tractatus 5

The two principles, those of Piety and Virtue, are seen to extend to algebra. Some insist that the primary foundation of algebra is Aristotelian, the identity that N=N. Independent of all other numbers, many take this truth for the beginning of the numerical science. What folly! Such asserts that if an egg have a crack, and if the egg can remain itself without a crack, that the crack can exist without the egg! The two principles I have delineated more satisfactorily resolve the foundation. The four basic relations of algebra comprise addition, multiplication, exponentiation, and logarithms. These relations comprise a minimum of two numbers, as an opened fruit yields at least two pieces, else the fruit is whole. For logarithms, I shall say that they tell the mathematician how long something may mature given a rate of growth. For exponentiation, I shall say that it makes growth observable. For multiplication, I shall say that it distributes itself among its parts. For addition, I shall say it is simplistic.

Fragment XIII

Kings replace friends as skin replaces scabs.

libretto iv

The Emperor:

No! The emperor deigns not
To bow before the crowd.
The works and days make men to sweat,
Men shan't make the day to leak;
The fever and the influences harm not
Nobles, gold-blooded, thoroughbred.
Without the emperor
They all would burn their meats
To cook the kindling.
Madmen, madmen, madmen!
Who will cure them of their curates?
Not I, no longer, no chance.

distich viii

I bought a fruit gone dark with rot and hung with mold,
A beard to rival that of cardinals, I'm told!

Observations on Correspondence (7)

I've held few correspondences in my life, unsurprising, expected, for I've held few households for great lengths of time, such as the summer I spent before moving to Portugal when my enthusiasm exceeded my stomach, by which I mean that I would forego lunch and breakfast, though only twice, in order to save for the long-distance postage, a distance which has since shrunken, or, rather, a price which has since shrunken, not unlike friend in Haiti whose admiration for the world of letters has diminished for reasons I shall not discuss, not here, not now, not me.

From "An Essay on the Ostracist" (2)

Fragments I and IV exhibit a common trope in poetry of any nation. As with much of Horace and with the first book of the Georgics, the Ostracist pays close attention to the time of year in which the given fragment takes place. Basho preferred oblique glances into the spring and more serious, for Basho, looks at the winter. The Ostracist designed to trap the listener, for it was an oral culture, into the situation. As the archaeologists have agreed, tonsure was seasonal, taking place well within the spring. With a touch of wit, the Ostracist wishes to draw parallels between the sanding of the orchards with the tonsure of the beard, for the former is deemed comical and the latter sanctimonious. Of course, this might simply imply tribal rivalry with another region that had no such ceremony.

libretto iii

Proserpina:

When I had left the birds were winging
Sweet airs, sweet airs,
They left me with a dirge
That I carried underneath.

When the primavernal empress
Leaves for cavernous hours,
The river hardens for his grief
That comes from deep within.

When Proserpina leaves the House of Bounty
And the clouds visit the villagers
They all seek out her tracks.

The dowry of Fall is full paid,
The king of Depth now pines in waiting;
The Duchy of Green is come again!

tractatus 4

Fancy lies below Custom. Any given custom may be unjust or impious, but always another custom, a preceding or foreign custom, balances the scale. The corruption of a monarch is resolved in his progeny. The winter of a kingdom gives way to its spring. Fancy belongs to the sordid individual, the corrupt monarch of one's own life, the base and disarrayed mind. The individual, if you will, is the Fancy engine. The lion may be known by its claw, but the individual's station may not be known without the entirety. To this end, the Divinity in Man, which shall be called the Beloved's Providence, governs the individual.

tractatus 3

As birds sing to one another, as insects fiddle to themselves, the forces of nature discourse. When the Beloved and his testimony are wanting, Custom is maintained. Pindarus believed Custom to reign all; though hardly true, the poet knew that Custom ordains all. He mistakes a Custom to its craftsman, as though a boat educated its shipwright.

tractatus 2

With regards to virtue, one must turn from the Beloved to the Theophile. In the absence of the Beloved, one finds mankind to be the Divinity among the beasts. One must serve the Revelation of the Beloved, but, when the Beloved shrouds himself for deception or for roth, those who once sought the Divinity are to turn towards the Testimony. In the absence of the eldest, fatherhood falls to the next; succeeding the bruise of the sunset, one lives by the light of the crescent. Without the Beloved, the race of Man resorts to himself.

theology iii

God's greatest message is unsaid. Laughter begat Struggle, for Isaac begot Jacob. The child sacrifice learned to laugh but from his mother rather than from the great Father. His two ungrateful sons could not understand to see the man who laughs from the great pleasantry.

tractatus 1

The two great forces in the cosmos comprise virtue and piety; for piety guides man in understanding the world whence he originated. Divinity compels man's perception. The Godhead rewards the mortality seeking the Beloved with creed, aspiration, and love-for-all. For surely, though the Beloved has allowed much evil in the world, he has repaid Man thousandfold for all its goodness. The Seirenes flocked to the barks of Ulixes, but the Mariner understood: the beauty of the voice is fair, but the captain alone responds as the oarsmen deny. The limbs of man must raise toward the Beloved, though his mind be distraught.

Fragment XII

...sweet[ness] from the warm[ly] tumid rind!

aphorism lv

The chasm between war and peace is a narrow wire; the difference lies in whether one starves or bleeds, respectively.

aphorism liv

The hunger of bullets exceeds even ours.

distich vii

Saints pen a word of clemency to those who read
The shrift, though geese prefer their coats to mercy's creed.

