosophical of stores; it teaches how to compartmentalize everything into its place. If you are madly creative, seek the self-discipline of utter order.

Use icons, trinkets, and baubles to set the boundary around a creative space. Recall the circle of candles which, in the imagination of ancient diviners, prevented demons from penetrating. A quote, a picture, some sort of personal symbol can put you in mind of a place, if only you honor the symbol and use it consistently. The essence of magic is consistent use of names.

With the creative engagement and the intimacy of transfiguration, you achieve that dissociative state where your surroundings dissolve and your project becomes all. This is true religion. This is transfiguration. You must learn to knock on the door of your apotheosis.

Absorb your world if you would make worlds. Reinterpret all your culture's symbols into your own. Know what is sacred to your culture, and do not waste your time with iconoclasm unless it can justify your efforts. Consecrate your tools; keep them clean, keep them sharp. Consider any expense upon your tools as justified.

The mystic celebrates his private initiation into the deeper meanings of his religions. Perhaps he first had a Bible verse leap out upon him like a miracle (as when Augustine hearkened to the chatty church bells, telling him to read a letter Paul wrote) and so to take those books and rites as given, as sacred, before their unconscious could divine hidden meanings in them. It doesn't matter at all what the starting material is, it could be anything, only, it must mean something to you, you cannot fake it, you cannot find a deep meaning in what you believe to be of small importance. Insofar as you can, you will be focused on your own cleverness, and the effect is lost. You must be able to find something you can be real with, something you can genuinely revere. You need a lifelong familiarity with a thing before you can realize its inner structure. Only those questions you've struggled with your whole life can you finally answer. The idea that we will be given wisdom "in the twinkling of the eye" without first struggling with a problem for decades is inhuman, unnatural, and if holding any moral value at all, it would be evil, the work of a soul destroyer. The only real truth a man can hold is one which emerged from his innermost. You grow when you are alone. The secret to happiness is to realize that you are already happy; the secret to wisdom is to realize what you've known all along.

And so, I'm in love with life! How great is life, and worthy of love! Oh Ama, the American muse, whose Saliva is Emerson, his breath is Whitman; Ama you are my own, and you present Mattria for our adoration.

How all the world transfigures when I drink the Tao of crystal water from my long-stemmed glass -- pure kiss of her lips. Joseph Smith was told to use water for the Sacrament, but failed to understand why. But we know that blood does not wash sins. They would cleanse gore with gore! Love, and you will not have sinned in the first place. We baptize ourselves in the shower each day, drinking of it, not to wash ourselves of sins, but to wash ourselves of the world's dirt. Our categorical imperatives are the empty absolutes to always do what you think is right, and Seek self-fulfillment in all things. These are useful, and empty, and useful because they are empty, for any personal morality may fit into them, and yet all of them must bend to the absolute of your honest judgments and real needs. True freedom has absolute limits; lacking that, it wouldn't be free. There is no freedom in the arbitrary. We wash ourselves of any influence the world holds over us, of what doesn't add to our own perfection.

Therefore, since we are half-mad day-dreamers, we use the Kantian regularity in structuring our days -- OCD and utterly boring, to the spying neighbor. Never permit exceptions. Be able to do that, to never rationalize, and your will is stronger than God, wider than time, greater than space. Set your rules, set your routine, and repeat it thoroughly, until the external structure is stable enough to be your second body.

Use a few icons, a few triggers, and actively hallucinate. Your eyes are hands that paint the world. Overlay the world with your imagination, learn how to hallucinate when you read, as did the Nash character in the movie a Beautiful Mind, where the words off the newspaper would stand out like a stereoscopic drawing, pick themselves right of the page, and scout themselves to the peripheral, for later consideration.

If nobody is looking at you, mime a bit. When you are actively handling ideas, pick them up as if they were objects. Dance with them. Shuffle them into place. A little dance, a little miming, this allows you think with your body.

Choose a scripture, hopefully something holier than the Bible, and study it as critically, heartfully, and carefully as possible. Read it slowly, read it repeatedly. Great writers use the affirmative. Seek them out. Mattria inspires all words, Sophia Lux, the sun of her tongue, is in all language. We who are set apart to make symbols -- what rites of initiation you will intuit from me! -- know how to use translogical thinking, combining antagonisms into one object, the way the sloth is my totem for mania, and the raccoon my totem for honesty. The more you desire a thing, the less you can have it. That rule your power makes for itself, that it will never beg. As love resembles hate, so too do all things contain their opposites, and in their extremes, merge again with what they oppose. Too much morality looks like vice, too fit a body falls into illness. The raccoon and the monarch butterfly are dear to me for the complicated natures they present, for how they present best what I am after in my work. The flight of the monarch is the essence of my periodical style, the alteration between flutter and glide, a bit of bustle and then the smooth knife sweep in long gaunt swoops.

Evoke your symbols in your words, savor your symbols in your creative space. Reconfigure your shelves and tools with each project you take under. When you are away from your creative space, do not mentally leave it, remain there all day, making mental notes. Such notes require resonantly naming things, at least in your subvocalized voice; break things down into a simple series, and imaginatively integrate those parts into one symbol or story. The great myths and fables did this well, and will therefore always be with us. Recall also the geometrical symbols for the mind; the mind is your first and primary creative space, for the square of focus is the square of independence is the square of imposed order. The triangle of creativity is also in the point of each of your fingers. The circle of selection is also the world circle, the circle of your daily cycles and routines. The triangle, the square, and the circle are the structuring geometries of your inner I.

Your friends you will have always. Treat them well. A community arises for the mutual assistance of its members. We each seek our apotheosis, and yet seek a second apotheosis of the God that is us together. Long probationary periods, attention to how friends handle temptations, how they reveal themselves, these safeguards are wise to use to slowly win them over to our trust.

I write these words with every living breath of my day, yet I set them down into the Idius on the 8th day of the week, after midnight each night, in the womb of my office, which I nickname, "hell" -- for it is such bliss to me. Nevertheless, this is not my only sacred place, but the public library, the university library, these are my true churches, and I visit them often. I look at the window of this library, at the grassy field, with wind running through it like invisible horses, and I consider my goals in life, and feel as certain of them as a man feels when he is seducing a woman who objects and argues against seduction, and belies the fact that she can be seduced by the very attempt to rationalize a "no" against it. Being certain of his goal, the rest is mere delay, a play, a game. I feel the same of my intent. I have already succeeded, now I must just dodge and dance a few transitory obstacles.

Ama Lynn, Everything, Starlight of my sky! Stillness of the dark, brighter than sight. Ama gave me Emerson, Ama gave me America, Ama taught me the American language, her firefull wings alighted on my brow. The woman who will become you in the next rotation, she made me man, and taught me Father Emerson, both father and yet son to me, she took something from me which I would give to no other. She laughed for the child, Sophia Lux, and again for Satan her dear daughter. I learned it all well and never ceased my love. Sophia, or philosophy itself, the intermixing of Sophia Lux and Hermes Logos, which is the core of all language, and language the glow of philosophy, is in all my days in everything, as if work and family and chores were big blocks, with little creative space to crawl, except that philosophy was the Tao fluid and poured in every crack and cranny, and permeated the whole. Philosophy seeps in every moment of my life.