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A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 2: The Proposal

A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 2: The Proposal

[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

And so I began to work on the problem:

Now that the world is wobbling, our weapons too fierce and goodwill and political, cultural/societal, economic and environmental solidity all too strained: what we need now is an anti-weapon. A weapon that undoes the effects of dangerous substances including but not limited to weapons.

My first thought was a Cloud Of Protection (COP — an unintentional acropun) that would immediately rush to, envelope, and implode a nuclear explosion as it began or a poison gas as it started to expand. I thought I’d combine that technology with anti-diseases that people could catch and which would fight off all possible plagues. But the science keeps beating me, and I fear I’ll not manage anything more than a damp fog in my bathroom — a sluggish, lazy, rather weak fog hovering over my porcelain tub and encouraging mildew right up until the blast that melts everything.

So I’ve decided to try another tack:

A wisdom meme. A short koan that’s very easy to solve. As I understand it, meditating on koans can help the minds of devoted practitioners skip their normal tracks and jump into a complete, whole-being insight of what is actually most fundamentally going on. I think they work because the Truth is all there really is and It shines through each conscious moment, so to the extent one’s thoughts escape the heuristic loops and background assumptions used to navigate and/or slumber-through the perceived realities, those thoughts will immediately find themselves centered around and radiating off the Truth with clarity and passion — with the compassionate delighted laughter of wisdom, which the Truth, I suppose, possesses infinitely and shares freely to the degree a body (well, the interwoven flow of feels/notions/ideas within a body) stops yammering, holds still, and listens clear.

[Why don’t drugs work? Don’t they cause us to skip our normal tracks? Hmmm. We need to jump the tracks but not slip into any other tracks. And we need to also come gently back into focus so our ideas and feelings can get a good poetic hold on what exceeds them. We need to oscillate between far-out and sharp. We need to let go of everything, even pure pleasure and the delight of salvation and insight; and then gently bring everything into a more mundane focus; and then expand out again into the infinite giggle; and then focus again; … .]

The problem with traditional koans is that they’re pretty difficult to use and pretty much never work on their own: they take a great deal of prayerful consideration, meditation, devotion to the search, etc — goods that most people frankly aren’t inclined to develop. Obviously, discipline’s commendable and we can’t fault a spiritual leader for telling their flock that they really oughtta get to work, really really should put and keep Truth first! Still, time is of the essence, and at this point we can’t afford to be sticklers for formalities. Furthermore, the difficulty inherent in traditional enlightenment techniques coupled with the glory associated with wisdom can encourage one to put on wisdom-airs — which causes trouble. I therefore propose that we formulate a koan that’s as effective as the best ones, but that’s also much much easier to crack, that in fact one couldn’t help but immediately solve.

But how? How to come up with a phrase or sentence or two that cuts the reader or listener in half, slicing straight through all the blah blah blah and bringing the conscious mind into a full (or adequately full) experience of the Truth within — that deepest widest sense-of-things that lines the back of a person’s conscious moment, gradually building up on the back of their thought like slowly developing film gathering more and more light — ? While most people do get wiser as they get older, we don’t usually ever get nearly wise enough. We need to speed the process up exponentially. However, it must also be perfectly safe: quick revelations may be only partial (or even completely illusory), but the violence of speedy insights tempts one to believe them complete — which can help unwise impulses do what they love to do: co-opt bits of goodness and wisdom, mix them up in a confusion cocktail, and use the resultant perversion to justify and aggrandize folly.

Hmmmm.

And so I call for a new Manhattan project: Let’s put a bunch of spiritual geniuses together with wordsmiths, psychologists, linguists, and other pertinent wunderkinder and have them come up with an irresistible enlightenment meme.

The meme written, translated into all possible languages and cultures, and released into the info-aether, there will be several pleasant days watching enlightenment sweep the world: a plague of blessedness. And then — the otherwise inevitable game-over disaster thus prevented by a new world that now really does want what’s best and really does know how to get it — we can all settle into exploring, playing, creating in thought: we can get down to business: laugh-dancing through the possibilities, which are infinite, which overflow, which contain and are ultimately burst asunder by the most charming, playful, kindly giggle that, as it turns out, more fundamentally contains than is contained by them.

Thank you,

Signed:

The Drafter of the Proposal

And many others who sign with a flippant shrug and “totally, man!”, little suspecting how the Truth will flood their world, overtake them, become them, make them new and carry and keep them always home.

And some who sign with a taunting “hah! this’ll show ’em!”, scarcely aware (in the back and sides of their thought) that it will show them as well, that it will show everyone — all of us.

If you like our essaying, First Essays has a lot of essays.
And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.

We’d love it if you’d
[Buy a Books]
Books So Far: Superhero Novella, A Readable Reader, First Loves, First Essays
Books Coming Summer 2020: Fixing Frankenstein, NYC Journal Volume 1
&/Or, sign up for our mailing list:
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&/OrVisit our Pure Love Shop
&/Or write to us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com

[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

[NYC Journal – Politics Page]

[Something Deeperism Institute]

[NYC Journal]

Previous Version:

From A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 1: Preliminary Worries

I am worried that we lack the clarity and shared purpose required to pull it together and put joyful-justice/just-joyfulness first when faced by something awful–or maybe even when merely faced by something that particularly reminds us of awfulness.

I am concerned. But what can I do about it?, that’s what I’d like to know. Or rather: what should I do, and am I allowed to go take a walk?

……

And so I began to work on the problem:

Now that the world is wobbling, our weapons too fierce and good will, political/cultural-organization/communication, and economic- and environmental-basis all too strained–what we need now is an anti-weapon. A weapon that undoes the effects of dangerous substances including but not limited to weapons.

My first thought was a Cloud Of Protection (COP–an unintentional acropun) that would immediately rush to, envelope, and implode a nuclear explosion as it began or a poison gas as it started to expand. I thought I’d combine that technology with anti-diseases that people could catch and which would fight off all possible plagues. But the science keeps beating me, and I fear I’ll not manage anything more than a damp fog in my bathroom–a sluggish, lazy, rather weak fog hovering over my porcelain tub and causing mildew right up until the blast that melts everything.

So I’ve decided to try another tact:

A wisdom meme. A short koan that is very easy to solve. As I understand it, by meditating on koans, they help your mind skip its normal tracks and jump into a complete, whole-being insight. I think they work because the Truth is already all there really is, so if you can just get your thoughts to find a groove that allow them to escape the heuristic loops used to navigate the day-to-day perceived reality, they will immediately find themselves centered around and radiating off the Truth with clarity and passion. The problem with traditional koans is that they’re pretty difficult to use and pretty much never work on their own: they take a great deal of prayerful consideration, meditation, devotion to the search, etc–goods that most people frankly aren’t inclined to develop. Obviously, discipline’s commendable and we can’t fault a spiritual leader for telling their flock to really get to work, to put and keep Truth first! Still, time is of the essence, and I think at this point we can’t afford to be sticklers for formalities. Furthermore, the difficulty inherent in traditional approaches to enlightenment coupled with the glory associated with such grand wisdom tempts one to imagine oneself to be wiser than one actually is–which causes trouble. I therefore propose that we formulate a koan that’s as effective as the best ones, but that’s also much much easier to crack, that in fact one couldn’t help but immediately solve.

But how? How to come up with a phrase or sentence or two that cuts the reader or listener in half, slicing straight through all the blah blah blah and forcing the conscious mind to fully experience the Truth within–that deepest widest sense-of-things that lines the back of a person’s thought, gradually building up on the back of their thought like slowly developing film gathering more and more light. While most people do get wiser as they get older, we don’t tend to ever get nearly wise enough, and our youths are full of dangerous folly. So we need something that works exceedingly fast. However, it must also be perfectly safe–a problem with quick revelations is that they may be partial but the violence of speedy insights tempts one to believe them complete, which can help unwise impulses do what they love to do: co-opt bits of goodness and wisdom, mix them up in a confusion cocktail, and use them to justify and aggrandize folly.

