#but with the context of the entirety of stone ocean behind it

[antirepurp]

as much as i love stone ocean im just so bummed that we didn't get an explicitly queer reading of jolyne because anasui was changed from a woman to a man before his proper introduction. anasui being a woman wouldn't of course change the weirdly unfitting romantic dynamic he and jolyne were shoved into at the last minute (i do think they have a dynamic it's just infinitely more interesting from a platonic perspective) and like i've mentioned before at worst it would play into the predatory lesbian stereotype today but i would've been much more okay with jolyne ending up together with a woman by the end, and i don't think it's just because of my own biases. i think it could've played into the growth she goes through in stone ocean, even in a kind of poetic sense with stone ocean starting with jolyne going through one of the worst break-ups with her then-boyfriend, getting over her daddy issues over the course of the story which helps her stand on her own and not seek the approval of others constantly, and by the end finding love with another woman who truly and genuinely cherishes and cares about her. it's not like jojo as a series is void of queer themes anyway, so something like it wouldn't have been terribly out of place in the grand scheme of things, and it's gonna be hard for me to not think about this whenever i look at the unfortunate wet poodle that is narciso anasui

[moldycantaloupe]

I'm bored and still working on a fic so in the mean time, here's a no-context-paragraph from each of my unfinished drafts that will most definitely never see the light of day;

Swiss knew he was fucked when Aether and Dewdrop sat on either side of him at Mass. He’d texted the two the day after ghosting both of them separately with a half assed apology claiming forgetfulness. But they both have noses, and Mountain reeked of him. Forgetfulness was not at play.

Phantom didn’t know where it came from; waking up was a struggle, their thoughts going a million miles the second their eyes opened. They contemplated getting ready for the day, wanting to just waste the entirety rotting in their overly warm bed. But promises were made when they were summoned, so through autopilot they managed to look halfway decent before leaving for breakfast.

“Phantom?” The figure asked, tentatively. They scooted further away from the bed, a fresh wave of fear running through their nerves. The figure hopped out of bed but didn’t follow them, instead they crouched down on the floor with their hands held up in front of them.

Rain liked touring for that reason, the chaos. The chaos of everything, always moving, never in the same place for long. He was forced to not think about everything, ironic as it is. The chaos gave him a break from himself, from his head. His bunk was too small to worry over, his shared space just that; shared space. Not his to obsess over.

Rain cut him off with a low growl, a warning. They knew how they looked right now; body hunched over themselves but rigid with their chest rising and falling in quick motions, tail whipping wildly behind them, eyes angry and wild. They knew they smelt like pure acid. Almost of a feral ghoul.

They nodded, standing up before Swiss could get a word out, already heading towards his room. They heard his chair squeak against the floor before footsteps followed them. They were quick to discard their shirt and pants once the door shut, leaving them only in their boxers. Swiss laughed, the noise that they usually seek now grating against their ears. He stripped down to his boxers and landed on his bed, patting the spot next to him. Phantom took the hint and joined him, sitting with their back stiff.

But it was all too late now. Now hours, maybe even days after the ritual he was sitting on the stone cold tile of his bathroom, leaning against his bathtub. He was hyperventilating, his lungs making false attempts to collect air but instead were drowning themselves in water he didn’t know he had. He had someone by his side, he’s not sure who, rubbing at his shoulder, but Satanas their hand against his skin was so hot, he didn’t even know he was capable of feeling heat that burned. He wants to yell at them to go, to never touch him again because he doesn’t know if he will ever be able to touch someone again without burning and it scares him. He’s shivering under their touch, and all he can do is breathe.

Except for one ghoul, except for Rain. He didn’t fully understand, maybe for how cool he ran compared to the others. Maybe because he had that water ghoul bond. Maybe because it was just Rain. He smiles to himself when Rain hands him a plate of food during dinner, their hands touching for a split second, the expected boiling of water replaced for a cool ocean. A pat on the shoulder during rehearsals, a ruffle in his hair while he sat on the couch just to tease. But Rain never did more than that. Dew knew Rain saw him hiss at Swiss for trying to hug him from behind during a bad day. He knew Rain thought Dew would hiss at him, too. But, oh, Dew began to actually crave for Rain’s touch.

