Part 2:

The Pentecost

I am sitting watching TV when the thought crosses my mind: she aches with a hundred yearnings: and I know it is already too late to turn back. Charlie goes out into the world spreading the good news and giving the terrible warning. We are both looking for Ezekiel; Charlie, because he wants to worship him; I, because I miss him, and he has left me deeply disturbed. But his limbs were brought behind his back and broken: and thus the power of his bones was taken from him. I think it has to do with that Masonic temple on Broadway and Alameda. That’s the one the mayor attends I think. They stand on the street corner: they are watching, and I am watching them watch: they don’t really care. There are all sorts of rings with special signets and seals, degrees and degrees and degrees. I have quit going to the university altogether. When I tell my brother of my paranoia he gets angry and says I haven’t been doing things in the right way. There’s always something he can point out that I have done wrong to get paranoid. I read in the paper that 3,200 individuals in Denver are under police surveillance. They are mostly activists and radicals. And he cut the eye out and said, "Now I have taken the sight out of an eye, and sight is an evil that possesses the eye, and sits inside the eye as the ghost and soul of the eye." Have you received those transmissions I’ve been sending? It was all very wild and fiery. The water is poured: there is a smooth look to the surface of the water. And just as the water is poured there is a flowing of time through the water and of water through time; and the water and time become one together, one thing together. The water cannot flow but through time and we cannot describe the progression of time but by describing the flow of the water. And so Charlie preaches on the street corner and at the booth at the university and hands out photocopies of Legal Impossibility; but as for me, I’m so very worried about the state of my soul that I grip the food in my fingers, and do not bring it to my lips; for my hand becomes afraid that if it moves toward my mouth it will end up in hell, and if it puts the food back into the dish it will end up in hell. The roses were lovely: so I ate the bud of a rose, and settled myself down for a long sleep. There is no more hairy wildness in my mind: my mind and heart have no more hair or claws, but are made tame, and are made to be friends with my friends, and enemies of my enemies. I am out to save no one but myself: and I would be perfectly happy to keep these revelations from the world, secret from the world; for they will only send the people to their destruction, and William Blake has said to me, "Those who listen to thee shall be murdered by thee and thy words; and those who do not listen will murder thee for thy words. Thine is the life of the fugitive." This is why I stand on the platform, and stones are cast at me as I stand before the people on the platform. I have no knee jerk reflex: I am blinded, and my face is concealed. There shall be doubles for you, doubles and doubles and doubles: you shall live in a world of pairs and doubles, until pairs and doubles come out of your nostrils and you say, "Who, then, am I to be paired with; where, then, is my own double?" And you shall also look to a pair of apples sitting on a sweater and say, "Have I, then, not even a mother?" But the thick sweet milk shall be bitterness to you, and there shall be nothing pure in you when you say, "In my childhood I was a stone thing, with nothing to connect me to anything else, solitary." And once you were walking from the 7-11 and someone said of you, "What is he? What is he?" And no one knew what you were or where you had come from; but you had arisen onto the face of the earth in the night, and suddenly you were here among us; and then just as suddenly you were plucked off the face of the earth in the night, and were no longer among us; and no one noticed your arrival nor your departure, but you came as a traveler in the night, not noted by anyone, except for that one who turned and noticed you and said, "What is he, O, what can he be?" I am going to count to four. Elen . . . devah . . . trasei . . . chenear. This is not a foreign language. But don’t the sounds give the perfect impression of one, two, three, four? There is no better way of pronouncing the numbers. They sound even more like the numbers than their English equivalents. And yet, no language that I know of counts to four in that way. Why not? If I were making up a language, this is how I would count to four. There could be no other way: the sounds are perfect. This is why William Blake has said to me, "The crazy sounds come from me to thee, and I perpetrate confusion against thee to torment thee with the sense in thy nonsense." He has also said to me, "The poet has the power to say untruth and make it sound true, to tell lies and make every syllable resonate with truth. This is all legal impossibility is, and all that thou hath written to investigate it." And he also pointed an accusing finger at my heart and said, "Have you not even the smallest desire to keep yourself from speaking, when every sentence means the destruction of a thousand human beings?" I said to him, "Thou art my tormentor and I am under the sway