Officers and Crew: Top Down and Bottom Up

Captain: And you could draw the analogy – I’m not saying you should, mind you, just that you could – that that’s what consciousness is, and that’s the role of human beings in a sentient universe: that our work is precisely figuring out what the work is. All very meta and suited to the 21st Century. But we actually are situated, not just under a cesspool with the ceiling cracking, but in a good place for seeing some things that other people in other times have been less able to see. Why be self-conscious at all? Because you need to other yourself, to be able to step outside yourself and look back, in order to attain some kinds of understanding. 

Lieutenant: though to complete it you have to step BACK again. Otherwise you get stuck in Descartes’ nightmare world of automata, and are susceptible to believing nonsense, like that the world is a simulation. Yeah. But we’re getting way way off the track here, Captain. I don’t think we want to lose the thread we followed last time. And you (of all people!) are the only one who has offered actual substantial answers. I’ll add one of my own: there’s poetry. Hell, we could start a poetry podcast. Amaze our friends.

Captain: And what Vlad said the other day is a key part. We need to deliberately, consistently plunge into beauty, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes a day. 

Lieutenant: In fact there’s two ways to go at this, and maybe we should do both at once. One is top down: to figure out the project in conceptual terms. The other is from the bottom up: we have some strong intuitions of what the component habits and activities are going to be. One of them is going to be that regular immersion in beauty. We don’t have to know what the project is before we start forming the habits. Not completely, anyway. By the way, where is the Sun?

Rat: where he often is when you need him most. Nowhere to be seen.

Kid: [unintelligible]

Rat: Well, what do you know. You got something to say, Kid?

Kid: No, not really, I mean – I don’t know. Sorry. I don’t really belong here.

Rat: [softly] Yeah you do, Kid. Hang out with us. You don’t have to say anything: you don’t have to make sense. We got all the top brass for that. They make sense all day long, the poor chumps. 

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
     A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!"

Sun: So here’s one question. When we look for a home, or for a way to build an altar: are we looking for something that can actually be found, or built, in the workaday world? Or are we making a basic category mistake? Maybe home is elsewhere. I mean, that’s basically the answer that Christianity and Islam and many sorts of Buddhism give: you don’t feel at home because home is not available in this world. Home is somewhere else: this is the land of sin, where nobody is at home. So that’s an answer that a lot of very smart people have taken seriously. We have resisted that answer strenuously all our lives: not because we have a great refutation of it, but just because we don’t want it to be true. Or, rather, because we are afraid that “our reward is neither here nor there”: maybe there’s no home at all, and the search is a fool’s errand. If that were true, where would it leave us?

Rat: Scrabbling in the garbage, I guess.

Sun: Yes, and this is our perpetual alternation. It seems like a dead end, or at least a profitless cycle. What we what is to move, somehow, out of the plane of this discussion. We’re stuck in two dimensions and we need to move in a third one if we want to do anything but go back and forth.

Lt: Is there a third dimension?

Sun: Of course there is. Where else could WE live? Where would I come from? If there’s no home, we all become totally inexplicable and unintelligible. And, like the Zen people say, it’s not elsewhere: it’s right here. But

Captain: But but but – yeah. That’s fine for a framework, but it doesn’t answer Rat’s question. What IS our business? It’s a fair question, and we have not begun to answer it. Is it writing poetry? Is it building model airplanes? Is it learning to carve walking sticks with elaborately worked knobs? Is it designing the history game to end all history games? Is it REALLY learning Spanish (French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew)? Is it discovering (making, unearthing, disclosing, refurbishing) the one true church?

Rat: And this is where someone pipes up and says it doesn’t matter so long as we pick something. The existentialist move. And I would say, if it doesn’t matter then none of this matters. The center doesn’t hold, and the whole thing collapses. It does matter. And if, as the Sun says, there IS this third dimension, then there actually IS an answer.

Lieutenant … and our business is in fact to figure out what it is: and – until we have figured it out we actually have no other business that matters. We have our work cut out for us. Our work is figuring out what our work is. NOT what we would like to do. What we MUST do because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, I don’t see any other way to read our predicament.

Council

Sun: Righto. Let’s have a council then, and hear everyone. Lieutenant, you want to bring something up.