[not-in-the-library]

The Viking’s Bones and the Chili Pot

so this isn’t really g/t but i’m still gonna tag it bc I think yall would like it hhhh I wrote it for creative writing and I had fun so here it is

~

Normally a reanimated skeleton would spend their time in a dungeon, or lurking around their own gravesite. Seldom would you see them in the supermarket looking for choice ground beef. But that’s just where this one stood. Despite not adhering to the no shirt no shoes no service policy of all markets in the realm, this one made it through entirely nude with no question. 

Hrothgar was his name. This particular skeleton had ambition. A dream and the drive to make it happen. He was going to win the tri state area’s annual chili cook off which is presumably the last thing he’ll do. You see, when he was alive and wrapped in still pulsing flesh, he made a comment about the chilly air making it impossible to cook off the filth of the water he and his friend were boiling. The exact context and phrasing has since been lost to time, but what’s important is that a local spirit had misheard his remark as a request. This spirit happened to be the resident of the river which he had taken the water from, and did that thing fae do where they fulfill your request with malicious compliance. 

Of course there were no chili cookoffs, not five hundred years ago, so this lady of the river essentially made a vengeful spirit that could not rest until winning a chili cook off, all because some Northman took some water and mumbled as he spoke of the cold air. He found no such cook off in his travels across Europe, Africa and Asia, which took a good long while, by the time he had visited every sniff of settlement, people had taken to steering around horseless carts. He opted to take a trip to the new world, but could find no boat that would take him. Granted, he did not think to simply sneak aboard a vessel, he is not the smartest skeleton. Or perhaps he is a very noble skeleton. I don't know, he never talks to me anymore. I miss him. Anyways, running out of perceived options, he landed on the choice to walk the ocean floor. And walk the ocean floor he did. The darkness and trenches made for a trek that spanned a century at least, he feared that he may be forever lost to the waves when his foot got caught in a lobster trap. One thing led to another and there he was on the rocky coast of Maine. 

Absorbing the new sights and sounds took a good while, but when he learned of this town’s tradition, an annual chili cook off, the thought made him weep. A full two months of phantom tears left very little time to prepare. Looking for counsel, he was drawn to the doorstep of old Mrs. Penborough, a blind widow with the finest culinary knowhow that no school could ever even attempt to relay or absorb. A perfect candidate to teach, with a terrible student to receive the wisdom. Despite having no meat to call his own, this possessed rack of bones could only be described as a meathead. Not to mention he had the faintest grasp of modern English. Reading, yes, he was quite proficient, all latin languages are very similar, though the lack of tongue made phonetics quite difficult.

“Well met, young lady!” He greeted her with honey, “You are looking for a disciple!”

He stood on her front step mere inches from her nose, a yard above her head yet shouted all the same. His voice rang like thunder just as it did when he still had hair on his crown. 

“Disciple?” she parroted, “No son, no. I’m not.”

“An acolyte?” He said, much quieter, with a hint of desperation.

She shook her head slightly, white hair waggling side to side. 

“No, dear. Do you need something else?” She looked up at his face, well, if he had a face, and if she could see. “Are you hungry?” He dropped to his knees with a sharp crack of bones colliding with brick.

“Kind lady, I beseech your aid! I cannot reach the grave with peace until the victory of the chili cook off is mine! Centuries, I’ve searched for you. I am starving and I am ravenous. I am but bone! Yet even still death turned her eyes upon this wretch and looked away. Years beneath the sea have stripped all but my spirit which dwindles evermore!” A cry in his throat. He did not mean to shout, but shout he did. “ I must win the tri state area chili cook off. Please! Teach me!” Her face was of stone. All that moved were her eyebrows upward behind her black tinted glasses.

“Oh you’re sensitive, dear.” she cooed with a laugh. “Come in, come in. I have something for you.” 

 The coming weeks brought laughter and stern smacks of a spoon. A once gray home now full of light and life despite the undead guest. 

For lack of wisdom or a better description the entirety for these weeks may be compacted into a Karate Kid style training montage which I know not of how to relay to reading eyes in the literary format. But know that Hrothgar did practice crane kicks on Mrs. Penborough’s roof at dusk and dawn. No one knows why, but that’s just something he did. Also he got a headband with the sunrise kingdom’s emblem on it, it’s not even the current Japanese flag, but how would he know. No one knows where he got it. But that’s beside the point. The point is he knows how to make chili really well. Did he win? I hear you ask. Well here comes another montage of sorts. 