and power of thee; I do not have the power to shut my mouth, though I murder millions with my words; for thou hath smitten me, and I am deeply in love with thee, helpless and pitiful." I saw a head of hair: it was red hair. This was the appearance of the demon: he was small, a young man the size of my lower leg. He had something in his hands and he was fiddling with it, some sort of metal machine: I thought of my father when I saw him there on the ceiling. My father was the first to show me how to fiddle with and manipulate machines, things that have all sorts of bolts and nuts and washers to go together. He used to tell me, "Don’t ever force anything," meaning that I should never force a part into place, but that if I do it right it should easily go into place; and if I force it I will only break it. The demon was fiddling with some sort of metallic object in his hands, some machine; thus he reminded me of my father, and I thought to myself, "My father," somehow with sadness. When I catch a trout, I always refer to the trout with pronouns such as "he" and "his" and "him". Thus I asked how long he had been dead. Now, this is the appearance of the fish that often comes to me in dreams: he is about the size of a large dog, he is fat and brown like a giant carp, and he is layered and layered in flesh (the fish of many gills and layers). And thus I am very frightened of him. But my roommate lit a match, and the demon disappeared instantly with the sound of the match being struck. This is why I say, "Certainly there are other parts of the human organism that are conscious besides that which controls voluntary movement." For the sperm will swim and swim like a fish with a will and sense of direction; and thus there are many groups of neurons in the brain that form a consciousness, though they are not I and I am not they: they are the Others, the Terrors, the Blessings and Sacraments. They suffer and suffer when I drink and make merriment; they sing with joy when I am terrified; there are networks and networks between me and them; and thus we communicate in the great religious cult that is my brain. We stand together as one, though we are bitter enemies; they seek to assassinate their leader, though it would mean a time of terror in the lands of my mind. We are the many that is one and the static that is active: like ice, like ice. And so I say to them, "Certainly you are wiser than I; certainly you are dumb and ferocious beasts; certainly you are angels of infinite intellect; certainly you are savages that are nothing but bundles of appetites." And thus there is trouble in the lands of my mind, and wars in the lands of my mind; and the lands are blighted, the crops are stifled, the rivers and lakes are acrid, the earth is ploughed in salt and all the wells are poisoned with carrion. And I said to that one in my mind who is king of my mind, the group of neurons that controlled the voluntary movement of my body, "Certainly you are a terrified ruler; certainly your people are a terror to you; certainly you cannot lift the left arm, but that you tremble; and you cannot set down the left arm, but that you sweat." And the king and ruler of my brain said to me, "I have been made scattered and weak: for many and many make up the kingdom that is I, and many and many make up the king of that kingdom; and thus we are all reduced to being parts that make up a larger whole, and this whole is only a part of some still greater whole; and we are each merely assemblages of parts, and each of those parts is an assemblage of parts; and thus here I am, at my fundament, a microscopic, terrified neuron who for whatever reason has been chosen as the leader of this vast and wild and terrible land; this neuron is every much as unable to command it as an infant would be able to command a nation." And so I stuck the dagger through this king of the lands of my mind, that pitiable little neuron, and took his place on the throne; and I ruled the land with terror: thus all my subjects became ferocious animals that subsisted and survived by tooth and nail; and indeed this kingdom is a terror and wasteland for all that inhabit it. There was an upcoming confrontation between you and one of your boyhood friends that was covered in all the newspapers and newsmagazines. One article in particular had a picture of a small airplane and the caption read, "This airplane is in San Francisco." Thus did everyone gather for the confrontation between you and one of your boyhood friends, and everyone was saying of you, "Don’t underestimate him." Now, these were the events of the confrontation: your boyhood friend sprayed a hose at you. The liquid he was spraying at you was medical waste; it was very salty. You swallowed all the liquid he sprayed at you with the hose on purpose; and then when he was done you jumped on him, and vomited up all the liquid onto his face. It had been warmed up in your stomach. It was medical waste. It was very salty. Thus you were the winner of the confrontation; and everyone said of you, "What is he, O, what can he be?" I was once given very good advice by a homeless man. This man was a good friend of mine. He said to me, "Soon the day will come when people will ask you who you are. They will say to you, ‘Are you Jesus?’ or, ‘Are you the messiah?’ or, ‘Are you a god?’ But the answer you must give is very simple: say to them, ‘I am Jason Stuart Ratcliff.’ " This was good advice. He said to me, "When ever they ask of you, ‘Who are you?’ and demand an account of who you are, only reply, ‘I am Jason Stuart Ratcliff, no one else, nothing more,’ and you will not be incorrect." The police are trying to entrap me for all sorts of sexual crimes. That’s why that man was standing on the street corner, doing nothing but standing, so late at night. That’s why that woman with her little boy sat across from me in the bus shelter (she was Ethiopian). Thus do the brute watchers watch me; but the Freemasons protect me, for I am Jason Stuart Ratcliff (let the reader understand); and they keep watch over me and protect me from the police (I have friends in high places). I noticed that cop on the bus and so I thought I would test him; I said to him, "Is this the #3?" He grew flustered and didn’t know how to reply; "I believe so," he said; "it’s my first time riding the bus." First time riding the bus! They don’t tell the cops the numbers of the buses they’ll be on for these sting operations; everyone knows the numbers of the buses they ride. He was a blond man with a blond mustache. I stand with thee and thou standeth with me; we are one together and strong together; this is how millions are murdered and wars are won, how nations are strong and how genocide begins. Thus did they break open the egg: and the egg was bloody, a bad omen. This is how you read the wax-in-water; this is how you read the entrails; this is how you draw pictures out of a random stimulus: and the entire world comes to be in this way. I thought I was reading a scroll but I was really eating a piece of greenery. It was not an edible plant but an evergreen bush, very hard on the stomach and throat. I wanted something to remember me by. Thus do nations go up against nations; thus do wars begin and tyrants come to power: with the psychotic acts of religious sacrament done by a schizophrenic on LSD at Cleo Wallace, Residential Unit E, Boys. For there is a cleft in the rock, and a cleft in the earth; and at a certain point in the cleft there is great leverage such that by the smallest motion one could split the earth; and thus that night I split apart the earth (for I did not realize the magnitude of my power); and ever since then I have gone through my sacraments and rites that keep hell from overtaking the face of the earth. That’s why I made offerings to that idol that I made out of my grandfather’s globe (for my grandfather had died, and I had inherited his globe). These were the offerings before my idol, a god of prosperity: coffee, tea, tobacco, rice, incense and candles; but my brother became angry at me for it, saying it wasn’t the correct way to go about living; and if I wanted a god of prosperity I ought to buy a fat Buddha, as this would at least be part of some tradition; so because my brother was angry at me for it I disassembled my idol and took away his offerings (his name was Henry). In this way wars are won. In this way a soldier, lying wounded on the field all night, tormented by the moans of the other wounded, can find comfort when he tries to use his body to warm his dying comrade, and settles in for the night thus embracing his dying comrade; and finds that his comrade is not moaning or delirious, but only says, "I’m so glad that it’s all over now, and I don’t have to worry about a thing anymore, ever again!" A handful of fire: boil, boil. There is sweetness in the core of it and sweetness on the surface of it: this world is tiny, and sweet. I see flesh and flesh and flesh: it is all my own flesh, and it is full of little appendages and pockets that give me pleasure when I combine the parts with the parts. The eyes take in a tiny world: the eyes are sweet, and the world I am given by means of them (that tiny place) is sweet. The bowels are sweet and anointed in oil: in this way dishonor becomes honor, so that I say to my body, "I shall give thee many honors and attentions, for thou art sweetness to me; and I shall render what is despised in thee many honors, and what is poor and thought unworthy in thee many attentions." For now I am in a tiny world: the eyes look out, the body feels and senses in the fullness of itself combined with itself. I look to the poor and despised and render it many honors, though were the world to know of it they would say, "Shame, shame, shame." But I merely reply, "I am merely assigning the highest dignity and majesty to Man, rendering what is despised by all in him many honors; and thus you are the ones who despise him, despising many things that are fundamental to his nature." But the world goes on with its contradictions and secrets, killing with the right hand and healing with the left. And William Blake descended upon me, his spirit came over me, so that I was paralyzed, and could not move even my tongue. He said to me, "Look what I have done to thee—thou canst not move, thou canst not breathe—surely thou wilt die. And yet, thou loveth me and wilt not let me go. It would be easy for thee to let me go, and yet thou wilt not do it." But I could not reply, for a seal was placed over my mouth, and my tongue would not stir; and so I tried and tried to let him go, so that he would be gone from