Hmmmm.

And so I call for a new Manhattan project: Let’s put a bunch of spiritual geniuses together with wordsmiths, psychologists, linguists, and other pertinent wunderkinder and have them come up with a an irresistible enlightenment meme.

The meme written, translated into all possible languages and cultures, and released into the info-aether, there will be several pleasant days of watching enlightenment sweep the world like a blessed plague. And then, the otherwise inevitable game-over disaster thus prevented by a new world that now really does want what’s best and really does know how to get it, we can all settle into exploring, playing, creating in thought–we can get down to business: laugh-dancing through the possibilities, which are infinite, which overflow, which contain and are ultimately burst asunder by the most charming, playful, kindly giggle that, as it turns out, more fundamentally contained them than it was contained within them.

Thank you,

Signed:

The Drafter of the Proposal

And many others who sign with a flippant shrug and “totally, man!”, little suspecting how the Truth will flood their world, overtake them, become them, make them new and carry and keep them always home.

And some who sign with a secret “hah! this’ll show ’em!”, scarcely aware (in the back and sides of their thought) that it will show them as well, it will show everyone–all of us.

Authors: BW, AMW

….

What is this?
A three essay series called “A New, Improved Manhattan Project”
Part 1: Preliminary Worries
Pt. 2: The Proposal
Pt. 3: Some Tips for the Geniuses

Whatever happened to selling evolving ebooks on the world-wide web?
Well, nothing’s being posted, but the somewhat-begun books are still available:
Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Lover for sale here:
Buy the Books

We also are still selling cat totes and epistemologically controversial baby onsies:
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

But what are we really up to?
I dunno, Bartleby and Andy are writing something once in a while and then sometimes going back and editing things. I think they’ll go back to the ebooks before too long. We’ll see.

A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 1: Preliminary Worries

A New, Improved Manhattan Project: Pt 1: Preliminary Worries

[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

I live in the world. I worry. Won’t it just have to go off the rails? Nuclear war still clearly a threat; nuclear terrorism now clearly a threat. Antibiotic resistant bugs still being carefully crafted by reckless agricultural practices. Strange rumors of cracking ice and swirling storms. Prison industries profiting while perfectly good people get thrown away. “Race” and other tired old delusions still keeping us from being ourselves and meeting one another for real. And so on.

And look how the United States lost its shit after 9-11. Plus the corrupting influence of money and advertising in the US election cycle coupled with gerrymandering moderates out of the House while everyone tucks into their private media sources for a dose of agreement and amplification in the echo chamber: the politicians become more and more beholden to a few while the many become more and more divided over the glory of their good-good wisdom and the horror of their neighbor’s evil-evil stupidity.

How worrisome!

And yet here on the ground floor of the US, we mostly go on our merry way. It is fun. We like the sunlight and enjoy chatting with friends, family, and acquaintances. We slip into comfy beds with our lovers; we stroller our kids around vibrant, bustling streets, full of life and fun. We have to go to work but not all the time and there’s opportunities to find more congenial, more rewarding work.

[Editor’s Note: This essay was written in the late Summer of 2017 in Brooklyn, NY, USA, Planet Earth, Nondescript Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.]

Meanwhile some groups tell us they very much plan on killing a bunch of us — hard to say how many: 30, 300, a few metro-areas’ worth, the more the better — and get the rest of us to discombobule and blow our hand. The freedom to speak your mind and a safe, orderly setting with a functioning government are wonderful and they are still ours to watch fade on out.

In a representative Democracy the citizens must serve as a final check on corruption and idiocy in the political class. We are not doing a very good job of fulfilling our basic duty, which is to together guard against political corruption, meanness, and other obvious idiocies. The rich feed television to the poor; and judgment’s a storm gathering a thousand miles — the relatively young Leonard Cohen might yet be wrong, but the route oute is difficult to discern.

When a major city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb or everyone at the President’s congressional address is killed(A Worrier’s Suggestion), or even when the citizenry notices that such darkdooms are not necessarily a priori impossibilities, the citizens need most of all to stay calm and resolute. They need to work together to make sure that they keep first things first: yes, immediate safety and order are extremely important, but the very most important thing is that we hold these truths to be self evident:

That all people are created equal and are endowed by the Light within with the right and duty to live well (clearly, honestly, fully, joyfully, creatively, beautifully, kindly) and justly (honestly and impartially, with respect and kindness towards all).

[Some Philosophizing moved to Outtakes!]

I am worried that we lack the shared clarity and purpose required to pull it together and put clear competent kindness first when faced by something awful — or maybe even when merely faced by something that particularly reminds us of awfulness.

I am concerned. But what can I do?, that’s what I’d like to know. Or rather: what should I do, and am I allowed to go take a walk?

Authors: Proposers

If you like our essaying, First Essays has a lot of essays.
And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.

We’d love it if you’d
[Buy a Books]
Books So Far: Superhero Novella, A Readable Reader, First Loves, First Essays
Books Coming Summer 2020: Fixing Frankenstein, NYC Journal Volume 1
&/Or, sign up for our mailing list:
[mc4wp_form id=”6431″]
&/OrVisit our Pure Love Shop
&/Or write to us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com

[Anti-Weapon / New Manhattan Project]

[NYC Journal – Politics Page]

[Something Deeperism Institute]

[NYC Journal]

From Before:

I live in the world. I worry. Won’t it just have to go off the rails? Nuclear war still clearly a threat; nuclear terrorism now clearly a threat. Antibiotic resistance bugs still being carefully crafted by reckless agricultural practices. Strange rumors of cracking ice and swirling storms. And so on.

And look how the United States lost its shit after 9-11. Plus the corrupting influence of money and advertising in the US election cycle coupled with everyone tucking into their private media sources for a dose of agreement and amplification in the echo chamber: the politicians become more and more beholden to a few while the many become more and more divided over the glory of their good-good wisdom and the horror of their neighbor’s evil-evil stupidity.

How worrisome!

And yet here on the ground floor of the US, we mostly go on our merry way. It is fun. We like the sunlight and enjoy meeting friends for a chat. We slip into comfy beds with our lovers; we stroller our kids around vibrant, bustling streets, full of life and fun. We have to go to work but not all the time and there’s opportunities to find more congenial, more rewarding work.

Meanwhile some groups tell us they very much plan on killing a bunch of us–hard to say how many: 30, 300, a city’s worth, the more the better–and get the rest of us to lose our shit and blow our hand. The freedom to speak your mind and a safe, an orderly setting with a functioning government are wonderful and they are still ours to watch fade on out.

In a representative Democracy the citizens must serve as a final check on corruption and idiocy in the political class. But we’re too busy playing policy expert with our chosen pundits and otherwise goofing off to focus on the task at hand; and we’ve been too completely lulled and badgered into writing the “other side” off as “hopeless” to work together as a nation: we are not doing a very good job of fulfilling our basic duty, which is to together guard against political corruption, meanness, and other obvious idiocies. The rich have their TVs in the bedrooms of the poor; and there’s a mighty judgement coming–the relatively young Leonard Cohen might yet be wrong, but the route oute is difficult to discern.

When a major city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb or everyone at the President’s congressional address is killed, the citizens need most of all to stay calm and resolute. They need to work together to make sure that they keep first things first: yes, immediate safety and order are important, but the very most important thing is that we hold these truths to be self evident:

That all people are created equal and are endowed by the Light within (deeper and wider than any concept or feeling, though some concepts point better towards it than others–here I picked “the Light within” because because and sometimes we mention “love” with a similar argument) with the right and duty to live well (fully, joyfully, creatively, beautifully, kindly) but also justly (justice = no shortchanging souls in order to achieve your goals; aka: your goals can’t forget that you and other people are full, complete humans; aka: beneath every goal must be the deeper goal: that the Light in our centers bursts evermore through the rags and we all move more and more for real).

