Have you ever jumped into cold water on a hot day? Have you ever ridden an asteroid across the surface of the sun? Have you ever done a backflip off the moon and landed in a bucket of water in Vatican City? If so, then you’ve experienced one-tenth of what I experienced the moment I took that pill.
My headache disappeared, my heart started pumping, adrenaline and pure energy flowed through my veins instead of blood. My fingers twitched and my mind moved at three times the speed of light.
I fell back on my chair, flew towards my desk and danced my fingers like I was playing the keyboard. Chapters fell before me like grass in front of a chainsaw.
I cranked out TEN chapters in three hours. And that’s not just writing them either that’s editing them multiple times, adding extra hyperboles, and making the first 31 sentences and the title into acrostic poems that read: Alex has shit ties.
It was heavenly.
After dusting off my 11th chapter I stood, did a couple of yoga poses and then took off out of my front door for a run.
Now, everyone has a weakness, Superman’s got his kryptonite, Achilles has his heel, I have physical exercise. Usually, the thought of going for a run would make me want to chop my legs off. But those crazy little pills made the sad-sad go away. I was flying past houses, high-fiving bushes and waving to people as I roamed the streets like an exercise junkie.
My god-like strides took me through the suburbs of The Village through to the centre of town where Sherlock-Holmes themed coffee shops and Wuxia-themed teahouses dominated the streets. Writers sat in booths talking and hacking away at tablets and laptops, while cover artists drew mythical figures in between shots of espresso.
There was a hard-working bustle about the place. Little box-like robots wheeled their way out from a boutique distribution centre to people’s homes carrying boxes of wine, cheese, and steaming meals.
I slowed my run and sat back on a bench beside a rose bush. Birds were chirping and there was a hum of music from the cafes. It was heaven.
That night Manuel was back at my house and we walked three blocks over to a giant log cabin and another party. The next morning I took a pill, busted out eight chapters and went for another run. As the weeks flew by I attended more parties than I’d ever been to in my life, smashed out over a hundred chapters and grew dark rings around my eyes.
And then one day I met her.
****
This time we’d been invited to a pool party in the early evening. Manuel was sucking up to a bunch of new authors, and I was drinking beer with a bunch of horror writers while watching two guys beside the pool punching each other in the face over the use of Oxford commas. I didn’t know who was in the right – the guy whose eye was bruised, red, and puffy – or the guy with a swollen, red lump on his forehead.
Turns out, it didn’t really matter because they both paused mid-swing to stare at someone behind me.
In walked a woman in a white turtleneck, and large round glasses. Four other writers dressed in full tweed suits flanked her. Heads turned. Famous web fiction writers who I hadn’t worked up the courage to talk to were whispering to each other and pointing to the woman in white.
The horror writers next to me were trying to look disinterested but I could see them peering at her out of the corner of their eyes.
‘Hey Stephen,’ I poked a tall guy in the arm, ‘who’s that?’
Stephen laughed, ‘Good one man.’
‘I’m being serious dude, why’s everyone staring?’
Stephen hissed his next sentence like he was embarrassed others would hear, ‘Man. That’s the emperor of this place – the most read author in the whole of Crusher Media, that’s...’
‘...Lazy Cultivator? The guy that writes the chicken story.’
Stephen nodded, ‘Only – she’s not a guy.’
‘I guess I should say hi,’ I got out of my seat just as Stephen put his arm up to form a barrier.
‘Dude!’ He said, 'You, me, all of us,’ he gestured around the circle of horror writers, ‘We’re dirt.’ A couple of the guys clinked their beers and took a swig. Stephen pressed a finger into my chest, ‘We don’t talk to people like her. We don’t even look at her. This place has a hierarchy and man, you are the mud that hierarchy sits on.
I swallowed, ‘Good to know I’m appreciated then.’
Stephen shrugged, ‘Just letting you know the way things are dude.’
The tweed-wearers and their leader moved through the party like blue whales through a school of shrimp. A group of romance writers cleared out of their chairs beside the pool and the gang sat down and produced bottles of champagne from a wine cooler. The woman in white pulled a pair of VR glasses, a wireless keyboard, and a purple pill bottle from her bag, then she slipped a pill between her teeth, pulled the VR glasses over her face and started hacking away at the keyboard so rapidly she broke off one of the keys.
I swallowed, ‘She doesn’t come to parties often?’
Stephen shook his head, ‘not the sort of parties the rest of us get invited to. But... I’ve heard stories.’
I nodded slowly, my forehead was beginning to hurt the way it always did when the orange pills wore off. I took the orange pill container out of my pocket and shook it. There was no comforting tap of pills on the side.
I spun the lid open. It was empty.
My hands started to sweat. I got up, knocking over Stephen’s beer. He yelled at me, but I just waved an apology. I made a beeline straight for Manuel who was chatting to a bunch of fresh writers.
‘Hey, Eli,’ he said, wrapping an arm around me, ‘You guys heard of ElitheHill?’
A couple of the new writers grinned, one guy stuck out his hand, but my headache was getting worse with every second.
‘Manuel,’ I hissed, ‘I need some pills man.’
Manuel raised an eyebrow, ‘What?’
‘I need them now, my head...’ I stopped and rubbed one of my eyes, ‘I need the orange pills man.’
Manuel nodded, ‘Yeah, I’ll get you some man – in the morning.’ he wrapped his arm around me, ‘Come on man, be cool, have a beer.’
I shook my head frantically, my hands trembled, ‘I need them now Manuel. Come on. You’ve got to have at least a pack on you.’
Manuel stared at me, his eyes suddenly seemed much colder, ‘Yeah. I got some, but they’re two thousand reads.’
‘Two thousand?’ I bit my lip, ‘Man, they were five hundred two days ago.’
He shrugged and pulled the orange container from his pocket ‘You want em? Or not?’
My hands were a pool of sweat, my head thumped like a drum and bass concert and my right eye was twitching.
‘Yeah,’ I snatched them from his hand, ‘I’ll get Alex to transfer to you tomorrow.’
Manuel nodded, ‘Now get lost,’ his smile returned as he looked to the young writers, ‘You’re scaring off the new kids!’
The others laughed.
I fumbled with the pill bottle and Manuel gave me a kick, ‘Man! Get out of here.’ His eyes were hard again.
I stumbled my way over to the toilet, kicked the door open and slammed it behind me. My hands shook as I twisted open the capsule. The toilet smelt like vomit. The lid gave a click, popped open and I shook two pills into my hand. I usually took one, but I felt like I deserved the extra hit after everything I’d been through. I shoved them in my mouth, threw my head back, and swallowed.
A moment later I had electricity flowing through my veins and lightning in my brain. When I kicked the door of the toilet open it was like the world was in 8k resolution. Colours and lights were sharper and more beautiful. Beethoven’s fifth symphony was playing, someone passed me who smelt of elderflower and sweet wine. I breathed in and started dancing.
****
My call with Alex the next day began with me reciting a poem about his ties that I made up on the spot. He was wearing a beetroot red tie and by the third verse, his face had gone the same colour. It took him a few minutes to calm down, but when he finally did he ended up being quite pleased.
‘I see you’ve been producing a lot of chapters Mr Hill, you’re also pulling in a lot of readers. My suggestion is that you should start stockpiling them, rather than just posting them as you finish, that way when you hit another of your dry spells, you’ll have a buffer to get your shit sorted.’
I grinned and pulled the orange pills from my jacket pocket, ‘I’m not going to have another slump.’ I tossed the pill bottle up and caught it behind my back without looking, ‘Alex, I have discovered the key to literary immortality.’
Alex’s smile wavered for a moment, then with an effort of brute force he manage to affix it back to his face.
‘I’m glad Mr Hill.’ he went silent for a moment, ‘Just be careful okay... with those chapters I mean... we don’t want you to get burnt out with nothing left in the can.’
I shrugged, shook the pill bottle again, ‘Don’t worry about me buddy – just keep transferring Manuel that money. Okay?’
Alex nodded and ended the call.
NEXT: https://www.reddit.com/HFY/comments/1ct3lp6/a_victim_of_online_fiction_ch16_the_call_of_the/

Axon Machina groaned in relief when the doctor finally told her she was free of the wheelchair. She got up and stumbled her way out, not bothering to listen to the rest of the doctor’s shrill voice as she swiftly bypassed all the security on her way out. Some small part of her brain told her to use crutches of some sort, but instead she powered on with her own two legs and almost faceplanted as soon as she stepped outside.
Devona grabbed her before she could fall, almost pitching forward himself at the sudden weight before Cirius grabbed a hold of him too, leaving them all dangling like three monkeys from a barrel.
They all righted themselves and Axon pushed herself to her feet, trying to ignore the shaking in her knees. Devona frowned down at his hand, and Cirius waved excitedly despite being only five feet away.
"What the hell are you two doing here?" Axon asked.
"Well, we heard you were possibly getting cleared today, so we decided to come by and celebrate!" Cirius explained. "Don't know why you didn't tell us, but oh well."
"Oh, uh, must have slipped my mind," Axon muttered.
“We got you a gift,” said Devona as he handed her a head of lettuce with a ‘Get Well Soon’ card tied onto one of the leaves. “I heard that was what people did.”
“We grew it ourselves!” added Cirius. “Well, I tried.”
It looked rather dirty and felt very soggy. It was chewed off in several places where caterpillars had been, and some of the leaves on the edge were falling off. It looked, all in all, rather terrible, and Axon hugged it as if it were a lifeline. “Aw, shucks, you shouldn’t have!” Axon grinned, trying to laugh off the fuzzy feeling that filled her stomach.
“It’s been a while since we’ve spent time together,” Devona mused.
“Yes, well, with Hastur and co. hiding from us, and the organised crooks keeping mostly in line there’s not much for us to do. Who knows, maybe our little group will be broken up shortly.”
Devona nodded after some hesitance. “I see.”
“But hey, we could still hang out!” Shit, that had sounded too desperate. “I mean, only if you want to, of course.” That wasn’t much better.
“Of course we would!” replied Cirius cheerily, saving her from further embarrassment. “Right, bossman?” Devona gave one of his signature shy smiles. “That would be nice.”
They ended up going to a cafe; Axon with some lemon tea, Cirius with black coffee and Devona with a strawberry milkshake. Axon thought Cirius was trying to be cool but discarded that idea after Cirius stuck a swirly straw into the coffee to drink from.
“So, how’s it been sharing a house?” Axon asked, firing a finger gun at the two of them. Her lettuce sat on her lap in a nice leather handbag she'd bought for it.
Cirius looked sheepish. “Oh, it’s been -”
“Nice,” Devona finished. “It’s pleasant having another person in the house.” He sucked at the strawberry milkshake and made a face. “It’s too sweet. How’s Harlow?”
Axon threw her hands up and scoffed. “Hell if I know. They’re certainly not talking to me,” she muttered bitterly.
Axon had never presumed everything would be sunshine and rainbows. But she’d hoped that everything wouldn’t revert back to the same, silent days. She'd stopped hearing from them very quickly, and never managed to pick up the phone before she psyched herself out of it. Regardless of how short-lived it was, she’d been enjoying the tentative yet pleasant days spent together. Perhaps it was too much to ask for Harlow to enjoy them too.
She set down the cup, the sourness of the lemon tea now sickening. So deep in her thoughts, she almost knocked the cup over when Cirius tugged at her arm.
“Hey, let’s get out of this place. Bossman, know any places?”
Devona put down his own drink and stood up, pulling out a map and ruffling it. “There’s this one called… car-are-o-kay?”
“Karaoke?” Cirius asked, sidling up next to him. Devona crouched down so they could read the map togethe
“That should be it. Have you ever been there before?”
“Well, no,” muttered Cirius, rubbing his chin. “But it should be fun! So, what do you say?” They both turned to Axon with open expressions.
Axon blinked at their expectant faces. She rubbed her eyes and grinned up at them.
“Sounds great to me.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harlow Wolfsbane Newland was on a mission. Stalking through the array of cabinets, they ducked and weaved through the crowds blissfully unaware of the figure darting overhead. They jumped down and snagged their target from the highest shelf in one smooth motion, slinking back into the shadows almost instantly.
They approached the exit, their prized goal in hand and freedom within grasp. It was so close they could practically see it with their True Sight - massive red arrows and a glowing neon sign.
“Hello?”
Harlow froze, and turned. Standing right behind them, looking rather puzzled, was a grocery store worker. She was in her forties, and her frizzled hair was starting to grey. Harlow stared down at the action figure in their hand, then at the self checkout they had been standing too long at.
“Are you alright, dear?” she asked. “Do you need some help? It’s alright if you do, shopping without your parents for the first time can be difficult.”
Harlow reached into the pocket of their cloak and withdrew a thick stack of cards, neat writing printed on them.
I’m quite alright. Just lost in thought.
“Oh, my mistake,” she responded brightly, quickly picking up that they were mute.
They flipped through the stack. Also, I’m a fully grown adult.
The woman’s eyes drifted down to the action figure they were gripping, then snapped back up as if she was trying to pretend she hadn’t.
“Right, of course. My apologies.”
She left as Harlow checked themselves out, stuffing the figure into their coat and heading for the exit. Before they could leave, they noticed her approaching them again. They pondered simply walking away, but that plan was dashed as she called out to them.
“Hey, wait up!”
They turned around in time for her to thrust something towards them. A small chocolate egg. Tiny, given how little chocolate there was these days, but coveted nevertheless.
“Here. For you.”
Harlow examined the egg. There were no traces of poisons, or even more basic traps such as razors.
“You seem like you might need it.” She smiled at them, in a way Harlow imagined a mother would smile at her child. They tugged at their hood to cover the flush in their face, and took the egg with a wordless thanks.
They stepped outside into the cold, autumn day. Their hand squeezed around the egg and their hood lowered. They stepped into an alleyway, cold and dark and clammy, and were carried away on silent footsteps.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For once, Axon was not half-asleep as she entered Equinox Prison. Seemed Devona and Cirius slept rather early, seeing that they split ways at only two in the morning. She strolled on through, checking any potential for attempted breakouts, giving a quick assessment of each prisoner’s cooperability and the prison schedule. The hours bled by as she worked, passed out, worked some more, drank and ate at the behest of the reminders Kyra had put into her phone until it was time for the prisoners to return to their cells.
She stood up, stretching her leg muscles and swearing as she almost collapsed onto her table. Damn flesh form and its limitations. She hobbled over to the elevator, bypassing all the security systems and sending herself straight down to Section A. Well, not down, since all the sections existed within a state of constant motion all across the globe. But it certainly felt like it went down as the doors opened to a thin, black pathway hung by chains with a deep abyss below. In the case of a breakout, the idea was to try to force the Angel down, where she could hopefully be restrained again.
The Angel. That’s what Axon still called her in her head. She opened the door and there she was, her stringy auburn hair looking as if it was matted with blood. She fixed Axon with a calm expression - slightly more friendly than the resigned glare she always had.
“I thought you had died, Miss. Newland.”
“Disappointed, Phoebe?” Axon replied coyly. “I didn’t know you hated me so much.”
The Angel just turned her head away from her, ending the conversation promptly. It was rare for her to speak at all during their sessions. Even this short exchange was surprising. And so Axon sat down and started to talk.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the two of them working together, it was only a matter of time before they would run into each other again. And it so happened that Harlow was feeling especially exhausted and was about ready to collapse on their bed when they came face to face with Axon.
They were avoiding people without thinking about it, their True Sight illuminating dusty figures that walked past them without a second glance. Harlow bumped into someone and their lips tried to idly mumble an apology as they went past. The figure froze, and Harlow turned to meet Axon’s gaze.
“Hey,” was the first thing Axon said. She cleared her throat and shuffled her feet, but still looked them straight in the eye.
Hey, Harlow signed, moving only their head down. Sorry, but I need to go. They started to walk away.
Axon snorted. “Yeah, of course you do.”
Maybe on a better day, Harlow would have walked away. Maybe they would have noticed how tired Axon looked, or how her shoulders sagged as they turned. But it wasn’t a better day, and Harlow was already turning around as soon as the words registered.
I do. Is there something wrong with that?
Axon seemed taken aback, but her face quickly filled with indignation. “No, there’s not. In fact I’d be more surprised if you actually had time to stay.”
At this point, everyone around them was starting to clear the area.
What, I’m not allowed to be busy? Harlow fired back.
Axon rolled her eyes and threw her hands up. “Did I ever say that? By all means, be busy. Not like you have anything better to do.”
Harlow’s signing became sloppy as their focus went towards their anger. What do you want, huh?
"I don't know, maybe I want a certain someone to not act like I don't exist. I wonder who that could be."
Harlow scoffed internally. Please, not like you tried to reach out lately. Couldn't even manage a call, yet you've come complaining to my face?
"Oh, so it's my fault, huh? I've always got to be the one who has to try drag you around, is that it? Yeah, that sounds FUCKING FANTASTIC, DOESN'T IT!" Axon screamed.
The air was cold, and silent except for the sound of heavy breaths. Harlow turned, and walked away. Axon's face went from shock before snapping right back to indignant rage.
“Fine then! Walk away! See if I care!”
Just before she became another fuzzy figure in their mind, Harlow watched as Axon’s fury fizzled and her shoulders slumped in defeat.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Axon was tired, but she was not sleeping. In fact, instead of sleeping she was sluggishly trying her hardest to figure out why everything was failing to work. She slammed her head on the table, knocking her empty cup off and scattering half-scribbled blueprints. Her hand flopped around, rooting for another energy drink but only finding empty cans and stains. She groaned internally, with her mouth only managing a grumble before giving up.
Her phone alarm exploded into the air, shocking Axon the slightest bit awake for a second before lethargy dragged her down again. She squinted at the piercing light, trying and failing to read the name on the screen. She pressed around to accept the call, turning up the volume and slamming the phone back onto the table.
“Axon, I’d very much recommend you to sleep,” came Claren’s commanding voice.
“How do you know I wasn’t sleeping when you called? You could have woken me up,” muttered Axon in response, edging her chin to the bottom of the phone.
“Because when you sleep, it takes a lot more than a call to wake you up.”
Axon tried to roll her eyes. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
Claren let out a long sigh. “You’re going to be dead if you keep going like this.”
“Is Axon still awake?” called Arena loudly through the phone, startling her.
“Christ, you’re loud,” Axon muttered.
“I’m talking as I normally do,” responded Arena boisterously. “Claren’s the one that’s whispering.”
“Arena, be mindful,” Kyra chided, also having decided to join the call. Were they all huddled around the one phone? “She’s very tired.”
“Why the hell are you all awake anyways, huh?” Axon grumbled.
“Axon, have you checked the time recently? It’s six-o-clock now,” Claren replied. There was a tinge of worry in his voice that she hadn’t heard before, and Axon’s jaw tightened.
“I can take care of myself, Claren. I don’t need you to babysit me anymore. Just - I really need to finish this, alright?”
Her voice became more pleading than she would have liked at the end, and she mentally kicked herself for it until Claren’s response shook her out of it.
“Are you… presentable, at the moment?”
Axon looked down at her stained cargo pants and ruffled button-up shirt. “Sure. Why?”
A second later, the space in front of her slit open and a portal expanded, rippling like the surface of a serene lake. Claren was the first to step through, wearing smooth linen pants and a shirt, paired with slippers as if he was staying in a hotel. Arena had a shirt that read “Yeah, I FISH” with some nonsensical acrostic under it. Kyra had cotton pyjamas with fox patterns, orange against deep navy, as well as a nightcap on her head.
Axon blinked slowly. “What is going on?”
“We’re having a sleepover. Come on, let’s go to the couch,” Arena barked good-naturedly. She grabbed Axon and slung her over her shoulder as Kyra waved a hand, rearranging all the furniture and summoning a torrent of pillows. Claren popped over to the kitchen, returning with a plate of crackers and sliced cheese.
It was all so… so familiar. How Claren rolled his eyes at Arena trying and failing to catch a cracker mid-air, Kyra fussing over her and trying to wipe the cheese off of her face. Axon could see herself nudge the person next to her, who’d smirk and make a light-heartedly sardonic comment that would send the both of them into uproarious laughter.
But there was no-one next to her, and as much as Axon tried to stop them, the tears poured out of her as if she was eight years old again.
“Axon?” came Claren’s worried voice. “Are you-”
“Just, tired. Really tired,” she managed between sniffles. She felt warm hands wrap around her shoulders, and before she knew it she was deep into the comfort of sleep.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It didn’t take long for Harlow to find where the store worker lived. Worryingly easy, in fact, to simply tail her back home with only the slightest bit of discrepancy needed. She looked over her back many times very quickly - Harlow was just quicker.
The lock wasn’t half bad. Took them a solid twenty seconds to unlock. It was sturdy too. Would have been enough to keep a normal person out. Harlow slipped inside the window, making no noise as they stepped inside.
The apartment was cramped, and dirty, as if the owner hadn’t cleaned it for ages. Despite the clutter of garbage it felt empty, with only a bed, a wardrobe and a small bedside table with a picture frame upon it. Harlow could see the image held within: the store walker, and a kid with long dark hair and a grumpy expression. They caught their own reflection in the window. The kid bore a vague resemblance to them - perhaps enough for a mother still stuck in her grief to see her own child in them.
They took out a large chocolate egg, wrapped in plain tin foil, and placed it on the bedside table. They unlatched the window, redid the lock, and were gone before the night wind could even blow into the room.
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They ran back into eachother just under a week later. People immediately starting to file out of the room, until it was just the two of them alone.
"Hey."
Hey.
"Listen, I'm sorry for what I said last time. I didn't really mean any of it."
No, no, I'm sorry. I acted badly as well.
There was so much Axon could have said in that moment. She imagined, for a brief, wonderful moment, that she'd ask them to go somewhere, anywhere with them, and they'd accept, and the two of them would run through open streets and kick dirt at eachother and splash in puddles as it rained and snuggle up under warm blankets as the moon shone bright in the night sky.
"So, uh, see you around."
Yeah. See you.
And so instead the two of them walked away, not indulging in a second glance back to see if the other was looking, until they were both too far gone to be seen.

This is book 9 of 9 and tbh there are bits of it I don't like any more and will rewrite but it was a worthy exercise. I encourage others to do the same. I posted my illustrations for it here a while ago. Background is I fell in unrequited love with a woman and cast her as a 1960s Roger Vadim lesbian vampire who lives off the blood of literate girls only. Here the classical 9 muses r arguing about who brought her into the world and allowed her to wreak damage etc. Her victim has just returned from a sojourn in the underworld after being bitten. Melpomene is Greta Garbo inspired by a 1930s mosaic in the national gallery London. Sappho is the 10th muse. Last bit adapted from Horace's Odes by way of courtney love + if anything else reads really weird here then it's prob an anagram of a person's name. There r acrostics elsewhere in the novel but I can't remember if there are any in this bit.
Felt ashamed for a little while but actually it's so camp of me to have done this idk how i'll beat it next time I'm heartbroken