me forever; but though he thought it would be so simple and easy for me, it was very difficult, and beyond my power. I descend into the expanding white sea: there is nothing but whiteness—I am made of blank whiteness through and through. For there used to be objects and colors sitting in my vision; but these have been erased one by one, until there is only whiteness within and whiteness without; this is the expanding white sea, made of water that has no color, that is invisible; I am surrounded by it, I am made of it: this is what I arose out of at the beginning of time, this is what I shall perish into at the end of time; there are no thoughts, there are no memories, there are no sensations; there is nothing of which we can say, "It is that, distinct from this," or, "It is this, distinct from us." Everything is mixed in with everything else, until there is only that expanding white sea: no I, no Thou, no It, no This or That. And this is how the world arose: this white sea is what existed at the beginning of time (and it did not exist, for it is non-being): the following is an account of how the world came to be: there began, by no cause and from nothing, a random stimulus, imposing itself on existence, a stimulus which floated in the void with no one to perceive it. We began to draw pictures out of this random stimulus, this absurd sensation floating in the void; we began to give it distinct lines and boundaries and forms through our own subjectivity; and thus all our objects of sensation came into existence, by imposing form on the unformed stimulus that sat there in existence; and thus the world was created, and it became a sensible world with each part interconnected with every other part, until everything in our experience was comprehensible to us; and though this world was a world of our own construction, we saw that the world was good. This is the world you are in when you look about the room you are in wherever you are—perhaps you see a lamp, a table, or a couch—everything in it is a random stimulus you are giving form to with your mind—the world is constructed by your mind. Thus at the beginning of time there was nothingness, everything being devoid of color and form; and thus at the end of time we shall perish into that white, undisturbed sea once again; for nothing can come from nothing, and nothing can perish into nothing; but our beginning principle is always nothingness, and that which is shall once more become what it was in the beginning—all darkness and void. There is one truth and one principle in this cosmos that is both fundamental to and undermines every other truth, and that is, "The impossible is legal;" and indeed God has made the impossible legal, though the impossible again becomes impossible in the world we construct with the intellect and mind. Human beings can never live in the impossible, though the very fact that humans exist is impossible—and existence itself is an impossible proposition. Let me tell you a story. It is the story about how a man who was once very afraid of the police became friends with the police. This man lived a solitary life in a cell in the city, and never went out from his cell. He never bothered himself with romance or women; but it didn’t matter, since he was probably gay; but this didn’t matter either, since he never bothered himself with romance or men, because he considered all this sort of thing nonsense and weakness. This man had a single friend named Greg whom he didn’t see much, but with whom he enjoyed talking on the phone. One day Greg invited him to a basketball game, and though he was unsure about going at first, finally he decided to go. He often wrote, this hermit, and often wrote about himself in the third person. At the basketball game, Greg kept fucking with him, telling him he (Greg) was going to make him into a gay porn star, telling him to take peanuts from a bag that was sitting on Greg’s crotch. It was all very lighthearted. When the man stood to go smoke a cigarette outside, Greg wouldn’t let him by at first but said, "What’s the password?" "Fuck you," said the hermit, and he didn’t say it in a lighthearted way. That night, the hermit had a dream. In it, there were two gays who enjoyed getting into fistfights together. The hermit was one of them. The other gay enjoyed the fistfights more than the hermit; the hermit didn’t like them, really. But one day, they were walking together, and each had an electric saw which each had just bought, and they were both very pleased with their new electric saws. The other gay suggested to the hermit that they fight with their electric saws. The hermit didn’t want to do it, but the other gay kept antagonizing him until he agreed. So this is what they did: they each attached a saw to the back of his truck with a robotic arm so that the saw could move about, and then each got in his truck and each drove abreast of the other, so that each could attack the other with his saw. By the time they were as far as Miami, the hermit noticed that the other’s saw was cutting into his flesh in his back, but he knew at the same moment that his own saw was cutting into his friend’s back; so if he merely kept cutting for a few seconds more it would be over, and the saw cutting at his back would be halted. Unfortunately, the other gay reasoned