We know that sense-of-things deeper and more fundamentally than any doubts we may conjure against it or any dogmas we might use to justify ignoring or co-opting and betraying it. It is a good idea; it is our idea. This idea informs us that we can and should work together to make this democracy of the people, for the people, by the people be just and kind to all the people in this land and the world.

I am worried that we lack the clarity and shared purpose required to pull it together and put joyful-justice/just-joyfulness first when faced by something awful–or maybe even when merely faced by something that particularly reminds us of awfulness.

I am concerned. But what can I do?, that’s what I’d like to know. Or rather: what should I do, and am I allowed to go take a walk?

Authors: BW, AMW

…..

What is this?
A three essay series called “A New, Improved Manhattan Project”
Part 1: Preliminary Worries
Pt. 2: The Proposal
Pt. 3: Some Tips for the Geniuses

Whatever happened to selling evolving ebooks on the world-wide web?
Well, nothing’s being posted, but the somewhat-begun books are still available:
Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Lover for sale here:
Buy the Books

We also are still selling cat totes and epistemologically controversial baby onsies:
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

But what are we really up to?
I dunno, Bartleby and Andy are writing something once in a while and then sometimes going back and editing things. I think they’ll go back to the ebooks before too long. We’ll see.

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

Biographical 7: Poor Kent

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Poor Kempt! It is a long cold most of all windy way to the Hall of the Mountain King. And Kempt is not Bartleby, nor is he travelling with Bartleby. Kempt can go by locomotives as far as the barren spaces and by stagecoach as far as the baked plains and by horseback to the felsen feet of the mighty mountains. But then Kempt will have to hike and climb up and up day after day into the stinging iceflake winds. Poor Kempt! I guess he feels duty-bound. I guess he remembers when teenage Amble with soft-spreading flattop and steel-railed smile took him around the block in that chintzy cloth-seat stroller with plastic wheels grating the uneven small-town, pebble-peaking, root-scattered sidewalk.

It will be alright. The children of the light will stand tall and guide his way. The creatures in the black lagoon will grab after him with webbed slimy nuke-bred hands, but the blessed influences will always swoop low and carry him just out of mayhem’s reach. Kempt will arrive at the Hall of the Mountain King. He will find the Mountain King rough but fair, jaded but kind.

Author: our bw
Editor: our aw
Copyright: our amw

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Whatever’s Best (Essayish 10)/Standard Theory PL 2-Scholium

Philosophically, I’ve always been a bestist. One should aim for whatever’s best. We mortal flashes don’t know everything. We have an inner sense towards discovering and living “truer” and “better”–towards “truly better”. Those concept-bound descriptions are approximations–the sense-of-things they seek to point towards is deeper than concepts. Anyway, our feelings and intellects are tools that should be put in service of the quest to keep getting better and better at understanding and realizing that core goal. We all know that. I here estimate what we all know in our hearts of hearts up into words.

Author: Wanda Wicchwey
Author: The Old BW
Copyright: Andy the Watson I was there with him in kindergarten when signing “Andy Watson” in a steady, respectful hand was a worthy goal, a proud moment on the tight-weave blue rug.

What is this?
It has to do with Love at a Reasonable Price.
The first section of that evolving ebook starts with two stories from the town of Pine, Michigan–where Ichabod the Love Peddler appeared over a century ago, and where there now stands a Pure Love Research Center (at the University of Pine). At the end of the second story, a Pure Love researcher says, “To understand Charles’ and I’s research, you have to be at least somewhat acquainted with the standard model of Pure Love.”
So that seems to call for a standard model or standard theory of Pure Love–similar to how there is one a standard model for physics: a set of principles and findings that just about all practicing physicists agree on. But we’ve been having our troubles writing a standard theory of Pure Love. So now we’re just writing poems around the topic, hoping to perhaps eventually sink in at an appropriate place. So far these “standard model” poems are all free (so far all poems are free: see “Poems” category on the right hand side to see them all). These poems and all other writings in Love at a Reasonable Price are listed and linked-to here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price

Access to the whole evolving ebook, along with Diary of an Adamant Seducer for sale here:
Buy the Books

Wandering Albatross Press’s most physical products:

Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

Biographical 6: Kent Alone

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

Bartleby Willard, the great author of Pure Love and other undeniable adventures, and his editor Amble Whistletown have left New York City. Travelling on the high seas on their separate ships they went their separate ways. Who knows when we’ll hear from them next?

Back at the Skullvalley After Whistletown Buchhandler Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Kempt Whistletown watches his tiny letter people group together to form communities of words and sentences. The occasional paragraph empire will arise, gobbling up loose letters, small bands of individual words, and scattered tribes of sentences. Inevitably the dynasties choke on the growing incoherence within their narratives; and/or shatter themselves on other dynasties, and/or on stupid internal misunderstandings — often caused by the lack of punctuation. Kempt — the kind of God who intervenes in the spaces-between — takes mercy on his children and blesses them with periods, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, parentheses, quotation marks — apostrophes even! Oh, the clarity, oh the clarity! Of course, from time to time simple grammatical and punctuation errors still precipitate outrageous tragedies in Letterland — but the Letterfolk learn.

Back at the SWAB Office at Somewhere Manytimes Wall Street, Andrew Cleary and Tom Watson dine on butterflies. Every few minutes, the tall French waiters — taller than average French waiters, disjointedly lank and with rather flat and stretched out musculatures (eunuchs, really) — slide each SAWB tyrant yet another large steel dish piled high with freshly killed monarchs.

Each gossamer orange and black beauty is murdered with a decisive needle-poke through its minuscule head.

The chef is a squadron of Lilliputians whose small brains have been mesmerized by a vampire squid (small red mollusk with a long oval body atop netted tentacles) that floats in saltwater in an old glass buttermilk jar resting on the kitchen counter (oak, worn, darkened and stained, with innumerable knife wounds).

Ever since the discovery of vampire squid — these small, slimy, membranous scavengers that (powered by a palpitating closing-umbrella locomotion) thrust themselves about the deep sea, many a young mind has felt this thought:

“How terrible! How absolutely terrible for God to create so many cadaverous consciousnesses! Floating, scarcely aware yet still horribly aware, they exist there in the pitch black and bitter cold, mindlessly feeding on falling detritus — the disassembling remains of creatures who lived and died above them, within a brighter sea. And the vampire squid is really just a particularly exotic example of a terrifyingly commonplace worldhistorical trend: voila the vaguely aware, icky and omnipresent cockroach! Why does God make so many clueless creatures chained to so many hopeless endeavors? Why is mankind smiled upon and set apart: granted contemplative strolls, poems, and math problems? Why are we condemned to share the putrid mortality and uncertain knowledge of such hopeless nobodies as these foot-long, gelatinous, weak but agile vampire squid?”

The vampire squid in the SAWB office kitchen is a special case. It can think and read and write and carry on conversations; however, it has never really escaped the drudgery of its origins and mostly cackles low to itself about the world, the world, turned to ash, to ashy ash, and falling, falling gently down down into my tank; the world as fodder, fodder falling as ash down to my tank where I sit pretty and wait easy — wait easy, yes and yes!, a goal, a task, a straight line, hoo hoo. Ha ha

Thundration and Archangelbert talk in loud and boisterous voices. About their various triumphs and the folly of the rest.