Lieutenant: I guess we have all had some education, and maybe we need to see it differently. But let me just say it as I would have said it a couple months ago: we’re wasting time. These hours of sitting in our chair shifting restlessly from a book that doesn’t really engage us to videos that do or don’t, and then landing in those accursed shorts, or reels, that always decline into vengeance fantasies and low-grade titillation… in the old days I would have put it like that: we’re wasting time: we need to pull up our socks and get to business. Any business, anything we could be proud of or at least not ashamed of.

Captain: Yes, that’s how I would have put it. And tried to impose a checklist of duties on everyone. But maybe we have a better way now? Would the Sun speak to us?

Sun: the shame suggests that someone is not being heard. If we’re in conflict, then there must be another party to it. If lieutenant and captain both want this thing, but it’s not happening, then someone is not on board with it. I would like that person to feel welcome here and to know they will be heard. We are not here to punish or thwart them. We are here to learn from them.

Rat: Well, all right, I’m here then.

Sun: Welcome! You need stay only as long as you like, and you may hide when you need to, and slip away without pursuit at any time. We would hear you, not chase you or catch you.

Rat: First of all. Look. You don’t have anything you really want to do. What’s this “business” we’re going to get down to? What good is it going to do anyone? I mean, sure, I scrabble around finding garbage, and it’s all a bit grubby and all, but at least I have velleities to follow. Do you guys even have that? I mean the Captain wants to establish a new church and be the wonder of the world and everyone will be drunk on his gorgeous presence, ecstasy all round, but in the meanwhile… how about a fashion video where a blouse might fall open? That’s basically how it works, right? And the algorithms know it. We’re all being jerked around by them. One for me, one for the Captain, one for me, one for the Captain. Something titillating, something edifying, ad infinitum.

Lieutenant (heavy sigh): Yeah, the church thing. The church thing again. I don’t know, dude, where are we with that?

Captain: I don’t know. I know I’m holding this tiny flame, and that I feel desperately protective of it, and I don’t want it to go out. And that’s really ALL I know. That’s why I’ve been so scarce lately. I’m not up to founding the church that will save the world. I’m not up to founding anything at all. But I’m holding this flame and I have to protect it from the wind. And the wind of the world is howling, friends. It’s blowing hard out there.

Rat: The question might be: what is that flame? Can it really be nourished? Can it really go out? Is it something other than the Sun who has called us here?

Sun: Oh, it’s something other, all right.

Rat: Well, that’s something, anyway.

Death and Decay: I’m just marking time. But remember: your capacities are dwindling, all the time. The time is not far off when you won’t be able to undertake new business. There’s that Rubicon, you know. Like when Dad realized that he no longer had the will and the concentration even to think out his deliberate death. One of the questions here is: have we actually already crossed that? Would we know if we had?

Rat: Or, is there any reason why we should? Does it make any difference?

Sun: I don’t think it makes the kind of difference you all are thinking of, no.

Lieutenant: So you, Captain, are afraid that the candle will go out.

Captain: Yes.

Rat: I just want to say that sometimes, when we bust all the bounds and just gobble stuff down, sometimes we seem closer to being able to hold some business. Like we read with that passion, while we’re eating the ice cream. Like the eternal fussing at each other gets drowned out, for a little. For a little. The Captain, he’s afraid the flame will go out, and I get that. But you know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid of this continual fucking whispering fight will go on forever and ever and ever, without anyone ever knowing what the hell it’s about. It makes me want to just break stuff, to just call a fucking halt, any way I can. I mean, alcohol simulated that so well, that’s why it was so seductive, it said, oh, here’s a way to make the whispering stop. Here’s the way to actually want something wholeheartedly. Of course, what we wanted was for a dancer to fuck with us and to have a really good hamburger and fries: but at least we wanted something. Aren’t we at the same place, dealing with the same thing, for the same reasons, now? We want to want something wholeheartedly, and we just don’t. Or we don’t dare to.

Captain: Well, yes, we’d look ridiculous. We want some twenty-year-old girl to want to fuck us? Of course everyone would laugh at us. They should laugh at us. That’s a stupid thing for an old man to want. It shows that you don’t know what the hell you are.

Lieutenant: Freud would say I guess that that’s what we really want, but… there we are with real again. Christ, this thing goes round and round, doesn’t it?

Captain: I mean, you can see why he would say that. Because after circling the drain for a couple hours, there you are with the vengeance fantasies and the soft core porn. If it all tends to that, then maybe that’s what’s real? That’s how Dr Freud would read it. But if that were the case, why would any of us be here? That doesn’t really make any sense, without having scooted out somehow to the view from nowhere. Who’s doing this watching?

