Oh my God, McCarthy thought, it has finally happened. A person born who is lacking the instinctive thought of the past, and therefore the capability of reflection which, in the rest of us older folks, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

For this much had already been established, in these Lectures which are now sadly, I mean triumphantly, drawing to a close; that the past is an idea that creates a category which, looking around and reading books and going to museums, etc. the world provided ample evidence for. But--and I am rushing this--the evidence alone is mute and out of context without the prior idea of the category. This I and McCarthy knew, and had often labored to make clear, I in my writing and he in his many careers as pilot, traveller and raconteur. But we also knew that just insofar as this is an IDEA a person has, there could be a person, or egads! a whole generation, born without the capacity for such an idea. It is, though described as instinctual, not necessarily given. To make a poor analogy, it could become like the appendix. Or more corrected, this idea of the past would have to classed among miraculous notions, ideas of truth, leading to religion--but it is clear that people in the past have had the idea of the past. And that there are still people, who have it.

But here is a girl who doesn’t understand why houses have no garages; and is not interested in the explanation! She would just as soon see those houses taken away. They are anomalies. So this is not that she lacks an appreciation of the past; appreciation is relative, among people who know the past at least happened. But, again, just having happened is not enough to establish the past. It has to be conceived of first, say by a child in the yard looking at trees.

For of course if the past arises in consciousness as a thought and then shines its light on the then apparently obvious age of things in the world, and enables a person to read books with a prior understanding that they are surviving from a former time, and are talking about this past, then I suppose it is possible that there could be a person who DOESN’T have this thought. In which person’s case then everything old would be simply inexplicable, out of the question, useless, a mistake, made by barbarians.

For again, one cannot infer the past from evidence, one has to know it existed to interpret the evidence. And this is not a relative function that applies only to some aspects of the past, but it is absolute. It is the fundamental category that is most vital for a person’s ability to comprehend the details. And the fact is that while McCarthy and I have long asserted this truth, very few have acknowledged it; most seem to have lived through it, so to speak, and become overwhelmed by their education into thinking the past is there just because time has passed. But anyway, before this girl, all have demonstrated that it, this past, was still operating. Now, what is going to happen, if all the pretty girls like this are part of a quietly invading army of ignorami--

And now I have said too much. This is the last post of Mortimer Shy.

Once again, the formula, the design, is there: the past exploding upon the scene. You can’t say, oh now we know and understand what actually happened, and use that to construct a new plodding chronology. It is just too spectacular a gap in historical time. One is forced to employ a different kind of thinking, in which this historical past is co-created in our own consciousness, and recognised as incomplete and impossible in its time. --If it’s own time was like ours, with our premises operating, which sounds silly. We know perfectly well people were thinking differently then. So therefore, this past, it wasn’t like this, and thus reality itself must have changed! Lord! A difficult train of thought alright!

But now, it is absurd to say that being a Christian depends upon whether you believe one or two propositions, and then assume that the rest of reality happens in the same way for anyone whether a Christian or not. And this is not just in the area of morality; it is a matter of whether reality changes, as a kind of backward result of a difference in reality, in history. Yes! It isn’t simply a matter of whether one has decided they are a Christian, on some personal criteria, but it is a matter of whether one is living in a Christian reality, which ought therefore to be in some kind of turmoil. Since it is brand new! It isn’t enough to have inward conviction and faith that is only reflective. If you enact a belief system and nothing happens to your sense of reality, then what is it? Pure conviction can’t stand, it will wither and fall; one has to be armed with continuous insights . . . derived from what one knows is the truth about history and what history has influenced, which includes the present. Which, indeed, must more and more be controlling this very present. God!

This of course is, at first, impossible, and always gets one is a corner, fascinated with the paradox, unsteady in their perception of what could, now, be a dangerously shifting world. The only solution is a style of backwards thinking, where the pure novelty of the world is seen as one half of truth itself . . . Ah, this I know.

But then, what kind of thinking is causing the other pure novelty we see happening literally everywhere, in the world born overnight of crazy instant communication, the cellphones all these travelers have, say, and the crashing incoming media! Surely this is not the future of the Christian reality! Is it? Stop the train. I don’t know. I was riding back from New York City and I kind of snapped out of these reflections, as the train pulled into a station somewhere. Like I suddenly worried I had missed my stop.

I looked out the train window. This fellow was walking by. Jesus!

And this is rather too difficult for a person to express, and admit to others without-- sounding like they are just denying they have a fear of personal extinction. No, that is not what happens when the shift in perspective is forced upon one, due, say, to the logical perception that one is becoming, irreversibly!, older, and therefore is, logically, doomed to say, wear out their welcome, and die. No, what the most consuming thought becomes is: what will happen to the world?

Or more precisely, won’t reality itself collapse without my perilous and tentative grasp on it? It is not that one thinks they have been holding the world together themselves, for obviously they haven't; but that one is forced to realise they NOT been holding the world together, and have no fundamental idea what the world really is. Yet they know nothing else! And therefore, without them at least studying it, offhand as their studies have been, this world just might fly, apart or become something else entirely. One thing it will not do is simply go on in the same old way. And the implications of that are terrible for the person, because that means all the other people in the world will no longer really exist, in the same old way, if AT ALL. One's first thought upon considering death is that death means the end of the world as one has known it. One does not imagine they are going to go into another, transcendent realm and leave the world spinning in time and history like they learned (in school).