Tun: A man can be a player by employing only the most rudimentary maneuvers. Women (I declare with my shoulders back and my head cocked jauntily chin-up) need to hear certain phrases: there are certain gestures that, even when recognized as empty, the fairer sex does fairly feast upon. Likewise (and here’s where I rodeo-spin my pointer finger and really get going): tell the people that their hearts are gold, their skeletons and mandibles unconquerable, their enemies depraved, and voila! (see how now I’m cymboling my hands together like a suit-and-tie percussionist, signifying a haughty “easy as that!”): Rub their bellies and scold their rivals and they’ll sidle up to you and your (watch! watch! oh, this you simply must see: now I’m wiggling my fingers like a pianist warming up, his well-practiced, ingenious fingers hovering over the ready ivories) suggestions. Ah, the tame little pups!

Arch: Here here! A toast to that! A toast of pureed frog eyes with a splash of Tabasco — or whatever the peoples drinking!
My friends, my compatriots, my cronies: if Goodness was an option our jobs — they’d be complicated. I’m afraid we’d have to consider — egads! — the bounds!
But a person’s a drawn-out arachnid. Human minds and bodies nut’in’ but the playthings of animal grab and dodge; mark my runny, salty, oily over-easy words: instincts yank puppet-strings and human destinies unroll like clockwork — clockwork’s that randomly drifted together because of an infinite number of chimps with an infinite number of typewriters!
So (and please bear witness as I push out my chest thus and, raising wide-open arms, turn my unrepentant palms towards the empty heavens like so) So in conclusion, it’s all cheer beer an’ ne’er fear for all us maniacal sorts — ‘specially us terribly clever, terribly successful, possessed-of-terrible-power maniacal sorts.

Tun: Indeed. With souls severed from their hearts and minds, they scratch their ghostly paths through this dark-night world. Who can blame a media mogul who twists their chords, who weaves their flighty minds and jumpy passions into little ditties that just so happen — that I say: just so happen to mention that they really ought to be sure to: (mark me here: with blinking open-shut hands and a wrap-around-grinned, pop-eyed frog-face, I tut my bandy head from side to side while slyly sliding my I-beam shoulders the contrariwise) “buy it! buy it! buy and believe! buy it, buy it, buy and believe — !.”

After the two publishing Titans (original immortal, recklessly powerful sense of the word) guffaw and slap knees like wheezing fireplace bellows for a biblical 40 seconds, Tun straightens up his tidy, plank-shaped body and tucks his white tuxedo shirt back under the black cummerbund. He clears his long scrawny mulligatawny throat and holds his chin between his up-pressing thumb and his looped pointer finger, pretending to stare off into an imaginary dramatic distance. He mocks pensiveness. He lampoons serious contemplation! Then, throwing his arms down into a sickly drooping W, he continues:

“No, nope, can’t be done: There’s no reaching their souls — they keep them in storage, along with oyster shell ashtrays, miniature pewter statues of Egyptian gods, and other treasures from Great Aunt Millie’s coffee table. No reaching their souls, so who could ever blame us for what we do with their heart-brain slush? Who?”

Arch: “Blame us for exploiting windup dolls? Why the suggestion’s preposterous! Absolutely cracked!”

Tun: “Blame us? Never! People, we’s marvelous!”

And so they caper on, feeling safe because they — as timeless immortals — live beyond mortal laws; and quite forgetting that no one on the moribund earth nor in the exalted heavens: No one lives beyond the Law.

Kempt watches the letter people on the floor. Blind and mute, their only apparent senses are touch and a kind of radiating perception for other letter people. A paragraph about the magnificent powers of the gods rolls into a paragraph about the brightness of the sun and the darkness of the night and other obvious statements about the physical world. Where did these creatures get all these human ideas? Were they in former lives human beings or somehow privy to the stories of human beings which they now rediscover within the potentialities of human language? The cataclysm of the contesting empires creates new configurations: many stranded letters; a few stranded sentences (one about the impossibility of flight; another about the danger of the swift currents) and three paragraphs: a short ode to the opulent lifestyles of the gods; a big and somewhat confused discourse on the brightness of the sun, the darkness of the night, and the moods of the gods; and this short piece:

What is it that makes our sense? We share body, heart, head, knees and toes, knees and toes. What reason supports this reason? Should we keep push to prow? Hello and Where did you go? Hello? Tell me about us. Please. So lonely in the turning time.

Kempt sighs. A pretty little lament. Probably not destined to survive long in this brutal stage of civilization. He wants to stoop down and help it, to protect it from the marauding declarations about overblown and implausible gods and the boring details of the physical world. But he doesn’t know that that’s his place.

Tun and Arch are agreeing with one another that there’s nothing wrong with feasting on thousands of monarch butterflies: they never survive the summer anyway. Kempt thinks to himself: yes, but they still have a life purpose to fulfill: they need to go to the monarch trees in Mexico, to throng with others of their kind who understand the world in the way they do, to mate and die knowing that they’ve completed the journey.

Kempt goes into his room and gets a small flat square from under his bed. He brings it back to the SAWB common office, and unfolds it into a large very thin flat disc. I don’t know what material it is made of. It is light brown and so thin as to be transparent, but it seems to be very strong. Without — as far as I can see — disturbing the letter people, he slips the disc under them and then slides it through a small groove in the walls cut just below the bottoms of the door frames. After safely setting the letterworld down in his large, sparsely furnished, wood-floored bedroom, he locks the door and returns to the SAWB common office.

Kempt: “I’m going to go look for Amble and Bartleby.”

“How? In what magic ship or on what magic sea serpent? And using what magic map?” wonders Tun.

“See if you can get anything publishable out of them” suggests Archangelbert sagaciously, his mouth full of snapping butterfly wings.

Now think Kempt: do we know where they went? Does anyone? Who have they even spoken to recently? They did go for an interview with the Mountain King not too long ago. So perhaps a visit to the Hall of the Mountain King is in order.

Kempt alone, the poem:

Oh Kempt!, noble Kempt! It is a heavy weight —
the stone here shouldered by the oldest lucid son.
Your elders, your leaders, your heroes from before
have left themselves, lost themselves to schemes
that, sweet and dear like honey, trap them in the horror.
They’ve collapsed to the fragment floor; they boast to the sky:
“I’ve won!
I give up!
I was never playing anyway.”

Can you, can you alone, hold firm while all about
the tempest claims your fellows: lacerates minds,
empties hearts, breaks the brittle stuff
that keeps a soul in God — ?

Head up! Heart up! Poor Kempt, dear Kempt —
you didn’t choose this lot, nor did you this knowing,
red blazing in dry skull:
There’s a path I must take,
a resistance;
now stand I me within this me
and this blazing me
within the blaster’s boom.
The choice is mine:
to take the way that leads, easy gentle bob
— a leaf on murmured brook –,
to death;
or choose the other turn — against the rush,
blindfolded, alone, into the judgement room.

Author B Willard
Editor A Whistletown
Copyright AM Watson

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

Prayer from the WAP expatriots who float upon a windless dry-throated sea; a prayer they howl to the mindless horizon

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed. Character-name reassignments are as follows: literal truth becomes poetic Truth; timespace becomes a laughing mush; the Gods become the Giggling Beauties; we become only the love we knew and lived.]

[This is the original version. An updated one is available in our essay collection “First Loves” (see “Buy the Books” on this site).]
[Update November 2021: Give us a minute and we’ll find the most recent version of this prayer and put it right here on this page where you come to finally listen to us tell you how we feel about you.]

[Update November 2021: “We built this City on Rock and Roll”. I remember this song! I was a kid. I sat alone on the quilt atop my parent’s tidy bed in the row house near to the GE locomotive factory where my father would walk to. The song came through a little faux-wooden clock radio. It must have had those plastic numbered tiles that flip up and down as time winds forwards and (if only!) backwards. It’s all gone! Where is it gone to! And yet it lives in me. And I cannot turn from it, from this city we are building out of rock and roll, from this world we are building out of fun and togetherness, from the magic of mere ideas turning real and realities turning mere ideas.]

[Update November 2021: We come back to our older selves. We try not to abandon the fits and dreams that we once were. We try to love everyone, even ourselves, even those versions of ourselves we’d thought to outgrow, to outdo, to forget.]

