Untitled

I say to you the grass came up
from the concrete there
in the night, from the porch
I saw brave little blades.
Water moved silently, covertly
and sometimes it sprayed-not
cognizant of our being there.
I say to you the sky is blue
wherever you go and the night
is in every shadow and night
is without one except when
for sure, she is full. She is so full.
I say to you the insects
consume particular parts and leave
others for the readings.
I say to you shells
are there for the taking,
a greed that carries on
but from where, we do not know.
I say to you the graves
are still occupied by their owners
night and day, they labor on.
I say to you a dream can last
a lifetime and eventually
it loses the leaves of invention
the colors and the faces disappear.
I say to you in limbo we are contained
butterflies in jars, crystal windows
cannot relieve much but the passage
of pressure and air and yet they break
with the entry of grass through concrete, the pummel
of oceans, the magnanimity of fists.
Enter through the door only,
do not enter through the apse
nor the cornice nor the transom.
I say to you thieves cannot take a soul
but some say they do where diamonds
are concerned, some say they do.
I say to you the sky
is blue wherever you are and the clouds
rebuild as often as rain pours
on the metropolis of the dead and the dying.
I say to you not shyly mind you....not shyly.
I say you are no longer purifying
the parts that produce the violent augars.

The Paths of the Righteous

Hi Meg,

Yes, I also received a letter from one bartelby schrivener mobonuga,
financial exchequer of the belgian ist national bank in Lagos where
funds
are secreted for one Narimbo Danatarr of whom i am told from whom I
have
utterly no pun intended decended. so be it. I am to act as a
facilitator in
abeyance and absentee exchequer for transmittal electronically to my
bank of
the tidy sum of 3 million nachorenias, nigerian money printed in lagos
before BEFORE 1989 and therefor inflation proof . huzza, shit such
wealth
and tomorrow or mwhen ever it arrives I will go out a buy some friends.

back from east coast and worn down a lot of difficulty with this
account and
smarmie attitude from chaos management neus zeigeist wannabees. thenold
game
of young bucks with computers whippin up on old drivers. If we stop the
wheels turning this beaucoup account goes under so they eat at the
edges of
our reality and I unfortunately am spending afar too much time thinking
about getting even. but that's fred. maturity takes more energy than I
want
to expend. or arriving at maturity, but then trucks go over hills and
mountains at 65 mph and with 10 speeds and all the truckin' bozo's are
into
550 CAT's and 13 apeeds and 74 mph whatever. I am about two miles an
hour
faster than some of rest of swtr drivers so I am having fun.

letter from pat Connor at WVU press sez they aren';t considering any
new
writers there in posey or poetry as demand is down quite a bit . I am
encouraged he liked my work I sent last year so i will have to get a
secnd
edition of radio room out sans Joe dong mao references and w' a
stronger
edit. may ghost press it and print and read aroundplaces when I get
time and
sell a little.haven't made it to NYC Open City at all and I am in
Newark
during the days but tied up loading. I will try tomorrow to look up
Open
City press. a viable readers market and tied in with other small
presses in
and around NYC, very viable and may be a home for you? I will get
together
some stuff on City Lights in Berkerly as that may be the only press I
can
feel comfortable with. theyare heavy on local presence and who has
spent
time there in Azuza street , paid their dues,and all the local stuff
but
they might be interested in what I have. will be february before I can
mount
an attack. are U counting the daze unti dismebarkation? fromm the great
desert ship Bisbee? Get me a French national passport and I will come
and
help you clean up and rebuild?



heap o' affection,



Fred








Fred:

Ah yes there it is and they are so beayootiful aren't they, one has to open them up for a while for the wonder potential. Glad to hear you'll have the ghosts do the printing for you but do they know how to read, can they fly? You Fred and sometimes I know all about the flying...on and on but when I mentioned it to the two babies in my care, they seemed not to remember that they could fly. Why do human beings do that you know, forget how to fly in their dreams? Is it because they forget about the abstraction of merely being awake or they just don't know how to say it? Once they learn how to say it they keep it to themselves, the babies. It is a dream of escape really but no one knows the difference anymore...they know it, the kids. One is only one year thus and the other a bit further along the way....we go to the parks to use our mouth parts to taste the swings. Hopefully, they will remember their great aunt Meggie as the one who would swing when they refused. Too much risk of going away completely forever to the sky.
The worst of it is, they will have been validated in their beliefs when I finally do swing away forever. They will remember it that way and then she will somewhere be and not come. Never. For now we just go in between spells and eat from the same bowls and fall on the same stairs. For now.