It is more like they will go into a lesser realm of their own half-baked impressions of life, like taking up residence in some Afterlife Hotel. And the world, freed from their misperception, no longer bruised, as it were, by their continuosly injuring it with their judgements. will resume being what it really always has been. Which, incredibly and unfortuately, even after having been alive for so long (one's whole life in fact!), has now possiblly become a thing that never will be comprehended. An experience unresolved, a philosophic dream unfulfilled, a poetic universe largely unwritten.

I repeat: It is therefore not the fear of death, for that is impossible, death being completely unknown, but the fear of not really having lived; that is what a person faces with the prospect of their life ever ending. It is that whatever they have been doing, while alive, may not actually be what life actually is--that they themselves were always a stranger, and never really got to know anyone, deeply enough to, say, guarantee them anything like . . . salvation. They were here, and that is about all that can be said about it. All the coherence of their assumptions upon which they based the grid of their actions is really challenged as possibly entirely provisional, a construct of their own making.

What now, if this temporary world could vanish, and the central figure in it demonstrate, by irresponsibly, selfishly!, just dying; as if they wish to release any responsibility for it? This is the prospect. A person cannot actually say, for instance, that they believe the past as they learned about it ever really happened that way. But not just the past as half-learned about, but all other possible pasts are gone too. It is not like they got it slightly, or massively, wrong; but that they didn’t even begin to get it. And if they can’t be sure any of the people they know in life will still be there, in that exact same life, they certainly can’t say they expect to see them in another life. Thus people are choked off from speaking about their own death, because of the enormous complication in their own thoughts, in regards to the experience of life itself.

I know this is the case with everyone; the idea of death occurs as a reflection on the state of the world and the reality of one’s own grasp of the world; it does not occur as in a moment of self-concern, or studied reflection about the facts of one’s personal existence. What happens is these facts crowd into the picture as to make it futile to ever finish the great unfinished project of understanding reality, that all one’s life one more or less secretly has been engaged in. And then what happens is other people start making assumptions about your status, so to speak, your condition and age, and they are making statements to you that indicate they think you must be, exactly, concerned about your own mortality.

But! In each case, they themselves, younger or older, never faced this concern themselves--since they, younger or older, are still confused by the real sequence, which is like I have been saying, anxiety over the implications for the world without its central figure waking and even sleeping, in the midst of it.

The real issue is panic, cold panic, over what will happen to the world, to everyone else, the world that one lived in and is all one ever knew. The thought of the world existing without me ? This panic is severe, and unanswered, because that world is uncentered without the person whom it has, in fact, always revolved around. It is a senseless, nightmare world. This is the fear of the death of the subjective world. A much greater worry than ever beset you over your own, so-called, mortality.

Very shortly (mere minutes) after they were created, and placed on the cookie tin in readiness for the parade, I mean the box of cookies, to bring exclamation and smiles to the faces of certain relatives on Christmas Eve, though eventually to be eaten, a conversation was overheard between this snowman and this penguin. Or so claims my wife.

This snowman said, "Sleighbells ring, are you listening?" This penguin replied, "Let me think about that."

The bottom line seems to be that certain people are self-motivated, somehow required. to talk. They seem to have to say something. And that is reason they must have these ideas--not because the truth has come to them. It is what sounds good, what is possible to say, that is what gets said, like an exercise in grammar; and the fact that it is phrased in the context of a presentation on a subject, with opinions gained, and research accomplished, personal stories attached, etc, that it is proposed as an explanation and a theory about something, that is purely a ceremonial requirement of the occasion. All one has to do is sound like they know what they are talking about, and they are going to get attention. Audiences for the large part are ready to applaud. And one might say: this is by and large, for pretty much everybody, a suitable arrangement.

So, even though a speaker will rather obviously display a caviliar, even downright casual, attitude towards his subject matter, he may still continue to make the assumption that he is required, covertly, to claim his ideas are true. Almost to the degree that he is public he may fall increasingly under this requirement, that he must also sideways defend himself against a charge of spurious theory-making. Even fiction writers feel required to defend fictional tenets holding together their craft, as somehow divinely inspired. Even though it is obvious that they are winging it, everyone is reluctant to admit themselves ever a fool in any part of what they have done. It is as if they believe a third party, neither they nor their obviously complicit audience, is watching, and that might lead to an investigation. Or maybe the root of their insecurity might be they are worried an investigation might reveal unglamorous behavior on their part, like that they stepped on someone else to get where they are. Proving not just that they are making things up, but that they aren’t even the original inventor, which makes them twice the fool. So that even though it might seem the authors and the public have a tacit agreement, to not put the truth-value of anything to the test, still the authors become entangled with an assumption that they must appear serious.

But why does one think they have to pretend they are absolutely, more than anyone else, embracing the ideas they are presenting? It is obvious that if and when any theory is actually expressed, the person doing it is very liable to be the first to recognise its flaws. For much as it is satisfying to be grammatical, and make sentences that sound plausible, it is more thrilling to be dialectical, and challenge your own thinking with opposite ideas. At least I think so. But if some talking fool is not permitted, by some societal sanction, or some belief or fear of their own, that to doubt your own thoughts evinces weakness, then perhaps indeed they are blocked from further reflection.