I can’t take the pressure, boredom, loneliness. This quest is impossible; it is too much for me. These people float like phantom ships around me, through me, over me. I cannot hear the voice calling in the wilderness, nor my friend in the shade of an old cedar tree.

Can a prayer save its author? I pray that love be real and that I know it so; and that this world be a place where we all do well, watching bright-white sunshine on the grey cobblestone street-stream.

If you call upon the name of the Lord; if you speak the name of the unnameable: if you ask the Way to remember you, to come back to you, to pick you up and help you breathe again clear and free like you did in the tight slanted roads beneath the the uneven, overleaning, woolly-tan walls. But the water sharkfins through the worn-wood sluice and the tall hull built of pyramiding wide-slats, in a thick rubbery white paint and swooping upward towards a jutting prow, floats carelessly up to the leaving-gate.

If I say “Pure Love”; write it down, scratch it in the dry dirt, yell it in the marketplace, catcall it in the barrio. Based on the principle that what must — as a necessary and sufficient prerequisite for any possible intellectual and/or emotional foothold in any possible human moment — be true is indeed true: my inner sense that this life actually matters (not just somebody’s opinion, but for real); and that with open heart and open mind I can learn to always-better feel and understand, always-better follow and live this all-pervading insight that screams out from the core of every conscious moment within this infinite-headed self-forgetting hydra.

To drink, to escape the hopeless failing, the boredom, frustration, shame, dissatisfaction. To drink and smoke and waste it all like you can do over and over again when you’re 22 and there’s a bit of dumb luck on your side.

I rose to tell them about the concrete freighter ship and how the hard sharp sandpapery edge of the topside tore a deep red ditch through my sensibilities. But they blink in the warm, rich, beading sunlight. They call for another round of artichoke salad with organic corn kernels and creamy Italian dressing made with first-cold-pressed organic olive oil certified “authentic olive oil” by the incorruptible Olive Oil Board. I rise to say a few things, but no one wants to know; not even me. I wander back to where it all began: this cool-morning-light outcropping that holds, with the proud cupped-elongation of a waiter’s white-gloved fingers beneath a silver hors d’ouevres tray, a stack of smooth rounded stones. The stack resembles a giant cowpie cast in eternal stone. I sit upon this heap of soft-cool rock and speak nothing to myself, nothing to the bright blue cloudless sky ahead, nothing to the feather-world of bending-arms-pines behind.

Who can say why Zeus chose to answer the heartfelt peace-prayers of the Achaeans and Trojans — prayers duly accompanied with pious slashes of relentless bronze into and along the soft sweet necks of their fattest, juiciest lambs — with another decade of grimy, limb-splattering, all-scattering war? Who can say why God found it appropriate to help the Israelites vanquish all comers in David’s day only to then let them divide into two conflicting kingdoms, one ultimately destroyed and irrevocably dissolved by the Assyrians, the other toppled and held captive in Babylonia for more than sixty bleak, shameful, disappointing years? Who really knows why God answers some prayers and not others? We people sometimes have some theories on the subject: but people have theories — only the God knows.

Still, we lift up our solemn prayer: Grant us exuberant and steady health, real wisdom and goodness, the clarity to perceive what’s best for us to do and the ability to fit ourselves into this fast-flowing world so as to do it: guide us to real success — the kind based in the boundless, undifferentiated soul and radiating outward through the many wondrous particulars.

Pure Love, pure love, love, pure love, real love; a love that gives infinitely forever; a light shattering the darkness; a void teeming with infinitely irrepressible kindness — the wellspring and the backdrop of all things.

Pure Love at the core. Pure Love at the extremities. Pure Love all through, shining bright as day. Help us move well now and always! Help us to do well for real in this world and the deeper one.

Prayer by Bartleby Willard, who lives in the sheltered river glen — far inland from the burly coast.
Desperately-born witness by Amble Whistletown, who dash-paces these old wooden floor beams like a twitch-nosed rat made reckless by hunger and confusion.
Copyright with Andrew Mackenzie Watson, who lives alone along the turning staircase in the old forgotten cold-stone tower by the sea.
Who cares what these three fools do?
And yet, it was nice of them to pray not just for their own fool selves, but for everybody.
This prayer’s now been edited some seven times. What does the author think? That if he spruces up the imagery and more precisely explains the ideas, the True Good will be more ready and able to work with him? Or does he think that if he improves his prayer, he’ll mold himself into a vessel more ready and able to accept the Grace that the Great God gives freely, infinitely, relentlessly even?

[Update November 2021: Never mind — we’ll just keep the version of the prayer that’s already here. It’s fine. It’s not like a finer, more refined prayer will bend God’s great ears more or less. It’s not like God’s an asshole.]

[Update November 2021: I love you. Help me love you right.]

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

From Before:

Our most physical products:

Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

Update November 2021: We also tried to get people interested in cards and T-shirts at Pure Love Shop. That’s another thing we tried and gave up on years ago now.

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

Biographical 3: Confessions of a Pure Love Salesman

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Update November 2021: We’re back at Diary of Adamant Seducer. We’ll try to bundle it into a book someday. For now the chapters are linked to above. See Buy Our Books for the books we’ve already completed.]

I’ll lend you line from a happier time, when Bartleby Willard and Ambergris Whistletown were only a little inside out; it is the time just before now, the time right before they fled to the sea.

Bartleby Willard, thin, of an inhuman see-through hue like a bug larva, but without the vaguely jumbled gray insides of a bug larva. Bartleby Willard, who you can see through but fuzzily, not very satisfyingly. Bartleby Willard, wearing anyway a baggy disheveled light gray suit, and so pretty solid-looking. Bartleby Willard, with purple eyes and forest green hair and rubbery-see-through face and hands.

Bartleby Willard, who writes himself and who for some reason has described himself into such an awkward and implausible being — one that seems like the scribbling colorings of a child who, clutching crayon like dagger, attacks the hollow figure with reckless zigs and zags. (Bartleby’s suit is colored in in that jagged, inconsistent way; his hair is a bit loopier — like the toddler colorist here imagined lost gusto at cartoon Bartleby’s outlined hair [classic rockabilly: parted on the right with a great swooping mass resembling a curling skunk’s tail above and dipping into the tall wide forehead] and — looking away from the page — circled a loosely held forest-green crayon around a couple times in the vicinity of the cartoon hair || and now mark this sloppiness: strokes of gray bleed into his black shoes and his see-through hands and neck; loops of green mar the top of his head. And everywhere he goes, these crayon-lines bleed into our wholesome solid reallikeseriouslytotallyreal-world).

Bartleby Willard is pacing to and fro in place: arms behind back, he takes one half-step forward, then quick-steps lag-foot to meet lead-foot and — raising only his heels — quick-pivots around to face the direction he just arrived from; he then takes a half-step back to where the iteration began; and repeat …

The character is exhibiting all the symptoms of “heavy distress”. Witness how he colors his flat-chested, narrow-shouldered self: unkempt: flippant crayon-colors executed with a scratchy slashy, madcap hand. And then analyse his gait: quickly pacing to and fro like preoccupied people do; but in a tiny tiny space, as if to scream to the heavens: “I am trapped! I am trapped! I am trapped here!”

And do the others help? Does anyone help him? Who throws him a smile? Who hints him a subtle, unobtrusive, forgive-and-forget understanding? Who leans slightly forward while slightly squatting, puts hands to knees, and makes a flat leaning platform of shoulders and back to share Bartleby’s burden? Who remembers him in their prayers — not just formally, but heartfelt? Who cares about Bartleby Willard, one more would-be-author in this monstrous, heavy-breathing would-be-world? No one here; no one there.

