u/bleedeast

The hermit clicked his gums to get my attention: “A proposition can’t be proved.” But we both knew, having argued too many times, that before the d in proved clicked from his dark, shiny little gums, he was somewhere between wrong and right, and that wrong and right were places, so to speak, that the assignment of their locations was as arbitrary as the brain-powered jaws crafting the air of his speech. “Is presupposes there, and there presupposes is,” I said, but he already knew: two neurons touched and lit like hot jellyfish behind his eyes, as a fresh tooth split his warming gums.

I want to follow Christ, but I do not know whom to consult. I have achieved many things, yet I know it was always empty sub specie aeternitatis. I read what He said: sell everything and follow Me, depend on nothing, for God provides for the sparrows and the flowers. But I do not know where to look.

Christ, by my lights, calls me to leave my life, my children, my job, my money, my degrees, my entire existence. Before me stands a chasm of profound fear, yet I know I must leap.

Søren Kierkegaard, whom I love, is not enough. Religious doctrines are not enough. The charity I do is not enough. Giving away my services to those in need is not enough.

I write this from an iPhone in a sauna at a country club. I am nothing. I must slough off the skin of my life in His name. I am afraid.

Any advice would be treasured.

The fossilized rainbow of sun-bleached Chevys and peeling balconies we believe Cuba to be conceals an inland palace that is not a palace, but a vestibule over the subterranean prison complex where Scarface, like Milton’s Satan, self-quickened and murdered his way to the light.

Sleeved in blood and spitting teeth, he sheathed his blade and scaled the marble staircase to Castro’s gigantic door.

The general was enjoying a Belgian cigarette on the freshly painted balcony, smoke swimming like alligators up the moon.

Scarface silently removed his sticky shoes and watched him through the dark.

The crackle of the exotic cigarette, the fantasy: lungfuls of heat whistling through bubbling slits and dribbling rib holes, the dictator’s blood-logging beard, curling vapor and bile rippling up through the neatly pinned medals.

Ready, Scarface gripped the knife’s cool handle, licked his broken teeth, and for a moment existed.

“I’ve a shell too,” said the crab. “Aye,” said the turtle, “but I can taste the air.” “As can I,” replied the crab. “Watch.” He ascended, broke the surface, then descended again with a trail of bubbles. “You see, dear turtle, I too can taste the air.” The turtle tried to think of something as the crab whirled in victory. He stewed and wallowed and grinded his little turtle teeth. Then he had it. (The fish watched but said nothing, as fish do not have shells and cannot breathe air.) The turtle, looking across the warm water at the proud crab, thought of sinking his spirits but could not embarrass his old friend. So he pulled himself up from his vantage between two rocks and swam to the crab, still whirring and clicking his claws in victory. "Friend," he said in bubbles, pointing up, figuring it best to whisper the news across the air so the fish would not hear. The two ascended and broke the surface. Smiling, the turtle readied himself for the satisfaction of guiltless victory. “What are you smirking about?” asked the crab. At this, the turtle opened his mouth to speak when, just then, a groggy crocodile snatched them both in a sunlit splash and into his cold stomach.

Unfortunately, Professor Copse, presently editing an article on two discoveries that lead to conclusions at odds with each other, did not care that Queens has a misspelled stop sign. “So?” he asked. My blood cooled as the waitress placed the professor’s espresso on the table like a relic, closer, almost imperceptibly, to me than to him. “There,” the professor said, staring at his newspaper, “is a comet hurtling through our solar system so fast and circuitously that nothing can explain its behavior. Blinking.” “What?” I asked. “Blinking,” he repeated, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline, “as if in and then out of existence.” The wind over Spain seemed to slow across the sky. Yesterday afternoon, he said, at an almost unholy speed the object had been observed scribbling orbits around Jupiter, and this morning it was seen following Deimos as if pursuing it. A minute ago it had vanished behind the sun in a flash of crimson. He set down the delicate glass and gestured toward the sky. “The solar hemispheres, look, East and West, they are reddening.” “Blushing,” I said. “Looks like the sun is blushing.” His eyebrows lowered. “Either this is no comet, when by all physical appearances it must be, or…” The waitress was taking another order nearby, elderly patrons with white teeth and bright clothes like geriatric angels. I tried to listen to her and the professor at once, but her hair was reddening, her shoulders reddening, the knot of her apron tightening, a fingertip too tight.

 

Once upon a time, Socrates was reborn as a girl, and her friend Thomas, who was Plato, became her scribe. The two sold frosty lemonade until the lemons ran out, after which they stocked the stand with chocolates and warm six-packs.

Within a week, their patrons declared Socrates a god.