So, alas!, one never gets to learn what it would be like to speculate without having to think of one’s speculations as true. One never knows what the imagination is. And to never find out what the real source and explanation is, that this is a function of a person’s consciousness, the split awareness that creates a sense of importance to the self, and the idea of a story in life. Any story being better than none. A person who can talk without regard for the truth-value of a theory, knowing it is the exercise itself that is yielding other territory, maybe--that person, well, will be laughed at, scorned for his ambition, and remembered for all time. Everybody loves a fool, really.

Dear God! I thought. What will he say next? “It will turn out that it is a case of systemic bad apples,” he said triumphantly. And Brickhouse pounded the bar. Now, truly no one else was listening, except for a couple of distant girls, who were moving closer. I was fascinated at the way this former President (that is what he said he was, and we don’t require resumes, just proof of age here at Monty’s Krown) was laying his mind right out there, like the proverbial patient, what was it? "etherized on a table".

“Also, the word systemic gets changed along the way to systematic, which is entirely different,” Bill was fuming, smouldering in his rhetoric now. “The scandalous problem proposed was formulated with a sham distinction, and now the solution isn’t even aimed at the original problem!”

Oh yeah, I knew what he was saying. Things are thrice removed before you get them out of committee, and that is a metaphor for life. Happens in committee! Yes, systemic is far worse than systematic, for it calls for essential reform of the system itself. Mere systematic corruption, that can be rooted out without reforming the system itself, even if you are left with virtually nothing but the, um, skeleton. Of the system. Systemic, though--you can forget the whole deal! That’s really bad apples. I knew all this, and like the former President of the United States I was often fatigued at having to lay the riggings of my brain out, just so people could in the end gawk at them and forget I ever even had the reins of any power, how great or little, once.

In Monty's, though, it isn't life, doesn't have to be. But try getting anyone else to understand these distinctions while in the government. The damn truth it is only after you have been there, that you understand what it might have been. What a dream, to really run things! Much less a country! Even around here, where we are all on a break, it isn’t totally free air. But you’d have to say it was better now, and the former President was reconciled to the neighborhood, to the midnight walk to the bar, the always bracing weather . . . whether or not he ever was a greater or lesser man. Maybe he hadn’t lost everyone’s attention; Sally Underwood was moonfaced with just the idea of comprehending him, and the aspiring film maker Johnny was interested in the fact that the former President of the United States was still so motivated to comment on the ever puzzling nature of current events. Or non-events, which was more to Johnny’s unrealized, experimental film style anyway.

“We have the choice between believing the government is corrupt or is incompetent; that is the choice. Either they are evil, or they are idiots,” Bill Brickhouse then said. Looking at him, you could see he was a man of former stature and strength. And even this more radically familiar choice, as he phrased it, a dumbed down version of the earlier point, I thought, still boggled the mind of Randy DeSoto, who had already forgotten his own last name, until someone said to him, “you’re driving, DeSoto!” That sounded like a car. How ironic! Randy had to go home, it was almost lights out with him, and he had to be at work in two days at the tattoo parlour. Two days! An almost unfathomable amount of time. Seems they're making Presidents younger and younger these days; and with people living almost a generation longer now--you go figure it out. Anybody in this bar could be . . . anybody.

(Commercial break: "When is a car more than just a car?")

And a crafty veteran like Jones coming in to close it? What we got coming out of that bullpen, this game is over. I want to know what kind of gum Jones is chewing, because he is certainly enjoying it. Because the A’s with a proverbial bloop and a blast could tie it. Well, they say its a game of inches. There was a swing that could have been either a harmless fly ball, letting Detroit out of here with a two game lead, or a grand slam that would have won it for the A’s. What, you don’t think these players grow a little facial hair to make themselves look more tough? Feel tough? I can believe it. Just like hitting, good pitching is contagious. The story when he first came over, his teammates wanted to make his brand new jersey look dirty, so they took a tire and messed it up, and he was upset by that. He said, you have to earn the dirt. They call him Mr. Intensity. Look at that ball tumble. Thinking, down. Again, the illusion of the strike. More than enough fastball. He almost double clutches the hitter, because he slows you down. You made a good point. I know Oakland doesn’t like to play that type of game, but I’ll tell you what, it’s a a great time to put the game in motion. Really good fundamental baseball. Probably best described as a meat and potatoes kind of guy. You want to put up some crooked numbers.Tried to shoestring it out there, but it got by him for a double. You gotta believe he’s hackin’, right, Lou? Yea, he’s cutting it loose. That is bad base running by Monroe. That one left a vapour trail off the bat of Ordonez.And there’s a rocket into right field by Guienne.They’re feeling it in the Motor City. This is how you win championships, take every inch of opportunity presented to ya. I guess when the umpire expands that strike zone a bit, it make the hitter stretch. Perhaps the season’s on the line for the A’s, when we come back. Players, as we know, have weird superstitions, almost all of them. If you have something you are doing right, you keep it up, like taking the same route to the stadium. He’s never stepped on a line in his life. Never had chalk on his shoes. Good pitching, like hitting, is contagious, like I said.

Some of my well-meaning friends wonder why I keep popping up with little essays on topics that seem to belong more in the domain of science, than in, say, literature or poetry, which they think I should more profitably stick to. But stuff like the above quote drives me nuts. I can’t help reacting to what I am surrounded by, like intellectual pollution. It isn’t the scientists--who are hopelessly deluded--, but the Little Scientist in everybody else that gets me, the one who never got out of sixth grade biology class. Because he or she was buffaloed right then, done in by the premise and assumptions of that one-eyed monster: science; and his lapdog, logic.