Like the end of The Sandlot where they throw and catch the ball and then fade away as the narrator describes what happened to each of the boys. But instead of young boys and a baseball, it’s Hrothgar working with different ingredients. Please take the initiative to imagine the voice of adult Smalls narrating the coming scene. Thank you.

And Hrothgar didn’t win that chili cook off. In fact he wouldn’t win the next tear or the one after that. He was destroyed by defeat after that first year and considered a killing spree to lessen the competition. But the glee that Mrs. Penborough congratulated him with made him reconsider. For years and years he would live with her. She lived for a happy six years after meeting him, and it wouldn’t be until after her funeral that he would win the chili cook off. He said something about her spirit guiding him. Immediately after the ribbon was placed his bones fell apart and clattered onto the ground. His spirit could be free now, and who was there to greet him but old Mrs. Penborough. I can’t tell you what came after that, but I like to think he gave his old friend from the river a good punch on the ghostly jaw for making him say something so dumb.

[lepreuxchevalier]

My second illustration of some pikemen and musketeers I retouched to feature the colours and coat of arms I designed for Hohenluxembourg, the ruling family of Das Königreich von Schönbrunn and prince-electors of The Empire of Mankind proper in my low-fantasy setting. Artwork designed for a low-fantasy setting of my original conception with technology equivalent to the late medieval and renaissance periods. Where formations of heavily armoured and mounted knights in either suits of full plate armour or heavy coats of chainmail fight alongside armies of pikemen and matchlock musketeers, where medieval-style stone castles are gradually being outsourced in favour of both lavish country estates and devoted, or otherwise “bastioned” military fortifications due to the technological advancements made in artillery design, and where growing nation states in the form of kingdoms and empires look beyond the great oceans and the frontiers of the known world in search of even greater wealth and territory. In context to the lore of my fantasy setting, Hohenluxembourg is the ruling family of The Kingdom of Schönbrunn, or “Das Königreich von Schönbrunn” in the “Northern” or “Austere” Imperial Language of my fantasy setting, prince-electors of The Empire of Mankind Proper, and nominal vassals to The Imperial Household of The Empire of Mankind. The House of Luxembourg is most noted for being the only royal household in the entirety The Empire of Mankind Proper besides The Imperial Household themselves, as well as having produced Karl Von Luxembourg, a doctor of theology in The University of Wörtzburch in Das Herzogtum von Solingen, a prestigious graduate of The Imperial Academy at Nymphenburg, or the seat of The Emperors of Mankind within The Empire of Mankind Proper, and the leading figure behind an international movement to reform The Conservative Church of The New Gods, or the preeminent religious denomination of The Faith of The Many Gods in my low-fantasy setting. Despite, or rather because of Karl Von Luxembourg’s religious movement to reform The Conservative Church of The New Gods, as well as his political and religious affiliation with The Hohenbuchenauer Dukes of Solingen as the official defenders, guarantors, and champions of The “Luxembourgian” Reformation, ancient enemies of The Luxembourg Kings of Schönbrunn going back several hundred years, Leopold III as reigning König von Schönbrunn, a prince-elector of The Empire of Mankind, and younger brother to Karl Von Luxembourg as the official head of Hohenluxembourg has begrudgingly remained fealty to The Imperial Household of The Empire of Mankind Proper as their feudal and elected suzerains and kept faith with The Conservative Church of The New Gods due to his ancestral oaths of fealty to the devoutly conservative Imperial Household for their royal title and station. The culture, language, and aesthetic of Das Königreich von Schönbrunn in my low-fantasy setting is loosely inspired by those of the High-Germanic culture of The Duchy of Bavaria in The Holy Roman Empire during the medieval and early modern periods of European history, keeping in faith with the obvious Germanic and Czech influence of the more dominant “Northern” or “Austere” cultural hemisphere of The Empire of Mankind in my low-fantasy setting.