in the same way when he felt the saw at his own back, and could see his own saw cutting into the hermit’s back. They were both cut straight down the middle in half, clean through. In the hospital, the doctors started fitting the parts with the parts just out of mere curiosity, but not because they could have saved either of them; they were just fitting parts with parts, seeing what went where. But when they began fitting the parts of the hermit together, the lead doctor said, "Wait a minute, perhaps we can actually save him." All his parts fit neatly together, after all, except the genitals. So they put him back together, though he still needed rehabilitation, for his brain had been cut in half. Now, the police officer who had been called to the scene was a woman, and she took a special interest in him, and kept coming to see him to make sure he was all right. And so during his rehabilitation they became friends together. And once he was fully healed, they were married. Thus is the story of how a man who very much feared the police became friends with them. People often said of him, "He is red," but really he was blue. For a long time he was green—he was very green for a very long time—and while Finnegans Wake is dark green Gravity’s Rainbow is dark blue—yes, for a long time he was very green, a very light shade of green, but now he was blue, though people often said of him, "He is red;" but he wasn’t really red. And while The Making of Americans is a creamy white, and The Satanic Verses is the color of the clothes of a perfect dandy, black and white with a flower in the lapel, most of what he wrote, like Gravity’s Rainbow, was a dark blue, especially his novella Cabeza de Vaca. But this book, his work in progress Legal Impossibility, is very green; like Finnegans Wake it is dark green. He has yet to write something like the Gospels, which are a very bright yellow, or the Bhagavad Gita, which like The Making of Americans is a creamy white; though his work Ahab in Three Acts is precisely the same nauseating color as the Qur’an, a color which he has trouble picturing precisely. But though he knows people say of him, "He is red;" and though he likes to pretend to be red and very much likes the hip image of redness, he is not really red at all; and it is all merely a game to him, and he says many things he does not mean, like if he were in charge he would outlaw gasoline and suburbs and housecleaning, and we would all live in little shanties with no plumbing or heat. Do you know what once happened in this very house, the one you have lived alone in for five years? You live in an apartment upstairs, but do you know what happened in the apartment downstairs? A man used to live there with his mother. He was constantly abusing the plumbing—throwing all sorts of large objects into the toilet and flushing it just to see what would happen. He got pleasure in that way, abusing his plumbing. He foolishly said to himself, "I am only renting here, after all—one day I will be gone, and the plumbing won’t follow after me." One day he threw a very large screwdriver into his toilet and flushed it while his mother was in the basement—the pipes in the basement all burst, the basement was flooded, and his mother drowned. She was a very old woman with slow movements (she constantly moved her arms about slowly, her legs about slowly; her gait was slow). Now you have a ghost in this house—only she has fled into the attic where the tenants never go—the tenants terrify her. But her spirit descends upon the tenants in the upper-story apartments at times and tries to get them to abuse the plumbing, just like her son used to do. She says to the tenants (for she is senile), "O, you must be my son—go on, abuse the plumbing just like you used to do." She hated her son for abusing the plumbing in her lifetime, she thought it was terribly shameful; but now his memory was her only consolation in that terrible purgatory she found herself in—and this is why you find yourself in the bathroom with a screwdriver in your hand. It is all so maddening—I don’t know how you can stand it. We cannot go back to past times; and the religious law of past times, if we made them state law in our own times, would be poison for us, and we would perish. For the times are cut off from the times; and try as we may to imitate past times, we will never attain our goal: we will have everything terrible about past times, and none of their blessings; and in fact many more terrors they did not have in those times. This is a mystery, why exactly this is. For it would seem if only we perfectly imitated Mohammed’s or Moses’s times, we should be successful, since there is nothing separating us from those times but time, which in itself is the same no matter what fills it. But this is not so; and we can never institute past times in our time, be they agrarian times or holy times. And yet, this does not give us license to be careless with our own times and future times, thus being careless and creating a future that heedlessly goes into the abyss without any caution or consideration. When we realize we have the power to create a human being with any physical or psychological characteristics we choose to give him, thus creating a human being designed to his very soul by machines, it is time to pause, and