Science does propose to explain how things are created, and in this effort effectively and permanently replace the need for a creator at all. This it vainly does by virtue of an explanation of the workings of nature, which is only description, backed up by repeated demonstrations and experiments, which don’t prove anything, except the unlimited power of circular logic. Because no matter what is done in the laboratory, no one can recreate the situation in which there is no laboratory at all.

Determining how something is apparently made does not establish how it was made, or could be made. It is only to be able to say, it appears to work this way. But if you replicate it according to what you have found out about how it is made, you create something else anyway. Even an exact repetition is not the original, for the original was made from nothing--or rather, something unknown to us. This is what people seem hard pressed to admit, and it is all because people, sort of greedily, mistake the discovery of a process for the process itself. This, I harangue my friends every chance I get (which is not that often, actually) cannot be done, by anyone. Why! Because the person's consciousness of the process is always involved in the discovery, both as an interpretation and an influence, and then involved again in the new creation.

Nature has happened, lucky for us!, and continues, without our participation. It has happened without us being involved. We are visitors, like with special visiting permits. We are so intimately a part of reality that we think we have the ability to intervene in processes of creation. Very unique situation, being alive. Put the popcorn on. The noise and confusion comes with Science’s bedrock assumption that to discover how something works is to discover how it was made. This is not only wrong by example, but wrong essentially. That is wrong everytime. It is not just approximately wrong, or just a technicality that we are not actually involved in the creation of anything. It is an absolute clue to our own being as a visitor in this world. You can stare and stare and marvel at the workings of nature, but you cannot replicate it; you can all but replicate it, and create lifelike artificial substances. But you cannot get yourself in the position of the creator of anything. And why is this? Because, children, you don’t have anything to work with, from the beginning.

Creation happens when there is no one there. We have no witnesses, and we not only don’t know how anything happens, but it should be clear to us that that fact is essential to their being anything at all. Our not taking part in creation is a circumstance that should not be ignored. The consequences of this ignorance, which I claim are willful, are the wages of sin. Here in a discussion of Thomas Aquinas' distinction between "the Good Angels and the Bad Angels", the writer of the blog SIRIS reflects: "Thus knowledge for the angels is not merely a bare acquaintance with things but a submission to Truth Itself -- as it should be for all of us. This is why Aquinas makes the qualification 'good angels' -- the fall of the wicked angels is a failure to move from the knowledge of things to the knowledge of God. The demonic life is a night without morning, because they do not attempt to look at what they know in the light of the rising Sun."

Thinking one has the ability or knowledge to be a creator does sounds like what we have heard is the crime of the devil. Configure the devil how you will, what we have to get clear is what his crime exactly is. It is not the crime of assuming the powers of creation, but the crime of ignoring the truth about creation. For one cannot actually get those powers; one can only assume they have them. And one cannot be punished (the devil is punished) for a crime one cannot actually commit. One would just laugh at the devil’s presumptions if they were harmless. It is the crime of not appreciating the creation that this devil has committed. It is the crime of not looking; this is paid back by a creator who says: “ungrateful child!” He does not say, “how dare you propose to be like me?” For no one can be like him, and he is not offended that anyone might hope to be like him; in fact he could only be flattered by that. The crime is in not worshipping him. He says, “how dare you ignore my handiwork, in creating the world and you yourself, you ingrate.” He is not even looking to be appreciated; but, for some reason, he needs to be acknowledged, and praised. Think this is religion? No this is just thought at its base level. The inescapable reverence for life.

It is at this point my well-meaning, but always intellectually curious friends, perk up and actually start listening. Strategically, I have positioned the killer part of my argument towards the end, knowing it would take a bit of prodding and poking to awake and keep awake with semi-painful jabs a practically comatose public. Make the popcorn! It isn’t that science and logic could create a world, but just didn’t create this one. Or that they helped create this world, like intervening somewhere along the way, and becoming commissioned builders of certain regions, adjunct developers of technology, for instance; --no, the truth is that science and logic cannot create anything at all. These men of no reverence for life have not the slightest ability to make anything, but can only reverse engineer nature at best. They can only, with triumphant skills and unabashed pride, analyse what is right in front of them, and take apart reality. But, they cannot put it back together again, because even if it looks the same, when they propose it, or fabricate it, or at the extreme say they have fixed it, is in every case fatally ruined.

As sure to rust as that metal scupture of the one-eyed devil in my backyard. (Credit to: Phil Florin).

But there is more. Science and Logic always speak with forked tongue, literally. The reason these arm-in-arm bullies have gotten credit for being as co-creators of creation, so to speak, is that they make to explain BOTH aspects of creation: the how, and the when. By claiming to understand how nature works, and simultaneously, as if part of the explanation, when it was formed, Dame Science and Duke Logic appear to run all other explanations off the field, or the kitchen table. No one can dispute them because slipped into to their argument is a time factor, posing as history. This completely flexible additive can make to remedy any observable process, by adding, say, a few million light-years to it.

Weakly, and ignorant of the devil’s cunning, what us good folks always do, to furiously oppose such appparent learning is to argue with the time factor. We try to correct them, argue that science itself doesn’t have a clean record, but moves by fits and starts, etc.. We try to show that history doesn’t back them up; mythology totally disputes them, etc, etc. But the strong attack is to attack the “how”. And show that nothing can be made from existing materials at all. There is always something novel in the mix, when reality is considered, and that novelty is the element that makes the whole greater than its parts. That forces thinking into a retrospection, and a reverie.