Lieutenant: and when we’ve experimented with just taking ownership and going into the bedroom and closing the door and jerking off, without apology – it doesn’t actually take us anywhere. It doesn’t feel like liberation, it feels like more of the same.

Captain: maybe the problem is that we’ve maneuvered ourselves into a life with almost no obligations, but it’s precisely the life with no obligations that has no meaning. When the Lt came up with his demands and we actually started thinking of answering them we backed off pretty damn quick. OH hell, we thought. THAT would land us in OBLIGATIONS. Horrors!

Rat: yeah, we could go back and look at that conversation. But remember just because you close the door, doesn't mean you've left enemy territory. And obligation is enemy territory too: they love obligation. 

Lieutenant: Yeah. The World would be perfectly happy to waste all of our time and give us nothing, nothing of value, in return. It’s eager to do that.

Captain: Heh. we really are “a spy in the land of the living,” then. It’s not a far-fetched conceit. It’s our situation. We’ve made a little island of relative safety but… we’re in the land of the enemy. We’re not home.

Rat & Lt: No. No, you’re damn right. We’re not home.

Sun: We’re homesick, that’s what we are. And no wonder.

Death and Decay: You can figure me as home, but I don’t think that’s quite right, either.

Sun: No, Close, but no cigar.

Lieutenant: So what do we have? It’s home. It’s like being drunk, but it’s not being drunk. We’re afraid, rightly afraid, of incurring the obligations but never getting the rewards. We’re being targeted by the enemy, every day in every way. We’re not here just because of our weak morals and our declining capacities: we’re here because it’s right where the enemy wants us to be.

Rat: Yes. And there’s a certain amount of energy to be derived just from resisting the enemy, but not enough. There’s has to be a real home that we’re trying to find, or build. That’s what would orient us. That’s what would give us a business that we would want to get down to.

Captain: A real home. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? And in that home there would be an altar, and I could light the candle there with this little flame, and its space would be so protected that I would never have to worry again about it ever going out. We would go out instead: and it would go on.

Lieutenant / Union Boss

[ I asked the persona variously known as the First Lieutenant and the Union Boss -- First Lieutenant, because he thinks of himself as the person who actually makes the daily running of the ship possible, and Union Boss, because he's happy to be known as the persona who leads the eating binges, which he refers to as "strikes" -- to tell his story ]

As far back as I can? Well you know, the food was the first thing. Food was a big fucking deal. It was the difference between Dad’s approval and his disapproval: was I a strong-minded rational man or a weak-minded irrational sheep? To my mom it was whether I was fated for a life of misery and failure – fat like her – or a life of happiness and success. And to me – you know, this is my origin story – to me it was just fucking food. Leave me alone to eat my fucking food. Just leave me the fuck alone.

And by God I was going to eat ALL of it. Every bit. I’d eat as long as it tasted good. Who cares if it’s supposedly too much? Orangutans find a tree of ripe durian and eat themselves silly, gorge till they fall asleep under the tree, still chewing. Why not? Mom and Dad could have all the stories about it they wanted to: I was just going to eat.

I don’t know when the Kid showed up. [ The Kid is the public persona who originally called himself the Captain: the Lieutenant always calls him the Kid ]. I don’t remember us really being at loggerheads early on. He had his domain and I had mine. He ran the show in public, among adults, around my parents. I ran the show in private.

I already knew that there was no way I was going to fit in the world. The food was just one thing. I wasn’t like other kids. I knew precisely where the Marshall Islands were, but I couldn’t learn to tie my shoes. I could solve quadratic equations in my head, but I never did grasp the rules of baseball. I spooked my peers and annoyed them. (I was an insufferable know-it-all, as I realize now, among other socially unpleasant things: totally self-absorbed and arrogant. That probably had more to do with my unpopularity than my intelligence.) But anyway, I struck the other kids as weird, and I took it on as my identity. “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it”: that sort of thing.

Halfway through the year, in third grade, I got called out of class and into the counselor’s office. I wasn’t in trouble, as it turned out. He wanted me to take some tests. He took out some blocks. “Oh, the Stanford-Binet! I like this one,” I said. My mom’s friends were all grad students in psychology, and they had always needed kids to practice on: giving kids intelligence tests was all the rage, in those days. He pulled out another, looking for one that I didn’t already know, but I knew all of them. Eventually he found one unfamiliar to me, that was basically just a vocabulary test. Well, that could only go one way. I read all the time: I was already in the process of reading everything on the science fiction shelves at the public library. I knew all the words, up through the college levels. So he told me I was going to get moved up to the fourth grade.