[salosion]

🌈⚡️❤️ Modes of expression are inherently subjective, there are no thought forms or models of reality that can represent the entirety of the thing they attempt to describe; they are each finite and therefore incomplete, the reality revealed through spiritual vision however is free from the restrictions of linear definition. For truly objective awareness to be experienced it must occur outside of time & the language structures bound to it, and while awareness is loosened and unencumbered by the syntax of temporality expression can only be a reduction of the fullness being sensed. The first description is the first limitation of the infinitude of existence ALL that gets defined becomes ordered into a context, into a structure that then derives it's meaning according to it's relationship to every other meaning alongside which it coexists. When the experience of spiritual illumination reduces itself into the corridors of expression it's narrowness defines the parameters of it's inaccuracy. The multitudes are the mask of subjectivity the expression of which forever confines meaning into the boundaries that describe it deceiving the listener to the extent that she clings to it's divergent forms while forgetting it's unified content; it is for this reason the words that stream into the mind one after the next to illuminate the splendor of the limitless light are forgotten beneath the currents of time, flowing into the endless ocean. Each distinction a dissolving grain of salt in the great sea~Do not listen to these words with attention on the tiny particles of salt, but receive the totality of the great sea into the retina of understanding;for the component parts of each particle of perception will not reveal the grandeur of the wH O le they will only draw the perceiver into the subjectivity of conceptualisation, tempting her to define herself by what she see's and it is by this definition that she condemns herself to temporality and dies because of it.The livingness that animates the perceiver remembers how to listen it is the eternal witness who fly's through the weightless waters of the great sea. Her knowingness effortlessly rides on vertical currents floating across sound and meaning as though they were but the fluttering ripples of wind through her feathers, these currents she locates by the heat of their spiraling ascension stabilizing the wings of awareness only long enough to carry her above time where her understanding soars in completion. Guide your attention therefore to the warm currents behind the particular forms of these words, let your thoughts penetrate the structures of these expressions to the expansiveness they conceal and yet radiate, this you will do only in your heart where the piece of the unlimited weight-fullness supports the souls of your feet as the stones you step across on the journey to the home we share.- Agnisa Um ❤️⚡️🌈

[hennyjolzen]

How did it all get here? And who are we? How did we get here too? What is going on? Why a universe at all? Why stuff? Why stations of consciousness? Why a pebble, an igloo, a croquet ball? Why anything? Why space? Why shape? Why gravity? Why ground? Why heat? Why worlds? Why time? Why matter? Why? Why? Why?How did all this trash and treasure get dropped on everyone's doorstep? How does anything emanate from anything else? How and why did it become this?

And, while I'm at it — why not something else? Something else entirely? Anything else entirely? Why not nothing? Why not nothing forever? Why creatures? Why private views? Why ego identities? Why now? Why should anything wake into radiance? Anteaters, shrews, snakes, wasps, and all the rest — to what purpose?

Everything in this world has a context, in fact many contexts. We deal only in contexts. There are big contexts: hunger, pleasure, survival, sex, shelter, profit, America, Christ died for my sins, romantic love. These drive not only behavior but meaning. Then there are small contexts: putting together a chair from parts, following a soap on TV, playing a chess match, supporting a candidate, an uncle's birthday bash, yoga class, stylish clothing, downtown, the sales and marketing team, the gun collection, plans for a holiday, being a hottie, tickets to a play, losing weight, the World Series, O. J. Simpson, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian. Money is context, war is context, bribery is context, police are context, the Bloods and Crips are context, jihad is context, mathematics is context, public transportation is context, trying to find a soulmate is context. There are mega-contexts too: mortality, the dead, the universe.

But there is no context for the whole, for the entirety, the state of existence (at least in contemporary American culture). There is no context for us. The closest to a context is God, or matter and energy, or DNA, but that is all outsider buzz. "Being" comes down to what "being" feels like.

Since the human species manifested in the Stone Age, each of its members has been confronted with the same astonishing blaze. Reality in its naked presentation, shining and bristling from within and across proximal space while penetrating absolute space, is flat-out shocking and profound. Realer than a motherfucker! It is more profound than all the profundities conjured by science and philosophy. Along its most deepening seam it is subtler than anything in it. Cars traveling down the street on some planet, probably but not necessarily this one, not even cars, are not profound when viewed by everyday mind; however, in the vast unacknowledged scheme the fact that they exist at all and are piloted in orderly fashion is profound and weird beyond conception.