“Now who shall say I have not done an original thing!” Edgar Allen Poe

Chronically, I am assessing my life, thus far--regarding it, up close and at a distance like it was a slow train going by, with many cars, more each year added to the front and the end, as not only memories but expectations become more resounding; slowly enough goes this train, indeed, that I can often run a few cars back, or forward, and make adjustments in the cargo there. And I can get back to man the throttle before anyone knows I am gone. Yet this train goes fast enough to provide me with the enjoyable sense that I am also a passenger, or sightseer, on this same journey.

But sometimes, no matter what I have accomplished, or prepared for, or how inevitable a future seemed, it happens that I find myself having to conclude that, in regards to one of my long-term expectations, well--it just didn’t happen. I realise that something I had assumed would happen has gone by, and can never be. Rare emotions, in regard to the never occurring, must be invented, for this non-occasion--then they too are liable to be fleeting. One can do this indolently, or giddily, or despairing. It is only one of those “infinite games” my old NYU professor, James Carse, tried to establish, as having the character of the sacred, while maintaining the appearance of play. But--and almost every sentence has a jag in it, you’ve noticed!, just around the bend and somewhere down the tracks, it is . . . not there. And now I confess it: one thing, long and jam-packed full of surprises as life is, I never expected not to happen is the opportunity to deliver that acceptance speech, which I long ago drafted, before a reverentially hushed audience of at least, let’s say, eight or nine hundred people with their hands suspended in the air, ready to applaud, in receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Or maybe it was the Nobel Prize for Literature. .No, I think it was poetry, actually, that was always my strong suit. In any case, the most important thing was not the words of the acceptance speech, but the graciousness, the palpable heartfelt emotion with which I gazed upon my public. That is what I knew I would be able to pull off with utmost style and sincerity. Probably no recipient of this prize would ever have struck the audience in quite the way I would, as appreciative of them, the humble readers and willing fans. That I was deserving for my work, that didn’t worry me; it was occasion itself I had long anticipated, and which would require my special attention.

Well, this apparently is not going to happen. And no strategy can make it happen, certainly not the obvious one of pretending to not expect it any longer--that is not what I am trying to do here! No, it can no longer come up and surprise me, I have exhausted the possibility of it--so to speak. No, I mean, yes, this I simply have realised will never happen, it is off the drawing board, nowhere around the bend--employ whatever metaphor you like, this simply is not in the cards. Metaphors are all there is to describe this phenomena (metaphors and pseudo-scientific jargon), for it is now in the category of . . . thin air. Me and the Pulitzer Prize do not collide, or collude, neither in the year 1989 (when frankly, folks, I really deserved every laurel), or the year 2009, which, significantly is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe--who hardly got his due shakes either! Lord, Poe was scandalised, robbed, beaten up and pushed in an alley, and his books published by his worst enemy. I certainly am not complaining for something so puny as lack of worldly recognition.

Far from it. I am just using this example to introduce a category of reflection we all should indulge in, and enjoy at our leisure--the nearly infinite leisure we all have at our disposal in those spacious, mostly empty heads of ours. The activity of systematically considering what has not happened. It is most refreshing! It makes you realise, for the most part, what a set of hackneyed dreams and unoriginal goals you always had. And thought is invisible, and it takes no time really. The things you are doing in time you can do at the same time, anyway--most of them. So run with it. Life allows for nearly infinite idle speculation. It is pure indulgent imagination.

Putting words to it, well that does takes time, and ages you eventually, so not everybody wants to indulge in it. You’d end up looking like a person who probably has a long convoluted history, and accomplishments and defeats, who probably received at least a few laurels!

The reason I now know for a fact that I will never be thanking some slick younger fellow for the Pulitzer Prize, is simply because I finally recognised that I eliminated myself from contention, long ago, during that fertile decade when I actually wrote the poetry. Frequently, now I ask myself, which would you rather have? The poetry, or the prize? Well, listen:

“The cause of his misfortune is that the dream
Of truth, the empty head of dreaming, the
Plaintive note of dying, is already consigned
To glory in the syllables of another time--
To this bright splashed terrain, to the hand
That says: Over there!--to the light that
Sweeps the floor, and the novel construction
I put upon your pain. As if the angels never
Sang in contradiction, and no other instruction
Every plagued the men of old, in tones like
The music falling late in the snowfall--and
To the oblivion of the erring human record.”

from part 3, The Modern Epoch
Edward Williams

N.B. Readers of these Lectures have by and large already determined that its author, the redoubtable, that is to say wholly fictional, Mortimer Shy, is the same as the poet Edward Williams. While the same he may be in some sense of contiguous physical being, to put it as we like to say pseudo-scientifically, the absolutely different he may also be, in that Shy seems to have left his youthful poet self in the dust. Merely quoting him now and then, making to back up his own sometimes insupportable theories. Shy is so determinedly a digressive and disorganised prose writer that it seems vengeful, nearly spiteful!, towards the spirit of the abandoned Williams, who was so blissfully unaware of his supremacy; and it makes me (who is suddenly neither of these fellows!) think that perhaps the old legend of the “inner child” has been reversed in this generation. For what we see emerging is a new race of witty old men, who boldly shine and are not easily traceable to any known type of historical humanity.