I have a hard time, now, believing this is what actually happened – weren’t there consultations with my parents? Didn’t anyone talk to me first, consult me about my preferences? All I remember is sliding back into my seat and whispering the news to my friend, who looked wise and said, “I thought that might be it.” And the next day I was a fourth-grader.

Weirder than ever, less physically competent that ever, but by God I was smart. Smart and weird. Look out for me: I’m little and wimpy, but I’ve got a wicked gift for inventing nasty nicknames that will stick. Leave me the fuck alone.

Well: and then, a couple years later, puberty hit. I was eleven years old, I had no chance of being seen as a viable boyfriend by anyone in the world (my then known world, at any rate) and I adored girls intensely. I had always adored girls: but this overbalanced me completely. I was kind of a wreck. I spied shamelessly, desperately, hoping for a glimpse up a skirt or down a blouse. My autism had already supplied me with the identity of “a spy in the land of the living”: now it was intensified. Fashion magazines and Sears catalogs with lingerie sections got my absorbed, painstaking attention. The years from eleven to fifteen were disastrously formative. Nothing but eros, in intense, absolutely unreachable images, really absorbed my attention. Now, at the age of 68, I still drop easily into that state: I can find myself watching fashion videos on YouTube, rapt, on the off chance of a momentary slip of a half-buttoned blouse. An hour later I’ll come to my senses and ask myself, “what on earth are you doing?” Embarrassed, chagrined; but it still is a wrench to tear myself away.

(A spy in the land of the living. The line is Edna St Vincent Millay’s, from a poem spoken by a conscientious objector to WW I: “Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to death?” Not a bad poem. A little too easy and pat, maybe, like a lot of her stuff, but she’s as underrated these days as she was overrated in her glory days.)

Anyway, the point is that bifurcation into two personas, one who was public and behaved acceptably, (especially under the eyes of scholastic authority, who actually might lavish praise upon me), and one who was utterly unacceptable and who was devoted to unscrupulously serving his appetites, was reinforced: to reappear and reverberate the rest of my life.

History is Real: our Past is Real

So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable

Is that it conceives of the person and the religious polity as in time in a different way, an open-ended way.

The end-state of a person is NOT ACTUALLY KNOWN, nor knowable

Covenants of communities are broken and repaired

(I am speaking of course of Abrahamic religion as it can be, not as it usually is)

I broke with Buddhism for two reasons: one, that it took the end-state for known and static. It will be like a moment of illumination and plenitude, except for ever and ever, it will be an ecstatic death. And two, that a person’s quiddity was simply a mask and an illusion. Those were my two reasons. Neither of those two things can be quite right. We labor in ignorance. We are seeds of something we can’t understand, but are reaching toward. We will arrive in places whose existence we could not have guessed. But we will arrive as selves which also we could not have guessed, but which are threaded on an unbreakable thread to who we are right now, individual and indelible. Change is real. History is real. Our past is real.

Are we immortal? I don’t know. In some sense, maybe. But just as certainly, we have to really die. Those three days, Good Friday to Easter, are not optional, not notional. The resurrection wasn’t theater. Jesus was stone dead.

April

Dear Prudence, sings a man who left before me
won’t you come out to play?

Fitting Lego bits together, left in a cryptic lay
by a little girl whose intensity puts us all to shame;

April takes stained awnings in its jaws
and puppy-shakes the house until it rattles in its frame.

You thought maybe an simple life would rise before you:
it won’t: we’re only here

to change the guard. We have no use
for captains who can’t steer,

or gold braid, or teachers’ pets: dear Prudence,
won’t you come out to play?

Real

I arrived at Tom’s to find the lot empty, the windows dark, the door locked, and a scrawled note: “restaurant closed until further notice. sorry :-(“ 

In the unlighted interior I glimpsed one of the cooks who usually make my breakfast sitting at the counter: a heavy, immobile Mayan face. He glanced up at me without expression and looked away. 

So. I’m sitting here at the Bipartisan Cafe, contemplating my future.

