May all the enemies of life be destroyed

While we look backward correcting all the errors of the civilizations behind us, so clear now, dotting the battlefield with massy lacunae, the vacuities, the errors or perhaps the results of the errors, that they left in Reason — the very ground, that is, on which we walk — like to the wounds dealt by cannonshot in the earth; these unmistakeable mistakes usually about the size of a closet, occasionally giving off bad airs, and all full of the shattered bodies in tweed coats, and the bespectacled skeletons, the hangings, and bats dwelling among the few moldering books left, and having gained the power of reflection, and the wisdom to exert it, we cast our scrupulous eyes behind us, with an eye to avoiding past mistakes, as we continue to walk — backwards in terms of individual feet but that hardly seems relevant compared to the fact that we are moving forward, we are taking our forward march, seeming to forget or most likely fail to observe that for every error annulled, there was another one right at our feet. Our feet went into it, then we lifted it, fine, everyday, and well enough, for never did they say the road would not be pocked with potholes, and our marches would not occasionally be interrupted, and true enough that bum foot-*note* can be corrected unless the *tempo* is lost, unless rhythm has become obscure, unless we totally lose our way, midway in the journey of our lives or right at the beginning, to get it over with. We don’t know what our feet do, and our mind does not notice, for it is a system of such mighty sophistication that a part of the brain located at the back of the head (which, again, is facing _forward_) can handle the whole system of balance and navigation that drives us ever boldly into the future, its entire set of errors and presuppositions, its fallacies and ruinous cliches, its mockable idiocies, its blasphemies, its venalities, its inability to see, its feeling of supremacy over all that came before it, its feeling of being the first at last to be clambering from a general muck, or that it fights to do so with the bad people, those who would suck one back down, into that whole diseased mess one is trying to get away from, while trying not to get caught up in again, which is the whole reason one is going backward-forward in the first place. Only after we break one leg, then two, and our hearts shatter, or our brains, will we come to realise, and take part in the democratic feeling subsident of this revelation, that ours was not the independent age to have at last risen from the muck, in fact we were simply part of everything that the past seemed to be, a general idiocy. Which is only part of the truth. The truth that certain have disclosed, a little bird told me it, I relate it just so, that idiocy is not something anyone ever leaves, nor does it run parallel to time, until it at last departs with a chilly flutter of that sonority characteristic of some rusted rectangular panes of iron scraping together to produce antiflight; but it runs, relative to time, perpendicular. Because idiocy is general. It is a universal force.

In it every living soul partakes, especially as the mind expands and grows in its powers and provenances, idiocy also expands to fill the given space, it grows with one, it is our companion, we cannot leave it. The greatest minds were therefore also particularly great idiots. The best one can do is be aware of their idiocy, and modulate it. It is good etiquette when guests are visiting to put your idiocy in an upstairs room, like Mrs. Rochester. Hide your idiocy from the world. But then comes a society where no door is locked, where every window is open, and we share everything with each other, primarily through images. A jagged shadow full of teeth lying in concupiscent attitude. A jagged shadow wearing a swimsuit. A jagged shadow succeeding at what it tries. Jagged shadows in the city. Perhaps someday a society can be created where idiocy will be fairly and equitably distributed between buyers and sellers, those on the make and those on the take, those in hogs-heaven, and those who dwell with Southey in the lake.

Personally I have liked to write, here, matter that comes from a region, a place, a state that is different than the one in which these words were entailed.

However the machine cult, mystifying many, most of all themselves, since most of all it makes me sad, and because it violates my sense of fairness, which is particularly prone to feeling violated when it feels that the fair dealings in question were not done with, itself, has made me not wish to put up my very prized and hard-won delicate pages here before I at least get paid for them, which I would like to do with a publisher, out of reverence for my muse, who deserves a red carpet not made of polyvinylchoride. (I am not sure how one does that.) Or it has made me hesitate, and since the system partially works through impulses, naturally hesitation produces vacation, and many birds winter in a summer land.

Otherwise I'll just try to pertain to my near surroundings, which may include defensive measures, both of the outer sanctum and the inner sanctum, the commons and the hidey hole. Yes, regarding the far-reaching and momentous events that were taking place in that era, events that would certainly have reverberations of some kind, I became like to the common house cat, or the fairy cat of Celtic legend, or the kingdoms of Titania and Oberon generally: earless to the tragedies that ever run report between the doors of the land the sea, between the stones that mark the untimely years, earless to the crows in the fallow fields, under different stars than cursed their shipsways, that moved on hoofbeat, and lamented with the sound of cornettone and flute, and desperate shouts, ever within the third kingdom, the which belongeth to men.