N.B.B The newly sprung existence of the webblog THE ALL-POETRY NOTEBOOK, which unblinkingly publishes one poem by Edward Williams after another, relieved only by mysterious paintings and photographs, must have something to do with the timing, and torturous tone, of these remarks.

The very next time I attempted to discuss the coming Dylan concert with another friend at this neighborhood bar, Andy Lowton (nicknames will suffice here), I got the same thing from him. Andy wasn’t going either because he couldn’t afford it. Again, I was taken aback, and left flat-footed; by this time I even had my tickets for myself and my wife, and was preparing to buy a third for an out-of-town friend who was coming through. With Red Rick I had thought, well he’s in a funk and will come around by the concert itself, and with Andy, who I have seen happily drop as much money in one night at this very bar, I figured he would be pulled in to this historic event as it drew near also.

But neither of them changed their attitude, and each become even more fixed in their determination to miss it; and two or three efforts on my part to prod them not only failed but redounded accusingly on myself. Why did it matter to me, whether these friends of mine went to this show? I found that I was burning with resentment, now, at their behavior, and this resentment wouldn’t go away. Instead it grew to the point where I was scornful of them, and anyone else who couldn’t “afford” to see a concert that compared in price to exactly ten Guiness draft beers, and a bag of peanuts. I became so high-minded, with comparisons like this, that I vowed to not even brag about the Show afterwards, and certainly not listen to their predictable lamentations and further excuses as to why they weren’t there. Nor to indulge in any description of it, to give them the slightest vicarious experience of it, but, if the subject were to come up, act as if it is too painful to for me to talk about. Because, evidently, some crime has been committed in regards to this Bob Dylan Show. I would deprive them utterly.

And the more I think about it, the more furious I become with these so-called fans of his and friends of mine. For what they have done is more than fail to be entertained themselves.. They have shirked continuing responsibility for the whole music culture they pretend to be a part of. Is that too harsh? I can make it worse.They have avoided planting a memory in their own experience that would, if they could admit it, have caused them endless profound trouble. Dylan would have gotten to them, brought them out of the shadows . . .

And here I have hit upon the real reason these laggards, these cowards!, did not go to the Bob Dylan Show, which was right down the street. It was to avoid responsibility, and being put in the difficult position of having to be positive, maybe inspired and full of praise. The whole thing promised to get in the way of their confirmed pessimism, their own status as outsiders. Can’t afford to see that many Dylan fans (5,500) all in one place, at one time! Such a bulwark in their memory they would be unable to defeat, with puny cynicism. Can’t afford it? Indeed. Can’t emotionally afford it, is the story.

For us, in the days after significant reverberations were happening. Another friend at the bar gave me a T-shirt which has a most fitting quote on the back, from Dylan’s new album, Modern Times: “You can hang back, or fight your best on the front lines.” That says it! It's from the song “Working Man Blues”. And another musician friend of my wife came up with a bootleg recording of the night itself, which I promptly copied to my computer and made several new copies for people . . . those not fortunate enough to be in Rochester! No copies are going to those who were too cheap. Or maybe I will relent, and try to coach them back into being strong people. But the point is, this kind of event is precisely not just a two hour night-out that costs $45.00 a ticket. It is a gateway to a world, hinging on establishing a memory, and earning the ability to say, “I was there.” The event then keeps accumulating. It's the sort of thing you really don’t want to be on the wrong side of, saying, “yeah, I wish I’d been there.” Or, “it was too expensive!” Gazing down at your hundred dollar sneakers.

Am I making too much of this? I hope so. Refusing to participate, you shut down several futures, for yourself and for others. Some things, if you stake them, are guaranteed to become larger and larger. Unless, to quote from another expandable, prophetic, parabolic, equivocal Dylan lyric, you are haplessly going to be, perpetually: “One day older, and a dollar short.” (Tweedley-Dum & Tweedley-Dee”)

Now, sitting at my desk, frightfully awake, I wish I knew who said that. For several years, starting no doubt just about the time I took a conscious break from writing those thousand-line poems, with titles like “One Soul Diverted,” and “The Devil in Close Company”, I have called my running, sprawling, inconclusive writing pad: THE ALL POETRY NOTEBOOK. In defiance of the fact that there is not a scintilla of recognisable “poetry” in it.. But this absence of verse in the all-poetry notebook is a conscious irony--you see, meant to indicate that the content of these notebooks is tending towards poetry, if and when a poet could be found. And this rationalises alot of stuff, I must say, particularly those entries which deal with subjects seemingly doomed to indifferent science, and impersonal philosophy. Entries I keep vary greatly, and are sometimes quoted from articles encountered in direct research. What happens is, though I usually put quotes around them, I might forget to include the names of the poor grubbers who wrote.

In other words, I am indifferent to the sources of these bits and pieces, but can applaud here that someone else wrote the thing above. Which means maybe you should try reading it again. Then, try the following, also with impunity. If you become inclined to refute it, be my guest, I am the humble collector.

“Consciousness is not a mental function achieved by humans in the development of the species, but an unexplainable sidelight ability, possessed by a person, whose purpose is entirely teleological. If biology thinks it can account for it, it is welcome, well, to go on thinking that as long as it wants.”