Yah. My assignment for this week – which has flown past on the wings of gwythaints – was to watch for glimpses of my true self. Every bone in my philosophic body twangs in anxious alarm: true? What do you mean true? What do you mean self? Haven’t Hindus and the Buddhists been squabbling about this for two thousand years?

You can’t do therapy without making extravagant metaphysical claims. Really you can’t do much of anything without making extravagant metaphysical claims: but with therapy it’s particularly obvious.

The modern habit is to just go on recklessly ahead, deferring the ontological reckoning indefinitely. Because “real” of course isn’t “real” and only prissy neurotic philosophy professors worry their pretty little heads about it. The rest of us spend our days stealing each other’s wallets, making YouTube videos, and sending emails to that charming Mr Epstein who’s supposed to have such interesting parties.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune

But, as milady correctly observed, a sense of inauthenticity has to come from some conviction, suspicion or delusion of a missing authenticity. And what is that? When does it arise? 

It’s a fair question, but it turns out to be a difficult one to answer. But this actually is one of the answers: sitting in a cafe and writing. Then there’s that little patch of time at the end of meditation; my phone plays its “wake up!” tones, I tap it off, say the sealing prayer, usually with a little rueful twitch of the lips at the “by this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra” bit – by this virtue? Good luck, buddy – but still I come to the hozho prayer, and turning my palms out, I feel the neutrinos from the sun streaming through my body. You don’t feel the neutrinos, nobody feels the neutrinos, they go right through without touching a thing, yeah, but you feel the neutrinos coming from the east at sunrise: not that they mind the earth either, they go right through that too; sunrise is just for photons & coarse stuff like that. But. Even so, yeah, that actually feels pretty real, for a moment. For a moment. “It has become beauty again.”

Already Spring

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 

irremediably.

Taking and Sending

The woman is old, nearly as old as I;
Her tongue working and making of her pleasant face
A monkey’s, moaning for the roll of deities to cease,
For the floor to hold still, for Death to open his hands:
I breathe in the fear and the confusion, I breathe out

Light and warmth, pouring from Those behind me
Whom I may not turn and see: breathe in the fear,
Breathe out the light. Give it all away. Every scrap
Of comfort. It was never mine to hold. It is not my peace.

There are others. A Protector, of sorts: dull gray.
Strangely impassible in this world of easy translucencies,
Porosities, She is up and to my right. I am forbidden
To Take and Send with her. All right. But in the corner,

That still heap of blankets (she put on her mask and pulled
The covers over at the outset, like a child, going to sleep):
A brightness has been growing there, a hidden light,
An unguessed generosity. Unto us a child is born

Again, and again. (Do you not understand?
You do not understand. Again, then. How many children
Must be born? All of them.) I contract to a tiny blue
Light, about to close its eye, to let its last ley lines fade:
The monkey’s face is mine, for a moment, and is gone.

The Dreams of Rabbits, Sleeping in my Hands

Oh Sir, I said, I have grown old dwelling in this hanker
And my hands are so empty and dry that the rabbits
Mistake them for husks, and try to build their nests in them.
Did you not say you would anoint us with the lymph of gods,
And wash us with fragrant oils, and wake us when the morning came?
He said, and how do you know that the rabbits are wrong? What did you think
They would look like, in this false and garish sun? The rabbits run
When they can, and so must you. Did you think I made a world
Without wolves? But Sir, I said, under this lamp we grow old so fast
Our nails crust with strange growths, we dig and strike sheets
Of rotten plastic in the earth. Can we ever plant or harvest here?
He laughed at me and said, so you thought I was kidding about death?
Now the seedbed of stars itself is crossed with crawling sabandijas
And night is a neon advertisement: what have you ever planted
But your own ruin? If you want to sleep, then wear yourself out with work;
If you want to work, then sleep till morning comes. What else can I say?
I have one vessel more, and I will break it open when the time comes.
But you have made their bed: now let them lie in it: dreams will come,
And you must read them as you can.

Psilocybin

Well. I certainly didn’t expect this physical exhaustion, this hangover, from psilocybin. I have been through the ringer. A mild headache; neck and shoulders all bunched up.

It was valuable. It was very much not what I expected, which is good, but it was very difficult in some ways.

One of the participants was having an intense and intermittently difficult experience, and was vocalizing a fair amount. Early on I started practicing tonglen (“taking and sending”) and I basically spent four hours doing really intense tonglen, mostly with her but with the other participant and the facilitator, too. It’s different when the taking and sending feels so palpable and literal. 