It is finally time that we seek to convene With each Muse. For amidst and among and between Every studio-shadow and misery-clod Do they lurk: born amidst the unwon and unawed From new wind-change and upkeep they faithfully swim. Now each Muse by herself has been brought to the whim Of the people: held up to the stare and the sight That is offered. Erato, first woman in white Now unassumed pride of her star-verdant banner Grows loved - and the hearings at N— manor (recorded a-front of this tome) are forgotten. (What really is rupted and slimy and rotten - A worm-tunneled pear? Or a misty-road soup If ‘tis not - let me say it - the nonevent group Who have plotted and rotted in abattoir dim Just to take, between each, three star-actors of hymn (Each near-bright, or burnt-out) and to faithlessly cross Every one in the sky - the green, smoke-twinkled moss Which was made as divide between hellish and earth. Now as answer - the runic and glimmering birth Of pure Knightlings - who search, ever hopelessly tortured And lost - in the shadowy, nominal orchard Of souls, for a Vampire who doesn’t exist. Yes, this time-driven, fanciful, century tryst Had a knock-on effect. As you’ll see from a glance At the milieu, untwisted - one roundabout dance Leads them all o’er the world; and the ground rumbles, stiff At their footsteps and blinkets. Each terminal glyph In each book is reprinted. The death-defied house Lies now open to tourist - yet locust and mouse Still refuse to step foot. (For the terrified smell Of anachronic-death, and the ding of its bell Resound large in the hills.) O, the glimmering hills And the noontime verandah, where, written, the ills (In pretentious sea-rune) lie await for their reader.) Erato, we’re back - and now we shan’t need her (You liar!) - we’ll tunnel far deeper instead For at henceforthing headstone, all veiled at her head Is another one, spawn of the Man of the Dark: People barter, agog, for the murk-making mark Of her teardrop to fall on their mutineer faces. Dear Melp! While your arts and your numerous graces Might suffice to prosper this greater illusion Our gentle withdrawal, and urgent conclusion Comes, drawn from all evidence herefore collected. An effulgent cathedral, now henceforth erected Hosts each glitter-Muse and her judgement - divine In one sadding sense, and another, a-line With the thinkings of Gods. What a wondrous night! Thus its pallor grew splendrous, emitted the light Of its Arts: all the Poetry (epic, pastoral And sacred and lovely) and History, moral With all of its teachings and anecdotes wise - And now Tragedy-comedy - one might divise Or still keep them together. And up to the stars Floats Astronomy, gainly. The Flute-player marrs All of this with her music. And last comes the Dance Of a happy inspirer - we’ve had, since, the chance To appreciate, kindly, the work of the Muses. Time beckons us now (as it hopelessly chooses) To look (as before) on the Hearing which heaves: That which one still refuses, the other believes. ‘Shall I speak, shall I speak,’ now Calliope said - ‘Of the Thespiomachy? In tow with the dead Statement given by heart-wretched Melpomene - That old fernal-eyed din - that darn cacophony (I can’t bear it!) which marks the first meeting at court Of our kind - still so burdened by things of the sort That occurred in this land several decades ago: ‘Twas the time when each star used to prettily glow In the sky; all the fated and savoured, the winds Used to speak: ‘Unsaved troubles!’ straight into the winds ‘Unsaved troubles!’ Alas! With your venturous blades And your unresolved stub, a! - another, she fades But you sit in the winds. And still nebulous, starved Of what made you so good in the start - swiftly carved Out the cliff edge, unlovéd… Digress! I digress! And each beautiful woman, each beautiful dress Steps at once and in glory straight out of the wind. ‘Peccavi, peccavi, peccavi, I’ve sinned! ‘Tis the greatest of all of the sins - poor Redundance. I’ll set the scene now. Look aground: an abundance Of artefact, bulky, of hard prairie paving Of long-foretold towboat, of workwoman braving The frosty conditions outside: great, a racket Caused over the death (blame a long-faulty bracket) Of screwier tern in the visible sky. Black, the tern. White, each cloud. Leached, tis awfully nigh That, the falling and rising of they - lo! engaged To the long-scouted hayloft - invincibly staged On the seventeenth plot. And now frank motormen Wryly edge to the tar - to the bog, to the fen, Where the cabalists lie. Where they drink - Satyr, roam! Now at great Hearer Manors - the conjugal home Of this country’s First Lady, and Secondmost Man Shall I set out the scene of the conflict. The span Of one wing of a bird of the Western Pacific Could cover, to be quite apace and specific The length of its ballroom to end (by one hundred). That night, as the Storm of the Unforeseen thundered Did ladle three hundred to merry, abed With another three hundred. That three hundred said ‘Are you well?’ and the others spoke never and not, And t’was not that they loathed to, but mere that they, caught By a bedridden plague (years still prior) were tied At the tongues, which were covered in rashes and dried Sores and boils, and deserved an interpreter, patient. When had it been ever so forméd and blatant That half the attendees at Hearer would die In a fiery pitwork of glass? And I’ll try To recount each disaster, each moment of violence By one, with my History’s head, from the silence Of centumvir shadowed; from Cicero’s desk. Yet their wailings excited, and pictures grotesque Do still wisp through my mind, at the Anglican rate By which (shrieking) a hummingbird wrestles the grate Of the put-upon sky. Lilac smoke is what comes And what went, on that day. Their attenuate thumbs Beat aground with it, ruptured: for what is it like To be able to burn with no swallow, no spike Of a scream in the air? Could it, quick, have enabled The others to stay in that dream-mansion, gabled With manifold bone and debonified man? I shall say what had happened, and take as I can Every detail, tumescent and vested and bursting In pain from my rumbling chest. While it, worsting All mainland disaster from that time to this Remains solid, the greater should never dismiss Its continuéd impact on modern relations ‘Tween actors and gods. From our cumulus stations Up high in the Monican highwayman air Could we see it all happen: yes, first came the blare Of their candles, lamps, torch-blowers, skirts set ablaze From star-anger. First casualties (struck by the gaze Of man-light in the mountains) those pitiful flies! Tear away, angle-court, not your rumouréd eyes - That was only a preview. The Hearer house ball Rumbled on to its infinite depths - now, the drawl Of three hundred eventual voices rang out ‘There is surely no need for those voices to shout’ Said I (lounging that night), to my friend, Polyhymn, But ‘‘Tis merely the way of the mortal, eyes dim, With the loud reservations of prayer’ she answered. Then, great came the phase of destruction, the mansard ‘Aroof, falling earthward to china-mitt crack. Then the sky sat about them, extensive and black And now shrouded in lacy and terminal smoke In great animal shapes - thus I casually spoke ‘What say you to the flingers of fury tonight?’ Of those sitting among me (enblankened in white) Sweet Urania noticed, and fretful, replied, ‘Do begrudge them not fateful astronomocide In the thespio-struggle. For worse is to dream (of destruction), and wreak it, than let all your steam (starry-speckled) escape through each pinkenéd gut.’ I was full of denial, and hopelessly shut On the Monican mountain; each odyssey-eye Rolling backward in tear. ‘Portly Urine!’ said I To the one who unfelt. ‘You know all of the sun And its wagings and gallops: now think of the dun Of a badly-braised man. Every clattering bone On the ground - and the sound of an edifice, blown, Fit to bursting. What launched that poor boy from the sky To the sparkling sea, but the parsifal cry Of inflammable feather and feathering flame?’ Urania shrank. ‘It will not be the blame Of our kind - let them sink’. And I let out a sigh. Fly again: a hotel-room. The throe of the eye Of the glittery storm: now a thalamus-fight Between two (first in sound, then in pyramid sight Were they set wild a-foes: were they ravened a-pair In the blistering rain). First the silent ones there Ran a-jerk, crucified, hid behind - long - the curtain Of eyes. While adept and adrift and uncertain And wise swanned the louder (each crucible flask Rang in turn with the whip) - now, the burdensome task Of destruction - of ruption - of mercantile blood (Green - a river, all shining-in-stagnation flood Strewn with lilies of flesh and with irises, dead On the lake as they rolled. Now, a cumbersome head Swans still over to us - new, a tumbling fount Runs the length of the stair. One is challenged to count Every life, every limb in the scythe-bearing room). And amidst all the dangers and into the doom Of their death and destruction were handed the quiet. (What cumulus terror. What put-upon riot) ‘Your manner is weft’, said the arrogant louder - ‘We’re warp. We are higher and flaccid and prouder Of this stolid existence - the stages of Man Know this too, and they bow for us. Simply scan O’er this gilt-edgéd room. We’re areign and you know it. Each God-abed painter and light-herder poet Amidst bends just to us, and now never to thou.’ In the midst of this shattered and fanciful row All the quiet said nothing, and shrank from the burn - ‘You read lousier books’, said the louder, in turn. And the quiet said nothing. The louder resisted To tear all the things of which Silence consisted: Their tear-bearing luggage, their pyramid frocks - Just to handle the handles, unhandle the locks Of their monochrome suites - thus a yellowéd scandal Did burne itself clear. Now each lily-lived vandal Screamed over them; deafened them. Not for the sake Of their venturous blades - of a flame-handled stake Were they finally spared; for a slow Arab death Quick caught up to them. Every last blubbering breath Came out silently, too. And one actress survived - More than one, I concede - they contorted, and writhed And lived close to the likeness of icy Queen Melp. As for those likely-worded - each glittery whelp In a sun-sparkled radius set to their plan It affected them not, and thus started the span Of a sequinnéd empire. On debonair copse Did they dance and rejoice; and the pectoral props Of the last were set promptly aside (dearest Melp!) Thus they lived, and as wary and cruciform kelp At the ground of the sea: ‘twas a world fairly floating And likely and bloody and turpid and bloating. Yes, the women who lived? Call it not in the slightest A ‘living’, but rather a fading-out (lightest And lighter and lighter the newer the year) While the other eight Muses gave barely a tear At the plight of the half-dead and wretched three hundred I watched - disbelief! - as the flower-flash thundered On bodies and bodies of thespian taking; The valley lit up, and a redawn took breaking When each of the fallen convulsed, looked ahead And shrank back from the mirroréd ceiling. The dead Were not dying at all. With their purple-bruised hands Did they clamber awake - on the green-as-blood lands Did they wander, obsesséd and farcing and mad For the taste of the liquid itself. Never had Earthly danger been so quite demanding as this: In one first week alone, of those toothily kissed By the new thirsty Vampire-race - every died. Whether white-dresséd maiden or cow, humble-pied. What disaster! Hereafter, at Helicon Mount Did we often congress - what had caused such a count Of our living to fall?’ So I sought (from the pulpit Of lakes and their valleys) the ultimate culprit. Thus I found, in a corner, poor pitiful Melp Wrapped in pillowy rags. ‘It was I!’ at her yelp Did I leap to concern - ‘How on Earth was it you Who made invalid carnage - an accident stew From this fanciful flock?’ ‘Great mistake, you could say Made I early tonight - on the sequin-eyed bay Did I wander, and saw every tourmaline light Cracking over that house - Hearing Mansion. A fight Broke out only when I (at a conversant lull) Challenged each long attendee (gold, dimmer and dull And enshrouded and silly and still effervescent) To take all of the other brave actresses present In contest of acting, and drama, and wit.’ ‘Are you mad!’ shouted I - kept I scarce from a hit At her tragic and gaudy and beautiful face. ‘You have lived all your life in the thespian place - Yet ‘tis still somehow cloudy and fateful, unclear That when two actors enter, the cumbersome fear Is that one actor leaves. What a cold-blooded sport! You would always, dear Melp, be the God-forsook sort Prizing drama in dying o’er terminal death!' Our fairy-queen Melp dropped her head - took a breath And with gaze on the hillside, tripped firmly away. It was all she could do to encumber and pray For sky-bound redemption, or, wingéd, a saviour From that bold evildoing and tempest behaviour. Weeklies later, in vain, wandered Clio, the old And erudite embracer of history; mould Grasped her hand, and her vision was cloudy, a sign Of the end (always nearing, appearing). Benign Did she spot poorly Melp in Arcadia wood; ‘Dear darling,’ she said, ‘let me speak, for I should Say that this is not (darn it) the first holy fall Caused in sorrow, regret, by a Muse - yes, we all Take a life or a breath from one time to another. In this forest,’ she said, ‘shall we hurry to cover And bury and wrecken your accident-crime. I’ve a century-knowledge, you’ve pathos, the rhyme Of the world falls a-tongue on our sweet Polyhymn. We shall thinken a story - a fabulous, grim And exciting and wicked and unforeseen fable. What better,’ she said, ‘which to bring to the table Than porcelain fibbings and mystery lies? What the thespian says, thus the Muse, swift, denies: Now that night, as I see it (tragedian dearest) Was not; never was - if you’d look to the nearest And foolest and guiltiest library-tome Would you find our solution. The Muse-ridden home Of all Nine on the sacred Olympian mount Up above has been tarred; I bring no-one to count Every in of insulting old ‘Muse Number Ten’. If she’s really a Muse - that bright witch-woman - then All our vestige and prestige is fast thrown away: For no summer-eyed cackle - no violet-eyed bray Shall unseat us from up on our Helicon seat. I am Musey of Epic. Each saccharine tweet From her mouth, and infernal and glimmering violet A-hair: with a sneering and cummerbund eyelet Do brave, my men drop them. My wonder, Vergilius! Your anaphor: startled. Your meter: punctilious. That’s nothing to say of dear Ovid, the Nasal. My hearty perjudgement, my vivid appraisal Is dulled not the least by his trip - oh, I beam! - To the boundaries of Empire. His passionate dream Roused me great: ‘twas a record of what, in the world, Pressed by nature, can change. With its cover unfurled And its pages disrumpled by Eurus, the wind - It is easy to see (while, concede, he has sinned) That the sheep-herding Man is a songster apace With each Godly creation, each God-defined face. But the ‘Tenth One’ (‘tis utter and fabulous scandal That anyone earthwise could hold, true, a candle To me, a bare Muse) - she is merely a fraud. Still they merry, recite! Still they, cancerous, laud! We shall break her. As needle of sharpenéd steel Pops apart a balloon - Yes, I certainly feel That this crime should be pinnéd and pushéd upon her.’ Melpomene rose. ‘What a flagrant dishonour And violet discredit to every Muse ethic! You say you’re the Muse of the terminal epic - The cabbage-white lie, though, sits haughty and central In Ovid’s change-record - a stab, bloody, ventral Unseats every word and each rhyme he has written.’ ‘Melpomene, dear’, said Calliope, smitten With merely the thought of the wrongdoing, bare Of a sky-Muse’s name, ‘You are being unware And unwizenéd. Sure - there is terror in lying And bribing and nothing and moralist-dying. But now think of yourself! When a Musey has fled From her Helicon mount, all the mortals a-spread On the mortalist Earth can do nought but a-mourn.’ Thus the following, foolhardy lie was a-born: The unworthy Tenth Muse, on her victory-bed Raised three-hundred, and cursed them. They wander ahead Through a thousandfold years of unmystery-masked And truth-undissolvéd, and catamar-casked And much-behalf-fabléd history, pure With the droppings and smudgings of Helicon - sure ‘Twas a lie, but a good one. Went down like a curse. Thus the crime of the sheep-man (a terrible verse And an unnamed transgression) was bested by far But with no deserved exile - no wobbling car To the furthest and longest of what, in our sphere, Longs to grow for us. Could it be yet more placid, more clear - All the dark undertakings of Muses, in vain To bury a lighter and prettier crime? Now I deign To look down upon both. For in centuries since There’s been death (blood the princess, and living the prince) On our docile green Earth. It remains to be right To point truthly to truth, and to endlessly smite Those who lie in this way. Thus I put down my case And I point, as I must, to the villain apace. So Calliope grounded her fanciful scroll And looked, desperate, askance. On the flowery knoll Of her knees were entwined (as that climate commands ) Both her worried and desperate and virginal hands. ‘I have spoken.’ she said, ‘of the terrible start, Now the terrible end is upon us’. Her heart Beat apace with the whispering spiral of Hell. Thus great Helicon opened. A rosy-green shell Grasped in stature and shadow all nine (only nine) Of the burdenéd Muses. Calliope, fine In her bearing and dress, took the watery hand Of Urania (blesséd, at sea and at land With the liberal power of justice) and led Her to cowering, gossamer, delicate head After head - after head - after head - up until They encountered (by chance, and by gore, and at will) The young rotted and shattering columbine, Melp. Thus with no intervention - with no gothly help From her friends, from the skies, from the godlies above Was she spurned to the Earth - as the wings of a dove Spin and turn in their greying and wintering fever. (Of Melpomene placid, I bring our dear reader To see her in silver and bloodening gold: In Filmgoers Monthly she waits - chancing cold And all-hails and less-fires. A wondrous feature, ‘Attraction’ stars Melp. Thirty-five millimetre ‘Tween cut-upon seaboard and gazing eyelash. But a soul tortured, still. Every sprite, every flash Is a threat to her yet. ‘I’m a woman alone,’ (as she scrawls on her gate) ‘All so very alone And ‘tis all that I ask - please do keep it this way.’ (There’s a vision, encountered, encroaching the bay Which reminds her of Helicon Mountain - she must Stay away from its passion and whimsy and dust) And the message resounds where Opinion stalks But ‘tis all that she says: ‘Dear Melpomene talks!’) Thus we scatter the Muses. Return to the past: For the hills, yet unspoken, lay scattered and vast With glintings and ovens of metal and chain - ‘Twas the Knight! On the ground, whereupon she had lain Spoke the flowers. Unwinding and greening and soft Were her violets; each clouding propelled her aloft Through the hallows of slumber to Eos’s wake. No tangible sound did it, strange it was, make - That transfusion from Down to her still-standing Up And yet cloakéd in mud did she lie - fit to sup On the wormies and beetles of Gaia, provided For special occasions as this. ‘And now why did I wake up in this odd position?’ she asked - Then the truth, as she saw it, dawned down fairly fast: ‘Yes, I ventured deep Under’, thought she, in a fright, ‘And learned nought’. To the heady and sensible light Looked she up - ‘This is not as the books say it is - For the greater Aeneas - the eminent wiz Of Old Rome - on descending, at least got a bough Made of gold, foily-leaved - and his national vow All to show for it. Wasted - a suitable night Whence to read - and to ponder - and fearfully fight - Wasted all on a bloodsucking, corpulent damsel!’ The Knight, in her ragings, clutched tightly a handful Of crystal-white mud, and thus pulled from the earth Its own weariéd coat. ‘Not since, darnéd, the birth Of our own Knightest Chief’ (upwards clanked she in rage) ‘Has a suitor been led - in this edifice-age To such torment and darkness and nightmare and ruin! The frosty suggestion - the last canine doing Of woman yet captured - still free of reproach. A-neck, as a cruel and unusüal brooch Are two scabbily punctures. My chivalrous blood (Regimented: no liliéd, rule-fledding flood In green darkness, but rather a measuréd stream Is what flows through me. Through to the delicate dream Of my lion-bound heart) - now all tainted forever!’ One mile up ahead - whence they waded together A week ago, surely, skipped softly, the paler And happier maiden. ‘O, psychopomp sailor!’ (She joyfully sang) - ‘O, my miracle Charon! I wish you would come to me - trumpetings blaring And take me, a-willowed, to Underworld-place! I know that one look at your chancellor’s face Would be equal (to me) as a gaze upon heaven - These hills may be frosty, these clouds greatly leaven Above, I admit it, the conjugal earth - And yet nothing, I swear it, could match to the worth Of your underground garden - each capable vine And envisioning trumpet does gladly entwine, A secret far happy from that which on Earth Does revenge us. The gullet, the stomach, the girth Of your power still holds me - the sound of each oar In the water and under, the nanny-state war Of its pounding - I’ll do what I must do to hear it. ’ The woman’s alert and immensely laced spirit Bode no greater farewell and no merchant adieu To the river, the land, and the tenderised pew Of that far-distant castle: (we fly ahead now To its death-picture windows). A shimmering bough Made of whispering turpentine hung through the brick. And each candle blew shivers and wavers - the wick Bowing gentle to she who climbed past: brave, the Knight With her long-shining armour, her face (in the night Flecked with scabbards and bruisings) her conjugal hair Tied with thornbush and thyme. Yes, the tumbling stair Pushed her upwards and roundwards. ‘I hope’ (thought she then to herself) ‘That the Orpheus-rope Pulling me to that woman is surely now broken. I’ve been through dear Hell, and afield I have woken And ‘twas all by her doing. A dose of my blood Has seeped, surely, inside her - that chivalrous mud All-endowéd with wisdom and winnings. I think She should now be a Knight - should all reddily sink To the heights of achievement’. She reachéd the door. ‘Let us go, foundly Vamp,’ said the girl, fitly sure ‘To the moon-resurrection and terminal shore Of the coast.’ And she held out a glimmering hand Glum with armour: ‘Abet me.’ The blackening sand Floundered acres away. Thus the two of them walked. To precisely unconjure and frankly decoct Out the skin of a Vampire - Apollo’s dark sun In its sparkling seat, in its valleys of dun And pale violet burnt through. So she sizzled and bled. So her elegant bearing and freshwater head Stopped to ooze and adjust and adjourn and complete. Streams the sea, in its greyed-out and parsifal seat: “It is not enough, groundlings, to peacefully greet Life’s last end in this way”. And the Great Lady’s spine Unfurled high in the air - as each milieu pine Wavers fiéry-borne to the Northern-pole star. “O, invincible tyrant! Ye fitful untsar - Rise up promptly and filter, as dragonfly-drone Through each fortunate crack in each spindly bone -” Thus aloft flew the Vampire-woman, denied (and astray) from her scalloped and second-death bride. Still the column of light pierced a finical hole Through her midwinter heart. On the clamoring pole Did she rise, since a sunglobe of blackenéd tar To the mystical East. Now a wandering star Shall be named in her honour, or absence of it. Here written: the final and hefty conclusion Of love, flaccid death and its verdant delusion. 

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I think that a word is spelled out in the chorus with other words like an acrostic. The singer is a woman. I believe the music was written by a man. I think the lyrics had a girl power / feminism vibe to them. I also saw some follow up videos where the lyricist later collaborated with the original artist of the music to record an official version.
This might be too vague for anyone to help with, but it's been driving me nuts for a couple days.

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Today's Reading, via Project Gutenberg:

VI

It is to Mr Lane's extraordinary enthusiasm, energy, and love of Art that we owe the pleasure of this beautiful collection of pictures, and, that it may not be but a passing pleasure, it is his proposal to collect funds for the purchase of these pictures, and to found a Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. A few days before the Exhibition opened he came to ask for an article about these pictures but it seemed to me that all I had to say about pictures in the form of articles I had already said; and I did not dare to accept his proposal to deliver a lecture on French Art until it occurred to me that being probably the only person in Dublin who had known the painters whose works hang on the wall, I might, without being thought too presumptuous, come here—I will not say to discuss French Art—I prefer to say to talk about Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Monet, and Sisley, and in doing so to discuss French Art indirectly. But before beginning to talk of these great men I must tell how I came to know them, else you will be at a loss to understand why they consented to know me.
When my mother offered me my choice of Oxford or Cambridge, I told her that I had decided to go to Paris. My dear boy, your education—you learned nothing at school. That is why, my dear mother, I intend to devote myself entirely to my own education, and I think it can be better conducted by myself than by a professor. You are taking William with you? my mother asked. I answered that I had arranged that he should accompany me. My mother was soothed, for a valet means conformity to certain conventions. But the young man who sets out on artistic adventure must try to separate himself from all conventions, whether of politics, society, or creed, and my valet did not remain with me for more than six or eight months; for, like Lord Byron's, his continual sighing after beef, beer, and a wife, his incapacity for learning a single word of a foreign language—the beds he couldn't sleep on, and the wines he couldn't drink—I forget how the sentence closes in the letter (addressed, perhaps, to Mr Murray)—obliged me to send William Malowney back to England. But too much love of living was not the sole cause of William's dismissal. I had begun to feel that he stood between me and myself; I wished above all things to be myself, and to be myself I should have to live the outer as well as the inner life of the Quarter. Myself was the goal I was making for, and to reach it I felt that I must put off the appearance of a gentleman, a change that my William resented; and being unwilling to reduce him to the servitude of brushing French trousers and hats, I gave him the sack. He died in Brompton Consumption Hospital.
In the Middle Ages young men went in search of the Grail; today the café is the quest of a young man in search of artistic education. But the cafés about the Odéon and the Luxembourg Gardens did not correspond to my need, I wearied of noisy students, the Latin Quarter seemed to me a little out of fashion; eventually I migrated to Montmartre, and continued my search along the Boulevard Extérieur. One evening I discovered my café on the Place Pigalle, La Nouvelle Athènes! Who named it the Nouvelle Athènes I cannot say; some ancient cafetier who foresaw the future glory of his house; for it was La Nouvelle Athènes before the Impressionists, the Parnassians, and the Realists came to spend their evenings on the Place Pigalle. Or was it the burly proprietor, associated always in my mind with a certain excellent râble de lièvre? The name sounds as if it were invented on purpose. You wouldn't have thought it was a new Athens if you had seen it in the 'seventies, still less if you saw it today, though it still stretches up the acclivity into the Place Pigalle opposite the fountain, the last house of a block of buildings. In my day it was a café of ratés, literary and pictorial. Duranty, one of the original Realists, a contemporary of Flaubert, turned in to stay with us for an hour or so every night; a quiet, elderly man who knew that he had failed, and whom failure had saddened. Alexis Céard, and Hennique came in later. At the time I am speaking of Zola had ceased to go to the café, he spent his evenings with his wife; but his disciples—all except Maupassant and Huysmans (I do not remember ever having seen them there)—collected every midnight about the marble tables, lured to the Nouvelle Athènes by their love of Art. One generation of littérateurs associates itself with painting, the next with music. The aim and triumph of the Realist were to force the pen to compete with the painter's brush, and the engraver's needle in the description, let us say, of a mean street, just as the desire of a symbolistic writer was to describe the vague but intense sensations of music so accurately that the reader would guess the piece he had selected for description, though it were not named in the text. We all entertained doubts regarding the validity of the Art we practised, and envied the Art of the painter, deeming it superior to literature; and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we used to weary a little of conversation among ourselves, just as dogs weary of their own society, and I think there was a feeling of relief among us all when the painters came in. We raised ourselves up to welcome them—Manet, Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Monet, and Sisley; they were our masters. A partition rising a few feet or more over the hats of the men sitting at the four marble tables separated the glass front from the main body of the café; two tables in the right-hand corner were reserved for Manet and Degas, and it is pleasant to remember my longing to be received into that circle, and my longing to speak to Manet, whom I had begun to recognise as the great new force in painting. But evening after evening went by without my daring to speak to him, nor did he speak to me, until one evening—thrice happy evening!—as I sat thinking of him, pretending to be busy correcting proofs. He asked me if the conversation of the café did not distract my attention, and I answered: No, but you do, so like are you to your painting. It seems to me that we became friends at once, for I was invited to his studio in the Rue d'Amsterdam, where his greatest works were painted—all the works that are Manet and nothing but Manet, the real Manet, the Parisian Manet. But before speaking of his painting some description of his personality is essential to an understanding of Manet. It is often said that the personality of the artist concerns us not, and in the case of bad Art it is certainly true, for bad Art reveals no personality, bad Art is bad because it is anonymous. The work of the great artist is himself, and, being one of the greatest painters that ever lived, Manet's Art was all Manet; one cannot think of Manet's painting without thinking of the man himself. The last time I saw Monet was at dinner in the Cafe Royal, and, after talking of many things, suddenly, without any transition, Monet said, speaking out of a dream: How like Manet was to his painting! and I answered delighted, for it is always exciting to talk about Manet: Yes, how like! That blond, amusing face, the clear eyes that saw simply, truly, and quickly. And having said so much, my thoughts went back to the time when the glass door of the cafe grated upon the sanded floor, and Manet entered. Though by birth and by education essentially Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress—his clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure! Those square shoulders that swaggered as he went across the room, and the thin waist; the face, the beard, and the nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression—frank words, frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes as they flowed away bitter, but at the fountain-head sweet and full of light.
A man is often well told in an anecdote, and I remember a young man whom Manet thought well of, bringing his sister with him to the studio in the Rue Amsterdam—not an ill-looking girl, no better and no worse than another, a little commonplace, that was all. Manet was affable and charming; he showed his pictures, he talked volubly, but next day when the young man arrived and asked Manet what he thought of his sister, Manet said, extending his arm (the gesture was habitual to him): The last girl in the world I should have thought was your sister. The young man protested, saying Manet had seen his sister dressed to her disadvantage—she was wearing a thick woollen dress, for there was snow on the ground. Manet shook his head. I haven't to look twice; I'm in the habit of judging things.
These were his words, or very nearly, and they seem to me to throw a light upon Manet's painting. He saw quickly and clearly, and stated what he saw candidly, almost innocently. It was not well mannered perhaps to speak to a brother of his sister in those terms, but we have not come here to discuss good manners, for what are manners but the conventions that obtain at a certain moment, and among a certain class? Well-mannered people do not think sincerely, their minds are full of evasions and subterfuges. Well-mannered people constantly feel that they would not like to think like this or that they would not like to think like that, and whosoever feels he would not like to think out to the end every thought that may come into his mind should turn from Parnassus. In his search for new formulas, new moulds, all the old values must be swept aside. The artist must arrive at a new estimate of things; all must go into the melting-pot in the hope that out of the pot may emerge a new consummation of himself. For this end he must keep himself free from all creed, from all dogma, from all opinion, remembering that as he accepts the opinions of others he loses his talent, all his feelings and his ideas must be his own, for Art is a personal rethinking of life from end to end, and for this reason the artist is always eccentric. He is almost unaware of your moral codes, he laughs at them when he thinks of them, which is rarely, and he is unashamed as a little child. The word unashamed perhaps explains Manet's art better than any other. It is essentially unashamed, and in speaking of him one must never be afraid to repeat the word unashamed. Manet was born in what is known as refined society; he was a rich man; in dress and appearance he was an aristocrat; but to be aristocratic in Art one must avoid the aristocracy, and Manet was obliged for the sake of his genius to spend his evenings in the café of the Nouvelle Athènes, for there he found artists, lacking in talent, perhaps, but long haired, shabbily dressed, outcasts by choice and conviction, and from them he could get that which the artist needs more than all else—appreciation. He needed the rapin as the fixed star needs the planet, and the faith of the rapin is worth more to the artist than the bosom of the hostess, though she thrives in the Champs Élysées. The rapin helped Manet to live, for in the years I knew him he never sold a picture, and you will ask yourselves and wonder how it was that in a city like Paris great pictures should remain unsold. I will tell you. In many ways Paris is more like the rest of the world than we think for; the moneyed man in Paris, like the moneyed man in London, admires pictures in proportion as they resemble other pictures, but the rapin likes pictures in proportion as they differ from other pictures.
After Manet's death his friends made some little stir; there was a sale, and then the prices sank again, sank almost to nothing, and it seemed as if the world would never appreciate Manet. There was a time, fifteen or sixteen years ago, when Manet's pictures could have been bought for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty pounds apiece, and I remember saying to Albert Wolff, some years after Manet's death: How is it that Degas and Whistler and Monet have come into their inheritance, but there is no sign of recognition of Manet's Art? Wolff answered: The time will never come when people will care for Manet's painting; and I left Tortoni's asking myself if the most beautiful painting the world had ever seen was destined to remain the most unpopular. That was fifteen years ago, and it took fifteen years for the light of Manet's genius to reach Ireland.
I have been asked which of the two pictures hanging in this room it would be better to buy for the Gallery of Modern Art, the Itinerant Musician or the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales. Mr Lane himself put this question to me, and I answered: I am afraid whichever you choose you will regret you had not chosen the other. The picture of the Itinerant Musician is a Spanish Manet, it was painted after Manet had seen Goya, but it is a Manet as much as the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales; to any one who knows Manet's work it possesses all the qualities which we associate with Manet. All the same, there is a veil between us and Manet in the Spanish picture. The veil is very thin, but there is a veil; the larger picture is Manet and Goya, but the portrait is Manet and nothing but Manet. And the portrait is an article of faith, for it says: Be not ashamed of anything but to be ashamed. There are Manets that I like more, but the portrait of Mademoiselle Gonzales is what Dublin needs. Salvation comes like a thief in the night, and it may be that Mademoiselle Gonzales will be purchased; if so, it will perhaps help to bring about the crisis we are longing for—that spiritual crisis when men shall begin once more to think out life for themselves, when men shall return to Nature naked and unashamed.
The glass door of the café grates upon the sand again, and Degas enters, a round-shouldered man in a suit of pepper-and-salt. Now there is nothing very trenchantly French about him, except the large necktie. His eyes are small, his words sharp, ironical, cynical. Degas and Manet are the leaders of the Impressionistic school, and their friendship has been jarred but once, when Degas came to the Rue Amsterdam and sat with his back to the pictures, saying that his eyes were too weak to look at them. If your eyes are too weak you shouldn't have come to see me, Manet answered. Manet is an instinct, Degas an intellectuality, and he believes with Edgar Poe that one becomes original by saying, I will not do a certain thing because it has been done before.
So the day came when Degas had to put Semiramis aside for a ballet girl; the ballet girl had not been painted before; it was Degas who introduced her and the acrobat and the repasseuse into art. And remembering that portraits lacked intimacy, he designed Manet sprawling on a sofa indifferent to his wife's music, thinking of the painting he had done that morning, or of the painting he was going to do the next morning. If Leonardo had lived in the nineteenth century, I said, he might have painted like that; and I wandered on through the Louvre thinking of the twain as intellectuals, till Rembrandt's portrait of his wife absorbed me as no other picture had ever done, and perhaps as no other picture will ever do again. The spell that it laid upon me was conclusive; when I approached the eyes faded into brown shadow, but when I withdrew they began to tell the story of a soul—of one who seems conscious of her weakness, of her sex, and the burden of her own special lot—she is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder shows through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket; grey pearls hang in her ears; there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the frame, and the hand reminds us, as the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay, etc., for the chin and hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge as Nature moulds.
The Mona Lisa, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared with this portrait; her hesitating smile which held my youth in a little tether has come to seem to me but a grimace, and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe or map seems at a distance, a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle, or ballade with double burden, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Lisa, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets, and we must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of a prose passage that our generation had by heart. The Mona Lisa and Degas's Leçon de Danse are thoughtful pictures painted with the brains rather than with the temperaments; and we ask sooner or later, but assuredly we ask, of what worth are Degas's descriptions of washerwomen and dancers and racehorses compared with that fallen flower, that Aubusson carpet, above all, the footstool? and if any one of Degas's pictures is bought for this gallery I hope it will be one of these early pictures, the red-headed girl, for instance, an unfinished sketch, exhibited some time ago at Knightsbridge, the property, I believe, of Durand Ruel.
In the days of the Nouvelle Athènes we used to repeat Degas's witticisms, how he once said to Whistler, Whistler, if you were not a genius you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris. Leonardo made roads, Degas makes witticisms. I remember his answer when I confided to him one day that I did not care for Daumier—the beautiful Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that hangs on the wall I had not then seen; that is my apology, an insufficient one, I admit. Degas answered, If you were to show Raphael a Daumier he would admire it, but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh: That is my fault—an excellent quip. But we should not attach the same importance to a quip as to a confession. Manet said to me: I tried to write, but I couldn't; and we must esteem these words as an artist's brag; I am a painter, and only a painter. Degas could not boast that he was a painter and only a painter, for he often wearied of painting; he turned to modelling, and he abandoned modelling for the excitement of collecting pictures—not for himself but for the Louvre. I've got it, he said to me in the Rue Maubeuge, and he was surprised when I asked him what he had got; great egotists always take it for granted that every one is thinking of what they are doing. Why, the Jupiter, of course the Jupiter, and he took me to see the picture—a Jupiter with beetling brows, and a thunderbolt in his hand. He had hung a pear next to it, a speckled pear on six inches of canvas, one that used to hang in Manet's studio, and guessing he was about to be delivered of a quip, I waited. You notice the pear? Yes, I said. I hung it next to the Jupiter to show that a well-painted pear could overthrow a God. There is a picture by Mr Sargent in this room—one of his fashionable women. She is dressed to receive visitors, and is about to spring from her chair; the usual words, How do you do, Mary, are upon her crimson lips, and the usual hysterical lights are in her eyes, and her arms are like bananas as usual. There is in this portrait the same factitious surface-life that informs all his pictures, and, recognising fashionable gowns and drawing-room vivacities as the fundamental Sargent, Degas described him as Le chef de rayon de la peinture. Le chef de rayon is the young man behind the counter who says, I think, madam, that this piece of mauve silk would suit your daughter admirably, ten yards at least will be required. If your daughter will step upstairs, I will take her measure. Vous pouvez me confier votre fille; soyez sûre que je ne voudrais rien faire qui pût nuire à mon commerce.
Any one, Degas said once to me, can have talent when he is five-and-twenty; it is more difficult to have talent when you are fifty. I remember the Salon in which Bastien Lepage exhibited his Potato Harvest, and we all admired it till Degas said, The Bouguereau of the modern movement. Then every one understood that Bastien Lepage's talent was not an original but a derivative talent, and when Roll, another painter of the same time, exhibited his enormous picture entitled Work, containing fifty figures, Degas said, One doesn't make a crowd with fifty figures, one makes a crowd with five. Quips, merely quips, and there were far too many quips in Degas's life; and I include in my list of quips a great number of ballet girls and racehorses. His butcher's corpulent wife standing before a tin tub was much talked about in our cafe, until Monet returned after a long absence in the country, bringing with him twenty or thirty canvases, a row of poplars seen in perspective against a grey sky, or a view of the Seine with a bridge cutting the picture in equal halves, or a cottage shrouded in snow with some low hills. Pissarro admired these, of course, but his preference ran to Sisley, who, he said, was more of a poet; and should a Sisley come later into this collection, my hope is that it will be a picture I saw years ago in the galleries of George Pettit: the bare wall of a cottage, a frozen pond, and some poplar-trees showing against the first film of light, a vision so exquisite that Constable's art seems in comparison coarse and clumsy.
Monet's art is colder, more external, and those who like to trace individual qualities back to race influence may, if they will, attribute the exquisite reverie which distinguishes Sisley's pictures to his northern blood.
Monet began by imitating Manet, and Manet ended by imitating Monet. They were great friends. Manet painted Monet and Madame Monet in their garden, and Monet painted Manet and Madame Manet in the same garden; they exchanged pictures, but after a quarrel each returned the other his picture. Monet's picture of Manet and his wife I never saw, but Manet's picture of Monet and Madame Monet belongs to a very wealthy merchant, a Monsieur Pellerin, who has the finest collection of Manets and Cézannes in the world. Cézanne exhibited with the Impressionists, but I do not remember having seen him in the Nouvelle Athènes or heard his name mentioned by Manet or Degas. Alexis told us once that he had breakfast with him that morning at the Moulin de la Galette, and that Cézanne had arrived in jack-boots covered with mud and had spent thirty francs on the meal, which was an unusual feat in those days and in those districts. Alexis was struck by the resemblance of Cézanne to his pictures. A peasant come straight out of The Reapers, he said; I thought of Manet, and we congratulated ourselves on the advancement of our taste, forgetful that the next generation may speak of Cézanne's portraits as the art of the trowel rather than of the brush. The word masonry must have been in Zola's mind when he exalted Cézanne in L'Oeuvre, and at the dinner given to celebrate the publication of the book declared him to be a greater painter than Manet. Both came from Aix; both had talent; and both were denied the exquisite vision and handicraft of Sisley and Verlaine.
Within the Impressionist movement were two women, Mary Casatt, who derived her art from Degas, and Berthe Morisot, who derived hers from Manet. Berthe Morisot married Manet's brother, and there can be little doubt that she would have married Manet if Manet had not been married already. I remember him saying to me once: My sister-in-law wouldn't have been noticed without me; she carried my art across her fan. Berthe is dead, and her pictures are very expensive and picture-dealers do not make presents, but Mary Casatt is alive, she is a rich woman, and I take this opportunity of suggesting that she should be asked to give a picture. After an absence of many years I went to see her and found her blind, but talkative as of yore, and we talked of all the people we had known, till at the end of breakfast she said, There is one we haven't spoken about, perhaps the greatest of all. I said, You mean Renoir? And she reproached me with having been always a little indifferent to his art. I don't think that this is true, or if it be true, it is only true in a way. I know of nothing that I would sooner hang in my drawing-room than one of Renoir's bathers, or a portrait of a child in grey fur dressed to be taken to the Bois by her mother. Some of his portraits of children are the most beautiful I know—they are white and flower-like, and therefore very unlike the stunted, leering little monkeys that Sir Joshua Reynolds persuaded us to accept as representative of tall and beautiful English children. I think it was at the end of the 'sixties that Renoir painted the celebrated picture of the woman looking into the canary cage—a wonderful picture, but so unlike his later work that it may be doubted if anybody would recognise it as being by the man who painted the bathers. By the bathers I mean all the plump girls whom he painted on green banks under trees, their fat so permeated with light that they seem like luminous flowers; yet they are flesh, and full-blooded flesh that would bleed. It may be that Manet never painted naked flesh so realistically. His art is less casual, less modern, less actual, than Renoir's. It came out of a different tradition, and upon it is the birthmark of easy circumstances and the culture thereof; whereas Renoir was a Parisian workman; he began life in a factory painting flowers, and his talent was not sufficient to redeem his art from the taint of an inherited vulgarity. Whistler would have cried for an umbrella to hide himself under were he asked to consider The Umbrellas.
The man I see when my thoughts return to the Nouvelle Athènes is a tall, lean man with red in his ragged hair and beard, and his voice has a ring in it. If Renoir had not been an aesthete he wold have been a Socialist orator. Some of his denunciations are quoted in Confessions of a Young Man, and here is an anecdote that a few may think instructive. Money suddenly began to accumulate at his bank, and he bethought himself of a stock of wine and cigars, a carriage, several suits of clothes, or a flat in the quarter of the Champs Élysées with a mistress in it. But turning from these legitimate issues, he went to Venice to study Tintoretto, and on his return to Paris he laboured in a school of art until it became plain to him that his studies, instead of decreasing, were increasing the distance between himself and Tintoretto. I remember his embittered, vehement voice in the Nouvelle Athènes, and I caught a glimpse of his home life on the day that I went to Montmartre to breakfast with him, and finding him, to my surprise, living in the same terrace as Paul Alexis, I asked: Shall we see Alexis after breakfast? He would waste the whole of my afternoon, Renoir muttered, sitting here smoking cigars and sipping cognac; and I must get on with my picture. Marie, as soon as we have finished, bring in the asparagus, and get your clothes off, for I shall want you in the studio when we have had our coffee.
The evenings that Pissarro did not come to the Nouvelle Athènes were so rare that I cannot think of the Nouvelle Athènes without seeing him in the far corner on the right, listening to Manet and Degas, approving of all they said. I remember his pictures, many of them, as well as his white beard and hair, and nose of the race of Abraham. He figures in Confessions of a Young Man, and turning to this youthful book I find an appreciation of him, and, as I think today as I thought then, I will quote it. Speaking of a group of girls gathering apples in a garden, I wrote: Sad greys and violets, beautifully harmonised with figures that seem to move as in a dream on the thither side of life, in a world of quiet colour and perfect resignation. But the apples will never fall from the branches, the baskets of the stooping girls will never be filled, for the orchard is one that life has not for giving, that the painter has set in an eternal dream of violet and grey, an apple orchard with peasants gathering the spare fruit of the mildew collected on a planet's surface. The picture in the present exhibition represents Pissarro in his first period, when he followed Corot; I hope Dublin will acquire it. And having said this much, my thoughts return to the last time I spoke with this dear old man, so like himself and his race. It was at Rouen about six years ago, whither he had gone to paint the Cathedral. For Monet having painted the Cathedral, why not he likewise? Why not, indeed? for he always followed somebody's dream. But though his wanderings were many and sudden, he never quite lost his individuality, not even when he painted yachts after the manner of Signac.
Who had invented Impressionism? was asked when he died, and attempts were made to trace Monet back to Turner. Monet, it was said, had been to England, and in England he must have seen Turner, and it was impossible to see Turner without being influenced by Turner. Yes! Monet was in England many times, and he painted in England, and one day we went together to an Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House, and there we saw a picture for which many thousands of pounds had just been paid, and Monet said, Is that brown thing your great Turner? It is true, the picture we were looking at was not much more interesting than brown paper, and I told him that Turner had painted other pictures that he would like better, The Frosty Morning, and he said he had seen it, remarking that Turner had painted that morning with his eyes open. Whistler likes Calais Pier better than The Frosty Morning, for it was more like his own painting, and no very special discernment is required to understand that Turner and Constable could not have influenced painters whose desire was to dispense altogether with shadow. Whether, by doing so, they failed sometimes to differentiate between a picture and a strip of wallpaper is a question that does not come within the scope of the present inquiry. Mr Lane is asking us to consider if a collection of Impressionist pictures would benefit Dublin, and it seems to me certain that Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir are more likely to draw our thoughts to the beauty of this world than a collection of Italian pictures gathered from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In God’s infinite wisdom and creativity, He has crafted magnificent things: watercolor sunsets, awe-inspiring mountains, turquoise oceans, and beautiful people.
Proverbs 31 is a well-known chapter in the Bible about a God-fearing, hard-working, generosity-driven woman.
Interestingly, Proverbs 31 was written by a man—specifically, King Lemuel, although it’s technically advice from his mother that he shared when he was king.
Something that’s not obvious in non-Hebrew languages is that verses 10-31 actually make up an acrostic poem—each verse beginning with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, successively working their way from aleph to tau (from beginning to end).
Toward the climax of the poem, the author writes:
“Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” - Proverbs‬ ‭31:30‬ ‭NIV‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬
Deep down we know this to be true, don’t we?
No matter how charming or beautiful a woman is, we know that beauty is fleeting. We know that charm will not last. We know that the aging process will eventually run its course.
But there’s barely any mention of this woman’s physical beauty, instead, the focus is on her character—on this woman who fears the Lord.
An earlier Proverb explains that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10)—the humble realization that anything good and wise and pure and true must have come from Him.
So if you know a woman like that—one who loves and respects God, one who honors and cares for people, one who invests wisely and lives purposefully—you might take a moment to thank God for her life. You might even consider how you can be more like her … as she aims to be more like Him.

"Capybara," says Tommy after a moment's deliberation, gesturing in the direction of a cloud. Harvey glances over at him, then back up to the cloud.
"How is that a capybara?"
"Looks like one."
"It's an amorphous blob."
"That's just what capybaras look like."
Harvey concedes with a hmm. He points up at another cloud. "That one looks like a... deformed sort of pumpkin. It's got the little- the stalk bit."
"Oh, true," Tommy agrees, before hmming in turn. "Hey, what should I be for Halloween?"
"I don't know," Harvey says, and then after a pause he adds in a slightly lowered voice, as if hesitant: "Maybe you could find something we could both do."
Tommy turns to him, astonished. "What, really?"
"Yeah. Maybe."
Tommy grins in disbelief. "No way, finally." He thinks about it for a moment. "So... you're gonna go to the Halloween party?"
"Possibly."
"Okay." Tommy squints at him a little, a sly sort of smile ghosting the corner of his mouth. "Since when do you do Halloween?"
"Since always. Shut up."
Tommy laughs at the lie. "Sure. Okay." He resumes chewing the piece of gum in his mouth as he weighs up asking a second question. "You like her, don't you?"
Harvey freezes up at the sudden and unexpected interrogation. He feigns ignorance. "Who?"
"You know who. You like her."
Harvey huffs, a short exhalation in recognition of the futility of playing dumb. "I most certainly do not. She's just my friend. Is it really so hard to believe that I have a friend?"
"Little bit," Tommy says, and Harvey scowls. Tommy shakes his head. "Alright, look- I wasn't actually asking. I know you like her. You're all... weird around her, and you're writing poems about her and everything. It's so obvious."
Harvey blinks and splutters out the beginning of a rebuttal but turns instead to indignation. "You bitch, have you been going through my stuff?"
"No, I haven't! I swear," Tommy lies. "You just left your notebook out like a knob."
"Ugh," Harvey says, greatly displeased by this turn of events. "How did you even know that was about her? It was deliberately abstract."
"'Cause you did that weird thing where the first letter of each line spells her name," Tommy explains, drawing a vertical line in the air to illustrate.
"Acrostics aren't weird," Harvey defensively responds, annoyed that the one aspect of literary technique Tommy seems to have ever absorbed happens to be this one. "Ever heard of Edgar Allan Poe? An Acrostic?"
"Right, yeah, but you're not Edgar Allan Poe," Tommy counters. "You're Harvey-who-likes-"
"Keep your voice down!" Harvey whisper-shouts, hurriedly glancing around to make sure nobody is listening in. "I do not like her. We're friends! Is it not the 21st century? Can a man and a woman not be friends without baseless accusations? Just- drop it, alright?" He crosses his arms sulkily. "Your eyeliner's smudged," he adds, and a flicker of alarm crosses Tommy's face. He realises it's probably not true- it's just a thing Harvey does sometimes when he's annoyed- but he can't take that risk, so he checks anyway, sitting up and pulling out his phone. It's not smudged. He glares at him, and they sit in silence for a while.
"So... is this gonna be one of the ones where you freak her out with a massive confession, or is it gonna be one of the ones where you pretend that nothing's going on until she gets freaked out?"
Harvey bristles, slightly wounded by the bluntness of Tommy's words. Jaw clenched, he pointedly fixes his gaze straight ahead. "Right. Or is it going to be one of the ones where you stab me in the back and st-"
"Oh my God," Tommy mutters, rolling his eyes. "I'm not gonna... Look, shut up about that." He picks uncomfortably at the fabric of his trousers. "I'm just saying..."
Tommy's no genius, but anyone with half a brain could figure out that Harvey's got a massive crush, especially if they're his twin brother who has witnessed every instance of him developing intense romantic feelings for various girls. Harvey's nowhere near as subtle as he seems to convince himself he is. And to be honest, Tommy's not looking forward to the moment Harvey inevitably gets rejected again. It'll be mope-central for ages. It's not that he thinks Harvey's feelings for anyone could never be reciprocated, he just always seems to pick girls who clearly have no romantic interest in him in return. It sucks watching his brother get hurt like that... not to mention that the inevitable, drawn-out pity party that follows gets so boring for Tommy. He doesn't know how to communicate any of that to Harvey without him getting crazy defensive, though, so he tends not to get too involved. Eventually, he might learn.
"Well... Are you gonna ask her out?"
"I don't see why I would do that, seeing as I don't like her," Harvey replies after a pause, making the baffling decision of sticking to denial.
"Okay. Cool. What's the answer that isn't bullshit?"
"Ugh." Harvey scratches his chin, lowering his hand when it encounters the tender beginnings of a budding pimple. "I don't know," he admits. "I don't want to... make things awkward."
They're already awkward, mate, Tommy thinks to himself. "Yeah, fair."
They silence they sit in for a while is equally awkward, punctuated only by the faint sounds of Tommy's gum chewing and the bustle of camp activity in the distance. Finally, Tommy breaks it fully: "So what d'you want us to go as for Halloween?"
Harvey's face twitches briefly as he takes a moment to formulate a response. "I don't know, but I'm not wearing anything that irrevocably compromises my dignity."
"What dignity?"
"Very funny..."
(OOC: This is open to roleplay if anyone wants to have their character come across them after this conversation, although it's basically just a little storymode. For reference, they are sitting together in some nondescript location in camp away from areas with many people)

