How did you do this, Charlie Covell?

I want to understand how you wove it, how you made Kaos, how you made art.

Everyone was worth knowing, all the characters had textures and hearts and minds. It lived for every episode. And it is true that no one can destroy the Fates, no one can destroy the intrinsic order — not the gods, not humans, not Kaos, not anyone.

It was a good series. I can’t imagine you can do it again, but I never guessed you’d be able to do it in the first place. So maybe! You couldn’t help but love them all, all the people, all the gods, all the Titans, even the Fates, even the only ones so truly blessed and immortal that the completely surpass our mortal frameworks.

It was good. A lot of times you keep watching these series because you want to see what is next, even though you don’t really care. But this time I cared, and I believed. I cared because I believed that every character was essentially human, a real human, a unique set of possibilities realized in unique circumstances.

What can we learn from this? How might we achieve this ourselves? Here and now in this art that we so desperately seek, the one that would actually help — not by being didactic, but by being true.

Because ideas were born, but they were not forced; they grew out of the characters and their shared reality and the always-plausible (within this reality) circumstances.

It was very good. And it was really neat to see a reality that we no longer take seriously taken seriously, made possible, made inhabitable — inhabited even.

Do we ever understand our fates? I don’t think so. Sometimes we try to submit to the will of God; sometimes we try to be our own person; and so we twist and turn, but at the end we are surprised by a Love that was always more than we could imagine, no matter how wise we were here and there — in flashes of insight or as the consistent fruit of steady practice.

Far beyond your mirror
Far beyond your dreams
Far beyond your moon signs
Far beyond your schemes
Far beyond the brother-hood
Far beyond James Dean
He was not James Dean
Is what I really mean
Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done

Far beyond what I believe
Or what my father said
Far beyond genetic codes
That run ’till we are dead
Far beyond the Catholics
Far beyond the Jews
I am safe here with the mother
I am safe here so are you

Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women
When all is said and done
Said and done

The peeling of the onion
As the pieces start to fall
You begin to see the faces
And the shadows on the wall
Tearing down the missiles
The pictures start to come
The image of a rosary
On the barrel of a gun

Waiting for the big one
I am living on the coast
Why do we deny
The things we fear the most
I am safe here with the mother
I am safe here in her arms
Still I hear the voices
Sounding the alarm
Where I am not the hunter
Still I am the hunter’s son
And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done

And we really all are women yes
When all is said and done
We really all are women yes
When all is said and done
Said and done

John Stewart, “Women” from Bullets in the Hour Glass.

I always thought he was saying,
“And we really all are winning yes
When all is said and done.”

And this is what I believe most of all.
And this is the art I seek.
And this is the song I remember.
And this is the poem that carries us past ourselves, into the Light.

But what does Xenophanes think?

Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another. R. P. 99.

Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. R. P. ib.

The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better. R. P 104 b.

One god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought. . . . R. P. 100.

He sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over. R. P. 102.

But without toil he swayeth all things by the thought of his mind. R. P. 108 b.

And he abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all; nor doth it befit him to go about now hither now thither. R. P. 110 a.

There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so. But all may have their fancy. R. P. 104.

Let these be taken as fancies something like the truth. R. P. 104 a.

And Heraclitus chimes in:

“One being, the only wise one, would and would not be called by the name of Zeus.