I wasn’t really tripping, in the sense of seeing pretty colors or apparitions of entities – I could see how one could go that way, I could have kept on my eye mask and turned inwards, but I felt called pretty urgently to attend to the others. So it was all about care-taking, for me. Often I felt, when “sending,” that there was something, or many somethings, behind me. Large and luminous persons. The light I was sending wasn’t emanating from me, it was coming through me. At one point I had the thought – it seemed profound at the time but now it seems faintly ridiculous – “well of course you can’t see God. You’d have to be facing the wrong way to do that.”

It was exhausting to refrain from touching people. Touch is my first language, the only real-time one I have ever been fluent in. But I supposedly didn’t know these people. So I sat in one place. Occasionally I felt an enormous constriction settling into me, and I had to breath deeply, find my hara, stay there a bit, let the thing lift. That too felt like a person, or persons: not necessarily malevolent, not necessarily intent on me at all. But I was surrounded by powers and intentions that I could just not quite hear or make intelligible. I found myself cocking my head, often, listening as hard as I could.

I am suspicious of conceptual take-aways from such experiences: they’re the probably the least useful way of responding. But one forms them no matter what, so here they are:

1. There’s a lot more going on than what I ordinarily let myself perceive. There are a lot of persons, a lot of intentions. In my ordinary state of mind I’m filtering out most of them. They are neither entirely inside me nor entirely outside me. (Are they real? I dunno. Am I? Are you?)

2. I am a caretaker, that’s “what I’m for.” 

3. But I don’t have to do all of it, or most of it. There are a lot of caretakers out there. The whole thing is just a lot more complicated than I have ever let myself imagine.

The connection with people was intense and lovely, but I was staggered by the responsibility it entailed. I don’t think I’d ever seen that so clearly before. 

I’m deeply grateful for the Buddhist practices I’ve learned: returning to the breath, letting conceptions go, inviting pain and confusion in instead of trying to fence it out. Nothing fancy. Bread and butter practice. But it was very helpful.

The Special of the Day

Baker Roshi says that the greatest obstacle to enlightenment is the desire for enlightenment. The Zen fondness of paradox approaches, maybe, a vice. But you can see what he means. Once you get firmly in your head a notion of what enlightenment is going to be like, what chance would actual enlightenment have of finding a clear space to unfold itself?

But we’re being too crude and peremptory here. I do sit down to meditate in hopes of a “special experience,” and really I don’t think I would sit at all if I didn’t have that hope. It’s all very well to knock away the crutches of a novice in a monastery who has lots of other things (rules, master, companions, a daily rice bowl) to hold him up. Kicking away the crutches of a homeless man is quite another thing.

I do want the experience again: the sunrise through the dripping twigs, each random twig picked out by the sunlight to form a perfect circle of radiance. That tree glittering in the wind, in Olympia, fifty years ago, all the leaves shivering. Of course I do. That and more. I’m a wanty little creature, and life rolls very rapidly to its drop-off.

Seriously, I don’t think I can afford to dismiss the desire for special experience. And I don’t think I have to: I think I just need to hold it lightly. I do wonder if psilocybin might give me an experience to steer by. A jolt, a reminder. Of course, you can’t order a psychedelic experience like you order your breakfast at Tom’s. You get the special of the day, Honey, and you sit there and eat it, whether you like it or not.

Nor Elephant Nor Cat

Indra’s elephant, pure white,
Has three heads, six tusks,
Except some say ten tusks,
One for each direction
(Eight, you know, plus Up and Down)
But I think it more suitable to give him
Two tusks per head, plus
A unicorn on his middle head
Threatening to split heaven, giving us
The pleasing number of seven
Cornamenta. Then picture
Indra’s famous net, flung
And settling over all that
Beautiful and deadly ivory,
Carelessly yet just so, shrugged
Back like the shawl
Of a model on the catwalk.
Elephants are not cats, except
Some say that they are: it’s just
The speed at which you perceive them
That varies, and which end
You start from. (Don’t try this at home.)
Each jewel would burn our flesh, we
Being neither elephant nor cat,
Altogether unhorned, and
Of minimal dignity; still we are
Invited to this party, slower than the cat,
Faster than the elephant, and subject
To sunburn and ulcer as we are;
Our job apparently to sing, or maybe
To clown: the instructions
Are unclear.