He’s moved frantically from the near-fore to the near-aft and back again over and over in the two places where one would’ve thought he might find a sympathetic soul: (1) The Skullvalley After Whistletown Building, where Tun Whistletown and Arch Skullvalley rule their vast publishing empire with debonair negligence and Kempt Whistletown lovingly — albeit a little distantly, glumly even — engineers various publishing-related contraptions; and (2) The Hall of the Mountain King, where Amber Whistletown sulkily awaits his interview with the Mountain King.

“What’s the matter with Bartleby?” asks Thundration (“Tun”) while, tube-arms folded across plank-torso, he — long neck leaning one way, sharp chin jutting forward and stretching opposite way, small eyes and pursed lips bunched together around some common irony — gazes out one of the several floor-to-ceiling windows lining the eastern wall of the SAW Bookmakers common office.

Of these windows: windows that one and all overlook and give witness to the East River’s melt into the Upper Bay: the bottom of the channel they call a river draining into the top of a bulge they call a bay, which so-called bay will quickly hiccup through a narrow, gush out a widening, and then fall forever into the slosh-tufting immensity of the North Atlantic || keep well in mind that these particular waters have been long coddled: they spent many a slow, shallow, sunbaked day in that great unseaworthy wading pool called “Long Island Sound”: keep that in mind as you assess their fate and, for wisdom-is-compassion’s sake, contemplatively mingle your lots with theirs.

“The boy’s worried he doesn’t know what Pure Love is — says he can’t be a Pure Love manufacturer, importer, exporter, marketer, and/or salesman if he doesn’t even know what it is to love everyone with an infinitely kind and effective love.” replies Archangelbert (“Arch”) while handing a very small “M” with two tiny MickeyMouse-like feet to a word-centipede comprised of “R E A S O”. Arch is on his blue-jeaned knees, supporting himself with one long, bow-fingered hand as he leans down and forward to the eager word-creature, or — seen from a little wider layer — eager letter-community comprised of eager letters with identity-overlaps and -subsumings akin to eager ants in their eager ant colonies. Each letter of the word-centipede is about the size of a small pink eraser like you used to have in your cartoon-themed pencil case.

Kempt sits in a sturdy wooden chair in this clearing (all the desks are pushed against the wall opposite the entrance door) on the southwestern end of the SAWB common office’s beautiful cross-hatch, Celtic-arena flooring (well, it was beautiful! Before all that scraping of heavy square-legged oaken desks!). He wears square-cut but not-baggy light-beige canvas slacks (a little frayed along the bottom edges) and a black T-shirt with a bold gold lion face in puffy-ink on the front (I don’t know where he got that shirt).

Leaning forward, resting slight forearms on slender thighs, Kempt watches entranced as his newest invention — these small, living, breathing, relatively intelligent letter-units/word-centipedes — wander around the floor, dropping and picking up letters to form new words and — in much weaker, more spread-out, visibly-wobbling bonds — simple sentences. Conceiving of and creating life and watching that life slowly find its way has put Kempt in a very zen place; he’s even stopped yelling at Arch for giving the poor little things the wrong letters, which confuses them.

“What?” Tun bursts, his too-long too-thin too-tubular arms and legs flying out, forming a much too-long and too-drawn-out X in front of the window that overlooks the courthouse with Washington’s swearing-in statue. “Whoever told him that Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Extraordinaire needs to understand the whats-its and hoo-zaps it unloads on the hapless hopeless folk!? They don’t care what they’re swilling — just so long as they’re swilling! Bring ’em the trough and clear out!”

“I know — that’s what I sez: I sez, Bartleby, whip-snapp — that’s fast-slang for whipper snapper — look BW, wisni, I sez: at SAWB Bookbinders Spectacular we sell things; we don’t dry ourselves out on fancy pants worries like oohh I don’t know what I’m sell’in or ooohh, I don’t know how what I’m sell’in’s gonna impact the ooohhh people!”

Kempt said nothing as he watched “I” and “don’t” wander towards “understand”, which in turn gave a little jump of surprised joy and then dashed to join the duo — for to say something, to get something of their chests, to speak it out loud and clear.

So Bartleby spins.

And here ends that story and its time — its merry, oom pah pahing, pale beer frothing out of clanked metal steins, heavy chested girls in uplifting bodices wide-mouthed and head-tossed laugh-howling, worried little magicians in black cloaks and black stovepipe hats stooped on busy street corners and peering through narrowed eyes that flicker-hesitate and then lunge from side to side, giant wooden ships sloshing into a square-stone harbor and tumbling out unkempt adventurous lads like a leather dice-shaking cup rolling out a game of dice, smooth-bellied zebras zigzagging through the tall pipelike grasses time.

Well, actually; because things are never as simple as they start out declaring themselves; and so, all in all,: hard to say. You see, this basically funloving frolicsome fretting happened a bit ago; directly thereafter Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown, disheartened, once again dispersed, fleeing with their separate vessels (actually, Bartleby jumped on the back of a sea serpent) to their separate seas; but now, well now I’m not quite sure what they are up to or what the current mood of this, our blessed project — the manufacture of letters and love — is.

….

What, I wonder, does a Pure Love salesman confess to?

“I’m up in the attic, looking through the musty trunks, hoping to find an heirloom to pawn or a conversation piece to parade. I’m wishing through the ravages of war and its compromises: the soft white flesh that seemed so inviolate before everything was sudsy dishpan water flung into the air. Pure Love for sale! Pure Love for sale? Here, give me a fiver and I’ll give you not just the promise that it’ll all be alright, but the holy stuff that runs through our hearty heathy skirmishes and squeamishes! Yes, the hissing bustling contraption over there squirts out dollop after dollop of infinite joy, infinite kindness, infinite potential, and infinite redemption! And so I grow rich on the back of God Itself! What’s to confess? Who’ll condemn or forgive one who takes from the unbounded Good? With my riotous potions, I’ve left all portions behind; beyond both law and lawlessness, no eternal judge can e’er measure me for the final fitting; so as a phantom imagined in a child’s mind vanishes when that child grows beyond his childish superstitions, I vanish beyond myself: I supernova into nothingness, and Nothing becomes my name. Was I wrong? Was I right? But I wasn’t even like that: I was just telling you a joke I’d heard along the concrete white sparkling edge of the curving dam. Hold back deep waters, mighty suburban dam! Keep them frigid at your inkwell floor and mild on the rippling, scatter, sunning surface. … Or am I wrong? Do I clank and clap, march in place, make band out of mother’s pots — not for fun or earnest reflection, but to hide a fault? Oh, confess me to myself, You who know what I’ve become!”

Author: BW; editor: AMW; copyright: AMW

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

– – – –

From Before:
[Update November 2021: Forget about this! It’s from Before! Not from Now! Why is it even here still?]

For the nonsubscriber: Above is the start of the third fictionish writing in Bartleby’s Diary of an Adamant Lover. For more on this book and what all else’s going on in this blog, see the words beneath these words. To skip formalities and let the passion for consumption drive you headlong into our seller’s net: Buy the Books/Chapter

About this project:[

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting it into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
Chapters listed and linked to as they arise here:
Intro to Love at a Reasonable Price
and here:
Intro to Diary of an Adamant Seducer.

You can also find the most recent posting of each book by clicking on the appropriate Category (Categories are on the right hand side of this blog).

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Essayish 5: Proposed Solutions

Can the dashing author-adventurer Bartleby Willard and his faithful editor Andy Watson get anything done? I dunno, maybe, if they can get the right rhythm going. Maybe they can put together enough sanity and creativity and firestorm and discipline and decency to make something of this project. However, what if their surrounding environment goes to pot? What then?

Many things can go wrong. A small band of haters can gather up chemical weapons or nuclear devices and take out a city or three. Or maybe before too long the world’s dependence on oil and fresh water will create a new cataclysmic strife. Or the pandemic really will come, and everybody will tumble into the sea, to float gently along: bloated sunk-eyed jellyfish who don’t recall their childhood in the scamper town or their grownup life drifting through the signs.