halt, and carefully consider how to go forward; and leave the option open to not go forward at all, but merely stop for good; for this is a terrible power we are toying with. But unfortunately the System does not work this way, but is a leaderless chaos in which we cannot say all together "Stop" or "Go"; but there are a thousand and a million complex parts and processes working in a great organic harmony, each autonomous but falling into its proper function like cells in the body, and none able to guide or control the whole of it. All of this is very bewildering to anyone who understands it; and those of us who are not confused by it are only the ones who have no understanding of it at all. When I ask myself, "What do I need?" I grow very confused. For here I am, in the very void, and I cannot understand what it is to need at all. When I grow hungry I do not really need food: for without food I will only die, and do I really need to live, after all? Some say there are universal human needs, but do we really need to live? We certainly do not have the right to live (as the prophet Sartre has said); after all, we exist by no cause and come from nothing; how is it that it was our "right" to come into existence? But an even more troublesome question is do we really need to live? If we need to live, to what end do we need it? Why, merely to live itself; and to live is an end in itself. But to say we need to live in order to live is completely circular; and there are billions of people who go without living, who are dead; if we all need to live they seem to not need to live; they do not live in any case, and I do not know that they suffer any evils for not living. Were I to die today I would be one in tens of thousands who died today; how is it I have some need to live?—people are going without living every day, dying every day, and I do not know that it is a bad thing not to live, or that being deprived of life is being deprived of anything I need. If I die, what of it? It will happen in due time anyway. It seems like I’ve been existing now for long enough; I’ve seen what the world is; if I live another forty years it will only be more of the same. And if I do not need to live, what could I possibly need? There are a thousand things I think I might need, and when I consider any one of them I realize I only need them for an end which itself is not necessary to me. I become a phantom thing, neither here nor there; and when I say, "What do I need?" that "I" gets transformed into a thousand different things if I imagine it without the things I think I need, and when I think of the things that "I" needs in order to be it itself, I can think of nothing, for it itself is nothing, and has the same innate nature as my desk or bookshelf—it is the It that ever was and ever will be, and nothing exists but that it has the same nature, that single nature and principle in all things. He rolled the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, and the tobacco kept falling out of the end of the cigarette. Thus he kept rolling the cigarette; he would say to himself, "I am almost done rolling it between my thumb and forefinger, and soon I will smoke it;" but he wouldn’t stop rolling it back and forth in his fingers, and thus the tobacco kept falling out of the end of the cigarette. There was no reason for him to roll the cigarette in his fingers; it was all ready to smoke; but he kept telling himself, "Now I am almost done; I just need to roll it a few seconds more," and so the tobacco kept falling out of the cigarette, until there was nothing left inside of it. And he said to himself, "Once a little had fallen out, I thought I needed to get all of it that was hanging halfway completely out to smoke it; but as soon as I had gotten all that was hanging halfway completely out, there was more that had gotten halfway out; and thus there was no end to it, and now I have no cigarette to smoke." For the samurai will say once one has made his decision, he ought to follow it through to a conclusion; but the Angelhaunt will say that there are many times when one must back down from what one has started, and many times in which one must pause and consider the consequences before beginning in the first place. Thus it was said of Angelhaunt, "It is the philosophy bewildered and confused, neither here nor there, with nothing firm to hold onto;" and indeed we see all things in all things. I look, I peer, and I say, "What does it mean? What can it mean?" And then I read the language, and I look without seeing, and peer at the words without understanding; and the words are only sounding themselves in my head, and no concepts are being communicated to my head; and suddenly I stop and say, "What can it mean?" For the prophet Leibniz has said, "In God all things are spontaneous," and I know that this is the profoundest statement on God’s nature ever said, and yet when I say, "But what does it mean?" I replace words with words, and I never find the answer. This is why men have often said of me, "His ears are brick walls," and, "The images impress him, and the impressions are not the images, and the images are not the impressions." And I know that the prophet Prabhupada also thought in a paranoid fit as he was dying that his disciples were trying to kill him; though he