Scientists now explain the existence of nature (and mind) by equations of heat, entropy, surface tension, binary coding, and differential survival. They scan substance to where its gauze is most distended (the sky), most discrete (the subatomic nucleus), and most quantifiable (the algorithm), as they try to excavate condition and origin. Fat chance!

Philosophers buy this prognosis hook, line, and then some; they extract "being," meaning, and values from it.

Psychologists overlay ego, psyche, personality, and behavior-thermo- dynamic and chemical vectors traveling inside membranes. They replace the philosophical mind with the biological mind and neurotransmission.

Shamans, priests, and clerics set nature under sacred sovereignty. Psychics tune to energies and planes not measurable or acknowledged by science. None of these gets to the bottom of the weirddom.

Among depictions and rationalizations of reality, twenty-first-century upper-tier denizens are most familiar with the West's sanctioned brand: the survival-of-the-fittest, you-only-go-around-once market economy. Their lives occur on its mean streets amid its hemorrhaging urbanization, in progressively more acute cycles of crisis and cataclysm, clinical anxiety and depression, plus urgency in the context of ever dwindling time and possibility, incessant craving for more, endlessly more: more life, more goods, more thrills, more validation, more anything.

In towers and operating rooms of the corporations and academies, professional scientists continue to address reality as a riddle in forensics, a cold trail left in the galactic sky and in the cyclotron of matter, evidence quasi to a crime. Dismissing its phenomenal aspects, they stalk it to the Big Bang and subsequent fusion, fission, and differentiation in stellar cauldrons ignited by the blowout. Comparing indices and refining their assays, they dowse and test the "splatter" in hopes of exposing the weapon used, the nature of an unwarranted slash on the void.

But there is no such smoking gun. The stuff that broke through from beyond time and space is out of play, forever. This is a spill zone not a construction site — everything in it has been used before and as something else. Or not: same difference.

The universe is simply too deep, too old, too frayed, too insouciant to be explained. That is why grand unified theories of All That Is are, to a one, pretexts and vanities. Inquiry is limited to what came after the Big Bang, which is all that we can get at. Just about every item, every primo seed is missing from dossier and file.

Science supposes that creation was merely statutory — no design behind it, no rationale or impulse, no hint of an absentee landlord, only the absence of sufficient obstacles to prevent or impede its splay.

Imagine a malefaction without a motive, that begins with its commission — absolutely — no assets or adjuncts of any kind.

Materiality is the present idol of our manifestation; it guards Entry and Egress; it decrees: "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me." And we don't.

Creek and Ainu philosophers, Australian Aboriginal elders, Tibetan shamans, and the Aegean cosmologists understood (and still understand) the engine better than do most citizens of modernity — and that includes sophisticated particle physicists. They understood it in the moment and bowed to its omneity: a light arising from darkness, a wind from stillness.

Once upon a time, the universe was sacred and unfathomable by simple emanation. Humans accepted the operations of nature as the mirror and counterpart to their own existence, surrendering to its primacy and innate dignity. They ceded a vast and absolute design and conducted a ceremony whose goal was adoration not interrogation. Before quarks and Big Bangs, they called it Spider Woman and Corn Mother and zoned its tiers by Chameleons, Swimming Turtles, Bouncing-Stick-Player-Toads, and Hyenas' Eggs. These are neither contrivances nor mere fables; they are not raw primitivisms either. They are hard-won intuitions of something before form:

"Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, a disk surrounded by the river Oceanus and floating upon a waste of waters, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind…."

Eros before matter, always. Listen carefully and you will hear the rustle and trickle of an actual universe, an inviolable presence, not a working factory.

"The Ground Squirrel said, ‘I think day and night ought to be divided like the rings on the Coon's tail.'"

Contrast and discrimination-on fur as among the rings of Saturn.

"A very long time ago there was nothing but water. In the east Hurúing Wuhti, the deity of all hard substances, lived in the ocean. Her house was a kiva…. To the ladder leading into the kiva were usually tied a skin of a gray fox and one of a yellow fox. Another Hurúing Wuhti lived in the ocean in the west in a similar kiva, but to her ladder was attached a turtle- shell rattle."  