v Characters:
· Volpone: Volpone is the play’s central figure. He is an old, rich, childless Italian gentleman with no heir his fortune, and he values wealth above all else. His name means sly fox, which is a perfect allegory for his character, since he spends the entire play joyfully deceiving Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino into believing that each one will be the sole heir to his fortune, all the while becoming wealthier through them. He is extremely greedy, and he takes immense pleasure in fooling the other Italian men. While Volpone’s pursuits begin as comedic and light-hearted, they eventually progress to the extreme when Volpone attempts to rape Corvino’s wife, Celia. Though he makes fun of the others for their excessive greed, and though he gets away with many of his tricks, Volpone ultimately proves insatiably greedy for pleasure and trickery. Instead of quitting while he is ahead, Volpone fakes his death, creating a chaos in which he is ultimately discovered, stripped of his wealth, and effectively sentenced to execution.
· Mosca: Mosca’s name means fly, and like a fly, Mosca buzzes around whispering in the ears of all the other characters in the play. He is Volpone’s parasite, meaning hanger-on, and he makes his living by doing Volpone’s bidding. Mosca writes and stages a small play within the play, and through that play he orchestrates Volpone’s elaborate ruses, showing his masterful usage of language and acute improvisational skills. He is praised for his “quick fiction,” which can be drawn in parallel with the playwright’s “quick comedy,” referred to in the Prologue. Mosca, thus, can be seen as an analogue for Jonson himself. Mosca takes joy in working for Volpone, but he’s treacherous above all: he easily convinces Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino that he is on each of their sides (when he’s really on Volpone’s side alone), and then, when he spies an opportunity to trick even Volpone, he takes it. During Volpone’s faked death, Mosca assumes the role as his heir, inverts the social structure by acting above his rank, and he ultimately causes all of the ruses to unravel in an attempt to win part of Volpone’s fortune for himself.
· Voltore: Voltore means “vulture,” and, true to his name, Voltore is one of the Italian men lurking around Volpone’s deathbed hoping to inherit his wealth. He is a well-spoken lawyer, and Mosca praises him disingenuously for his ability to speak so well and argue any side of a case. Later in the play, when Volpone is accused of raping Celia, Voltore uses his masterful language skills to convince the court (the Avocatori) that Volpone seem innocent. Voltore seems go back and forth between being ruled by a conscience and by his greed. When he believes that Volpone is dead and Mosca has been named the heir, he recants his testimony before the Avocatori out of guilt. But when Voltore learns that he still might inherit Volpone’s fortune, he pretends to be possessed by the devil to argue that his original false testimony was true. The play emphasizes the importance of language, which might be the reason (in addition to his flashes of moral integrity) that Voltore’s punishment at the play’s end is less severe than the punishments of other characters.
· Corbaccio: Corbaccio’s name means “raven.” Another bird of prey figure, he is a doddering old man who, like Voltore and Corvino, hopes to be named Volpone’s heir. Corbaccio doesn’t hear well, and he is old and infirm, so his hope is only to live longer than Volpone. Whenever he receives news of Volpone’s (false) illness, Corbaccio openly expresses joy, even saying that hearing that Volpone is dying fills him with youth and energy. Part of Corbaccio’s desire for wealth seems altruistic, as he wants to leave his own fortune to his son Bonario. However, Mosca is easily able to manipulate Corbaccio into disinheriting Bonario. While Corbaccio initially does this in the hope of increasing the wealth he’ll eventually leave to his son, Corbaccio ultimately becomes corrupted and caught up in Mosca’s schemes, and the court forcibly transfers all of Corbaccio’s assets to Bonario.
· Bonario: Corbaccio’s son. Bonario’s name comes from the Italian word for “good,” and he represents goodness in the play. He is a valiant, morally righteous figure who maintains family values despite being disinherited by his father. Though Mosca attempts to manipulate him, Bonario is able to resist this manipulation more so than other characters in the play, and he courageously rescues Celia from Volpone’s attempted rape. In court, he refuses to lie, and he claims that truth will be his only testimony.
· Corvino: Corvino, whose name means “crow,” is the final ‘bird’ hoping to inherit Volpone’s wealth. He is a merchant, and he is both greedy and controlling to an extreme. He’s cruel to his wife Celia, whom he confines to their home, and he is so jealous of other men looking at her that he tries to prevent her from getting too close to the windows. However, his financial greed proves more powerful than his jealousy and desire for control; having heard that doctors have prescribed a night with a woman as the only cure for Volpone’s illness, Corvino tries to force Celia to sleep with Volpone in order to secure his place as Volpone’s heir. By the end of the play, Corvino is willing to pretend that Celia cheated on him, preferring to be publicly recognized as a cuckold than to admit that he tried to force his wife into infidelity to obtain someone else’s wealth.
· Celia: Celia is Corvino’s wife and her name means “heaven.” She is innocent, good, and religious, and she’s faithful to Corvino despite his suspicious. When Volpone tries to rape her she resists, and in court she constantly appeals to heaven to expose Volpone. She represents the Renaissance ideal of a woman: chaste, silent, and obedient. At the play’s end, she is freed from her marriage to Corvino by court order, but not necessarily permitted to remarry.
· Sir Politic Would-be: Sir Politic Would-be is an English knight, but he only gained his knighthood at a time when the English throne sold knighthoods out to make money. As an English traveler in Venice, he has been warned by travel guides to avoid being corrupted by the loose Italian morals. Politic means “worldly-wise,” and Sir Politic attempts to seem so. However, he is a comic figure because he is extremely gullible, and he tries so hard to give the appearance of being knowledgeable that he agrees to ridiculous fictions and fabricates absurd economic enterprises. Much of the play’s subplot is at his expense.
· Lady Would-be: Lady Would-be is Sir Politic’s wife. In contrast to Celia, who is confined to her home, Lady Would-be is given a lot of freedom, roaming Venice freely. Lady Would-be also contrasts with the Renaissance ideal of a woman, since she is extremely talkative and well educated. She is skilled with language and makes constant literary references, but most of the men in the play (in particular Volpone) find her exceptionally annoying. She constantly chides her staff for not doing a good enough job.
· Peregrine: Peregrine’s name means “traveler,” and he is another English traveler abroad, a counterpoint to Sir Politic Would-be. Sir Politic offers to help Peregrine learn the ways of Venice and avoid corruption, and Peregrine agrees in order to spend time with Sir Politic (whom he considers to be a ridiculous figure) for his own amusement. When Lady Would-be mistakes Peregrine for a prostitute, Peregrine believes he has fallen for a prank of Sir Politic’s, and he immediately designs his own prank in revenge.
- Minor Characters:
· Nano: Nano’s name means “dwarf” in Italian, which is fitting, since Nano is a dwarf. He, along with Androgyno and Castrone, is a servant and fool (jester) to Volpone.
· Androgyno: Androgyno means “hermaphrodite” in Italian. Like Nano and Castrone, Androgyno is a companion and entertainer to Volpone.
· Castrone: Castrone’s name means “eunuch” in Italian. Like Nano and Androgyno, Castrone is a companion to Volpone, but he has very few spoken lines in the play.
· Servitore: A servant to Corvino.
· Women: Several serving women, attendant on Lady Would-be.
· Avocatori: Four magistrates presiding in the court in Venice.
· Notario: The court recorder.
· Commendatori: Officers in Venice.
· Mercatori: Three merchants, used by Peregrine in a prank against Sir Politic Would-be.
· Mob / Crowd / Grege: A mob, members of a crowd.
· Stone the Fool: A dead English fool who does not appear in the play. Sir Politic Would-be thinks he was a spy.
v Themes:
· Theatre and Appearance vs Reality: Like other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, Jonson explores the relationship between appearance and reality, of seeming versus being—which, of course, evokes the theatre itself. At first glance, much in the play is as it seems. Certain appearances and labels (names, for example) are indicative of reality. Volpone, the fox, is a sly trickster hoping to fool other animals. Mosca, the fly, is his servant, buzzing around and whispering lies into peoples’ ears. Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, the vulture, raven, and crow respectively, act like birds of prey, scavenging for Volpone’s wealth on his (apparent) deathbed. Most of the play’s other characters also have allegorical names that reveal their true selves at first glance. This effect is used for humor (the dwarf has the deadpan name of Nano, which means “dwarf”) and to reinforce the play’s sense of morality, as the virtuous characters Bonario and Celia are named after, respectively, “good” and “heaven.” These characters clearly represent abstract ideals, which is typical of morality plays, a genre which Jonson riffs on in Volpone. While Jonson merges many sources and complicates the typical morality play, the plot of Volpone is essentially that of a simple animal fable in which the fox uses cunning to trick birds out of their meals. Appearance, then, can be indicative of reality. At the same time, the trickery in the play suggests that appearance cannot always be trusted. Volpone is filled with disguise, deception, and theatre. The characters constantly stage performances to confuse and manipulate on another. Volpone pretends to be mortally ill as part of his ruse, which includes a costume and makeup to appear more convincing. In a completely contrasting role, he also acts as an over-the-top mountebank selling a healing elixir, and later he acts as a court deputy. Mosca facilitates much of this deception; he deceives Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino into believing that they each will be Volpone’s heir, acting as a writer and a director of the play’s tricks. Mosca’s skills, then, are performance and improvisation—in other words, obscuring reality with theatrical appearances. At one point, Volpone even praises Mosca for his “quick fiction,” which draws him into parallel with the playwright himself, since Jonson’s “quick comedy” is praised in the play’s prologue. As the play unfolds, though, Jonson begins to suggest some of the dangers of deception: some of the disguises in the play, for example, become so convincing they threaten to become real—Volpone worries that pretending to be diseased will cause his health to decline, and the ruse in which Volpone makes Mosca his heir threatens to become reality and rob Volpone of his fortune. Ultimately, though, the ruses are all revealed. Jonson’s opinion on theatre, as indicated in the prologue, is that it should be entertaining and beneficial; theatre can be funny, but it should still contain some moral lesson. In this play, the moral lesson is reinforced through the punishment of pretty much all of the major characters. Volpone and Mosca are exposed and punished for their deception, and so are Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, who by the end of the play have been roped into one of Mosca’s ruses. After all the plots have been revealed in court, Bonario says, “Heaven will not let such gross crimes be hid.” This line can be used to express the play’s overall treatment of appearance and reality. Appearances can be convincing and deceptive, and they can be manipulated for positive gain. However, certain realities—fundamental truths, goodness, and evil—will always make themselves known, despite any attempts to change or hide their appearance. Theatre can create powerful fantasies, but Jonson seems to say that, even in the best performances, truth and goodness will shine through fiction.
· Money and Commerce: The driving force of the play’s plot is desire for money, which propels the three men trying to steal Volpone’s fortune and drives Volpone in his attempt to manipulate and swindle them. In the play’s opening scene, Volpone shows how much the Italians value money when he delivers a blasphemous speech in which he calls money “the world’s soul” and praises it like a god. Money, he says, is everything, and whoever has money is naturally imbued with nobility, valiance, honesty, and wisdom. Numerous other analogies are also used during the play that stress money’s importance. Talking to Volpone’s fortune, for example, Mosca tells money to “multiply,” which personifies wealth by invoking reproduction. Throughout the play, money is also described, through medicinal and alchemical imagery, as the best, purest cure for all ailments, expanding on Volpone’s claim that money makes everything better. In a final, extreme example, Mosca leads Corvino to believe that he will act as Corvino’s servant, and he says that for this employment he owes his very being to Corvino. Mosca thereby substitutes money and employment for a divine creator, who would typically be credited for a person’s existence. It’s a telling substitution, because, in the play, material pursuits become a sort of religion for those obsessed with money. Such excessive emphasis on money is a satire on Venice’s stereotypical obsession with commerce. In one sense, Ben Jonson’s satire of commerce is purely comedic and ridiculous. Sir Politic Would-Be plans numerous farfetched entrepreneurial schemes with the hope of becoming rich, all the while being ridiculed by Peregrine. This absurd subplot goes as far as Sir Politic pretending to be an imported turtle. But the play also gives a more serious satire in the main plot, in which money is depicted as dangerous and corrupting (as we’ll see in more detail in the following theme). The play shows that people are willing to do anything for money, which leads to moral lapses. Voltore, Corbaccio, Corvio, and even Lady Would-Be become convinced that they will inherit Volpone’s fortune, and all of them compromise their values and are easily manipulated by Mosca. Corvino is even convinced to offer his wife up as a sexual partner for Volpone to secure his chances at the fortune. Much of the emphasis on commerce and money comes from the English stereotype of Italians (and in particular Venetians). English playwrights like Jonson saw in Italy a dangerous society in which wealth, competition, and materialism were valued over morality. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, for example, concerns money and desire for wealth taken to the extreme, and it is also set in Venice (as its title suggests). Part of Jonson’s mission as a playwright is to leave the audience with a lesson, and so his satire of the Italian obsession with commerce also expresses the fear that London would fall prey to the same obsession and become morally bankrupt in the pursuit of wealth. In other words, Jonson feared that London would turn into an English version of Venice, in which citizens are fatally, blasphemously obsessed with wealth. The play thus hopes to dissuade viewers and readers from allowing financial matters to outweigh moral ones. This message is heavily reinforced by the play’s ending, in which none of the principal characters wind up with any fortune, and Volpone himself winds up with a near death sentence. Money can be taken away easily, since it is impermanent, but the implications of moral lapses are eternal.
· Greed and Corruption: In addition to having a reputation for commerce, Venice (and Italy in general) was stereotypically known for greed and corruption, both moral and political. Volpone’s subplot involves fear of spying, but the play’s primary interest in corruption is of a different kind; more than political corruption, Volpone explores the ways in which people can become morally corrupted. The Italian men in the play are all corrupted by avarice, which means greed or excessive desire. According to Jonson, desire itself is not inherently evil. Rather, it’s avarice—excessive desire—that becomes morally corrupting. Avarice is first presented (as hinted at in the Money and Commerce theme), as financial greed. Again, desire for money isn’t inherently bad, but the characters in Volpone become corrupted once that desire is excessive. Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino are obsessed with becoming Volpone’s heir because they hope to inherit his fortune. Their greed is so strong that they have no regard for Volpone’s life; Corbaccio even overtly expresses glee when Mosca lists Volpone’s fake symptoms and diseases. All three of the hopeful heirs are driven to extreme moral lapses by their greed, each of which violates a key aspect of society. Voltore, the lawyer, commits perjury and helps Mosca to deceive the court, the play’s ultimate source of punishment, authority, and justice. Corbaccio is convinced to disinherit his son, challenging the fundamental means by which wealth was preserved. (Though it could be argued that he only disinherited his son to win Volpone’s fortune, thereby increasing the fortune that Corbaccio’s son would eventually inherit.) Greed is also sufficient to convince Corvino to break the sanctity of marriage and offer his wife up to Volpone. Volpone is greedy for money, but his downfall is ultimately caused by excessive greed for pleasure, showing that greed comes in many forms and that, in excess, it is all consuming. Volpone takes immense pleasure in fooling and swindling Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, and it’s his inability to stop and settle for the pleasure he’s already had that brings him to his demise. After he has almost been discovered and still managed to get away with his plots, Volpone is driven to try to pull off an even more excessive one, going as far to fake his death. This fake death then provides opportunity for Mosca to succumb to greed and turn on Volpone. Victory, then, and excess of anything (especially wealth and pleasure) are corrupting. Put simply, desire for too much of anything is bad. While the Italian men in the play are morally corrupted by greed in many forms, the play also explores the way Englishmen could be morally corrupted by Italian influence. This dynamic is explored through Sir Politic Would-Be and Peregrine, two English travelers abroad in Italy. Sir Politic offers to help teach Peregrine how to properly be Italian without corrupting his more reserved, English nature. Neither man becomes corrupted in the same sense that the other major characters are (a ruinous obsession with wealth or pleasure), but Peregrine does stage an elaborate ruse to prank Sir Politic, complete with disguises and costumes, which suggests that his time in Venice did influence him to use the type of trickery that Volpone and Mosca abuse. The play’s moral stance towards greed and corruption is outlined by Volpone at the beginning of the play, despite the fact that even he eventually falls prey to it. Volpone says, “What a rare punishment is avarice to itself.” The act of being greedy necessarily brings on its own punishment. He is referring to his would-be heirs here, but also unwittingly foretelling his own downfall. Audiences might root for Volpone in his first plots and take pleasure in his ability to manipulate others, but Volpone’s desire for pleasure becomes so excessive and insatiable that the play turns on him and ends with his punishment. The harsh sentencing rendered at the end of the play reinforces Jonson’s moral lesson to avoid excess: all the men are stripped of their wealth, and it is implied that Volpone will lose his life for his own acquiescence to avarice.
· Gender Roles and Women: Most of the play’s characters are men who operate in the traditionally male sphere of commerce. At the time in which the play is set, men were wholly responsible for finance and they were expected to have power over women in relationships, roles that most of the male characters in the play firmly occupy. However, the play also compares male authority, love, sex, and courtship to the social expectations of women by exploring two examples of marriages, one an extreme depiction of an Italian marriage and the other a comedic English relationship. The Italian marriage is between Celia and Corvino. Though Celia is virtuous, she is kept under Corvino’s extremely careful and cruel control—Corvino keeps her indoors almost at all times, and he forbids her, at one point, from even venturing too close to a window. Corvino’s rule over Celia is extreme, but it was stereotypical for Italian men to be jealous and controlling of their wives. Likewise, Celia represents the stereotypical Renaissance ideal of a woman; she is silent, chaste, and obedient. This is shown to work to both her advantage and disadvantage. Her sterling reputation initially gives her credibility in court, but her testimony is quickly undermined since, as a woman, she was considered to be an unreliable witness (even to a crime of which she was a victim). The power of Celia’s reputation cannot stand up to the stereotype that women are too hysterical and emotional to be trustworthy and rational, even though the men who argue against her are known to be deceitful. The cruelty of the impossible position in which Celia finds herself in court illustrates that seventeenth century women couldn’t win—no matter how virtuous, women were considered to be untrustworthy and inferior creatures. Jonson’s position on gender roles can be clarified, to an extent, through an examination of Corvino and Volpone, who both try to exhibit male authority over Celia through sexuality (Corvino attempts to whore her to Volpone, who in turn attempts to rape her). For a while, it seems that Volpone will get away with this rape attempt, as several men during the play conspire to say that Celia is lying about her accusation. At the end of the play, Volpone is punished, but it seems that the primary reason for his punishment is his continuous deception of the play’s other men, rather than the attempted rape. It’s difficult to discern Jonson’s ultimate statement (if any exists) about sexual oppression. However, it could be argued that, while he shows sexual oppression and violence to be reprehensible, Jonson believes that the oppression of women is less important than the moral lesson about excessive desire and greed. Lust and rape are bad, in other words, but only because they are a form of avariciousness. The crime Volpone seems most guilty of in the play is excessive greed for money at the expense of Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino. Lady Would-Be, the second woman in the play, is the opposite of Celia. The play contrasts her marriage to Sir Politic Would-Be—a quintessentially English marriage—with the Italian marriage between Corvino and Celia. Lady Would-Be is more independent than Celia, which reinforces the stereotype that married English women were given more freedom than married Italian women. Lady Would-Be is able to wander Venice on her own, and she is seen without her husband just as often as with him (contrast this with Celia, who is prevented from even leaving her home). Lady Would-Be is also much more talkative than Celia, though the play doesn’t exactly suggest that this is a good thing. When Lady Would-Be visits Volpone, he jokes in asides that she is so long-winded that he’s being tortured by her “flood of words,” and that, though he’s only pretending to be sick, she’s actually making him ill by talking ceaselessly. Much of this scene, we can note, is taken from an ancient Greek book called “On Talkative Women,” suggesting that Jonson might have believed that there was some truth to the stereotype that woman talk excessively (more generously, one could argue that Jonson is merely engaging with the literary tradition of depicting women in this way). Lady Would-Be, however, also breaks the mold of a renaissance woman in that she appears to be educated, certainly much more so than Celia. Her long-winded speeches are so filled with literary references and allusions that Peregrine is shocked when she yells at him. The differences between Lady Would-Be and Celia illustrate different societal roles for women in Italy and England, which suggests that gender roles are culturally contingent, rather than biologically determined. In this way, the play challenges stereotypical gender roles and assumptions about women, though it sometimes affirms stereotypes, too. At the very least, Volpone complicates the role of women in society by showing that women—like men—can be well read, virtuous, well educated, and well spoken.
· Language: Throughout Volpone, Jonson celebrates quick wit (especially his own), wordplay, and language itself. The play begins with the “Argument” and the “Prologue,” both of which stress the playwright’s mastery of language. The argument is given in a masterful acrostic, in which each of the seven verses begins with one of the letters of VOLPONE. The prologue then emphasizes that the play itself is of high quality, and assures the audience that the play was written in five weeks without any collaborator or any other input. By the time the play itself begins, audiences have been firmly reassured of Jonson’s own wit and skill with language. Within the play, the skill that separates Volpone and Mosca from the other characters is a brilliant ability to use and manipulate language. Volpone even praises Mosca for his “quick fiction,” which echoes the lauding of Jonson’s “quick comedy” from the Prologue. Mosca, then, can be seen as embodying some aspects of the playwright within the play. As noted in the Appearance vs Reality theme, Mosca is like a writer and director, using his plays-within-the-play to trick other characters. While Mosca uses disguises to pull off these ruses, language is his most significant means of deception and the greatest source of power in the play. It’s Mosca’s ability to think and speak on his feet that allows him to deceive Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino so easily, even if they are all in the room together. The play also emphasizes the importance of language in the court scenes, in which language is equivalent with truth. Voltore, the lawyer with a “gold-tipped tongue,” is praised (disingenuously) by Mosca at the beginning of the play for his ability to instantly argue either side of a case. In the court scenes, though, Voltore launches into long legal speeches that are so successful that the court becomes convinced by Mosca’s ruse (that Volpone didn’t attempt to rape Celia). Mosca even tells Volpone to pay Voltore because the language he used was so strong. When asked to put up their own witnesses, Bonario and Celia merely appeal to their consciences and to heaven without saying very much. One of the Avocatori is quick to respond, “These are no testimonies.” Though Bonario and Celia cannot properly speak or testify for themselves, their morality is insufficient—their exoneration must occur through language, as Volpone eventually confesses verbally to his crimes. It’s also of note that the Avocatori deliver their punishments simply by speaking them, demonstrating the legal power of speech acts. The legal system thus reinforces what Jonson shows in the Argument and Prologue and what Mosca demonstrates throughout the play: language is power.
v Motifs:
· The Sacred and the Profane: Volpone, both in his initial speech in Act I and in his seduction speech of Act III, mixes religious language and profane subject matter to a startling poetic effect. In Act I the subject of his worship is money; in Act III it is Celia, or perhaps her body, that inspires prayer-like language. As a foil against this, Celia pleads for a distinction to be restored between the "base" and the "noble," (in other words, between the profane—that which is firmly rooted in our animal natures, and the sacred—that which is divine about humans. Through their respective fates, the play seems to endorse Celia's position, though Jonson invests Volpone's speeches with a great deal of poetic energy and rhetorical ornamentation that make his position attractive and rich, which is again, another source of tension in the play.
· Disguise, Deception, and Truth: Jonson creates a complex relationship among disguise, deception, and truth in the play. Disguise sometimes serves simply to conceal, as it does when Peregrine dupes Sir Politic Would-be. But sometimes it reveals inner truths that a person's normal attire may conceal. Volpone, for example, publicly reveals more of his "true self" (his vital, healthy self) when he dresses as Scoto Mantua; and Scoto's speeches seem to be filled with authorial comment from Jonson himself. Furthermore, disguise is seen to exert a certain force and power all of its own; by assuming one, people run the risk of changing their identity, of being unable to escape the disguise. This is certainly the case for Mosca and Volpone in Act V, whose "disguised" identities almost supersede their actual ones.
· "Gulling": Gulling means "making someone into a fool." The question that the play teaches us to ask is who is being made a fool by whom?. Volpone plays sick to make the legacy-hunters fools, but Mosca plays the "Fool" (the harmless assistant and entertainer) in order to make Volpone into a fool. To make someone else into a fool is both the primary method characters have for asserting power over one another and the primary way Jonson brings across his moral message: the characters in the play who are made into fools—Corbaccio, Corvino, Voltore, Volpone—are the characters whose morality we are supposed to criticize.
v Symbols:
· Disease and Medicine: At first glance, disease might appear only to be used as a tool for trickery and humor in the play. Volpone’s main scam is pretending that he is rife with disease in order to get money out of hopeful heirs to his fortune. In another scam, this time pretending to be a mountebank, Volpone mentions an excessive list of diseases in an absurd sales pitch for a miraculous healing elixir. In both of these scams, any mention of disease is theatrical and comedic. At the same time, however, for contemporary audiences (and for the characters in the play) disease represents a serious, deadly, and mysterious threat. As mentioned at one point by Sir Politic Would-be, Europe was rife with plague, about which little was understood. And while illness was terrifying and dangerous, contemporary doctors offered little comfort. Characters in the play commonly express their utter distrust of doctors, whom they believe kill patients at will, and characters seek and believe in alternative forms of medicine even beyond cure-all elixirs. Corvino, for example, agrees to let his wife Celia sleep with Volpone as a cure for his ailments. We can also note that despite Volpone’s willingness to evoke disease for trickery, he is constantly afraid that acting sick, dwelling on fears, or experiencing displeasure will result in him truly becoming infected. Medicine and disease, then, are often referenced humorously, but they represent deep and legitimate fears for most of the play’s characters and for its 17th century audience.
· Gold and Alchemy: On one level, gold symbolizes wealth. Gold is physical money, both expensive and luxurious. The opening speech of the play reveals Volpone’s obsession with money through an ode to gold, and the first transaction of the play involves a gift of a gold plate. Throughout the play, characters emphasize that gold is what lends objects and people in the world their best qualities. Blasphemously, Volpone even says that gold is brighter than the sun or God himself. The Renaissance understanding of gold, though, was complicated and fluid. Alchemy, an early form of chemistry, taught that metals were all composed of the same material; the only difference between lead and gold was purity. Thus, with the right methods, one could purify lead into gold. This idea of purifying something and scientifically changing it into gold parallels a lowborn person accumulating wealth and becoming highborn, as Mosca almost accomplishes at the end of the play. We can note that, for years, the play was performed with an alternate ending in which Mosca receives Volpone’s fortune. The alchemical fluidity of gold also allows it to blend with the play’s other symbols, as characters constantly say that gold is the best medicine. This is meant figuratively, as characters within the play believe that wealth and gold instill people with heath and excellent qualities, but also literally, as an elixir of drinkable gold was sometimes used as medicine.
v Protagonist: Volpone is the protagonist of the play.
v Setting: The setting for Volpone is Venice, which the English considered a center of sinful vices. Thus, Jonson felt very comfortable using this city as a setting for a story about greed. Shakespeare also used Venice as a setting for several of his plays, including The Merchant of Venice and Othello.
v Genre: Volpone is a comedy play by English playwright Ben Jonson first produced in 1605–1606, drawing on elements of city comedy and beast fable. A merciless satire of greed and lust, it remains Jonson's most-performed play, and it is ranked among the finest Jacobean era comedies.
v Point of View: No narrator, no point of view.
v Tone: Tone is defined as the author's attitude towards the subject he is dealing with. This question asks us to look at the songs in Volpone, and describe how Jonson uses them to indicate to the reader what he thinks of the events of the play. If we do so, we note, first of all, the songs are all light in tone, jovial, and tend to celebrate trickery and roguery; for example, Scoto's songs to sell his medicinal oil, or Nano's song about the life of the fool. Or there is Volpone's song to Celia in III.vii, which lyrically describes the life of sensuous pleasure he envisions for them. And finally, there are no songs after Volpone's attempted rape of Celia. The last one, Volpone's, comes right before that event. This suggests that the presence of song is directly linked to how we should view Volpone; the light-hearted songs encourage a similarly light-hearted attitude towards Volpone and his trickery. But after the attempted rape, the songs disappear, and the attitude of the play in general changes, and becomes much harsher towards Volpone; the sudden lack of song helps signal this to the reader. Other purposes the songs may serve include characterization and the exploration of the themes of parasitism and "gulling."
v Foreshadowing: Mosca's soliloquy in III.i
Literary Devices: Through the device of Volpone's con, Jonson makes his satiric commentary on greed, using dramatic irony, situational irony, verbal irony, and repetition.