After the laughter dies down, I admit, yes, I copied that quote down too, and neglected to cite the source at the time, also. Maybe some cataclysm occurred shortly thereafter, knocking this article out of my mind and the precise line of inquiry which caused me to be reading it. So I cannot piece it together from memory; but no, it is not swimming around in the dark lagoon of my unconscious brain, seeking the right neural transmitter, at all. It is more like if I take a drive out to the Mall I might find it, on a scrap of paper swirling in an oil slick. Or if I get out of this swivel chair and go down to the sidewalk I might see this shocking enigma: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," indeed. But a painted sewer pipe.

One can have a consciousness, which is a talent, and not use it. It can become like the appendix., and doctors can remove it. "Look here," the doctor says, " we have a man who actually thinks his brain causes him to think!" One can feel like a fifth wheel. Consciousness, according to this new definition, is outside the mind. It is a rocky road, dark forests and sand dunes are there to be traversed, and frequently one is falling through empty space--such is terrain! Notes are scrawled sideways on yellow pads--I think I said that. The record of life is entered with tortuous slowness word by word as if by an amnesiac. Consciousness is a struggle, like reaching for an adjusting the rear-view mirror in my car as I wheel onto my street and think to see the September light, creating the street behind me. I seem to be always just getting started, with this new ability to think. Thinking is repetition. And that sense that you are an observer--that is the whole point of life!

It is obvious that when speaking of consciousness, trying to define it, I have a source. That is certainly the funniest thing I have ever said. “Sure you do, honey,” says my wife, swabbing my forehead with a cold towel. I am always acting like I just got beaten in a ten round fight, and am lucky to be still alive. And I can check the accuracy of my definition, I mean my own pulse, without moving a muscle. One of the functions of consciousness itself is to humourous reassert your own existence.

Sure, it is always mine, this consciousness is tied to my sense of self, and how that happens is also unexplainable. But they are not the same thing.And I do not want to say it is merely the accumulation and eventual familiarity that causes the identity and revisitation of myself. Nor it it the pathetic “still small voice” of infantile literature. It is a unique monument that has been honed through time, now, and I, the product of my consciousness, become more odd and accomplished everyday. Also, I can imagine that I might still have a self if all content and memory was stripped away from me The point it, it is not dependent on the quality or quantity of stuff attached to it. Similarly, the existence of consciousness itself is not the result of an evolution that has brought the mind to a higher and more survival-oriented plane. As said, it is a sidelight ability, and can go unused because the ability is not the same as the content garnered by that ability . . .

In fact the consciousness I have is savage, though forgiving, and pointed in its opinions and is not at all promoting either longevity or strength as related to me as a specimen (hate that word!) of humanity. It is doggedly in pursuit of meaning. It is all meaning, and when you trace meaning back to its origins it does not even go through the body. Meaning follows from the mystery of life, and is thus so religiously oriented that it has notions of an imperious will, and self-sacrifice--in order to obtain such meaning. Consciousness in this case is dedicated to meaning, which it somehow thinks it can recognise and gather, even while lacking the overriding answer to its condition existentially.

Consciousness! Not a finely tuned adjunct to perception, or a propellant for the student in psychology, or, egads!, a full-scale course in the history and paradoxes of philosophy. For consciousness is what makes truth apparent. It is all about truth to begin with.

I think that was his name. But I may be mixing him up with one or another of the fourteen or fifteen others I have impersonated, thus far in my short career. Three poets, one self-published memorist who was just too shy to show for his own reading and panicked at the last minute, but mostly just “first”, which means doomed, novelists--oh, and one guy who wrote an actually profound treatise on the Shroud of Turin-- these have been my assignments, so far.

Of course the Rochester store at Pittsford Plaza is my usual haunt; where I have a nodding acquaintance with the clerks, and am fine-tuning a running dialogue with the cafe girls. So it is extraordinary that I got away with the one stand-in I did there, for I could so easily have been recognised, as myself (so to speak). That Barnes & Noble is where I return, always right away after one of my sojourns in disguise, into the conquered lands of all Barnes & Noble--to regain my sense of self (so to speak). Even though in this job, which I like to say is the job I couldn’t refuse, I am being someone different each time, I do get a sense of how being a public person, an Author, is always at variance with that old familiar self one can be, as long as they are not recognised by strangers, at home. There is where my talent was discovered and I was given the proverbial break, if being a designated S.G.A. can be viewed as a real job . . .

Now I will tell how I got launched, or vaulted, or jettisoned, into this role, and why I am so perfect, so well-suited by history and temperament, for it. Though as I have indicated it is fundamentally a degradation and an insult, maybe even a major setback to the real Mortimer Shy--who must always prepare, and be in readiness, for his own lecture tour. As it was happening, on that Thursday evening, I thought it was the most unprecedented and unlikely scenario ever to befall a hapless bookstore regular. After it was over, and I was actually offered the job of doing it again, and again, all over Western New York and parts of Pennsylvania, I have since realised how naive it is to think the franchised literary world is without systems of deception.

Still, I completely stumbled into it. I was on the second floor looking out over the balcony with my telescope--I mean my telescopic vision, which you need up there if it is your wont to watch what is going on over at the Customer Service Desk. Yes, so if I am a spy on humanity, it is humanities fault--they gave me the work! What I saw from this privileged view was an animated conference going, between the lady in the high-necked pants suit whom I know to be the Hostess of most of these local events, and two young clerks. Down the aisle to my left, past the Art Books, there were about thirty people already sitting in the Community Room, facing an empty lectern w/microphone. At the entrance to the Community Room was one of those metal stands with a poster of the author and the title of his book. “The Domain of the Wretched,” if I recall correctly,

There could be a question as to how much I looked like the fellow in the poster. But, one might say, I looked enough like him. I had noticed the resemblance, earlier in the week when I scoured the Events Calendar, and went through my usual cycle of obsessive persecutions, relentlessly trying to figure out why I am not one of these guys, running through all possible jealousies and vindictive comparisons, but ending in a kind of triumphant exhaustion, feeling on the whole quite smug enough.