Or here’s a list of other worries I recently made:

We’re going to kill ourselves soon. I don’t know exactly where to fit this in. Categorize it under “First things first”. The US and Russia still full of nukes pointed at each other and around the world; still sliding nuclear submarines around the globe, ready to take out a billion people. And countries around the world still trying to edge their way into the nihilistic world-destroying club while those already in chuckle to themselves, their mountains safely full of doomsday–as if anybody could control doomsday! Oh, and then there’s pumping tortured livestock full of antibiotics; in this way agribusiness avoids the cost of treating animals with a trace of decency while simultaneously creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs. And what’s going on with GMOs? And why didn’t we put the brakes on high risk banking after it cost the world economy gazillions and came close to melting it down into burning paper and overturned streets.

Why don’t we get serious about nuclear disarmament? Why don’t we stop small groups from profiting by putting the rest of us in danger? Clearly the only hope is a growth in wisdom. But what does wisdom look like in the public sphere?

I would like to see an end to the subtle corruption of the USA of my day: The way money buys political ads and accompanying that money flutter lobbyists whispering sweet-somethings into squishy, campaign-fatted ears. But apparently spending money to make people see your propaganda everywhere they turn is equivalent to freedom of speech, which of course we need as a fundamental guard against corruption, and which is therefore duly protected by the very first amendment our forefathers brought forth on this great nation. It is perhaps conceivable that the right to outspend your enemies and therefore more fully saturate everybody’s poor little unsuspecting brain with your psychologically proven mind-influencers is not actually equivalent to freedom of speech. It is conceivable that that was nothing more than an opinion held at one specific time by the majority of nine old sitabouts who–far from being the Form-following philosopher kings that their intelligence, expertise, dedication, advanced age, and freedom from financial or career concerns was supposed to make them–had their own hatchets to sharpen.

But even supposing another set of uppermost judges were to–rightly or wrongly!–reverse the ruling that equates regulating campaign spending with regulating speech (perhaps using an argument that the speech act is one thing and the using power to drench the world in it is another thingNote 1), we’d still all be gathered around our own individual media sources, drinking only the spin that already agrees with our own particular prejudices, getting thicker and thicker in certainty and swagger and louder and louder in indignation and disgust at neighbors who gobble the contrary media.

The real problem is clearly that we’re an evil and depraved people. Except that if you actually meet us, we’re not that bad. We’ve just stopped believing in a shared good, in a larger nation, in beliefs and hopes and goals held in common. We’ve fallen for the lie of Red vs Blue and it is killing us down into the asphalt that the jumpers dent, splatter, and forget.

Perhaps if we began to pull ourselves away from the televisions and computers, and/or we began to demand not journalism that makes us feel like we are already right, but journalism that challenges us. (I know!: The problem with the latter fix is that the underlying problem involves how everyone thinks their opinions are the Truth and it’s the other side who can’t bear to be challenged with the Truth.)

Whatever you are trying for: “truth” or “goodness” or “holiness” or “best current guess” or “decency”–whatever phraseology you use, your deep underlying goal presupposes that life matters and that we can consciously find our way to better and worse ideas and actions (ie: your real motivation is a sense of meaningfulness deeper than ideas and feelings). So though our specific philo-spiritual persuasions vary widely, we all agree that life matters and that with open-hearts and open-minds, we can find our way to truer visions and better actions. Take that common ground seriously and you will see that it implies a shared absolute standard of values. The real Truth is prior to our ideas and feelings about Truth, but each of us has the same inner sense: this is the truth from which we can begin: this is the truth from which real commonwealth can beginNote 2): admit that the Truth is in each of us: we all know very well that life matters, that people matter, that we need to treat one another with respect and dignity. We don’t just think that or feel that, we know it, and it is this deep knowledge, deeper than the assumptions out of which we’d build our doubts about the authority of this knowledge, that binds us.

We need to start seeing that we have enough in common and that the only things that win in media battles are memes and dramatic swells of self-aggrandizing emotion-puffs. People aren’t soundbites or momentary thrills. They aren’t even complex, well-thought-out ideas and intricate mazes of overlapping and interacting feelings. They are ideas and feelings centered around that indefinable something that motivates and justifies our attempts to use ideas and feelings to find truer and better paths. People win when they treat themselves and others with dignity and actually think and work together; they lose when they reduce the real world to black and white sides and human beings to us or them.

But in case we don’t straighten up and fly right, I’ve got another plan:

Some scientific genius can come up with some magic dust that will–upon release from a small, square-based, cork-stopped glass flask–instantly fill the world and undo all nuclear weapons all over the world–rendering them all harmless. Another scientific genius can come up with something similar for chemical weapon X and another for Chemical weapon Y. And then we’ll need a scientific genius to release a special bacteria that will make us resistant to all the dangerous ones and a special virus that will keep us safe from the bad ones. And so on. I’m not sure how many scientific geniuses we’ll exactly need, or how we can be sure to keep their inventions from not backfiring and actually making things worse. But at least that’s the plan in a rough-sketch.

Or everyone could do like me and turn into a superbeing that cannot be harmed by anything and that jumps from city to city, from harbor to harbor, from coast to valley, from desert to mountaintop, from the seafloor to the country church. I certainly enjoy this lifestyle and wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone. But for some reason the many–stiff-necked!–drag their feet, make milky-eyed laments and handlebar-frown excuses. They can’t, they don’t know how, they’re just so wretchedly mortal–and on and on. There’s no helping some people!

Author: Bartleby Willard
Oversight: Andy Watson

Copyright: Andy Watson
Note 1: This idea originated in the idle conversation of WAP co-founder and -leader Tom Watson, co-chief of the implausible yet achievable Wandering Albatross Press. On numerous chit chat throughout the continental United States, Tom Watson has expanded at length upon a scholarly legal article that he proposes to write. In this much-promised and little-realized paper, Tom plans on demonstrating the constitution’s ultimate support for campaign finance in the 21st Century and beyond, basing his prodigious future-arguments largely upon the distinction between the freedom to speak and share your opinions and the power to fill the media sea with them. Or so I understand this as yet nonexistent but at least to hear him talk inevitable intellectual, moral, and spiritual achievement. As the unwritten article as yet remains unnamed, for convenience’s sake we will in the future refer to it as “Article I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Note 2: A Literary Allusion: “Villanelle for Our Time” by Frank Scott (Leonard Cohen put music to this poem in his 2004 album “Dear Heather”)

“Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.” is in F Scott’s poem.

I found the poem, along with a concise and thoughtful commentary by a certain “Max Stephenson, Jr”, professor of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, here;
http://www.ee.unirel.vt.edu/index.php/outreach-policy/comment/leonard_cohen_a_villanelle_for_our_time/

It goes without saying that this poem is a favorite amongst Something Deeperists far and wide and near and far.
……

This piece has been filed under Diary of an Adamant Lover: Essayish.

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Statement of Faith (Essayish 4; also included in the beginning of LAARP)

Here for the umpteenth gazillion time, BW tries to summarize Something Deeperism and its philosophical appeal.

Statement of Faith

Bartleby Willard is a simple man of faith. He is a simple Something Deeperist. He maintains that though the True Good is prior to our ideas and feelings, our ideas and feelings can still interact meaningfully with the True Good.

Something Deeperism attempts to hold the middle ground between radical skepticism and fundamentalist religiosity. Radical skepticism refutes itself because only a fealty to one’s underlying sense toward “truer” and “better” can justify or motivate intellectual rigor. Fundamentalist religion refutes itself when it allows religious sentiments to turn one’s focus away from centering oneself upon the True Good/God/Truth/Dharmakya Buddha/the Way (for a direction towards ideas and feelings, only poetic formulations can be used; so we’ve chosen several common names for the “wheel within the clay”) that justifies and motivates true religion.