Link to story on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39895998/chapters/99895653
Chapter 1 (Part B)
The night went faster than I would have liked, and the next day went about the same. I showed up at McDougalls, watched more videos, and went home to spend my night gaming with the homies. Wednesday was my saving grace. I only had to watch an hour's worth of videos before I finished them all. And, I got to see the fabled customer service one; it was bad. The actors talked like robots, especially the muton actor who smashed a table in rage because his burger didn't have pickles on it. It looked like a high school play.
I walked into the office. Mark was typing on a computer when I came in. "Hey, I'm finished with the videos."
He looked up from his work and stopped typing. "Great, just in time for the lunch rush. Follow me." He stood up, and I followed him to the front counter. I hadn't thought about it much because I almost always took my orders to go, but the dining area of Mcdougalls reminded me of a hospital. With its grey floor tiles, white fluorescent lighting, sterile white tables, plain walls paired with stale art of burgers and paint splatters, and tvs playing the news constantly.
I felt my heart skip a beat when he walked me over to Sammy. "Vincent, this is Sammy."
This was a gift from God the Almighty and I will not squander it. I forced myself to say something. "Ey, what's up?"
She smiled back at me and said, "Oh, just, like, taking orders, well I would be if it wasn't slow right now." Nailed it.
Mark continued. "She will be your trainer until you feel confident enough to take orders on your own."
"I'm, like, a really good teacher. I help my sister with her homework all the time, so you, like, don't gotta worry about a thing."
"I've got work to do in the office, so don't disturb me unless it's important." He turned to leave and walked back into his office, leaving me and Sammy alone. As alone as we could be in a restaurant full of workers and customers.
"So, Sammy... Where should we start?"
She turned my attention to the computer screen in front of her. "Well Vincent, since there's, like, nobody ordering, I can give you, like, a rundown on the system. So, like these things are touchscreen, so you touch the buttons you want." She clicked through some tabs at the top. "There's, like, different sections to the menu that have different items. You, like, click the small, medium, or large buttons before clicking the food item, and that makes it a meal. Pretty easy."
"Yea, yea. I guess, like, when you, like, explain it like that, it, like, makes perfect sense."
Her eyes widened and she laughed. "Omg, you are such a bully. This is, like, my first time training someone, okay. I'm not like reading off a script."
I shrugged my shoulders. "Ey, forget about it, I'm sure you'll get a turn to bully me too."
"Shhhhh. Here comes a customer. Pay attention." She turned her attention to the customer, who was a middle-aged woman. "Hi, what can I getcha?"
The woman looked at the menu for a few seconds. "I'll get the Humogous Meaty Dougall as a meal with a diet citrus, and a 6 piece Chicken tender, not as a meal, with Habanero Ranch. A large McCheeseburger meal, no onions or mustard with a citrus. A chocolate creme cookie McBlurry, and 2 Apple flavored pies." As the woman rattled her order off, Sammy clicked all over the screen in a flurry and the order popped up on the screen.
"Alright ma'am, is that for here, or to go?"
"To go."
"Ok, your total is 180.32 shillings."
The woman reached her phone towards the top of the computer and held it there. After a few seconds, the transaction went through. "Could you put extra napkins in the bag?" The woman said.
"I sure can. Here's your receipt, we'll call your number when your order's ready."
"That was crazy, how you were pushing all those buttons so quick. I could barely keep up with what she was saying."
She smiled and shrugged. "Once you, like, work here a couple months, it's easy. I could still take orders if I was blind."
"You are wearing glasses, you could take them off and try that out."
She laughed again. "Omg, stooooooop."
We both straightened out our act as a fat black guy in a green coat walked up to the counter. "Can I get, uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, two number 9's, a large number 9, a number 6 with extra McDougall sauce, a number 7, two number 15's, one with cheese, and a large diet cola."
"Ok sir, your total is 4,799.14 shillings. Is that for here or to go?"
He said, "To go." as he held his phone up to the computer.
And that's how the next few hours went. I'd chat a little with Sammy in between orders, and try to watch what she did when she took the orders. Things were going well, I made her laugh a few times, but I still knew nothing about her. I'd have to find an opportunity to get to know her better. It was time for my lunch break, so I got some food from McDougalls, Sammy made me type in my order on the computer, and I was successful.
Once my food was ready, I took it to the break room, but saw all the chairs were full through the glass window in the break room's door. Damn, where the hell am I supposed to eat now? Then I remembered that there were a couple of chairs by the dumpsters. Better than sitting on the floor. I walked out the back door and past the cars in line for the drive through. A brick wall and a metal fence gate with plastic inserts sounded the dumpsters to keep people from digging in the trash and to prevent them from seeing inside the area.
As I lifted the latch and walked inside, I was greeted with a grunt from someone. As I turned to look, surprised I wasn't alone, sitting on, and curled around, one of the chairs was a Viper. Her scales were pale white with light grey patterns criss-crossing acrost her body; she had the standard viper diamond pattern, but it was like the colors were completely mute. There were these dark circles around her eyes; I couldn't tell if they were a part of her pattern, or makeup, or from sleep deprivation, but it accentuated her deep blue eyes that contrasted from her almost colorless appearance. Her hood was pierced with two wide black hoop earrings higher up on the right side of her hood.
I'd've assumed she wasn't supposed to be here if she wasn't wearing a McDougall's black polo shirt. The bottom she wore was a form-fitting black skirt made of the same material as my pants. Her name tag had Tay written on it. We were both caught off guard, and she observed me as much as I observed her in that moment. She took a long drag from the cigarette she was holding and blew the smoke in my direction before saying, "What're you gawking at faggot, you never seen a girl smoke a cigarette before?"
Her hostility was sharp and quick, like a snake lashing out to bite at whatever had disturbed its hiding place. I'd been called plenty of things on construction sites, so faggot didn't catch me off guard. "Sorry, uh, I didn't expect anyone else to be back here."
Her blue eyes drifted to the bag of food I was holding, and she made a weird chortling sound. "Wait. Were you gonna eat your lunch back here?"
No point in lying. "Yea, I was."
She took another drag of her cigarette, waiting for me to elaborate, and when I didn't she asked, "Why?"
I shrugged. "Table was full in the break room. Plus, I guess it's a lot quieter out here. Don't have to listen to those fucking beeping noises from the ordering system."
She listened intently to my reasoning and acknowledged it with. "Hmm... You the fresh meat? Mark mentioned he hired some Italian guy recently."
"Yea, I just started this week. And my parents and I are American, my family's been here for generations."
She raised her scaly eyebrows and smirked. "I think you mean were American. The states aren't as united anymore if you haven't noticed."
I didn't have anything to respond to that with. "Okay."
Her uniform was loose around her stomach, but it hugged her supple bosom like a glove, and when she leaned back in her chair, they looked like they were going to rip the buttons and burst out of her shirt. "Are you gonna stand there all day like a dumbass, or take a seat and eat your lunch?"
I took a second to collect myself after that, and now I was getting mad. "Look, I don't know who shit in your fucking bolognese, but don't be such a dick."
Her long neck slumped over the backrest of her chair, and she kept smoking behind it. "No one is forcing you to stay here..." she sighed.
I took a seat in the folding chair across from her and started eating my burger and fries. As I ate, her eyes would occasionally glance in my direction from behind the chair.
As much as she was being an asshole, I figured I'd try to make small talk anyway. This was the first time I'd ever had a casual conversation with a Viper before. "So, what's it like working here?"
Air escaped her nose. "It sucks."
"That's it?"
She shrugged. "What more is there to say? I'd be the happiest girl on Earth if that building burnt to the fucking ground."
"It sucks that much?" I was hoping it wasn't going to be that bad working here.
She pulled her head up from behind her chair and pointed at me with two fingers holding the cigarette. "Let me give you some advice, new guy! No one and I mean no one works here because they like it! And no one, especially not a Viper that could crush your bones like toothpicks, likes having their 15 minute break interrupted!"
She slithered out of her chair, up to me. I winced as she put her cigarette out on the underside of her arm and threw it into the dumpster behind me. When she left the dumpster area, she turned to give me a death glare with her sharp blue eyes before shutting the gate, leaving me alone. Jeez, what was her problem?
The rest of my break was not as eventful. As I walked back inside McDougalls I ran into Mark in the hallway. "Hey, Vince. Getting back to work?"
I nodded. "Yea. The, uhh, the alien you got employed... Is she a Viper?"
He looked behind himself at the grill in the kitchen. That Viper Tay was flipping patties on the grill. "Ah, you met her. Yes, she works here."
"I thought you said she worked a night shift?"
"Yes, I did. Asked her to come in a few hours early today to fill in for Calvin. She's not happy about it, but she'll get overtime."
She glanced in my direction and frowned. "I noticed..."
He chuckled. "Oh, that's just — don't let her scare you. She's not a psychopath, much as she wishes she was, just your run of the mill asshole."
"And she doesn't cause trouble?"
"Oh, she's always in the kitchen, and there's fewer people working at night. I wouldn't ever have her take people's orders." There is something else he isn't telling me. He could tell I wasn't convinced, so he leaned over and whispered to me. "She's the one non-human I hired to meet the diversity requirement. The city government supports her wage, and she's a good worker, so I'm not about to get rid of her."
I nodded. "I get ya."
"Good, now quit standing around and get back to work. I've got work to do."
I went back up front and continued my training with Sammy. By the end of my shift, I was taking orders on my own. My first meeting with a viper didn't go how I imagined it would, but I had to bring it up with my friends tonight.
My walk home was uneventful as was my shower. I joined my friends online for a game of Rebuilding Civilization, it was a sequel to a much older game that was just called Civilization.
"Yes, I've got elerium near one of my cities for once. You guys are so fucked." Ray said confidently.
I surrounded a bandit enclave with my low-tech militia units and began peppering it with makeshift small arms fire from a hill tile. "You doing alright Josh? Haven't heard you say anything in a while."
"My Capital city is surrounded by bandit enclaves and chryssalid hives, dude. I'm just trying to survive." He sounded annoyed.
"At least you won't have to worry about anyone else invading you." I joked.
"You guys sound like you have it so bad. I'm just over here trading with the Parisians and the Bavarians." Daniel said.
"You always pick the most boring strats, Dan. Why don't you ever try something besides economic victories?" Ray said.
"If it works well, why would I do anything else? Besides, my civilization is more stable than any of your guys'. No offense Josh, my ears are not deaf to your plights."
"Please... help me." Josh begged.
I had been waiting for the right moment to discuss this, and with the bandit enclave destroyed, I could leave my city on autopilot for a few turns. "So, the wildest thing happened to me at work today. You guys remember when I said there was an alien working on night shift the other day?"
They all responded with, "yeah".
"Well, I actually met her today. And she was a Viper."
This caught the attention of Ray. "Dude, no way your ass actually talked to a Viper today... Did you get her number?"
I laughed. "That's the thing, she was a bitch. I don't think I want her number."
"What did she look like?" Daniel asked.
"She looked like a viper, had the hood, but she was a weird color. All white with grey patterns, black around the eyes, and her eyes were this vibrant blue color."
"I'll trust that you took in every detail." Daniel laughed. "Sounds like a morph, not all vipers are the same color since some deviation was allowed from the original Advent genome towards the end of the war. If she had a hood she's definitely not an Adder, could be a Cobra, but there aren't many of those around here—"
Josh interrupted Daniel's musings. "The real question is: how big were her snitties?"
"Vro, those things were so massive that if they had milk in them, she could feed an entire village. Absolutely humongous snockers."
Ray cut in again. "Dude, why didn't you get her number?"
"I already told you: she - was - a - bitch. Called me a faggot and a dumbass in the 5 minutes that I talked to her. And when she left, she put her cigarette out on her own arm. She is one crazy broad that I do not need in my life."
"Ha, she know something we don't, dude? Maybe she can smell it on—" Ray was interrupted by Dan.
"You know, the scales on a viper are not like human skin, they're thicker, so technically, a cigarette burn wouldn't hurt her that much."
"She also threatened to coil around me and break my bones." I said.
"I'd let her break my bones." Ray said.
"You would say that, Ray. You'd let a muton crush your head with her thighs, too, you freak." Josh replied.
"Homie, you better watch what you say or you might give me a chubby." Ray joked. "So, if the Viper's a bitch, how's things with that Sammy girl?"
"Made her laugh a few times today, so that's a good sign. Probably gonna ask her if she wants to hang out, soon."
"Don't rush it, dude. Some chicks, like the viper, have all their bullshit on display. But most chicks keep it hidden deep down inside. Don't rush into anything, take it slow." Ray said.
Daniel cut in. "Wow! Actual good advice Ray, I'm impressed. Bit presumptuous on your part, but you can't go wrong with taking it slow. That's what I've done."
"Vince ain't got a lot of experience with the ladies, so I'm providing what advice I can. I do have the most experience out of all of us."
Daniel chuckled. "Yeah, but I have the longest relationship out of all of us. So, who's the real winner there?"
"Yeah Dan, we know you're boring. You'll probably end up marrying that girl at some point. Real niggas like me live on the edge."
"We get it. You both are smooth with the ladies. Just you wait, the sigma males will have their day in the sun soon." Josh said with a laugh.
"Ugh, what's this! Where did all these chryssalids come from? You still haven't killed all of the hives, Josh?" Ray said.
"The revolution begins. The bugs will soon inherit this imperfect world." Josh let out a maniacal laugh after saying that.
We played well into the night, and no one won, but Ray got close to winning a domination victory. I climbed into bed. What a day too bad about that Viper. I was hoping the first one I met would be nicer than that. She was nothing like the Viper from the Cosmic Banditz anime. Good thing I won't be seeing much of her. Maybe the next one I meet will be nicer. At least Sammy isn't crazy, maybe tomorrow I'll ask her to hang out this weekend. Sleep took me.
—
As always I appreciate any and all feedback. Constructive, and not.
PreviousNext

The last chapter of Proverbs ends with a poem about an ideal woman. What might not be obvious in translation is that the poem is an alphabetic acrostic. This means that verse 10 begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, verse 11 with the second letter, verse 12 with the third letter, etc. through all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This is a fun poetical structure that occurs in several places in the Hebrew Bible, most dramatically in Psalm 119 where 8 verses are dedicated to each letter rather than a single verse as here.
As I pondered this passage I was wondering why use an acrostic here. The purpose of an acrostic is to either teach the alphabet by associating it with well known principles, or to teach well known principles by associating it with the alphabet. Either way the expectation is that the audience is either literate or should be literate. In the ancient world literacy was often confined to priests or politicians. Here this passage targeting women seems to suggest that in ancient Israel women should be literate.
I already found this to be a great thing about this passage but what about the picture it paints of womanhood? How does a their ideal hold up some 3,000 years later? It actually does pretty well.
The KJV mentions a "virtuous" woman but this isn't the best translation.
ʾeshet ḥayil - "Ḥayil means vigor, strength, worth, substance. It is a martial term transferred to civic life. Some have proposed that the term invites us to see this exemplary wife as a heroic figure, a kind of domestic warrior." Robert Alter Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary.

10 ¶ Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.

Same was said of Lady Wisdom. Is this a continuation of that metaphor? By the way rubies isn't correct. It was probably corals, but the meaning is the same.

11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.

We have here another martial reference. Her husband doesn't need to go raiding.

12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
13 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.

The production of textiles is ubiquitous in the ancient world. In most cultures this was the major task of women. If they did not create cloth, you had no clothes to wear.

14 She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.

She is involved in commerce and trading. We now see activity beyond the domestic sphere.

15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.

She works in real estate. We have her examining choice land and working it.

17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.

She goes to the gym? Takes self defense courses? These are terms we would expect of a warrior.

18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.

She runs her own business and knows the value of the goods she produces. Again it emphasizes hard work, maybe even ambition.

• 19 She layeth her hands to the spindle,
  • and her palms hold the distaff.
  • 20 She stretcheth out her palm to the poor;
• yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.

Here I changed the KJV slightly to reveal a nice chiasm in the Hebrew. While KJV uses the term "hand" throughout, the Hebrew actually alternates between two words giving hand, palm, palm, hand.
It should also note the parallel here between her role in the domestic sphere and her philanthropy.

21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.

Not only does she produce clothes for all her household (which seems to include family and slaves) but they are well dressed in the finest of cloth and do not fear the cold.

22 She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.
23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.

The gates were the location of all important legal transactions and the marketplace. This seems to tie her husband's success and respect to her efforts.

24 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.

Again she runs her own business. Sort of an ancient version of Etsy.

25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

Again terminology more expected of a warrior.

26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

The explicit connection with Wisdom again remind of the personification of Lady Wisdom throughout proverbs.

27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
28 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
29 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.
30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

We conclude with a few lines of blessing as well as tieing the whole picture to religious devotion.

"From the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things." - Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), asking for a pardon from Donald Trump

Roe To The Wolves

The May leak was not a fluke: Five Republican Supreme Court justices overturned both Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood on Thursday, eliminating the constitutional right to reproductive freedom across the land.

• Let's skip straight to the dissent, signed by all three liberal justices, which laid out the damage the Alito Five have done. Their minority opinion "says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs." They also point the finger at the far right justices, observing accurately that this is not legitimate judging: "The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them," they wrote. "The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law."
  
• The dissenting justices also warn that the Dobbs ruling is a harbinger of things to come, and that the Republican justices who pretend otherwise are lying. On the abortion front, they warned that "state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct... incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion." And on the slippery slope, they noted this opinion is a live torpedo aimed at rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, and others that share the same foundations as Roe. "Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other."
  
• As if to prove their point, Justice Clarence Thomas write in a concurring opinion that, "in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is 'demonstrably erroneous,'" Those opinions secured rights to contraception, sexual privacy, and same-sex marriage.
  

There was (and is) more underscoring to come.

• Former Vice President Mike Pence celebrated the occasion by calling for a nationwide abortion ban. Newly elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has asked Republican legislators in Virginia to draft their own abortion-ban legislation. Donald Trump (who wants to be president again and do more damage) took all of the "credit" for himself. And across the country latent abortion bans, unenforceable under Roe, snapped back into effect. Even before the ruling came down, fertility doctors took steps to move embryos into blue states, to prevent right-wing governments from commandeering them.
  
• Attorney General Merrick Garland put states on notice that the Justice Department will protect women's right to intestate travel, and stand in the way of their efforts to ban FDA-approved abortifacient medicine. All Democratic leaders responded to the development in similarly withering terms, but the key line from President Biden was this: "We must elect more senators and representatives who will codify a woman’s right to choose into federal law once again, elect more state leaders to protect this right at the local level."
  

He should get more specific. Democrats can say that Roe v. Wade is on the ballot, but the way to put it there in a way people will understand is by offering a specific bargain: Give us the House and two more Democratic senators, and we'll restore the right to abortion in January of next year.

Look No Further Than Crooked Media

In today's emergency episode of Strict Scrutiny, Leah, Kate & Melissa are breaking down the Supreme Courts opinion in Dobbs and what it means for abortion access and care going forward.

Under The Radar

** We've come a long way from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) lying to reporters about his attempt to hand fraudulent election documents directly to then-Vice President Mike Pence, calling it a "non-story," pretending to be on his cell phone, Brave Sir Robinning away from a group of Capitol Hill reporters, and blaming it all on someone else's intern.** Johnson now admits that he coordinated with his chief of staff, Sean Riley, and a Wisconsin attorney named Jim Troupis, to obtain the fake-electors' paperwork in the hope of delivering them to Mike Pence, so that Pence could carry out Donald Trump's illegal coup strategy. While neither Johnson nor his staff ever denied that Johnson intended to courier a fraudulent slate of electors to Pence, his spokeswoman Alexa Henning did claim Johnson "had no foreknowledge that it was going to be delivered to our office." So that was a lie. No bottom with these people!

What Else?

They won't stop here. Neither will we.
The Supreme Court issued a shameful ruling explicitly overturning Roe v. Wade – turning its back on 50 years of precedent.
Emboldened by this decision, anti-abortion extremists and their political allies won't stop here. Opponents of freedom are planning for a nationwide ban on abortion. And they're also attacking our right to use birth control, access gender-affirming care, marry who we love, and vote.
But the ACLU has been preparing for this moment. We're committed to using the full force of our organization to fight these assaults in the courts, in statehouses, in the streets, and at the ballot box. And we're ready to work as hard as it takes – for as long as it takes – to protect all our civil liberties.
The ACLU needs you now more than ever – not just for today – but for the long haul. Donate in this crucial moment to ensure we have the resources needed for the urgent work ahead to defend people's rights.
The ACLU will never back down and we know you won't either. Because, we, the people, always have the power to fight back. And, with your support, that's what we intend to do.
Thanks for taking action,
The ACLU Team

What Else?

The House and Senate have each passed a modest bipartisan gun-reform bill that will tighten the so-called "boyfriend loophole," encourage states to enact red-flag flaws, and fund mental health care and school security.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to replace his domestic intelligence chief, and longtime friend, Ivan Bakanov, who's overseen critical security failures during the resistance to the Russian invasion.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has begun reaching out to Wyoming Democrats with guidance on how to change party affiliation and vote in the GOP primary.
Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters has come out in support of privatizing Social Security.
Republicans are in a panic that Eric Greitens might win Missouri's GOP Senate primary, not because he's a sexual predator and abusive parent who called for mass-murder of RINOs, but because they're worried he'll cost Republicans the seat, so they're not actually doing anything meaningful to stop him.
The Napa County, CA, district attorney has charged Paul Pelosi with two misdemeanor DUI offenses.
An Iowa family honored a deceased relative by rendering his epitaph as an acrostic that spells out FUCK OFF, and other locals who can't mind their own business are all upset about it.

Be Smarter

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as Donald Trump's coronavirus response coordinator (and, too be clear, is hawking a book and trying to cleanse her reputation) delivered harsh testimony to the House select coronavirus subcommittee about her team's enormous coronavirus failures, which derived principally from Trump and his loyalists placing his political fortunes above the health and security of the nation. The central sycophant was Dr. Scott Atlas, a charlatan with no relevant expertise, who assured the Trump administration that COVID-19 would "cause about 10,000 deaths" in the United States, and that non-pharmaceutical interventions wouldn't save any lives. The flattery got him very far, but in Birx's belated estimation, it cost 130,000 Americans their lives. In totally unrelated news, when the Brazilian legislature uncovered similar failures of the Bolsonaro administration, its leaders accused him of mass murder and called for him to be charged with crimes against humanity.

What A Sponsor

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Light At The End Of The Email

Vote Save America has an Immediate Impact Funds, which allows you to donate easily and will spread your donations evenly among the Repro Legal Defense Fund, National Network Of Abortion Funds, and Keep Our Clinics.
Vote Save America also has all the tools you need to find and support candidates in key races who will decide whether abortion bans stand or not.
A former law clerk for Sonia Sotomayor and current Stanford Law Professor has a game plan for states to outmaneuver the Supreme Court as it wages total war on modernity.
A federal grand jury has subpoenaed Arizona GOP Chair—and fake Trump electors—Kelli Ward and her husband Michael.

Enjoy

rob on Twitter: "Jordan Peterson: When a ghost says, "boo!" it is BEYOND alarming, obviously. But the word "boo" not only frightens, it is a condemnation. Joe Rogan: The ghost is scaring you, but he's also, like booing you. Peterson (tearing up): Well there you have it. That's exactly correct."

Verse of the day

(NIV)

What should we learn from Psalm 119?

Containing 176 verses, Psalm 119 is the longest single chapter in the Bible. The author of Psalm 119 is unknown, but most scholars agree that it was written by David, Ezra, or Daniel. Each of these proposed authors suffered serious difficulties in his life, and the author of Psalm 119 reflects that in descriptions of plots, slanders, and taunts against him (verses 23, 42, 51, 150 ), persecutions (verses 61, 86, 95, 110, 121, 134, 157, 161), and afflictions (verses 67, 71, 143, 153). The persecution and affliction of the man (and woman) of God is a major theme of Psalm 119. Another prominent theme in Psalm 119 is the profound truth that the Word of God is all-sufficient. Psalm 119 is an expansion of Psalm 19:7–9: “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.” There are eight different terms referring to the Word of God throughout the psalm: law, testimonies, precepts, statues, commandments, judgments, word, and ordinances. In almost every verse, the Word of God is mentioned. Psalm 119 affirms not only the character of the Scriptures, but it affirms that God’s Word reflects the very character of God Himself. Notice these attributes of God ascribed to Scripture in Psalm 119:

1. Righteousness (verses 7, 62, 75, 106, 123, 138, 144, 160, 164, 172)
2. Trustworthiness (verse 42)
3. Truthfulness (verses 43, 142, 151, 160)
4. Faithfulness (verse 86)
5. Unchangeableness (verse 89)
6. Eternality (verses 90,152)
7. Light (verse 105)
8. Purity (verse 140)

The format of Psalm 119 is an alphabetic acrostic, meaning that the first letters of each line in Hebrew follow through the alphabet, 8 lines per letter, thus 8 lines x 22 letters in Hebrew = 176 lines. One message of this psalm is that we are to live a lifestyle that demonstrates obedience to the Lord, who is a God of order (hence the acrostic structure), not of chaos. The psalm opens with two beatitudes. “Blessed” are those whose ways are blameless, who live according to God’s law, who keep His statutes and seek Him with all their heart. The author of the psalm is a man who has known great trouble in his life, but also one who has come through it with a deep and passionate understanding of God’s unfailing love and compassion (Psalm 119:75–77). Throughout his affliction, the author clings to the truths he learns from the Scriptures, which are eternal and “stand firm in the heavens” (Psalm 119:89–91). His love for the Word of God and his dedication to remember it and live by it is a theme that is repeated over and over (verses 11, 15–16, 24, 34, 44, 47, 55, 60, etc.). These are the lessons for us in this great psalm. The Word of God is sufficient to make us wise, train us in righteousness, and equip us for every good work (2 Timothy 3:15–17). The Scriptures are a reflection of God’s nature, and from them we learn that we can trust His character and His plan and purposes for mankind, even when those plans include affliction and persecution. Blessed indeed are we if our delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law we meditate day and night (Psalm 1:2).
​
Verse of the day Psalm 119:2 five minute devo

Prayer

I praise You, Lord and Heavenly Father, for Your Word and the valuable lessons it contains. Thank You for the protection it affords, and the treasures that are hidden within. May Your Word become to me my daily sustenance, and my life-support, knowing that it alone can keep me from the evil one and enable me to live a life that is pleasing to You. I pray that day by day, You will teach me and train me through Your Word, so that I do not go astray, and I further ask that You use me to guide others into You paths of peace. In Jesus' name, AMEN.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigation#mw-head)Jump to search#searchInput)The Game📷A player announces her loss of The Game at San Diego Comic-Con International in July 2008.Years activeUnknown (see origin#Origin))Playing timeIndefinite (ongoing)Random chancePartiallySkills requiredThought suppression, strategy[specify]
The Game is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game. Depending on the variation of The Game, the whole world, or all those aware of the game, are playing it all the time. Tactics have been developed to increase the number of people aware of The Game and thereby increase the number of losses.

Contents

• 1Gameplay#Gameplay)
  • 1.1Strategies#Strategies)
• 2Origin#Origin)
• 3Psychology#Psychology)
• 4Reception#Reception)
• 5See also#See_also)
• 6References#References)
• 7External links#External_links)

Gameplay

There are three commonly reported rules to The Game:[1]#citenote-nebraskan-1)[[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-depers-2)[[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-The_Rules-3)[[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-rutland-4)

1. Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (This is alternatively expressed as, "Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game" or "You are always playing The Game.") A person cannot refuse to play The Game; it does not require consent to play and one can never stop playing.
2. Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses.
3. Losses must be announced. This can be verbally, with a phrase such as "I just lost The Game", or in any other way: for example, via Facebook. Some people may have ways to remind others of The Game.