Now, this fateful eve, a sense of eager anticipation, true suspense, built rapidly as I watched this scene below; and quickly this yielded to a perception of actual crisis, as the clerks started pointing to the big doors to the outside and throwing up their hands, clearly mouthing: “I don’t know where he is!” The pants-suited Hostess was officious and deadly calm as always, and she actually glanced skyward, which, little did she know, was in my direction. And that might have been exactly when the idea flew into my head. Or when the devil of the idea literally launched me from my comfortable stuffed chair, and made me almost fly over the balcony. Instead, I lurched toward the escalator, as if rushing to catch up--with my own fleet person, almost late for an appointment with destiny. Though the escalator ride was agonisingly slow, I seemingly I arrived just in time, to hear one of the clerks say: “I don’t know what we are going to do!” Then the other guy says, “the sub is down with the flu!”, a statement which I didn’t understand at the the time, nor the degree of his apparent frustration.

So I walked in between the three of them and said, “I’ll do it.” And I swear, I was only compelled by the sense that this was a great joke, a kind of superior kidding--I mean I was willing to be kidding, I just thought this was the funniest kind of in-joke. The highest kind of irony, after all, that I should be willing to step into the shoes of, well, anyone! I kind of thought they all kind of knew me, anyway--I hang around there enough without buying much but coffee. But, without showing any astonishment at all, she said, “Okay, go ahead.”

I’d like to say it was with great trepidation, and a fear that I would not be able to fulfill the expectations of the crowd, that I stepped into that room and took the microphone and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, we’ll get started right away now” (after being introduced of course by the royally attired Hostess, where I was able to pick up a few key facts about myself). But how hard is it, to give a short blustering statement about how hard it was to write your book, and then read the first chapter from it? I don’t fit every role, but I can pass for any fiction or non-fiction author, certainly any poet, who is between a drooping thirty-five and a spritely sixty, and even those lines can be pushed and blurred when audiences are arriving in such a state of expectation they will believe anything they see and hear. Of course I only appear in front of small audiences in Community Rooms or the Bookstore Cafe, I am not impersonating anyone well known by the general public (though I do look like Stephen King, sort of, if you take that look off his face!). I just stand in for those on their way up or down, in the escalators marked Fame and Oblivion.

Which does lead one to wonder just why Barnes & Noble feels it necessary to have such a position as I fill. Well, it is because in this world publicity trumps even celebrity. That is why it is important to keep these tours and Book Signings by second and third-tier writers intact. It becomes more important to fulfill the calendar predictions of the Bookstore than anything else. The actual identity of the author is secondary--it can be faked, for the sake of keeping up the event and the schedule. Events must . . . come true. Or a very severe disenchantment in the reading public could set in. The sense that the culture has sanctioned that book in your hands . . . is that book's tenuous grip on you.

And the way I deal with that panic reveals my lack of concern that any people actually read them. For what I think of doing is not getting an Agent or a publisher, or radio show or a newspaper column, but I think of desperate measures: making copies and placing them in vaults here and there, in banks all across the world, as if to give them a chance to be discovered in the far future, or after the some global war. Like maybe they would work for the foundation for a new civilisation. I am utterly disdainful of trying to figure out their importance or usefulness in present culture or society; and I get annoyed if people tell me I should care. And yet I am vain enough to idlely and even confidently imagine my ideas substantial and virtuous enough to be the source of all future literature and philosophy. I see my verses emblazoned on Courthouses, if their be such in a new reality, and don’t so much imagine people reading these books, but schoolchildren being assigned them, because they are already a part of an established past, somehow.

Or I seek refuge in the idea that family members will preserve them. And that brings consequences which are troublesome, as I then feel guilty that I will be creating a burden which will weigh down my own children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, their wives and their wives’s sisters, brothers, and inevitably poison and wilt the whole family tree . Having this responsibility and constant reliance will be like a timebomb in the far future, where someday people will suffer the sudden effects of an enormous miscalculation. In fact placing them in the hands of my own relatives is fraught with upsetting images that I can hardly bear. One of which is that some irrational great-grand nephew will decide to burn the whole archives anyway, exactly like the scene in my first novel, "Black Forest"--all the stairway of books crumbling into coals, then into ashes in the great hearth.

Then I think of simply littering the world with copies. This I had already done to a certain extent, from the long gone days when I hopefully sent manuscripts to publishers and magazines, and gave readings to fervent small groups, as if seeding a revolution. Now, in the present tyranny of the Information Age, this must include endless e-mails of all things written since I got this computer, nicely typeset and made into PDF’s, and perhaps, as doomsaying friends have advised, getting me one of those free-for-the-asking Internet self-publishers. This of course is like throwing a note in a bottle in the ocean. But one can do such things, these days, in the spirit of . . . well, how about riding a camel through the eye of a needle? That is only a matter of securing a convex mirror, if you see what I mean.

But the handiest future, the simplest, the most ineffectual and yet pleasing, the newest of all forms of oblivion, the very simulation of life, is to get yourself a Blog.