Sonnet IV

I took a flying song into my heart
That seized me, shaken, primavernal weather
Shall never vie to loose the light-forged art
Afflicting us, unwarned, to lie together.
Last night I took the air from him who dotes
Upon my smile, which he compared to sections
Of quartered limes, revering forms, like notes,
That touch of symmetry. Upon reflection
Entire nights long, that mendacious strain,
So sick with damp, the hungering mouthfuls clutch,
With avaricious groans, the tightening rein.
The trite deception's hardly worst as such.
The string lies stretched across the span and shakes
When struck by wind that desperation wakes.

octave ii

I steal upon the deluge flooding wide,
There are no folds to oblige the promise-rite.
I take the lodestar for my constant bride.
Though every man would look upon her sight,
In me, and only me, will she confide
Her smoldering will, impassioned, charring bright,
That claws the viscera within. The soul -
That killing flight - will nail me to the pole

octave i

Across the earth whose waving peaks delude,
Those climbers striving upward and ahead
Ignored the quakes, the faults misunderstood.
Marines, by navigation underfed,
Forever discontent with longitude,
Starve for the sight of dusk forever red.
Surpass, my son, the blinkers of the day,
And the irons in the night that bade you stay

libretto ii

The Emperor:

Don't they recall... does nothing come to mind?
Do they discern, do they even blink an eye?
Knowledge, enlightenment, and civilization
Had passed them by like birds for the south.
The townsmen and the hill folk
that cry for confederacy
Have chosen for their progeny
The serfdom of the tooth,
And the law of bones,
And the worship of the morass!
Alas, the empire
Is uncrowned
As the sinews lie slack,
Hung as they are like a side of pork,
Or afflicted with the Gnashing of Teeth!
"Life," say I,
"Cry instead for life!
Betroth Reason!
Understanding!"

libretto i

The Navigator:

We stopped over
And I conversed with a colleague of mine
At Tokyo International.
We both deeply admired the design
To which we compared various monuments
Of our many encounters. Then we shared
Snapshot from the old days,
Gyres of the ocean,
The plains of all continents,
The deserts of Peru,
The rouge of West Africa
That chases the sunset.

theology ii

(from On Quaternarianism)
Assuredly, the notion that God is limited to three persons is absurd! Given the popularity of the belief, popularly known to be truth, unpopularly called Trinitarianism, I propose a counterplan. Perhaps God consists of four persons. Daniel's statue takes four parts, as do most of the beasts in the Son of Patmos. Most of the wisdom of Solomon expresses itself in four-parted statements. Another myth of the trinity I have heard comes from the parerga of St. Patrick; he made use of the native clover to explicate the tripartite nature of the LORD. He might have done better to use a four-leafed plant, which itself is considered fortuitously auspicious.

Biography IV

The theologian, known better in our time than in his own, held the Nietzschean opinion that individualism was the invention of the church; that Christian doctrine had shaped and formed the landscape of the individual appealed to the theologian. In his typical irony, he reveled in the notion that the individual as a concept was invented by the turbulent crowd of mystics. What jollity! What oddity! What verity! I believe, and I am not alone in asserting this, that the comedy of the occasion unfettered the theologian from the Scythian rock. Sometimes, I even believe, though unpopularly, that his sense of farce had more to do with his celibacy than his oaths.

distich vi

Such virtue's bollocks! a truly virtuous colleague would
Cohabit, shelter thee when Judgment's come for good!

distich v

Hail rivergod, ris'n past the knee of my dear lady
Whose comely sock bespeaks a flirty damp and shady.

Sonnet III

A gibbous flare stuck in the drop of glass
In frozen constance, static in the soil.
The bead observed the ruddy dawn to pass
And blinked the years of hours and toil.
The nature's flaw ingrained within the form
Where sinuous blows and marks had fast remained,
Then came the wind again in baneful storm
That dared to wash away its visage stained.
What futile, running, cosmic sustenance!
The fatal Bend may try well as it might.
Now Nature yet unvanquished sees that Chance
Twists everything, all seen or far from sight.
No turbulence nor tempest nor deluge alone
Ever unties the palsy from the stone.

theology i

I give little credence to the notion that heaven promises the stalwart soul pleasance of any species. Scripture impresses us with entering "εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ" hereafter (Μάρκος θʹυεʹ). Paul sees a paradisaical heaven as necessarily uncertain, hardly the paradise one would expect (κορίνθιους β ιβ'δ'). Typology compels the many to believe a world such as that of paradise to greet us having forsaken the blood of Eve. A traveler once told me that he had been navigating the undersides of a massive cavern, the dark underworld populated by boneless creatures whose bodies must then melt into the underfoot. He emerged days later, but having emerged he continued to wander, to treat even the benign miasmas outside as those within, speechless, cautious. He had left the cavern to find but his own blindness; he departed the solitary cavern to encounter the solitude of the village. Just as we cannot know whether we shall enter heaven or not, knowing whether or not we are even in heaven is likewise impossible.

distich iv

The sweaty dripper fans him from humidity
Though he'd dry faster flying from cupidity.

distich iii

Our daily bread give us this day, before
The age of staleness take our lunch, or more.

distich ii

The pilgrims flock to bones and wood, but notice them-
They've stuffed their maws with all except the lotus-stem!

distich i

The ship of missionaries departed from the wharf,
Beneath them they beheld a dark enantiomorph.