The definition of "thinking about The Game" is not always clear. If one discusses The Game without realizing that they have lost, this may or may not constitute a loss. If someone says "What is The Game?" before understanding the rules, whether they have lost is up for interpretation. According to some interpretations, one does not lose when someone else announces their loss, although the second rule implies that one loses regardless of what made them think about The Game. After a player has announced a loss, or after one thinks of The Game, some variants allow for a grace period between three seconds to thirty minutes to forget about the game, during which the player cannot lose the game again.[5]#citenote-canpress-5)[[6]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-lal-6)
The common rules do not define a point at which The Game ends. However, some players state that The Game ends when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announces on television that "The Game is up."[3]#cite_note-The_Rules-3)

Strategies

Strategies focus on making others lose The Game. Common methods include saying "The Game" out loud or writing about The Game on a hidden note, in graffiti in public places, or on banknotes.[2]#citenote-depers-2)[[7]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-metro-7)
Associations may be made with The Game, especially over time, so that one thing inadvertently causes one to lose. Some players enjoy thinking of elaborate pranks that will cause others to lose the game.[8]#cite_note-kansas-8)
Other strategies involve merchandise: T-shirts, buttons, mugs, posters, and bumper stickers have been created to advertise The Game. The Game is also spread via social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.[8]#cite_note-kansas-8)

Origin

📷A woman holds up a sign reading "You Lose The Game".
The origins of The Game are uncertain. In a 2008 news article, Justine Wettschreck says The Game has probably been around since the early 1990s, and may have originated in Australia or England.[9]#citenote-9) One theory is that it was invented in London in 1996 when two British engineers, Dennis Begley and Gavin McDowall, missed their last train and had to spend the night on the platform; they attempted to avoid thinking about their situation and whoever thought about it first lost.[[6]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-lal-6)[[7]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-metro-7) Another theory also traces The Game to London in 1996, when it was created by Jamie Miller "to annoy people".[[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-canpress-5) Journalist Mic Wright of The Next Web recalled playing The Game at school in the late 1990s.[[10]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-10)
However, The Game may have been created in 1977 by members of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society when attempting to create a game that did not fit in with game theory.[citation needed] A blog post by Paul Taylor in August 2002 described The Game; Taylor claimed to have "found out about [the game] online about 6 months ago".[11]#citenote-11) This is the earliest known reference on the internet.[[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-canpress-5)
The Game is most commonly spread through the internet, such as via Facebook or Twitter, or by word of mouth.[8]#cite_note-kansas-8)

Psychology

See also: Ironic process theory
The Game is an example of ironic processing (also known as the "White Bear Principle"), in which attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts make those thoughts more common or persistent than they would be at random.[6]#citenote-lal-6) There are early examples of ironic processing: in 1840, Leo Tolstoy played the "white bear game" with his brother, where he would "stand in a corner and not think of the white bear".[[12]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-12) Fyodor Dostoyevsky mentioned the same game in 1863 in the essay Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.[[13]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-13)

Reception

The Game has been described as challenging and fun to play, and as pointless, childish, and infuriating.[5]#citenote-canpress-5)[[6]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-lal-6) In some Internet forums, such as Something Awful and GameSpy, and in several schools, The Game has been banned.[[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mindgame)#cite_note-depers-2)[[7]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-metro-7)
The 2009 Time 100 poll was manipulated by users of 4chan, forming an acrostic for "marblecake also the game" out of the top 21 people's names.[14]#citenote-14)[[15]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game(mind_game)#cite_note-15)

See also

• 📷Games portal
• Catch-22 (logic))
• Finchley Central)
• In-joke
• Meme
• Mornington Crescent)
• The Button (Reddit))
• Paradox
• Finite and Infinite Games
• Roko's basilisk

References

1. ^#cite_ref-nebraskan_1-0) Boyle, Andy (19 March 2007). "Mind game enlivens students across U.S." The Daily Nebraskan. Retrieved 18 May 2008.
2. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-depers_2-0) b#cite_ref-depers_2-1) c#cite_ref-depers_2-2) Rooseboom, Sanne (15 December 2008). "Nederland gaat nu ook verliezen". De Pers. Archived from the original on 15 December 2008.
3. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-The_Rules_3-0) b#cite_ref-The_Rules_3-1) "Three rules of The Game". Metro). 3 December 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
4. ^#cite_ref-rutland_4-0) "Don't think about the game". Rutland Herald. 3 October 2007.
5. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-canpress_5-0) b#cite_ref-canpress_5-1) c#cite_ref-canpress_5-2) d#cite_ref-canpress_5-3) Montgomery, Shannon (17 January 2008). "Teens around the world are playing 'the game'". The Canadian Press.
6. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-lal_6-0) b#cite_ref-lal_6-1) c#cite_ref-lal_6-2) d#cite_ref-lal_6-3) Kaniewski, Katie (1 March 2009). "You just lost the Game". Los Angeles Loyolan. Retrieved 27 March 2009.
7. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-metro_7-0) b#cite_ref-metro_7-1) c#cite_ref-metro_7-2) "If you read this you've lost The Game". Metro). 3 December 2008. Retrieved 6 July 2014.
8. ^ Jump up to:a#cite_ref-kansas_8-0) b#cite_ref-kansas_8-1) c#cite_ref-kansas_8-2) Fussell, James (21 July 2009). "'The Game' is a fad that will get you every time". The Kansas City Star. Archived from the original on 24 July 2009.
9. ^#cite_ref-9) Wettschreck, Justine (31 May 2008). "Playing 'The Game' with the other kids". Daily Globe). Retrieved 11 November 2014.
10. ^#cite_ref-10) Wright, Mic (13 April 2015). "You just lost The Game: the enduring hold of the pre-Web world's Rickroll". The Next Web. Retrieved 16 February 2016.
11. ^#cite_ref-11) "The Game (I lost!)". 10 August 2002. Archived from the original on 14 June 2008.
12. ^#cite_ref-12) Tolstoy, Leo (2008). Leo Tolstoy, His Life and Work. p. 52. ISBN) 978-1408676974. Alt URL
13. ^#cite_ref-13) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1863). Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Vremya). p. 49. ISBN) 9780810115187.
14. ^#cite_ref-14) Schonfeld, Erick (27 April 2009). "Time Magazine Throws Up Its Hands As It Gets Pwned By 4Chan". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2 November 2014.
15. ^#cite_ref-15) "Marble Cake and moot". ABC News. 30 April 2009. Archived from the original on 11 January 2012. Retrieved 2 November 2014.

External links

• 📷 Media related to The Game (mind game)) at Wikimedia Commons
• 📷 Wikinews interviews manager of site 'Lose The Game' at Wikinews

Introduction
This book displays what can be called the Gnostic Dialogue or Dialogue with the Savior (in the terminology of the ancient Gnostics). For us, as Thelemites, it is called the Knowledge & Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. But the display is a symbolic record; a connotative notion and not an actual and denotative record of this unique experience that is the success of all those who would practice Scientific Illuminism. So that we repeat here the warning of the Master Therion:
He therefore said: "Let me declare this Work under this title: ‘The obtaining of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’", because the theory implied in these words is so patently absurd that only simpletons would waste much time in analysing it. It would be accepted as a convention, and no one would incur the grave danger of building a philosophical system upon it."
The commentary we present here is generated from our own spiritual insight and experience. It is meant to add to the growing canon of insight that was first presented by Crowley’s insight and experience and followed by Motta's insight and experience. And as we mulled over the verses and searched our own soul, we found added insight to generate our own experience of the Gnosis. So that it is hoped others will still yet follow and append their own commentary to these verses; that even a greater Qabalah will grow therefrom.
In terms of the Holy Qabalah, part of the exegesis that we are most proud of in this commentary is our use of the English Qabalah (cf. Liber 805) that further proves it as the solution to the ‘Riddle of AL.’ Over and over again, the gematric synchronicities have deepened the insight of the phrases and verses of this book, which is precisely what the application of such techniques should do. And this is an important first step in detailing the praxis of our English Qabalah. It hoped yet, that further down the line, that the techniques of Notariqon and Temurah tables may yet be developed.
To that end, we do have a start at this; a notariqon, as found in the fifth chapter of this holy book—the verse with our commentary represented here for the sake of further engendering this idea:
LXV:V.43 “Adonai, divine Adonai, let Adonai initiate refulgent dalliance! Thus I concealed the name of Her name that inspireth my rapture, the scent of whose body bewildereth the soul, the light of whose soul abaseth this body unto the beasts.” In his commentary to this verse, Crowley points out “an acrostic”—the initial-caps of the words of the first sentence spelling the name of one of the women he was intimate with during the period that he received this holy book. “Her name” was Ada Laird. But what is that much more significant here is that for the first time in the Holy Books of Thelema, the qabalistic process of Notariqon is actually employed. And we hope the reader will note the many applications of our English Qabalah to the words and phrases of this holy book, so that other inspired qabalists may come along and apply other processes, such as Notariqon to the book in order to glean yet, more interesting insights from this great work (pun). The problem in this particular verse is, why should we care for this woman at all? Crowley points to the fact that he this verse has revealed to him that he has connected sexual ecstasy with the spiritual ecstasy of communing with his Angel; that there’s no difference for him in his conscious being. And there is a good point to be made in comparing ‘le petit morte’ with the surrendering of the petty egos to the Angel. But the name of this lady has no special meaning for the rest of us. Stretching things a little bit and begging the reader’s forgiveness, Ada Laird can be modified to form the word, Adelaide; a female name from a Germanic word that means nobility. And it gives us an indirect inference to Our Lady Babalon. So that in this way, the scribe “concealed the name of Her name that inspireth my rapture, the scent of whose body bewildereth the soul, the light of whose soul abaseth this body unto the beasts.” So that we get the image of Babalon astride the Beast. [End of commentary]
As a holy book in the Thelemic canon, this book has its own power; Crowley noting the book to be written in Class AB. So it is highly inspired with some level of praeternatural contact. We highly recommend that the book be studied carefully by taking a verse a day and ruminating over that verse throughout the day. And ultimately, memorize at least one chapter. That chapter will come to its own life inside of your psyche and set you off on your own Gnostic Dialogue. In the end, this is a wordless dialogue and a joyful effulgence that emanates from the mind, heart and soul.
Liber Cordis Cincte Serpente; the serpent being the Ouoboros—the dragon in the sky (as found in the Book of Revelation) formed from the back of the head of the Macroprosopus; the Tetragrammaton being the Aur (L.V.X., Kether, Ra-Hoor-Khuit) of the Ain Soph; impregnated by the Ain in the Book of the Concealed Mystery. This is in itself, a complex technical mystery of the Holy Qabalah; and one well-worth the understanding (pun intended). It is that understanding that is the height of the intuitive prowess of the soul. And certainly any true rendering of these verses in the heart of the emergent adept; the aspirant working the path of truth will yield the most sublime result—that conversation that has no words from the silent voice of the created self.
I once read an interview of the American punk poet Tom Verlaine who stated that he uses words to say what cannot be said with words. This is truly the mark of great poetry. Such poetry depicts an mytho-poeic image and an intuition; a scene that may only be viewed from the eye of the soul. And that is truly the poetry of these highly inspired verses by the emergent adept; known to us as the Master Therion. Indeed, these verses are “the truth, the light and the way.” Such beauty (pun intended) can be found in no person and certainly not in the words of any text (including this one); but only within your own heart; girt with the serpent; whose venom is the elixir of the Divine.
https://smile.amazon.com/Insights-Into-Liber-Joseph-Rovelli/dp/1974301729/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=insights+into+lxv&qid=1632958212&sr=8-1

Introduction
This book displays what can be called the Gnostic Dialogue or Dialogue with the Savior (in the terminology of the ancient Gnostics). For us, as Thelemites, it is called the Knowledge & Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. But the display is a symbolic record; a connotative notion and not an actual and denotative record of this unique experience that is the success of all those who would practice Scientific Illuminism. So that we repeat here the warning of the Master Therion:
He therefore said: "Let me declare this Work under this title: ‘The obtaining of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’", because the theory implied in these words is so patently absurd that only simpletons would waste much time in analysing it. It would be accepted as a convention, and no one would incur the grave danger of building a philosophical system upon it."
The commentary we present here is generated from our own spiritual insight and experience. It is meant to add to the growing canon of insight that was first presented by Crowley’s insight and experience and followed by Motta's insight and experience. And as we mulled over the verses and searched our own soul, we found added insight to generate our own experience of the Gnosis. So that it is hoped others will still yet follow and append their own commentary to these verses; that even a greater Qabalah will grow therefrom.
In terms of the Holy Qabalah, part of the exegesis that we are most proud of in this commentary is our use of the English Qabalah (cf. Liber 805) that further proves it as the solution to the ‘Riddle of AL.’ Over and over again, the gematric synchronicities have deepened the insight of the phrases and verses of this book, which is precisely what the application of such techniques should do. And this is an important first step in detailing the praxis of our English Qabalah. It hoped yet, that further down the line, that the techniques of Notariqon and Temurah tables may yet be developed.
To that end, we do have a start at this; a notariqon, as found in the fifth chapter of this holy book—the verse with our commentary represented here for the sake of further engendering this idea:
LXV:V.43 “Adonai, divine Adonai, let Adonai initiate refulgent dalliance! Thus I concealed the name of Her name that inspireth my rapture, the scent of whose body bewildereth the soul, the light of whose soul abaseth this body unto the beasts.” In his commentary to this verse, Crowley points out “an acrostic”—the initial-caps of the words of the first sentence spelling the name of one of the women he was intimate with during the period that he received this holy book. “Her name” was Ada Laird. But what is that much more significant here is that for the first time in the Holy Books of Thelema, the qabalistic process of Notariqon is actually employed. And we hope the reader will note the many applications of our English Qabalah to the words and phrases of this holy book, so that other inspired qabalists may come along and apply other processes, such as Notariqon to the book in order to glean yet, more interesting insights from this great work (pun). The problem in this particular verse is, why should we care for this woman at all? Crowley points to the fact that he this verse has revealed to him that he has connected sexual ecstasy with the spiritual ecstasy of communing with his Angel; that there’s no difference for him in his conscious being. And there is a good point to be made in comparing ‘le petit morte’ with the surrendering of the petty egos to the Angel. But the name of this lady has no special meaning for the rest of us. Stretching things a little bit and begging the reader’s forgiveness, Ada Laird can be modified to form the word, Adelaide; a female name from a Germanic word that means nobility. And it gives us an indirect inference to Our Lady Babalon. So that in this way, the scribe “concealed the name of Her name that inspireth my rapture, the scent of whose body bewildereth the soul, the light of whose soul abaseth this body unto the beasts.” So that we get the image of Babalon astride the Beast. [End of commentary]
As a holy book in the Thelemic canon, this book has its own power; Crowley noting the book to be written in Class AB. So it is highly inspired with some level of praeternatural contact. We highly recommend that the book be studied carefully by taking a verse a day and ruminating over that verse throughout the day. And ultimately, memorize at least one chapter. That chapter will come to its own life inside of your psyche and set you off on your own Gnostic Dialogue. In the end, this is a wordless dialogue and a joyful effulgence that emanates from the mind, heart and soul.
Liber Cordis Cincte Serpente; the serpent being the Ouoboros—the dragon in the sky (as found in the Book of Revelation) formed from the back of the head of the Macroprosopus; the Tetragrammaton being the Aur (L.V.X., Kether, Ra-Hoor-Khuit) of the Ain Soph; impregnated by the Ain in the Book of the Concealed Mystery. This is in itself, a complex technical mystery of the Holy Qabalah; and one well-worth the understanding (pun intended). It is that understanding that is the height of the intuitive prowess of the soul. And certainly any true rendering of these verses in the heart of the emergent adept; the aspirant working the path of truth will yield the most sublime result—that conversation that has no words from the silent voice of the created self.
I once read an interview of the American punk poet Tom Verlaine who stated that he uses words to say what cannot be said with words. This is truly the mark of great poetry. Such poetry depicts an mytho-poeic image and an intuition; a scene that may only be viewed from the eye of the soul. And that is truly the poetry of these highly inspired verses by the emergent adept; known to us as the Master Therion. Indeed, these verses are “the truth, the light and the way.” Such beauty (pun intended) can be found in no person and certainly not in the words of any text (including this one); but only within your own heart; girt with the serpent; whose venom is the elixir of the Divine.
https://smile.amazon.com/Insights-Into-Liber-Joseph-Rovelli/dp/1974301729/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=insights+into+lxv&qid=1632958212&sr=8-1

Saw it in the early to mid-90s with my family, cannot for the life of me remember the name.
Other random details I remember:

• They locate a blonde woman wearing a red bonnet and think she's the Sun Maid girl
• They were trying to return Sam to his real home which had something to do with the government
• The older brother forged a bunch of documents showing Sam wasn't a real child including making up an acrostic for S.A.M. about how he was a mutant
• The brother proved there was a chip in Sam by having him chew on tin foil with his back teeth and it hurt
• At the end of the movie, Sam is returning home on an airplane by himself (I do not remember what happened to the brother) and chews on a gum wrapper and is surprised when it still hurts, only to be informed by the older man in the seat next to him that it hurt because the metal in his fillings is reacting with the foil and would hurt anyone who had fillings
• I don't remember how the Sun Maid Raisin girl fit into this scheme
• The older boy was maybe 12 or 13, Sam was probably about 9

Hello and welcome to the latest Nugu Roundup!
What is this?: This is a bi-weekly feature designed to highlight the unknown/underappreciated groups and soloists working hard in the Kpop world that often fall under the radar. Please share your own information, favorite performance videos, fanmeet stories, or anything else relevant below!
Last roundup we got to know Momoland's little brothers T1419. This week let's check out a group that's been quite busy since debut earlier this year, let's get to know Majors!
Look at the first comment below for the winner of the 33rd album giveaway plus details on this roundup's album up for grabs!
What is Nugu?: While in Korean it literally means 'Who' in the broader Kpop context it refers to groups that are generally unknown amongst the greater public. It doesn't have to mean they're extremely new, though it can, and there are of course varying degrees of 'unknown' which some groups having very strong niche fandoms and others being almost invisible. I take a fairly broad view and will include groups that may be known to some, but who don't have widespread name recognition.
Let's get on with the show...
________________________________________________________
MAJORS
Who are they?: Majors are a six member girl group under ANS Entertainment. Their name comes from the desire to be the top girl group just like the Major Leagues are the top leagues in sports. Their fandom name is MVP.
Company: ANS Entertainment is the former home of disbanded girl group ANS and soloist ORLY. Though having disbanded ANS the company is still holding the members under contract and all except for Bian, who is now a member of Majors, and Haena, who is working under the company as a model and actress, are currently involved in litigation to have their contracts invalidated.
Members

• Ida
  • Position: Leader, Vocalist
  • Real Name: Koh Chaeyoung
  • Age: 21 (IA)
  • Facts: She was a backup dancer for 2NYNE. She is proud of her sense of style and always tries to match all of her accessories to her outfit even when it's just for the practice room. She was a popular music major at Kukje University. She has four cats. She can cry on command. She is friends with Yongheun of BlackSwan. She likes shooter videogames.
• Vita
  • Position: Main Rapper, Lead Dancer
  • Real Name: Kim Jimin
  • Age: 21 (IA)
  • Facts: She is the 'happy vitamin' of the team and took her stage name from 'vitamin'. She says that speaker malfunctions during their debut practice led them to believe their practice room was haunted which they took as a good omen for luck. She thinks the group would excel if they could go on Running Man since they're all athletic. The other members say she has the biggest range between being able to be cute and badass. She likes to go to new restaurants and especially likes pasta. Her favorite kind of music is hip-hop. She studied abroad and can speak English. She can play the violin, flute, and piano.
• Aki
  • Position: Lead Rapper, Lead Dancer, Vocalist
  • Real Name: Jang Minju
  • Age: 20 (IA)
  • Facts: She is from Busan. She says that the group's skill at taking on different concepts will be their secret to lasting for a long time. G-IDLE's Soyeon is her role model and she'd love to learn how to write songs like her. The other members say her bright personality livens them up. She can play the piano and guitar. She was a business major but is now on a break from school.
• Bian
  • Position: Main Vocalist, Main Dancer
  • Real Name: Yu Jiwon
  • Age: 20 (IA)
  • Facts: She is a former member of ANS and the pre-debut group MIDNIGHT. She is the 'Baby Wolf' of the team and in charge of reverse charm. She is very popular in China because of a resemblance to a popular Taiwanese actress, and even before debut she had over 150,000 followers on social media from all nations. She says that the group's powerful and cool dance moves are the reason they've been popular with international fans. She studied Akido and other martial arts but found that she preferred dancing and switched to studying that more, specializing in popping and locking and hip-hop dance. Her stage name comes from a type of Korean doll because her hair was so damaged from frequent colorings that it felt like doll hair. Her favorite foods are sushi, radish kimchi, and chicken gizzards. She said that her crooked teeth gave her a unique look but is now wearing braces to correct them.
• Suzy
  • Position: Lead Dancer, Vocalist
  • Real Name: Kim Suji
  • Age: 20 (IA)
  • Facts: She is in charge of innocence on the team. She doesn't like cleaning. She had a short training time so puts in many hours in the practice room and has been noticed by the other members for her strong work ethic. She has very poor eyesight and has to wear glasses to be able to see details and read. She worked in a cafe but she dislikes coffee. She has a driver's license. She likes to swim. She studied ballet and can play the piano. She has her own YouTube channel where she does dance covers.
• Shinye
  • Position: Main Vocalist, Maknae
  • Real Name: Gam Yerim
  • Age: 17 (IA)
  • Facts: She is from Daegu in southern South Korea. She says that while filming their video for Dancing in the Starlit Night she was so tired from their rigorous schedule that she fell asleep while filming. She wants to be known as an all-around idol who can dance, sing, act, and excel in variety shows. She says Vita always cheers her up when she's sad. She is very athletic and has studied ballet, golf, swimming, boxing, and Taekwondo. She figure skated competitively for eight years.

Debut: March 9th, 2021 with Spit It Out (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: Their promoted track from their debut digital single album "The Beginning of the Legend" this song features a strong bass line and a trap beat combined with EDM elements and lyrics inspired about the group's desire to take on the music industry.
• Composers/Producers: Olof Lindskog (Everglow - Dun Dun, Red Velvet - Zimzalabim, KARD - Red Moon), Brooke Toia (Hyomin - U Um U Um, Loona - Heat, Yves - New), Adelen Rusillo Steen (no other credits found)

Debut Part 2: March 9th, 2021 with Stronger (MV) Dance Practice (Link) KT Skylife Version (Link)

• Song: Filmed and released concurrently with the title track from "The Beginning of the Legend" this track did not see music show promotion, but did receive and MV and Dance Practice as well as a Studio Choom-esque performance through KT Skylife. Described as a Pop-Dance song with a strong drum and bass element, this continues in the theme of their debut in making a strong statement about the group's desire to climb the ranks of the industry.
• Composers/Producers: arcon (T1419 - Asurabalbalta, VERIVERY - Thunder, TOO - Don't Fear Now), Mosin (no other credits found), Anna Timgren (BVNDIT - Cool, Checkmate - Drum, Weki Meki - Dazzle Dazzle)

First Comeback: April 16th, 2021 with Rain On Me (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: The first of dual title tracks from the group's second digital single album "The Beginning of the Legend - Rising Star" this combines some fun sax line with an 808 bass element and a trap beat for a mid-tempo dance-pop song. In contrast to what's typical of the style there's a strong sung chorus in this one.
• Composers/Producers: Olof Lindskog (see above), Daniel Caesar (SNSD - All Night, Red Velvet - Red Flavor), Hayley Aitken (Everglow - La Di Da, ANS - Say My Name, Ailee - Make Up Your Mind)

First Comeback Part 2: April 16th, 2021 with Dancing in the Starlit Night (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: Filmed and released concurrently with Rain on Me just as they did with their debut digital single album, this EDM song features an ethereal melody over a driving beat for a slightly dreamy and atmospheric effect.
• Composers/Producers: Romantic Sashimi (Yellow Bee - DVD, G-Reyish - Blood Night, D-Crunch - Pierrot), iLLA (Wanna.B - Leggo, Postmen - Revolving, iLLA - I Miss You Before I Know), O:VE (Park Soyeon - Flower)

Most Recent Comeback: June 25th, 2021 with Obvious (MV)

• Song: The title track to the group's third digital single album "The Beginning of the Legend - Shining Star" this was the only track from this release to receive an MV and no tracks were promoted as this was designed as a thank-you album for the fans of the group. All songs on this release are in English, reflecting the group's appreciation of their international fans. In the EDM Electro-House genre, this song speaks about how 'Obviously' MAJORS will achieve their dreams.
• Composers/Producers: RheaT (Peace - Yallacha, A-Seed - Shake It, Rocket Punch - I Want U Bad), Lee Soo Ah (no other credits found), +1 (no other credits found)

YouTube Channel: MAJORS Official
Member YouTube Channels

• Ida
• Suzy

Random Stuff

• MAJORS 5 Word Acrostic Interview [ENG SUB]
• CBC Star Interview [ENG SUB]
• KT Skylife DANCE.ZIP Dance Cover Compilation

Trivia: The group has announced that they will be coming back again later this year with a new album and a new concept after taking a short break to rest and recuperate from their busy debut schedule. They say that something that will set them apart from other groups is that they won't be tied to a specific concept and will be open to trying a variety of musical and visual styles. They say that another special element of their group is that their rappers will all have big vocal roles as well. Given ANS Entertainment's track record with ANS there are some fans who have become concerned about how MAJORS may be treated, although thus far the members appear to be happy and have been supported well.
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SOLOIST OF THE WEEK
MOTI
Who is he?: A male soloist, rapper, songwriter, and producer under Planetarium Records and part of the loose association project group PLT.
Company: Planetarium Records represents a collective of male soloists, musicians, songwriters, composers, and producers who have collaborated in various configurations as the project group PLT, the rap crew ALPHADICT, and as various features with one another, yet also allows all of them to work on their own solo and side projects. The most notable current artist under the label is Gaho who broke out last year through the chart-topping OST for Itaewon Class.
Real Name: Jo Junseong
Age: 25 (IA)
Solo Debut: July 9th, 2018 with Blue (MV) Live Performance (Link)

• Song: Moti's debut single from his debut digital single album "Blue Wave" this upbeat hip-hop song was inspired by the color blue which has both melancholy and invigorating aspects, with Moti choosing to focus on the powerful and invigorating aspects of the color for this release.
• Composerse/Producers: Moti (original artist), Ahn Kwang Hyun (Sh!n - SSSS)

First Comeback: February 12th, 2019 with Go (feat. June) (MV) Live Performance (Link)

• Song: The title track from Moti's first EP "WHSH" which stands for "Work Hard Stay Humble" Moti says that this was inspired by advice from his father to "always stay humble" and as a reaction to a trend to saw in hip-hop where "swearing and sulking in arrogance" had become fashionable. This song is dedicated to his belief that you should work hard at your craft yet temper your pride with humility. A fantastic Rhodes Piano intro and background groove gives this a retro feel.
• Composers/Producers: Moti (original artist), June (original artist)

Second Comeback: December 30th, 2019 with Want (MV) Live Performance (Link)

• Song: His second digital single, this is a swingy and up-beat trap based hip-hop song, this is about the stress and frustrations that come from the daily grind in trying to make it in the music world, the sacrifices made to devote all of his time and energy into growing his position in the industry, and his hopes for better things in the future.
• Composers/Producers: Moti (original artist), Ownr (Chuu - Hello, Leo - Favorite, Gaho - Pink Walk), Jeong Jin Woo (Victon - Circle, ALow - Maze, June - Beautiful)

Most Recent Comeback: April 4th, 2021 with Whenever feat. CAMO (MV) Live Performance (Link)

• Song: The first of two title tracks from his second EP "Win Some Lose Some" this dark hip-hop song with electronic elements introduces the albums concept of loss, looking back on Moti's past after a year spent having too much time left to think instead of act.
• Composers/Producers: MAVI (Crie de Joie - Knock Knock, UNIK - Wall Slam, La Poem - Crescent), Ownr (see above), Moti (original artist), Camo (original artist)

Most Recent Comeback Part 2: April 4th, 2021 with Die feat. Mckdaddy (MV)

• Song: The second title track from "Win Some Lose Some" this atmospheric and distorted hip-hop track features dark imagery and continues in the album's theme of loss and reflection.
• Composers/Producers: Ownr (see above), Moti (original artist)

YouTube Channel: via Planetarium Records
Random Stuff

• Humility Special Clip
• Boa Live
• Sound K on Arirang Radio Full Episode
• Live from PLT Christmas Party Concert
• Live from Planetarium European Tour

Trivia: His stage name comes from 'Motivation' but felt that the full word was too harsh so just took the first part. His use of autotune distortion when singing has become a trademark element for him and host Ashley says he was the first one to use it when singing live on Sound K. In addition to his own music he has written for other Planetarium artists such as June, Gaho, and Villain and electronic/hip-hop artist Knob9.
________________________________________________________
IN MEMORIAM
MADTOWN
Who were they?: A seven member boy group under J Tune Camp and later GNI Entertainment. Created to carry on the legacy of MBLAQ who had debuted five years previously, their fandom name was MADPEOPLE.
Company: J Tune Camp was founded by R&B Artist Rain and featured other artists including Two X and MBLAQ and was later absorbed by JYP Entertainment. When J Tune Camp later stopped operating as an independent agency the contracts for MADTOWN members were sold to GNI Entertainment, an agency primarily known for actors, for $3 Billion Won (approximately $2.6 million USD).
Debut: October 6th, 2014 with YOLO (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: The lead single from the group's debut EP "MAD TOWN" this is described as a 'minimal hip-hop song with 808 bass' and features lyrics about a man who must work up the courage to approach his dream woman.
• Composers/Producers: Dean (Fanxy Child - Y, 2xxx - Piss on Me, Dean - Come Over), Jordan Kyle (HALO - Flying, Oh My Girl - Cupid, Speed - What U)

First Comeback: March 12th, 2015 with New World (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: The lead single from the group's second EP "Welcome to MADTOWN" this is described as a hybrid trap-hip-hop genre song and features both hard rap elements and a more laid back melodic element.
• Composers/Producers: Dean (see above), 2xxx (Minje - Heaven, MCND - Stereotypes, HOTSHOT - Take a Shot)

Second Comeback: November 12th, 2015 with OMGT (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: The group's first digital single, the title stands for "Oh My God Thanks" and is reference to them expressing thanks for helping them to meet the perfect woman. Stylistically this is described as a 'ratchet' hip-hop song.
• Composers/Producers: ESBEE (Golden Child - I Love You So, Monsta X - Ready or Not, Sistar - Yeah Yeah), Rishi (TOO - Hard Carry, MXM - Errday, Monsta X - All In)

Final Comeback: June 21st, 2016 with Emptiness (MV) Live Stage (Link) Dance Practice (Link)

• Song: The lead single from the group's third and final EP "Emotion" this saw the group take a softer turn with a mid-tempo hip-hop ballad about the pain involved in the loss of a relationship, with the Korean title of the track translating to 'blank' implying a blank space left by their loss.
• Composers/Producers: B-Rock (Botopass - Flamingo, Huh Chanmi - Lights, Varsity - Rolling), J-Lin (GBB - Kemi, A-Daily - Spotlight, GeeGu - Sunlight)

Active Between: October 2014 - Early 2017
Reasons for Disbanding: Following the group's transfer to GNI Entertainment the CEO of GNI Entertainment was arrested for embezzling 800 Billion Won (approx. $700 million USD) from investors. Many managers and staff left the company, effectively leaving it shut down yet keeping MADTOWN trapped in contracts with no resources available to promote. The group sued the company for release from their contracts and the court ruled in their favor placing an injunction against GNI from enforcing any aspect of their contracts with the group, leading to their disbandment.
Trivia: Leader Moos was originally supposed to debut as 'Thunder' in MBLAQ but due to various circumstances someone else took that role and stage name. He and fellow member Buffy were previously in a rap group called Pro C. Member Jota was previously a famous Judo athlete and had appeared on numerous programs relating to that. Moos is now active as a DJ. Jota is now an actor under his given name Lee Jong Hwa. Lee Geon is now a soloist under the name Lee Woo. Heo Jun is now active as an actor. Daewon took part in UNB following success on The Unit and is now an actor. Buffy enlisted following the group's breakup and is now making music under the name HENNEXXI. H.O became an AfreecaTV streamer and is now a musical actor.
________________________________________________________
That's it for today, let's get the discussion on!
As always, if you have any suggestions for groups, content, or things you'd like to see, please let me know in the comments below.
Also as always, a big shout-out to u/not-named-in-credits for founding nugutown and u/sharnaranwan for continuing the work over there.