How was this possible before there were either foxes or turtles? It is because these stories encapsulate construction of a universe of events inside a prior universe of meanings.

"The Sun also existed at that time. Shortly before rising in the east the Sun would dress up in the skin of the gray fox, whereupon it would begin to dawn…."  

This is it! It might slip by as a pretty-boy metonymy if you overlooked its ontological cred: Everything arose from nothing. Concretely and explicitly. This is what it looks like if you peer inside this very minute: gray foxes and self-emanating light.

Viewing electrons, atoms, and chromosomes in the scientific manner as they shape-shift and deliver payloads doesn't alter or encroach upon their identity. For being exposed like a burlesque dancer, a mitochondrion is no less or more immaculate a riddle than it was inside Stone Age hunters. Western reality has no prerogative or supremacy over other brands. It may be the present operating system for modernity on Earth, but its roots are no more rooted, its arising no more fundamental or absolute. No one species's or planet's deposition has primogeniture or is endorsed by the universe. The same claims are made implicitly by the spider and the mouse.  

Through the entitlement of its birth, each entity places its lien on existence. Albert Einstein and a 1930s sea squirt each expressed a sincere and desperate truth, equally confronted the fact of their being and rendered a coherent paradigm of it. They fed the universe's eyes, ears, and brain.

There is Bushman reality, Navaho reality, Aranda reality, Cherokee reality, Xhosa reality. Within each of these sprout countless personal realities. And these barely scratch the surface. Cat reality, snake reality, whale reality, wolf reality, worm reality, bacterial reality all are "real" too.  

The osprey with its wingspan and talons, the owl with its judicious eyes and motion-detecting granules, geese with their star- and sun-maps, were knighted long ago by vanished gods. Currents of air, below and above feathers, fins resisting waves through rippling flow-these are sciences too. "Even the trodden worm…," declared philosopher William James, "contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be." Amen, and God have mercy on us all.

Science as we know it is not science anyway, not by standards of worlds or biting Rigel, Antares, and the Dog Star or, if not there, then somewhere. The Big Science of the Milky Way provides an impartial jury for claims of truth by experimenting parties on separate worlds. The Meta-Science of the Universe alone knows everything (or anything) about any thing. Earth Science, endowed by private and corporate interests, offers only space-time audits from the perspective of deputies on one planet in one small capillary.

Alligator crocodile reality, dragonfly damselfly reality, realities on the billions of inhabited planets in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — there are more stars and skies, more heavens and earths than are dreamt of in our philosophies and operas.

Each entity gets born, lives, and dies on the universe's terms, and the universe is one serious mutha. We don't get to choose our own operating system or paradigm indefinitely. The universe owns all paradigms and systems — and it is running a far bigger game than science.

So get off your high horse! Physics is not king of the universe. Earth is not the only game in town. Three dimensions are not the sole platform. Stranger realities arise continually on worlds in other solar systems, close to here and unimaginably far. We know their presences intuitively and unconsciously because, like hydrogen, consciousness is singular — we know them as something else. We know them at all.

Reality is the state in which we participate with everything else in the universe, a living fire that keeps emerging. And again at this next moment, and so on … in every creature in every crack and cranny, every tidepool and volcanic vent.

Yet scientific laws operate with impunity, as if official, as if someone other than us made them up and enforces them, as if they were cast in something more than the breccia of metaphor.

In its act of establishing a jural reality, science has detoured from honest inquiry into institutionalized ideology, using a bogus authority to enforce its sponsors' products. Our bodily existence and minds are now arbitraged in a futures market. Queued into motor pools, creatures are encouraged to trade in existence for algorithms, to refute their own beingness.

What used to be pure scientia — neutral knowledge — is a combo dictator, morality squad, and hanging judge. When doctors confer cures, they must do so under a regime of terror, unacknowledged and reduced to muzak, falsified documents, and profit-and-loss statements. The Fates still decide how, when, and why each creature is born and dies. Clotho spins the thread onto her spindle. Lachesis measures it by her rod. Atropos cuts it with her shears, Charon receives it with a coin in its mouth. By usurping this province, by making DNA the oracle, a Taliban-like authority commands and deludes us (and itself) into thinking it is rolling the dice and cutting the cloth. Meanwhile it recruits us for its jihad: consumers all.