When the real Aristotle heard this, he rose from the black sands of his forgotten grave, forced his way through the throngs, and pulled a beer from one of the sticky packs.

“Phonies,” he sneered, through a spritz of fingernail-cracked foam.

“No,” the crowd howled.

“You don’t...” he yelped.

“No,” they mooed, stripping the philosopher of his tunic and brittle laurels, then waxing him until he was dolphin smooth.

Alexander, eye-white with rage, ordered the Macedonian army to march on North Korea. The legions seized three tritium-core hydrogen bombs and dragged them up the frozen slopes of Elbrus. Standing ankle-deep in the snow, the king declared the end of philosophy.

With the flip of a switch, the champagne-plated rockets ripped into the midnight air. Two vanished. The third struck the Moon at Mare Crisium, launching a column of dust, like space milk, toward the turning Earth.

Socrates looked up through the falling ash at the splitting Moon and clung to Thomas, steadying his writing hand as he recorded every detail.

“Moon snow,” she whispered into his reddening ear, as the script looped off the page.

“He carried God over the sun-blessed hills of Jerusalem,” complained one red donkey to another. The blue flies, wreathing the rims of his shining nostrils, reeled their probosci in dismissal. “Ha! He wishes to be a horse, as we wish to be horseflies.” But the parasites adrift in the invisibility in the liquid blisters bubbling across the the flies’ eyes, remarked microscopically in viscous crisps, “There is no tomorrow,” spurring the porcines cankering the parasitic cells to ask, “What is tomorrow?” 

The question continued down through the molecules, atoms (where it was briefly debated) past the whirring quarks, and into the loops at the bottom of everything, who—being made of eternity—complained in orbic flits of not having time.

Amid the perfumed gardens of Oz, I found her. Standing before the sinking sun, I called, “Rapunzel, you’re a robot.”

Her eyes clicked west.

“Only from the neck down,” she said, as sparks scribbled across her clenching teeth.

“A cyborg, then,” I said.

She sneered. “I. Am. Ra. Pun. Zel!” -- Black Sabbath style -- her braids snapped into scourges.

“Witch!” I withdrew my sword.

Her eyes flickered like strobe-lit jewels as she rose from her sun-warm garden.

Medusa? I thought, as her crystal clodhoppers dropped from her rising figure. I spun in prayer toward the sun’s retreating rays, eyeing her advance like some satanic Pippi Longstocking in the blade’s reflection.

“Are you my knight, then?” she asked amid the dying light.

Her body, her voice, her face cooling on my neck.

“I am.”

Nietzsche in 90 Minutes was my introduction to him, 2002. I am NOT sure why the ratings are so low. Paul Strathern's 90 Minute series is excellent! Check it out here:

https://a.co/d/06lV4SYY

https://preview.redd.it/r17t4eiberzg1.jpg?width=324&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=787889bfcf2eb315ccd11d9d17ab384d431a3f96

His lid-thin tears broke and left his eyes like prayers. He is, he thought.

Just then the planets and moons and stars beyond the vault of day slowed their courses. The galactic deep, all its hidden business beyond time itself, attended to this place, to this moment, to his salt-stiff lips, as if borrowing from the future.

“Turn these stones to bread, if ye be the Son of God.”

The bear pressed the old bones into the dry leaves. The crunch pleased him, so he crunched and crunched. When the patch was warm and flat he gathered more bones and leaves, piling them thick before lowering his full weight upon the brittle rib cages and leaf stuffed skulls. All delights. Jars of sun warm peanut butter, the barbed spice of bee-clotted honey, pink melts of salmon brain on the tongue, everything dissolving amid the slow, increasingly sticky crunch.  

It turns out that the Milky Way might have four arms. My money was on eight, though for decades it was “definitely” two. One of the original “twoists,” fearing confirmation of additional arms, threatened suicide. Another razed a city block before emptying an Uzi up his nose. An entire department at one of Canada’s oldest universities, the “bluest twoists,”  jumped in pairs from the roof of the engineering tower. The impacts of the falls were so violent they left bone-shaped negative-space stains in the concrete below, now grayed patches and 2D skeletons. Anyway, my money remains on eight, a lonely cosmic octopus eating itself.

There are four queens in the universe who claim my daughter. The first orbits the North Star. She is mean, tired, and ugly. The second lives in the Fornax constellation, where it is warm, near Hell, and in no way resembles a queen: loud, drunk, nude. The queens of the East and West have never met, but will. There is a moon rumored to wander so far into the western sky that it returns to the east. The war that follows will rearrange the zodiac and change everything, except the truth: there are four queens, but only one princess.