I think everyone has missed what actually happened at the red wedding. Let’s look at what we THINK we know.
The “Frey” family killed Robb and company at the wedding. They had help from the Bolton Patriarch and Tywin Lannister. The “Frey” family break guest right, and kill the Starks.
Or is that just what George wants you to think? Using a top secret code breaking tool, I’ve deciphered what really happened.
Let’s look at the “Frey” family. First off it’s clear “Frey” is just an acrostic puzzle. Let’s look at the details F R E Y So, we have four letters. What are the words corresponding to the letters? Well, we can figure that out by thinking about who benefits from the Starks being wiped out. First off, the people who want the North, the ‘Free’ Folk. Let’s add Free to our puzzle Free R E Y Now, the R is actually a big trick. You might think it stands for Roose, and you’d be WRONG. The R stands for Rhaegel the Dragon! Why? How? You absolutely ghoul! It’s clear that Rhaegel saw the vision in the house of the undying, and realized that the Starks were going to die. So Rhaegel warged Rhaegar and had him kidnap Lyanna Stark. Lyanna then gave birth to Robb, who Eddard Stark brought back to Winterfell and switched with Jon while Catelyn was distracted when Eddard said “look at that! Is that a fish?” And quickly moved the two boys around before Catelyn turned around. So now we have two words Free Rhaegel E Y What noun corresponds with E? Well, we know a noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. But the trick with this one is the word is actually backwards. The word is ‘Empire’ with the ending e being what corresponds with the E. Why? Well it’s simple. The Great Empire of Dawn is actually traveling backwards in time, and begins with the Bloodstone emperor. What happened at the Red Wedding? What is the first part of Bloodstone? That’s right, blood. Now we know it’s custom in Westeros to check the bed to see if the woman bleeds on her wedding night. So Roslin’s child becomes the Bloodstone Emperor. Now we have the E, let’s turn to the Y Free Rhaegel Eripme Y The Y is the greatest question of all. Y am I writing this? Y is Winds taking so long? Y...is the hardest and most difficult question to answer. We may never actually know the mysterious fourth party behind the Red Wedding. Maybe we will find out in Winds.
Now I have a theory that it’s Ygritte. How? Well we know Ygritte was Benjen in disguise, who was afraid his favorite nephew would die a virgin. But we forgot that he is also Joyeuse Erenford, the new wife of Walder Frey. Euron wanted to destabilize Westeros, so by marrying Walder Daario was able to make sure his plans could come to fruition. Now Mance can finally travel south of the wall, and once again take up his seat at Greywater Watch. Maybe we will finally know why Varys, who we all know is actually Tyrek and Gerion Lannister in a trench coat, did all of this.
Thank you all for reading, I think I can finally finish up my final paper now that I’ve written this.

"Listen dear!" The lady asked,
as she sat up tall in bed.
"That's Rock-a-bye Baby;
on the wind!" The same sweet lady said.
There by the window, stood a man,
looking out upon the grounds.
He never enjoyed hospitals,
the sights, the smells, the sounds.
He gazed over the parking lot,
and watched some patients pass.
He shifted focus of his eyes,
and saw himself among the glass.
He turned to see his tired wife
as silence filled the space.
A cloud seemed to pass over him
as he saw his sweetheart's face.
Her empty eyes were facing him.
"But does she see?" He thought.
The woman who he knew so well,
wasn't acting as she ought.
She summound strength, to sing so soft,
the line "...down will come baby,"
The man mouthed "cradle" with his wife
"and all." Finished the lady.
He sat beside his loving wife,
and wiped her grey face clean.
Tears swelled into his eyes,
for the mother-to-have-been.
"Her dillusion," he had guessed,
"this state in which she dreams,
a token, similar joy,
yet a sorrow so extreme."
"Joy never hurts". Whispered the man,
in a tone for him and her.
Please send your prayers to all who face
the greatest pain known to occur.
1) https://www.reddit.com/OCPoetry/comments/m6xinm/two_women/gr8cdsf?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
2) https://www.reddit.com/OCPoetry/comments/m6x81b/leave_me_alone_an_acrostic_poem/gr8cq0i?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

I had an older cousin back home. We’ll call him Miles for the purposes of this story. The name fits somehow.
He lived in a log house he’d built himself right at the fork where Needham Branch turned off to the left as you were going up the creek. Right there where the paved road ended and the rough dirt one winding further back into the mountains began. That was as far as the mail carrier would go; hence the ranks of mailboxes erected at that juncture.
It was as far as the school bus went, as well, which accounted for a lot of wear and tear on winter footwear for my Brothers and me. But we got a monthly stipend from the State for each of us to keep us in decent work boots. Many did. It was a benefit provided in an impoverished region for any child of school age who had to walk a mile or more to catch the school bus. Gram and Gramp’s place was a good two, two and a half miles further back into the hills, so we got good exercise on a daily basis, coming and going.
Gramp also got a monthly stipend for Black Lung disease. Diminished lung capacity from his earlier days working as a deep shaft miner in the bad old days, when the fine coal dust that the miners breathed would settle permanently in their lungs, steadily increasing as the years went by, draining their strength and vitality until many spent the last few years of their lives with a permanent wracking cough that could never clear from their lungs the fine black dust that was slowly choking them to an early death.
Gramp had spent a couple or a few years in the mines as a younger man, decided that shit wasn’t for him, and had started his own sawmill business and gone into land speculation on a limited scale. Among many other things over the years, some legal, some not so much.
The amount of Black Lung he had acquired didn’t amount to overmuch, seeing as how he got out of the mines after only a short while, but it was enough to provide a little additional monthly income in his later years, along with selling off, a little at a time, much of the mountain acreage he had acquired many years ago, when it was dirt cheap. He had other revenue streams coming in, as well, on a steady basis, including dividends from the natural gas deposits that had been found on his land. He had refused to sell his mineral rights, and opted instead for a percentage of the profits from the same, at no expense of development for himself. He was also paid a monthly wage to keep an eye on the wellheads and the above-ground pipelines, and report any leakage to the Company. As well as free gas for as long as the wells produced. A sweetheart deal. He and Gram were comfortable in their later years, were able to help their children financially when they needed it, and still owned considerable property, which is still in the hands of the Family. The wells still produce, too, though at diminished capacity after seventy or eighty years or more, and Family members still get a bi-annual check from the Company for Gramp’s share of the profits - not nearly as much as it once was, though.
As for Gramp’s minor Black Lung, it never bothered him any, or slowed him down that I ever saw. He could outwork and out-hunt men half his age. Restless all his life, he had always to be doing something. He never could stand to sit still for very long, unless circumstance and weather dictated it.
As for Miles, a visit with him and Nan was always a first stop whenever I went home after having been away for a while. To have gone on by without stopping in to say hello would have been considered a rudeness. And, in truth, I always looked forward to those visits for their own sake.
Except for a certain wild-eyed, bearded, half-tamed Great Uncle, Miles was a tale-teller, cheerful liar, and spinner of windys without peer. An hour or two or three spent in his august presence was always sure to be a treat. The best procedure was to just get comfortable, settle back, and let the bullshit mixed with wit, wisdom, and the occasional nugget of truth pour forth. I was never sorry at the end of it, and always considered it time well spent.
Miles would sometimes curb his creativity somewhat in the presence of those of us who knew him well, and were not averse to calling him out occasionally on some of his more outrageous embellishments. But if there were a newcomer in the audience, he would lay it on thicker than cowshit on a winter cornfield, especially if it was someone from the Outside, and ignorant of our mountain hillbilly ways. The rest of us would let him have free reign, then, and watch as the recipient of his lying largesse would become ever more confused and uncertain. Having no barometer by which to measure where the truth began or ended, and becoming, by and by, ever more alarmed. Wondering if they had made a mistake in coming to these parts, and if everyone else here were as obviously batshit crazy as Miles was. Entertainment of the highest sort.
I’ll tell of one such visit and conversation, when home on leave, and chronicle it as accurately as memory permits. Maybe shortened some. It’s a fair example of a visit to Miles’ place.
“Well, will you looky hyer! Come on in, OP, come on in! Ain’t seen you in a While, son! How’s ‘em Marines treatin’ ya?”
“Ain’t treatin’ me much at all, Miles, but I git by.”
“Nan! Look who’s hyer!”
Nan came smiling from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron, a smile on her face. “It’s good to see you, OP! Set down, set down! I’ll git you some coffee. “ It was a ritual of welcome. A pot of the strong black brew was near always bubbling on the stove. That was true of most folks, and the first thing that was offered when you visited. I’d had my first cup when I was eight.
“I’ll take one, too, Nan” Miles informed her.
“Git it yourself. You ain’t crippled.” Grumbling under his breath, he went to do so.
I picked a comfortable old overstuffed chair and sat down, balancing the cup of scalding black brew in its saucer, and Miles, with his, settled in across from me.
Nan visited for a few minutes, then returned to her cooking, after having informed me that I would stay for supper. I knew better than to argue.
After a bit, Miles got up, peeked around the corner to make sure Nan was occupied, then went over to the bookshelves he had built against one interior wall. Pulling a big, thick Bible from one of the shelves, he reached into the space it had occupied and pulled out a flat bottle of Jim Beam, a little more than half full. Adding a good slug to each of our coffee cups, he then returned it to its hiding place.
“Nan don’t like me havin’ it in the house” he whispered. “But she ain’t caught me out yet.”
“Don’t she ever git suspicious?”
“Well, she’s caught me starting t’ take it out er put it back a time er two, but she just assumes I been takin’ a interest in the Good Book. I let ‘er think so. She’s sweeter to me when she thinks I been readin’ The Word.” And he gave me a wink.
“How’s things been, Miles?”
“Oh, passable, passable. ‘At new dog I showed you when you was hyer last is comin’ along jist fine. I think he’s gonna be a good ‘un”. Miles was an avid ‘coon hunter, and not just locally. He would go to out-of-state tournaments, and usually placed quite well. Dogs that he had trained fetched a good price when he was willing to sell.
“What about that new pup?”
“Had t’ shoot ‘im. Sumbitch started killin’ my chickens. Once they start that, you cain’t break ‘em of it.”
“Couldn’t you just have given ‘im away?”
“To who?! Nobody wants a chicken-killin’ dog!”
“I reckon you got a point.”
“You reckon right. So, they keepin’ you boys busy these days?”
“Busy enough, what with nothin’ goin’ on anywhere.”
“I guess that’s right. But I know you boys got t’ stay ready fer when they is.”
“That’s true”.
“You know Pearsely’s boy Preston joined up, don’t ya’?”
“I never heard”.
“You boys went t’ school together, didn’ ye?”
“We did.”
“Don’t know as how ‘e’ll fare. Was always hard-headed.”
“He’ll be all right. What you been up to?”
“Not much, lately. Been too busy around the place.”
Then he brightened. “You ‘member Emma Watson, what left ‘er husband t’ shack up with ‘at old man over on Murtle Creek?”
“I heard tell of it.” (It had been years ago).
“Well, she went back home. Begged ‘im t’ take ‘er back. Said she’d make ‘im the best wife ‘e could want, if ‘e would. Swore on a Bible she’d never complain ‘er have another cross word, ‘d keep the house, iron ‘is clothes ever’ day, an’ have supper on the table when ‘e got home. Said she’d warsh ‘is truck twiced a week, never holler at ‘im no more, ‘an she’d even be nice t’ ‘is Momma.”
“Now you’re lyin’, Miles. She hated ‘is Momma. Still does, I’d guess”.
“Hell, everbody hates ‘at old witch. Even him. But she said she’d try.”
“He don’t hate his Momma, Miles. Nobody hates their Momma.”
“He does. Even had a hex put on ‘er, tryna’ kill ‘er off - tired of ‘er meddlin.’”
“Bullshit, Miles.”
“I swear it’s the truth! Only ‘at old woman’s so mean, it bounced right back on ‘im! He ‘as sick near t’ death fer three whole weeks! Sent fer the preacher t’ pray over ‘im an’ all......an’ ‘is best dog died! He’s sleepin’ on the porch jist as pretty as you please. Seen a haint in ‘is dreams. Scared ‘im s’ bad ‘e jumped up, let out a howl, an’ run right out in front of a log truck. Committed suicide, tryin’ t’ git away from what was after ‘im.”
“Was you there, Miles?”
“Nossir. But I got it on good authority.”
“How come her to go back to her husband?”
“‘At old man didn’ have much choice. She was gonna’ be the ruin of ‘im! Them rental houses ‘e had up an’ down the creek started catchin’ fire late at night - the ones with nobody in ‘em at th’ time. Everbody knows it was th’ husband, but couldn’t nobody prove nothin’. Old man told her ‘e couldn’t afford ‘er no more. Packed up her an’ ‘er thaings an’ drove ‘er home hisself. Went to ‘er husband hat in hand, apologized fer doin’ wrong by ‘im, an’ said ‘e’d be much obliged if ‘e’d please take ‘er back.”
In truth, some of the houses in question Did burn, and the husband was the prime suspect, though nothing was ever proven. Young Emma returned to her husband of her own accord after she found that her new friend wasn’t quite as wealthy as he had made out to be. That was Miles’ way - sufficient facts mixed in with the bullshit to make you wonder just a little bit how much of the rest of it was true. It was a gift.
“I tell you what, son, you missed a bad winter!” Miles said, switching topic. I settled back and took another sip of black coffee. Miles was getting warmed up pretty good by now. This promised to be interesting.
“That bad?”
“Worst I’ve ever seen! And Cold, son. Snow waist deep, and temperatures so low they bottomed out on the thermometer!”
“That’s pretty cold.”
“You better believe it! The water froze in the well! Dropped the bucket an’ hit solid ice!”
“Water underground don’t freeze, Miles, as a general thing.”
“Well, it did this time, I’m telling’ ya’! I dropped a twenty-pound rock down in it t’ try t’ break enough of a hole t’ draw a bucket o’ water, an it jist bounced once an’ then jist set there.”
“What’d you do?”
“Had t’ climb down in there on a rope. Set my feet out agin’ th’ walls - you know ice is alwys thickest at the edges. Took a twelve-pound sledge an’ pounded away ‘til I had a good-enough-sized hole broke in th’ middle t’ dip the bucket in. That done th’ trick. We ‘as fine after that.”
“That’s some kinda cold!”
“I’m hyer t’ tell ya!”
“How come it didn’t freeze back up again?” I couldn’t resist.
“Rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Yessir! I’d drop one down there ever’ now an’ then jist t’ keep it from freezin’ back up. Time th’ weather warmed up some, they’s s’ many rocks in th’ bottom o’ the well, the water’d done rose three feet. Makes it easier t’ draw water ‘at way. Was gonna use them rocks t’ wall up th’ front o’ th’ porch, but ‘at’ll have t’ wait.”
I couldn’t picture Miles doing extra work around the place than wasn’t absolutely necessary, but I let that pass.
“I’m glad I missed it, then.”
“You should be. Lost a few chickens to it.”
“How’s ‘at?”
“Went out t’ th’ henhouse one mornin’ an’ foun’ four of ‘em froze solid as a block o’ ice, feathers an’ all! Jist settin’ on their perch starin’ all wide-eyed inta’ th’ distance. Some o’ ther toes broke off like ice cycles when I pried ‘em loose.”
“Y’ eat ‘em?”
“Naw. Froze as solid as they was, woulda’ took too long t’ thaw. Woulda had t’ bring ‘em in th’ house t’ do it, too, an’ Nan wouldn’ o’ liked that. Ground froze too hard t’ dig a hole, so I just took ‘em out an’ dumped ‘em in th’ woods. Reckon some stray dog likely broke a tooth ‘er two tryin’ t’ eat ‘em. They was froze so solid, ya’ bumped ‘em t’gether, sounded just like two blocks o’ wood knockin’ agin’ each other.”
“At’s cold!”
“You ain’t got no idee! The worst part, though, had t’ do with yer Gram an’ Gramp.”
I perked up a little at this. Had they come to some kind of harm? Surely, I would have been told.
“I called one day t’ make shore they was all right. They ain’t gittin’ any younger, y’know, an’ them all snowed in up there all by theyself. Couldn’ raise ‘em a’tall. (The lines was still up, by some miracle). Jist a busy signal’s all I got, time after time, like when th’ phone’s off th’ hook. I started t’ fear somethin’ed happened. Mebbe one of ‘em’d tried t’ call fer help, an’ collapsed. Mebbe th’ gas was off, an’ ‘ey was freezin’. You know they ain’t had no workin’ fireplace fer a long time now. I knowed I wasn’t gonna rest easy ‘til I knowed they was all right, so I knowed I was gonna have t’ walk it.” (Miles didn’t own a horse or mule).
“As cold as it was?”
“Nothin’ fer it. So I set out. An’ it was Cold, I’m tellin’ ya! Took damn nyer ferever jist t’ git t’ the Barlow place. ‘Em damn mean dogs o’ his was s’ plumb mis’rable ‘ey didn’ even bark.”
“Now, I’m plumb wore out already, breakin’ ground through ‘at deep snow, but I know I still got a long ways t’ go. Not long after, I realized I couldn’t feel my pecker anymore, what with th’ crotch o’ my britches dragon’ through th’ top o’ the snow ever step I took.”
“I thought you said it was waist-deep.”
“Well, almost waist deep. Stop interruptin’. I took to movin’ more slow an’ careful after that. That broke off like a ice cycle, I wouldn’t be too much use t’ Nan after that. Only reason she keeps me around, anyhow. “
“That’s a little more than I need to know, Miles.”
“Yeah, well, anyways, it weren’t already bad enough - you know ‘at next creek crossin’ wher it runs kinda deep?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, since I know it’s done froze solid under all ‘at snow, an’ I hadn’t had no trouble at th’ other ‘un, I goes t’ walk my way acrost, an’ I fell plumb through! Come up outta that cold water wet from top t’ bottom!”
“But you said it was froze solid.”
“It Was, goddammit! But right in the middle there, where th’ water flows faster, it was thin. Now, hush, an’ let me tell th’ story!”
“All right.”
“I come up outta that water faster’n I went in, let me tell ya’! Time I made it t’ th’ bank, I was froze up all over! I’as breakin’ new ice ever time I took a step ‘er moved my arms! I spit out some creek water’d got in my mouth, an’ it froze solid ‘fore it hit th’ ground!”
“I had t’ stop ever now an’ then, t’ rest. Ever time I did, I froze so solid it was a chore t’ break th’ ice enough t’ git movin’ agin.”
“But I fin’ly made it, an’ you know what th’ problem was?”
“What?”
“Rolly hadn’ hooked th’ receiver back on th’ phone right, an’ th’ line was still open, given’ off a busy signal. ‘At’s all it was!”
In truth, Miles did make that long two-and-a-half mile trudge through nearly waist-deep snow, and then back again, in the dead of a cold winter, just to make sure Gram and Gramp were all right. He would have done much more than that for them if he thought they needed him to. He loved them just as much as I did, and we all looked out for each other.
But he never fell through the ice, and he wasn’t a mobile ice sculpture. His chickens endured the cold just fine, and there was never any problem with the well, of course. That was all just Miles being Miles’ highly entertaining, outrageously prevaricating self. I’d come in expecting a good time, and I hadn’t been disappointed.
Nan called from the kitchen. Supper was ready.