Body-mind is not even the sole frequency of intelligence. Beyond the charm of a matter-on-matter universe, other entities coalesce in untold dimensions of hyperspace. However divergent from our embodiment and shibboleths here, they are sordidly and viscerally real wherever they are because they are rooted in primordial awareness of their own existences and the common substratum from which they are arising. From their perspective today's local blue sky is the ultimate surreal backdrop.

For that matter the Earth is a planet that even we should never have seen, one that we were-yes-forbidden to see.

So I come back to my original question: Why us? Why here? Why now?

Why this gaudy manifestation, each granule, bump, and surly or succulent intent of it? How could you ever take it — your own existence, the warrant of "life"-for granted?

Just look around you at what has formed and stuffed itself into every gap. Witness pure existence arising, creating space and direction, lighting its own canopy, pouring through its own portal, filling the void with objects, shading its own light!

Empty yourself of preconceptions. ‘I don't know what I am. I don't know what this is.' Like the gentleman songsters of the Whiffenpoof, "We are poor little lambs who have lost their way./Baaa, baaa, baaa!"

Let this confession fill your mind, roll across your skin, dilate into your chest and sockets, sink down below your shoulder blades, open your diaphragm, reverberate in your belly and lungs, drop into your genitalia. Answer the unanswerable question by an affirmation at your core.

Sense how deep and thick and omnipresent and sensational the universe is. Feel its silent stream of semblance. Hear its gurgle at a frequency so immediate, scrupulous, explicit, and snug that it is nonexistent. Watch its liquidity flowing from and to everywhere-the ground of yourself filling with a fulgent gleam. How is this possible? How is such an impeccable state of being and knowing allowed?

The moment you let go of your habit addiction, you explode in all directions. An intimidating audit, but not half-bad. At least it is happening at all.

Staring at surf, I am struck by the interplay of gravity, mass, and cohesion under lunar pressure, as rocks carve waves into glyphs.

We are sustained by foam as wide and precisioned as gravity, written by styluses as fine and hieroglyphic as air. What is spelled in our own minds is what was once written dumbly in the sea, in the calls of seabirds, welling up through ganglionic stations into sequestrations of self.

Mind is in constant dialogue with the intelligence of its own formation.

An imperative had to begin somewhere. Each motif indicates a source; otherwise there would be nothing at all.

What Sigmund Freud posited vis à vis dreams — that every entry and instance has an energetic prerequisite necessitating and providing it-is true as well of the waking dream, the simmering fog. Each item exists because it must. And there is no bottom or break to the ring of proxies engendering and sustaining it.

Where else would or could it come from?

Beavers gnaw down trees many times their size, pile up mud, dam rivers, store vegetation in cold houses under snow, patch holes in their dams. The semi-aquatic rodents permit muskrats to co-occupy their underwater huts and eat from their larder-why? From where does the symbol come to render and allow the gift?

Muskrats pay a "rent" of grasses and vines as they swim into and out of the communal refrigerator. Under what compact do the beavers monitor this transit?

What future and eternal meaning is synopsized in the screech, the caw, the yowl? Barking seals, baying hyenas, chittering moles, shrieking gulls — these metabolic packets don't merely provide meanings prior to language. They are meaning. Wild turkeys crossing a field at sunrise are screeching raw existence, intentionality, wonderment, and individuality back to the universe.

North American squirrels, though color-blind, discern a dissimilarity between acorns from red and white oaks, consuming the white ones which, by sprouting before spring, quickly lose their food value, while burying the slower-sprouting red ones for sustenance during late winter.

How does such information, at its every level of designation, get through the cables into molecular space?

In years when there is a shortage of red acorns, those same squirrels munch just enough sludge out of the white acorns to disable their sprouting capacity, and then they bury them.

Australian lyrebirds imitate car alarms, doors opening and closing, men with chainsaws cutting trees. Urban crows drop nuts into traffic in order get them cracked; they select streets with red lights because movement periodically stops there, allowing them to fly down and retrieve the meats unscathed.

Various species of birds pick up twigs in their beaks, then poke with them at grubs in tree trunks, agitating them to move in their dream of succor, to come out and be consumed. Standing in shallow water, other birds make their wings into shade to trick fish to come to the surface.

The symbol is always and ever being born.