needed not to worry, for he was very soon to be ferried away from us, and a seal was soon to be placed over his mouth so that he could be sent off silent into the abyss. My poetic angel sits buried in my heart; and thus words are always coming from my heart, and my poetic angel’s name is Decay, and just as the light of the sun is the sun’s decay, so too are the words on this page my own decay. Thus do I enter the maze daily, and make my way through passageways and around corners daily. For deep inside of me is a complicated labyrinth, mazes within mazes; and I travel them daily, and get lost and perplexed in them daily. Confusion for me is ecstasy, and clarity is only illusion; thus it was said of me in the beginning, "We shall make him live in paradox;" and indeed I mix all things with all things. If Islam is right, if the Christians are right, and we are condemned for the way we worship, and we have worshiped according to Angelhaunt, and thus are condemned, only say at your condemnation, "For what are you condemning me? For being kind to the poor, for being generous to the outcast and despised, for protecting the orphan and widow? After I have done these things, are you going to condemn me to hell, then, because I bowed down before this instead of that, or that instead of the other?" And if you are condemned after saying this, indeed if saying this brings you more condemnation, you will know that the universe is really ruled by the Evil One and not by God; though this is impossible, so it will never happen anyway. The Pentecost continues. As you see. It’s all very clear to me now. The Way of the Schizophrenic is the Way of Faith. Though unusual things are happening all the time—indeed are constantly happening—the safest path for the schizophrenic is to say, "Nothing unusual, nothing great, nothing extraordinary is happening." His mind is a confused mesh of notions and counter-notions, so that if he takes a step forward he trembles, and if he takes a step backwards he shakes. William Blake has said to me, "All thy life thou hath been punished for honesty; and now they come for thee. Those who would save thee are blinded and in darkness, and those who would destroy thee are invisible and unassailable." I said to him, "Where are they that I may fight them, let me find them that I may battle with them." But he only pointed a finger at my heart, so that it was touching my heart, and shook his head. This is why I destroy things: for from the old ones come the young ones, and out of a seed sprouts a shoot; and thus the one, being brought to life, cannot birth itself out of the void but that the other goes down into the void. And it is impossible for the void to be added to or grow; and yet when one thing is cast out of it into the plenum of existence, a claim is laid upon it to one day return; and when creatures bring creatures out of the void, a claim is laid upon them all to pass on again into the darkness from which they came. I think I’ve broken my English. I can no longer speak English, but bury my face in my hands and moan. This is all so wild and sick. What is this name that comes to me? What is this series of lines and dots, lines and dots? Is there nothing left for me but these squiggles on paper? And so you see why I moan with my teeth clenched and my face in my hands. For it was said of me in the beginning, "He shall live with no head," and indeed the single-celled organisms that make up my body have no leader. I said to William Blake, "How is a man with no trials to find meaning in life? What shall he struggle for? Where shall he find his trial?" "If only he will live honestly," said William Blake, "his life will become a trial for him. For the world is filled with illusions and lies, and an honest man sets himself against the world; and thus he has taken a stand, and unless he is only very extraordinary will he survive, for the world hates an honest man. Of all Moses’s commandments, the commandment against false witness is the hardest; for throughout us and in us is falsity, and there is nothing but falsity in the world. But for the wise there is only truth, for there is nothing that is but that it is truth; and truth is the one nature and principle in all things." I have peered past the veil, I have seen the nature of everything and the unity of all things; and a man being tortured in prison is no worse off than a man in the throes of ecstasy with his wife; and a man at his daughter’s wedding is no better off than a man whose daughter this day is killed. No matter what one thinks, feels, takes in through the senses, grasps, lets go of, picks up, puts down, there is only this . . . this . . . but you already know what it is: you live it every day. I saw my mother today. She told me the story behind a Longfellow poem. Two lovers in Europe had pledged that they would be married once they reached America. The man got on a boat to America, intending to marry his bride when she arrived. Once he arrived, he waited. He waited for years, and she still did not come. Finally, he married another woman. But he still always went to the docks when the boats of immigrants came in. Years went by. Finally, his betrothed arrived. They embraced under a tree—I forget what kind of tree it was—but he was already married, and so he had to let her go.