Something Deeperism does not claim that either skepticism or religion is an error, but merely points out that the basis of both is deeper than either one: the point of bothering with both skeptical and the religious analyses is to better understand and follow the True Good.

Trying to figure out how to think and act or best follow God’s will only makes sense if it actually matters what you do: if you actually matter: our inner sense that it matters what we do is logically and experientially prior to specific notions about how to do things right (note that an inner sense that I matter is not the same as feeling like I matter or having the idea that I matter: we’re talking about a sense deeper than ideas and feelings here!). The various tools of human thought and human culture should therefore serve this inner sense of We All Matter! For Real!, and not get off into tangents, making gods of themselves and otherwise pushing us away from the very wisdom/joy/decency they should be pushing us towards.

A Something Deeperist can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a secular humanist or etc; all that is barred from Something Deeperists is to deny the sacred Love at the core of reality, or to claim either that one’s intellectual and/or emotional thought perfectly understands that holiness, or that those aspects of one’s thought have no understanding of that holiness, or that one’s intellect cannot better its understanding of that holiness. A Something Deeperist must keep pedaling.

“The logos (account) is only one. It is willing and unwilling to be called by the name of Zeus.” [Heraclitus]

Or again: “Let’s not sing of Titans and Giants–those fictions of the men of old–nor of turbulent civil broils in which is no good thing at all; but to give heedful reverence to the gods is ever good.” [Xenophanes]”

The author’s hope for himself and his various groups (be they friend-, family-, practitioner-, nationstate-, worldwide- or ecetera-units) is only this:

Let us all be Something Deeperists at least to the extent that we keep our ideas and feelings about What Matters (including of course so the God help us Amen our ideas and feelings about Something Deeperism) from betraying that ineffable light that they are to some degree imperfectly but still to some degree adequately pointing towards! Help us, Oh inconceivably vastly vast That Which Helps! Please!!!!

“Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.” [Heraclitus]

Bartleby Willard, WAP staff writer; in a resort on the water, vacationing ten days after Independence Day, 2015. Slashed and revised August 1, 2015. Another attempt made August 2, 2015, then again Aug 3, and again November 12.

{Some frenzied, overwashing, desperate, footnotes:

About poetic formulations and irreducibles:
All concepts are prior to the way things really are. A literal formulation (ex: “The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock”) can therefore only label something within a system that is already assumed (like a mathematical or physical set of rules); the metaphysical existence of the foundations of such a system are not provable or even fathomable, and so literal statements can help us to work within working-hypotheses but they cannot speak meaningfully about what is actually the case (or even if such a thing as “actually the case” exists). Poetic formulations (ex: “human life truly matters” or “The capital of Arkansas actually is in Little Rock”), on the other hand, knowingly point with imperfect clarity, precision, and verifiability; they can therefore be employed to discuss irreducibles (senses-of-things that cannot be reduced to any further argumentation: anything having to do with “no, but this is actually the case”, for example “some philosophies are better than others”).

“Imperfect” is not necessarily the same as “inadequate”, so it is conceivable both that an individual could grow in knowledge about the Something Deeper and that humans could meaningfully share their senses of the Something Deeper with one another:
Poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate our inner-senses-of-things to ideas and feelings; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–it was an unfounded philosophical prejudice to suppose that our ideas were somehow hermetically sealed off from our feelings or our deeper-senses-of-things (how to think about the relationship between the Something Deeper and ideas and feelings? A good analogy is our ability to use ideas to talk about feelings, even though feelings are wider/deeper/less-conceptually-solid).
Similarly, poetic formulations cannot perfectly relate one human’s experience to another’s; but that doesn’t mean they cannot adequately do so–we are all essentially the same and we learn language from other humans: from this we know that our poetries can meaningfully relate to other people’s poetries.}

Author: BW
Copyright: Andy Watson

Some products sold by WAP to support WAP endeavors:

Buy the Books
Buy Cat Totes!
&/or Objectively Cute Baby Onepieces! (advertised here: An ad for an “Objectively Cute” baby wrap

About this project:

We’re letting Bartleby write his book; we’re even publishing it for him; it is two loosely bound sketchbooks:

(1) Love at a Reasonable Price: Stories of his magically timeless time here at Wandering Albatross Press interspersed with writings from that time or from now but somehow connected to that time–stories about manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling Pure Love;
and
(2) Diary of an Adamant Lover: Stories of his current time here all alone with the quiet squeaking floorboards and the rats thumping in the ceiling: Stories of his cries for help in the ruins of Wandering Albatross Press, the black and dark time after the hope and before the answer. We’re splitting this one into two sections: Biographical (writings that mostly relate the current movements of BW, AMW, and the rest of the WAP gang are ex) and Essayish (writings that mostly stay within a certain thought entertained and cultivated by the author and/or his editor).

Both books sold as they evolve here:
Buy the Books/Chapter
That page also includes a current list of chapters for each book.

Actually, the posts of Diary of an Adamant Lover probably won’t ever require a subscription. Still, with a subscription, you get a nicely ebound eevolving ebook compilation of the writings, and you get a quick buy eye-connecting “Thank you” from AW and BW as they bow their way out of the subway car with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the songs in their lungs.

This blog will consist of extracts from the book’s chapters as they are released into the lumiferous aether. You can buy BW’s book as he writes it here. You can also consider this blog a long advertisement for Wandering Albatross Press’s some-such-several wonderful products; like . You can also view this blog as it’s own thing–a good unto itself–and as such a sweet, chaste little kiss running through the infomaterous aether (the theory of a lumiferous ether through which electromagetic waves move is no longer widely accepted and its originators all long dead; it is very much in the public domain and so publishing houses, such as the beautiful WAP, can use it any way they please). But insofar as this is a commercial venture, we still need it fundamentally grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us to try. Or at least let us try.

Author: Bartleby Willard, fictional character

Copyright holder/editor: Andrew Mackenzie Watson (of the Sand Springs Watsons)

Beginning of “The Things We Long For”

Beginning of “The Things We Long For”

[The entire essay is included in “First Loves”, available for $2.99 in the “Buy the Books” section of this blog.]

Demographicars tell us that around seven billion people live in the world today. Written out: 7,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes, a lot of total failures. And if you think over the history of the world, the number of failures soiling this earth becomes absurdly large. Or consider animal life: Has there ever been a cockroach that amounted to anything? The Smithsonian estimates that at any given moment there are 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on the world. Add that together with arachnids, worms, mammals, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and the rest of them! Just contemplate how many useless failed wretches this earth holds! Just hold that in consideration for a moment or so; hold that terrible edification in your wretched skull for a few.

I am uncertain whether or not to include the tiniest of critters (amoebas and the like) within our list of losers.

But first — before a thorough and fair inquisition of the one-celleds — :
Although I know we all already know what constitutes a failure, some may have difficulty admitting it to themselves, as it clearly implicates them and all they stand for; so let’s review the anatomy of failure by investigating a simple mosquito. A moment in the presence of a mosquito is enough to let anyone know that there is a drop of consciousness there. Is a mosquito therefore a failure? Take a deep breath, consider it, feel the mosquito and the question of whether or not we could consider the life of any mosquito ever to have been any kind of a success. Breath out. Clearly not! It is self-evident that mosquitoes have some little pathetic sliver of awareness, and it is just as self-evident that mosquitoes are always losers: it takes only a drop to condemn: one drop of consciousness within a creature that’s not amounted to much is the criterion of hopeless failure.

[“The Things We Long For” is available in its entirety in “First Loves”, a collection of essays published on this site at “Buy the Books”.
It’s author is Ponce de Viermeil, many years, reforms, back-slides and rejuvenations after discovering the Fountain of Youth in what is now Southern Florida, USA.
Copyright AMW]