Arch: Bartleby, get in here!

Bartleby: Yes?

Tun: What is this?

Bartleby: That’s the business plan you requested.

Arch: Business plan! Business plan, he calls it! Something we requested, he informs us! A business plan! On what sun-circling orb? ‘Neath what starry element, ancestral jungle-meets-misty-mountains canopy, or lee side? Under what cheshire-grinning, madhatter-endorsed rubric?

Bartleby: I am not sure I understand this line of questioning. However, I can assure you that this was an original work, without any input from any character from Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Arch: He’s not grasping. He’s not the mental strength to take hold and remain! The man’s a drifter, untethered from the mother ship, spinning through the horribly infinite vacuum of empiest outer darkness!

Tun: Now, Arch, let’s not let a little misunderstanding ruffle our decorum. We are, if nothing else, responsible, respectable, dignified, and otherwise steady-on professionals.

Arch: And he can thank his starry-eyed heavens for that!

Bartleby: What is the issue, exactly?

Tun: Bartleby, did you read this business plan? Could you tell us who wrote it? Arch suspects Amble, but I feel like the tone is that of someone a little less … experienced. In any event, no one would mistake this for a work of Bartleby Willard — self-authoring fiction; a self-told tale as blessedly eternal as a god, and with the easy, black-button-eyed, of-long-and-vaulting-wings self-sufficiency of the wandering albatross, a creature that eats, sleeps, and dreams on the wing.

Bartleby: Well, you see, lately, I’ve begun to bubble over with a deep and difficult animal intensity, a type of frustrated, choked, hammers-smashed symphony in the pit and pith of me.

Tun: Oh dear!

Arch: How now? Feeling your rooster? Wanna crow? Bartleby Willard? Why, you don’t even exist!

Tun: Arch! What he means, Bartleby, is, well, you write yourself into existence, so why not simply edit out these unpleasant and unproductive pings and pangs?

Arch: Duck and cover! The boy’s a steam boiler, and he’s poppin’ his every rivet!

Bartleby: Yes, ha ha, someone call the American Society of Mechanical Engineers — formed, 1880, as they were, largely to address the 50,000 casualties annually caused by steam boiler explosions in this nation alone — oh, yes, ha ha, my all means, tee hee hee

Tun: Well, Bartleby, with your vast resources, I’m sure you can navigate a little human passion. Now, if you would be so kind as to draft a business plan for the sale of Pure Love — the timespace-prior spiritual Love that creates, sustains, shines through, cherishes, love-lifts, and some sense ultimately Is this interconnected tapestry of created minds and matters we call “reality”, or “universe piled upon universe, as they blink in and out of this gauzy daydream”.

Bartleby: Of course. It would be my pleasure. I will gather together a good big pile of words, and then begin moving them around into patterns both existentially meaningfully and economically practicable.

Arch: Now there’s the spirit! No more of this lonely-john, moan-shrieking tom-cat jive, if you please!

Author: Bartleby Willard (he wrote the previous post called “Business Plan” as well! But we couldn’t tell you then! Because it would worry the surprise!)
Editor of both pieces: Amble Whistletown
Copyright holder of this entire website, among many other loose associations of words and symbols, : Andrew M. Watson