How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun? To stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life. The closest I ever came was over thirty years ago. On February 26, 1979, a solar eclipse passed directly over the city of Portland. I bought my bus tickets and found a place to stay. But in the end, I couldn’t get the time off work. Well, anyone who lives in Portland can tell you that the chances of catching the sun in February are pretty slim. And sure enough, the skies over the city that day were completely overcast. I wouldn’t have seen a thing. That work I couldn’t get out of was my first job out of college: A sales clerk at an old Radio Shack store in beautiful downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. On my very first day behind the counter, a delivery truck pulled up to the front of the store. They carried in a big carton, upon which was printed the legend TRS-80. It was our floor sample of the world’s first mass-market microcomputer. The TRS-80 Model I had a Z80 processor clocked at 1.7 megahertz, 4,096 bytes of memory, and a 64-character black-and-white text display. The only storage was a cassette recorder. All this could be yours for the low, low price of $599. This store I was working in had seen better days. At one time, it had been near the center of a thriving commercial district. But like so many other New England cities, the advent of shopping malls had, by the early ‘70s, turned it into a ghost town. Worcester’s solution to this problem was decisive, to say the least. The city’s elders apparently decided that if they couldn’t beat them, they would join them. And so several square blocks at the heart of the city were bulldozed into oblivion, destroying dozens of family businesses, including the site of a pharmacy once operated by my great-grandfather. In their place was erected a vast three-level shopping complex, with cinemas and a food court. When the dust settled, only a few forlorn blocks of the old Worcester remained standing. My Radio Shack store was in one of those blocks. Then, to add insult to injury, Radio Shack opened a brand-new location inside the shopping center, less than 500 feet from my store. So now patrons has a choice between a clean, well-lighted establishment with uniformed security and acres of convenient parking, or a shadowy hole in a seedy old office building next to an adult movie theater. Consequently, I had plenty of time to fool around with the new computer. I taught myself BASIC programming. Then I learned Z80 assembly. Both, of course, so that I could write games. I also created self-running animated demos which ran all night in the store window for the edification of the winos who peed in our doorway. Strangely enough, the few customers we had didn’t seem to be interested in our new computer, even after the 16K memory upgrade. In fact, most of the people who set off the buzzer on their way through the front door weren’t there to buy anything at all. They were there to exploit a free promotion which was the bane of Radio Shack employees for over forty years: The Battery of the Month Club. The idea of this promotion was simple. Customers got a little red card upon which was printed a square for each month. Twelve times a year, the lucky sales clerk got to punch out a square and give the customer one brand new triple-A, double-A, C, D or 9-volt battery. Of course, customers weren’t allowed to choose just any grade of battery. At the time of my employment, Radio Shack offered three different levels of battery excellence. First were the alkalines, powerful, long-lasting and expensive, hanging behind the counter like prescription medication in gold-embossed blister packs. These were most certainly not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Next were the high-end lead batteries, sturdy, dependable batteries, moderately priced, and prominently displayed near the front of the store. These were also not available through the Battery of the Month Club. Finally, at the bottom of the barrel, were the standard lead batteries. These were literally piled in barrels, cunningly located way at the back of the store, in a dark corner near the TV antennas. Remember TV antennas? Customers who came in looking for their free Battery of the Month had to walk the entire length of the premises, past the CB radios and stereo headphones and remote-controlled racing cars. Nothing would stop them. On the first day of every month, like clockwork, those customers come in waving their little red cards. I would look up from my programming and wave them to the back of the store. It didn’t matter that the batteries were only worth twenty-nine cents. It didn’t matter that most of them were already half dead. They came. They grabbed. And, as far as I can remember, not one of them ever paid for a damned thing. I was such a crappy salesman. I was young and foolish. I thought my education in game design was happening at the keyboard. I almost missed the lesson coming through the front door. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person fooling around with games on micros. All over the country, people like me were experimenting. Scott Adams was coding what would soon become the world’s first commercial adventure game. Remember adventure games? My future employer, Infocom, was being founded, along with other legendary companies like On-Line Systems, Sirius, Personal Software and SSI. Those were exciting times. Teenagers were making fortunes. Games were cheap and easy to build. The slate was clean. But in 1979, the biggest news in gaming had nothing to do with computers. § On the morning of the autumn equinox, September 20th, a new children’s picture book appeared in the stores of Great Britain. This picture book was rather peculiar. It consisted of 15 meticulously detailed color paintings, illustrating a slight, whimsical tale about a rabbit delivering a jewel to the moon. On the back jacket of the book was a color photograph of a real jewel shaped like a running rabbit, five inches long, fashioned of 18-karat gold, suspended with ornaments and bells, together with a sun and moon of blue quartz. According to the blurb underneath, this very jewel had been buried somewhere in England. Clues pointing to its location were concealed in the text and in the pictures of the book. The treasure would belong to whoever found it first. The book was called Masquerade. It was created by an eccentric little man with divergent eyes and a talent for mischief named Kit Williams. Within days, the first printing was sold out. And the Empire That Never Sleeps found itself in the grip of Rabbit Fever. Excited readers attacked the paintings with rulers, compasses and protractors. Magazine articles and TV specials dissected the clues, floated theories, and followed with keen delight the reckless exploits of the fanatics. One obscure park, unfortunately known by the nickname Rabbit Hill, was so riddled with holes excavated by misguided treasure seekers that the authorities had to erect signs assuring the public that no gold rabbits were to be found there. Some hunters ended up seeking psychological counseling for their obsession. The craze lept over the Atlantic Ocean and invaded America, France, Italy and Germany. It sold over a million copies in a few months, a record unrivalled by any children’s title until the advent of Harry Potter. Over 150,000 copies were sold in foreign translations, including 80,000 copies in Japanese, despite the fact that the puzzle was only solvable in English. It didn’t matter that the Masquerade jewel was only worth a few thousand dollars. Many seekers spent far more than that in their months of exploration and travel. It was the thrill of the chase. The possibility of being The One. Treasure hunts, secret messages and hidden things seem to exert an irresistible appeal. They’re fun to look for, and to talk about. And this fact of human psychology has been exploited in computer games since the earliest days. It finds expression in the hidden surprises we call Easter eggs. Atari’s Steven Wright is credited with coining this term in the first issue of Electronic Games magazine. The first Easter egg in a commercial computer game appeared in an early Atari 2600 cartridge called, simply enough, Adventure. By a sequence of unlikely movements and obscure manipulations, players could discover a secret room where the words “Created by Warren Robinet” appeared in flashing letters. Over the decades, Easter eggs and their evil twin, cheat codes, have become an industry within an industry. Entire magazines and Web sites are now devoted to their carefully orchestrated discovery and dissemination. They’re part of our toolkit, our basic vocabulary, the language of computer game design. Computer gamers may have been the first to refer to hidden surprises as Easter eggs, but we certainly weren’t the first to use them. Painters, composers and artists of every discipline have been hiding stuff in their works for centuries. The recent advent of VCRs and laserdisc players with freeze-frame capability exposed decades of secret Disney erotica. Thomas Kinkade, the self-appointed “Painter of Light,” amuses himself by hiding the letter N in his works. A number beside his signature indicates how many Ns are hidden in each painting. Picasso, Dali, Raphael, Poussin and dozens of other painters concealed all kinds of stuff in their paintings. A favorite trick was hiding portraits of themselves, their families, friends and fellow artists in crowd scenes. El Greco loved dogs. But the Catholic Church forbid him from including any in his sacred paintings. So he hid them, usually within the outlines of celestial clouds. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich chafed under the political censorship imposed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture. His symphonies and chamber works are loaded with hidden signatures and subversive subtexts which, had they been recognized, would have sent him to Siberia. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is filled with musical allusions to the rituals of the Freemasons, the ancient secret society of which he and his mentor Haydn were members. But the most famous purveyor of Easter eggs is that champion of the late Baroque, the ultimate musical nerd, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was a student of gematria, the art of assigning numeric values to letters of the alphabet: A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. By comparing, sequencing or otherwise manipulating these numbers, secret messages can be concealed. Bach took particular delight in the gematriacal numbers 14 and 41. 14 is the sum of the initials of his last name: B=2, A=1, C=3 and H=8. 41 is the sum of his expanded initials, J S BACH. These two numbers show up over and over again in Bach’s compositions. One of the better-known examples is his setting of the chorale “Vor deinen Thron.” The first line of the melody contains exactly 14 notes, and the entire melody from start to finish contains 41. Another of Bach’s favorite games was the puzzle canon. A canon is a melody that sounds good when you play it on top of itself, a little bit out of sync. “Freres Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” are familiar examples of simple, two-voice canons. But a canon can employ any number of voices. And you don’t have to play each voice the same way, either. You can change the octave, transpose the key, invert the pitch, play it backwards, or any combination. Finding melodies that make good multi-voice canons is a fussy and difficult art, of which Bach was an undisputed master. Now, in a puzzle canon, the composer specifies the basic melody and the number of voices, but not the relationship of the voices. The student has to figure out the position and key of each voice, and whether to perform them inverted and/or backwards. Bach wrote quite a number of puzzle canons. The most famous, BWV 1076, is part of a fascinating story. One of Bach’s students was a fellow by the name of Lorenz Mizler, founder of The Society of Musical Science. This elite, invitation-only institution devoted itself to the study of Pythagorean philosophy, and the union of music and mathematics. Its distinguished membership reads like a Who’s Who of German composers, including Handel, Telemann and eventually Mozart. Applicants for membership in the Society were required to submit an oil portrait of themselves, along with a specimen of original music. With nerdly efficiency, society member number 14 decided to combine these admission requirements into a single work. He sat for a portrait with Elias Haussmann, official artist at the court of Dresden. This portrait, which now hangs in the gallery of the Town Hall in Leipzig, is the only indisputably authentic image of Bach in existence. The Haussman portrait shows Bach dressed in a formal coat with exactly 14 buttons. In his hand is a sheet of music paper upon which is written a puzzle canon for six simultaneous voices. In 1974, a manuscript was discovered which proved that this canon was the thirteenth in a series of exactly 14 canons based on the ground theme of the famous Goldberg Variations. As if these musical gymnastics weren’t enough, Bach liked to hide messages in his compositions by assigning notes to the letters. His initials B-A-C-H correspond to the pitch sequence B-flat, A, C and B-natural in German letter notation. This theme makes its most memorable appearance in the last bars of his final composition, The Art of Fugue, published soon after his death in 1750. The word “fugue” comes from the Latin fuga, which means flight (as in running away). So the art of fugue is the art of flight, the art of taking a theme and running with it. Bach wrote hundreds of fugues, but none as sublime as this sequence of 14. In the last and most complicated fugue in the series, the first and second sections develop normally. This is followed by the B-A-C-H signature, and then suddenly, without any warning or structural justification, the fugue stops dead in its tracks. One of the composer’s 20 children, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, claimed that Bach died moments after those last few notes were written. This story is probably apocryphal. The Easter eggs in Bach’s music are a pleasant obscurity, known chiefly to professors and students of Baroque music. But in March of 2002, when this lecture was first delivered, those Easter eggs were the talk of the entire classical music industry. Sitting near the top of the classical music charts that month was a compact disc on the ECM label called Morimur. It is performed by the Hilliard choral ensemble together with a talented but, until then, little-known violinist, Christoph Poppen. The music on Morimur is based on a gematriacal analysis of Bach’s Partita in D Minor for solo violin. This analysis, by German professor Helga Thoene, assigns numeric values to the duration of notes, the number of bars, and the German letter notation of the Partita. In doing so, she claims to have discovered the complete text of several liturgical ceremonies encoded in the notes. The CD presents these hidden texts, superimposed over the original music. The result was strangely melancholy, dark, haunting, and very, very popular. Quite a few music critics attacked this disc. They didn’t buy Professor Thoene’s analysis, dismissing it as a combination of numerology and canny marketing. Their caution was not without basis. Numerology is a slippery slope down which many a fine mind has slid to its doom. Allow me to offer an amusing anecdote from my own experience. Back in the early ‘90s, before the Internet took off, one of the more popular online bulletin board systems was a service called Prodigy. I bought an account on Prodigy so I could join a fraternal interest group, and gossip with fellow members around the country. One day, a stranger appeared on our bulletin board. Right away, I knew we were in trouble. This fellow, whose name was Gary, began spouting all kinds of apocalyptic nonsense about worldwide conspiracies, secret societies and devil worship. At first we tried to be polite. We questioned his sources, corrected his histories, logically refuted his claims, and tried to behave in a civilized manner. But instead of soothing him, our attention only made him worse. His conspiratorial warnings became urgent, approaching hysteria. He began to threaten people who disagreed with him. To coin a phrase, Gary went All Upper Case. But his most urgent warnings weren’t about the gays, the Jews, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. According to Gary, the greatest enemy of mankind was Santa Claus. Gary claimed to possess a secret numerical formula that “proved” beyond a shadow of a doubt that Santa Claus was an avatar of the Antichrist. Intrigued, we pressed Gary to reveal his formula. In doing so, we walked right into his trap. We should have known he had a book to sell. I fell for it. I sent him the fifteen bucks. Less than a week later the book arrived. Above an ominous photograph of the Washington monument was emblazoned the title: 666: The Final Warning! Inside this privately printed 494-page monster, Gary reveals a simple gematriacal formula which he claims was developed by the ancient Sumerians. This formula assigns successive products of 6 to each letter of the alphabet: A=6, B=12, C=18, etc. Imagine my dismay when I applied this ancient formula to the name “Santa Claus,” and obtained the blasphemous sum of 666, the Biblical Number of the Beast! I went on Prodigy and reported to the stunned members of our interest group that Gary was right, after all. There could be no doubt that, according to the unimpeachable wisdom of ancient Sumeria, Santa Claus was the AntiChrist. I then went on to point out several other names which, when submitted to Gary’s formula, also produced the sum 666. Names like “Saint James,” “New York” and “New Mexico.” Soon the bulletin board was filled with discoveries like “computer,” “Boston tea” and, most sinister of all, “sing karaoke.” Gary left us alone after that. I got my $15 worth. But Gary is hardly the first person to connect secret codes to the Bible. People have been looking for Easter eggs in the Bible for hundreds of years. The Hebrew mystical tradition of kabbalah can be described as a gematriacal meditation on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. The advent of computers has made the application of numerology to the Bible fast and efficient. The latest spate of Bible-searching was instigated by a book published in 1998 by Michael Drosnin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. His book, The Bible Code, applied a skip-cypher, in which every nth character in a text is combined to form a message. By applying his skip-cypher to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Drosnin claimed to have discovered predictions of World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and both Kennedys, the moon landing, Watergate, the Oklahoma City bombing, the election of Bill Clinton, the death of Princess Di and the comet that collided with Jupiter. He also found predictions of a giant earthquake in LA, a meteor hitting the earth, and nuclear armageddon, all scheduled to occur before the end of the last decade. The Bible Code spent many weeks on the bestseller lists, spawning several sequels and dozens of imitators. The Bible has certainly attracted its share of crackpots. But for the real hardcore egg hunters, nothing can rival the ingenuity, the tenacious scholarship, the stubborn zeal of those who seek the answer to the ultimate literary puzzle. A poisonous conundrum that has squandered fortunes, destroyed careers, and driven healthy, intelligent scholars to the brink of madness, and beyond. Who wrote Shakespeare?⁴ The essays and books devoted to the Shakespeare authorship problem are sufficient to fill a large library. Several such libraries actually exist. Not even a day-long tutorial, much less an hour lecture, can begin to do justice to this complex, bizarre and dangerously tantalizing story. Nevertheless, for the unacquainted, I will attempt to summarize the issue in a few paragraphs. The undisputed facts of Shakespeare’s life and career could be scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. We know for a fact that a man named William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in or around the village of Stratford-upon-Avon. We know that he had a wife and at least three children. We know he bought property in Stratford, was involved in several lawsuits with his neighbors, and died there in 1616, aged 52. We also know that during those same years, a man with a last name similar to Shakespeare worked as an actor on the London stage, eventually becoming co-owner of some of the theaters there. We also know that, about the same time, a number of most excellent poems and plays were published in London under the name Shakespeare. We do not know for a fact that the landowner in Stratford and the actor in London with a similar last name were one and the same man. We do not know for a fact that either man had anything to do with the poems and the plays. All we know is that those poems and plays have, in the four hundred years since their composition, come to be regarded as a pinnacle of Western culture. The works attributed to Shakespeare appear to have been written by a man or woman who knew something about just about everything. They’re filled with references to mythology and classic literature, games and sports, war and weapons of war, ships and sailing, the law and legal terminology, court etiquette, statesmanship, horticulture, music, astronomy, medicine, falconry and, of course, theater. Therein lies the problem. How could a farmer’s son of uncertain schooling from a mostly illiterate country village, a man of practically no account at all, wield such encyclopedic learning with so much eloquence and wit, so much wisdom and human understanding? For the first 150 years, nobody questioned the traditional history of the Bard. Then, in the late eighteenth century, Reverend James Wilmot, a distinguished scholar who lived just a few miles north of Stratford, decided to write a biography of the famous playwright. Dr. Wilmot believed that a man as well-educated as Shakespeare must have owned a fairly extensive library, despite the fact that not a single book or manuscript is mentioned in his will. Over the years, he speculated, some of those books must have found their way into local collections. And so the good Reverend Doctor scoured the British countryside, taking inventory of literally every bookshelf within 50 miles of Stratford. Not a single book from the library of William Shakespeare was discovered. Neither were there found any letters to, from or about Shakespeare. Furthermore, no references to the folklore, local sayings or distinctive dialect of the Stratford area could be found in any of Shakespeare’s writings. After four years of painstaking research, Dr. Wilmot concluded, to his own dismay, that only one person contemporary with Shakespeare of Stratford had ever demonstrated the wide-ranging education and expressive talent needed to compose those poems and plays. That man was the multilingual author, philosopher and statesman, inventor of the Scientific Method, Chancellor to the Courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James, Sir Francis Bacon. Dr. Wilmot never dared to publish his theory. But before he died he confided it to a friend, James Cowell, who, in 1805, repeated it to a meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society. The members of the society were suitably outraged, and the scandalous matter was quickly forgotten. Then in 1857, a lady from Stratford -- Stratford, Connecticut -- published a book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. In this book, Miss Delia Bacon, no relation to Francis, claimed that the works of Shakespeare were written by a secret cabal of British nobility including Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney as well as Sir Francis Bacon. Delia Bacon’s book electrified the world of letters. Battle lines were drawn between the orthodox Stratfordians and the heretical Baconians. Literary societies and scholarly journals were formed to debate the evidence. Hundreds of pamphlets, newspaper articles and essays were published defending each side, and ridiculing the opposition with that self-aggrandizing viciousness peculiar to tenured academics. Armed with her explosive book, Delia Bacon journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon and, unbelievably, obtained official permission to open Shakespeare’s grave. However, when the moment came to actually lift the stone, Delia’s self-doubt precipitated a catastrophic nervous breakdown. She later died penniless in a madhouse. Around 1888, things began to get a bit out of hand. U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota became interested in the Shakespeare controversy. One day, browsing through his facsimile copy of the First Folio of 1623, he noted that the word “bacon” appeared on page 53 of the Histories and also on page 53 of the Comedies. He also noted that Sir Francis Bacon had written extensively on the subject of cryptography. Donnelly began counting line and page numbers, adding and subtracting letters, drawing lines over sentences, circling words and crossing them out. The result was a complex and virtually incomprehensible algorithm which he claimed was invented by Bacon to hide secret messages inside the First Folio. The greatest Easter egg hunt in the history of Western civilization had begun. Here are just a couple of the sillier highlights. A doctor named Orville Owen of Detroit constructed a bizarre research tool he called the Wheel of Fortune. This wheel consisted of two giant wooden spools wrapped with a strip of canvas two feet wide and a thousand feet long. Onto this canvas he glued the separate pages of the complete works of Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Greene, Peele and Spenser, together with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. By cranking the spools back and forth, Dr. Owen could quickly zip across the pages in search of clues and cross-references. Employing a large team of secretaries and stenographers, Owen claimed to have uncovered a complete alternative history of Elizabethan England, as well as several entirely new Shakespeare plays and sonnets. Listen to this hidden verse, supposedly penned by the mighty Bard himself, which inspired Dr. Owen to build his Wheel of Fortune. Take your knife and cut all our books asunder And set the leaves on a great firm wheel Which rolls and rolls, and turning the fickle rolling wheel Throw your eyes upon Fortune That goddess blind, that stands upon a spherical stone that, turning and inconstant, rolls in restless variation. After publishing five thick volumes of this rubbish, Owen announced the discovery of an anagram indicating that Bacon’s original manuscripts were buried near Chepstow Castle on the river Wye. Owen spent the next fifteen years and thousands of dollars excavating the bed of the river with boat crews and high explosives. He died before anything was found. A fellow named Arensberg wrote an entire book based on the analysis of the significance of a suspicious crack in the tomb of Bacon’s mother. A ray of sanity finally appeared in 1957. To those familiar with the science of cryptology, the name William Friedman needs little introduction. During World War II , Colonel Friedman was the head of the US Army’s cryptoanalytic bureau. He is credited with cracking the Japanese Empire’s most sensitive cipher. After the war, the Colonel decided to apply his expertise to the study of the Shakespeare ciphers. He interviewed several of the experts in the field, and prepared a detailed scientific analysis, which he published under the title The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. His conclusion? In a word, bunk. According to the standards of cryptologic science, not one of the hidden messages purportedly discovered in Shakespeare’s works was plausible. The rules used to extract these messages from the texts were non-rigorous, wildly subjective, and unrepeatable by anyone except the original decypherer. The people involved were not being dishonest. They were channeling their preconceptions. They were trapped in a labyrinth of delusion, mining order from chaos. “Angler[s] in a lake of darkness.” Lear III.6. You would think that Friedman’s cold and ruthless exposure would be enough to silence the heretics once and for all. Not a chance. The books and TV specials and Web sites and conferences and doctoral dissertations keep right on coming. I should point out that the Shakespeare authorship issue is not only the preoccupation of cranks and weirdos. A substantial number of respected authors and Shakespeareans have expressed serious doubts about the traditional origin of the plays. The list includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sam Clemens, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud. Living skeptics include the artistic director of the New Globe Theater, Mark Rylance; Michael York, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, and even that most revered and scholarly of contemporary Shakespearean actors, Keanu Reeves. The current leading candidate for the authorship is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a theory first proposed in 1920 by an English schoolmaster with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney. What is it about Bach, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare that inspires this intense scrutiny? Nobody’s looking for acrostics in Chaucer or Keats. There are no hit CDs of the secret chorales of Wagner or Beethoven. For the answer, we need to recognize the unique roles which the Bible and Shakespeare have played in the development of Western culture. No other single work of literature has influenced Modern English more than the translation of the Holy Bible published in 1611 under the auspices of King James I. The King James Bible exemplifies the meaning of the word classic. It has been called the noblest monument of English prose, the very greatest achievement of the English language. It has served as an inspiration for generations of poets, dramatists, musicians, politicians and orators. Countless people have learned to read by repeating the phrases in this, the only book their family possessed. Our constitutions and our laws have been profoundly shaped by its cadences and imagery. But even the glory of the King James Bible, compiled by a committee of 46 editors over the course of a decade, pales before the dazzling legacy of the Swan of Avon. The lowest estimate of Shakespeare’s working vocabulary is 15,000 words, more than three times that of the King James Bible, and twice the size of his nearest competitor, John Milton. His poems and plays were written without the aid of a dictionary or a thesaurus. They didn’t exist yet. It was all in his head. When Shakespeare had a thought for which Elizabethan English had no word, he invented one. The Oxford English Dictionary lists hundreds of everyday words and phrases which made their first appearance in the pages of the Bard. Addiction. Alligator. Assasination. Bedroom. Critic. Dawn. Design. Dialogue. Employer. Film. Glow. Gloomy. Gossip. Hint. Hurry. Investment. Lonely. Luggage. Manager. Switch. Torture. Transcendence. Wormhole. Zany. Hamlet alone contains nearly forty of these neologisms. Who today would have this audacity, this giddy exuberance of invention? Only one other English author even approaches Shakespeare’s facility for coining new words: Sir Francis Bacon. In the modern era, the record holder is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who, interestingly, also happens to be the second most quoted author in English, after Shakespeare. Everyone has been profoundly molded by the influence of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Like it or not, all of us peer at the world through the lenses of these great works. They are the primary source documents of modern English thought, the style guides of our minds. Contemplating these dazzling jewels of wisdom and eloquence gives rise to an extraordinary feeling. A potent, rare and precious emotion with the potential to completely upset your life. An emotion powerful enough to make a man abandon his wife and children, forfeit career and reputation, lay down his possessions and follow his heart without questioning. That sweet, sweet fusion of wonder and fear, irresistible attraction and soul-numbing dread known as awe. Awe is the Grail of artistic achievement. No other human emotion possesses such raw transformative power, and none is more difficult to evoke. Few and far between are the works of man that qualify as truly awesome. It is awe that convinces a rabbi to spend a lifetime decoding Yahweh from the Pentateuch. Awe that sends millions of visitors each year to the Pyramids of Giza, Guadalupe and Mecca. It was awe that drove poor Delia Bacon to her doom. Now, please don’t come away from this lecture thinking that the key to awesome game design is the installation of Easter eggs! Ordinary games, with their contrived Easter eggs and cheat codes, are like the Battery of the Month club. You have to trudge down to the back of the store to get what you really came for. If super power is what people really want, why not just give it to them? Is our imagination so impoverished that we have to resort to marketing gimmicks to keep players interested in our games? Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous. The treasure is right there. One afternoon, I was sitting alone behind the counter at that old Radio Shack store. My boss had stepped out for some reason. An elderly woman walked through the front door. Like most of our customers, she was shabbily dressed. Probably on a fixed income. I assumed she was there for her free battery. But instead, she placed a portable radio on the counter. This radio came from the days when they boasted about the number of transitors inside on the case. It was completely wrapped in dirty white medical tape. The woman looked at me, and asked, “Can you fix this?” Slowly I unwrapped the medical tape, peeling away the layers until the back cover of the radio fell off, accompanied by a cloud of red dust. The interior of the radio was half eaten away by battery leakage and corrosion. I looked at the radio. I looked at the old woman. I looked back at the radio. I reached behind me, where the expensive alkaline batteries were hanging like prescription medication, and removed a gleaming nine-volt cell from its gold blister pack. Then I pulled a brand-new transistor radio from a box, installed the alkaline and helped the lady find her favorite station. No money changed hands. She left the store without saying a word. Awesome things are kind of like that. Bach offered his students very specific insight into the source of awe. In addition to B-A-C-H, two other sets of initials are also associated with Bach’s music. These initials are not hidden in the notes. Instead, they’re scrawled right across the top of his manuscripts for the whole world to see. The initials are SDG and JJ. SDG stands for the Latin phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “To the glory of God alone.” JJ stands for Jesu Juva, “Help me, Jesus.” Bach wrote all of his great masterpieces sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity.” He did not compose only to please his sponsors, or to win the approval of an audience. His work was his worship. Bach once wrote, “Music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul. Where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.” The name of the power that moves you is not important. What is important is that you are moved. Awe is the foundation of religion. No other motivation can free you from the limits of personal achievement. Nothing else can teach you the Art of Flight. Computer games are barely forty years old. Only a few words in our basic vocabulary have been established. A whole dictionary is waiting to be coined. The slate is clean. Someday soon, perhaps even in our lifetime, a game design will appear that will flash across our culture like lightning. It will be easy to recognize. It will be generous, giddy with exuberant inventiveness. Scholars will pick it apart for decades, perhaps centuries. It will be something wonderful. Something terrifying. Something awe-full. A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference in London. My wife joined me, and we took a day off for some sightseeing. We decided to visit England’s second-biggest tourist attraction, Stratford-upon-Avon. It was cold and rainy when our train arrived. Luckily, most of the attractions are just a short walk from the station. We visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, a charming old house along the main street which attracts millions of pilgrims every year, despite the complete lack of any evidence of Shakespeare ever having lived there. We went past the school where Shakespeare learned to read and write, although no documents exist to prove his attendance. We visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the rustic country farm where his wife spent her childhood, although no record shows anyone by that name ever having living there. Finally we came to the one location undeniably associated with Shakespeare: Trinity Parish church, on the banks of the river Avon, where a man by that name is buried. This beautiful church is approached by a long walkway, between rows of ancient gravestones, shaded by tall trees. The entrance door is surprisingly tiny. No cameras are allowed inside. The interior is dark and quiet. Despite the presence of busloads of tourists, the atmosphere is hushed and respectful. A few people are seated in the pews, deep in prayer. An aisle leads up the center of the church. The left side of the altar is brightly illuminated. On the wall above is a famous bust of the Bard, quill in hand, gazing serenely at the crowd of pilgrims. On the floor beneath, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, at the very spot where Delia Bacon lost her mind, the gravestone of William Shakespeare bears this dire warning: Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here Blest be the man who spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. Every year, three million pilgrims arrive from every nation on Earth to approach this stone and consider the likeness of a man whose body of work can only be described as awesome. By contrast, the right side of the altar is dark and featureless. Nobody of any consequence is buried there. The only point of interest is a wooden case, of simple design, carved of dark oak. Inside the case, sealed beneath a thick sheet of glass, lies a large open book. A plaque on the case identifies this book as a first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611, when Shakespeare was forty-six. Not many pilgrims visit this side of the altar. Most of those that do simply glance at the book, read the plaque and move along. A few, more observant, note that the Bible happens to be opened to a page in the Old Testament: the Book of Psalms, chapter 46. No explanation is given for this particular choice of pages. For the initiated, none is necessary. If you are of inquisitive bent, if you are intrigued by English history and literature, if you value your peace of mind, cover your ears, now. In the year 1900, a scholar noticed something about the King James translation of Psalm 46. Something terrifying. Something wonderful. The 46th word from the beginning of Psalm 46 is “shake.” The 46th word from the end is “spear.” There are only two possibilities here. Either this is the finest coincidence ever recorded in the history of world literature. Or, it is not.