Tomorrow, it is to the great Bahia Kino with Radi Ann Porter at the helm. We've got the castle all folded together, full of cords and tarps, shovels and pesto.
One week on her favorite beach where she has always wanted to share with us there, the water. She thinks it belongs to her and is so tired of the individual partaking of it....so we go. With cameras and books...for me it is the Cantos, Gravity's Rainbow and the Quran. Cannot go without that you know and the rugs so that I can pray to the Creator near the Mexican sea that he left there for Radi. Saying, here it is...enjoy it for a while. Two dogs will be our gargoyles for the federales and gypsies. My mate is so very jealous of it all as he is stuck in the prison of Riyadh but I told him I'd miss him more because he is less there than he is here. At least here he has a voice on the phone or a smiley on the internet, but there he is just a constant dream and reminder to protect them. Protect them all he says to me as if I am some kind of demon warning system (he knows that I am). The demons down there though are afraid of the Virgin of Magdalena and those in Santa Ana. I cannot wait to be there again in the dusty gas and a taco towns of Sonora. Only Sonora but is there really anything beyond Sonora? You fall to sleep and cannot leave the state of it. That is what the beach is for Radi tells me..for the sleeping. The eating is only for the continuity of the sleeping. At least there we are closer to our hopes of one day seeing the Aztecs. This, we have promised to do if death does not intervene with one of us...and doing these things at our age has become a terminal diagnosis...maybe this will be the last time. We always think of that and then remember the swings that swing aunties away forever. We live in a countdown you know. The darkest star on the brink of radiation over a graveyard of the living...from that short on the view from 16th. Did I tell you?

I live in a Masonic house. Oh it is like driving into a mausoleum...two obelisks at the foot of the driveway...must have been a very big boss indeed to put on such airs. I wonder what kind of sacrifices were practiced here in this house you know, what meetings and organizational endeavors...you see? How the ratings of dingdong have gone down? Nothing is left to say without a confirmation from me that the missive was received. A complete blank save for the few stragglers there hoping he can muster an army against me. I left the Death of Merat taken by Radi Ann on the door and said, see here? Oh..I know the artworks and have seen the paintings in the Louvre ...the Degas are my favorite...his sketches on the corners of his backstages. And I've seen the horses with human faces in the Topkapi. I know what they were saying. They said, you know what we are saying. Simple messages. Things aren't as complicated as they seem you know but there goes the inherent complications...a man named Curtis Faville...somehow famous and I don't really know how..some books perhaps on criticism and then he called me babe. Oh no. Do not call me such a thing and complain about the Tehranians who have banned the Da Vinci Code (which he called an embarrassment when I told him it was not about the sex and murder but what you call, a trade embargo of the highest order..the slap in the face of your dignity kind of thing when the Tehranians say: we do not need to learn how to kill kids in math class you know...we already have had enough of the real deal..you brought it to us, remember)....I might stop by and tell him a thing or two before I do the Up and Adam type of things with the kids in a few hours...drag their drowsy selves out of bed so that we can gettyup and go with Radi Ann to the Sonora...who wants to stop off for some home made lunch at a place she has already earmarked for success. We'll have our cameras and there will be no option but for some picture TAKING. You have to be fast when you steal those or they'll get you, the ghosts. The demons will persue you all the way down to the shores.

All for now...I'll write you from there if I can...she says they have a dinghy internet shop there in Kino just like back home in Haris where we used to sit for hours on lazy Saturdays and swat at the flies in order to read what must be read: the mail.

Meg

View From 16th

There is a sense of not wanting to be here on 16th and Center, address 319 North, some awful transposition of 19 squared there, in the Masonic house. Two small, concrete obelisks are on either side of the driveway and it ought to be pleasant to look out onto the hills from the large, clean windows of this house, the natural hills and those which are man-made and called slag; the way the sun and the iron play off of each other to create lavender vistas all around is very lovely. There isn't though any solace in the view or on the roofs of so many quaint houses staggered around the smallish valley nor any charm in the massive structure sitting directly across from here just under a natural incline where the cliffs contain whole dynasties of evolution in fossils. It is right at the base of dump number seven. That would be the old hospital which is now a boarding house for the indigent and elderly. It is a handsome building, particularly in the afternoon when the light sculpts the art deco facades into crisp shapes. The place is charming the way things like that are, irresistable to people not used to the less than Byzantine. It is mostly brick and wood laid against timber, all quite flammable and impermanent. The only solid structures in sight are the several frames of shaft elevators that dot the hills in seemingly arbitrary places that mark areas where minerals are easy to find and extract by those who, in the past descended to mine the rock walls for a variety of things like copper and silver and sometimes, a bit of gold. It ought to be pleasant, but it isn't.

The best part of being in a catastrophe is actually being in one. There is nothing anyone can really say about that sort of thing, there is no choice within the boundaries of it, no conclusions and nothing which resembles remorse. It just is. It is a case that one does what one is compelled to do and that would be, to move along with it as if in a river, just glide along and look at things as they pass by or remain motionless at various points along the way.

Waking up in a large hall prepared in advance for the arrival of so many souls (on the run) after one has slept what seemed like several lifetimes contained in a few seconds, is the material of which epiphanies are made, the kind of thing a person only gets to do once, like everything else in the scheme of things. Ship load after ship load, ours was the fourteenth wave. When a person arrives in such a hall, the rest have already disappeared to wherever it is they ship people like us, refugees. There are lines and lines of open cots with one blanket each and a brand new pillow depending on the invasion and the invader. In this particular case, it could be said of it, "it was well appointed". There are boxes full of food and the essentials, foot powder and sanitary napkins and one bathroom with three stalls and three sinks for the women and probably, about the same for the men. It is an exhibition hall on the Turkish side of the island. It is prearranged for cataclysm.

I lay down after spending several hours settling in to the camp by organizing and reorganizing my few possessions but could not sleep because I was still bleeding and felt unclean. I didn't want to shower out in the open with the other women. The children were sleeping on and off and our traveling companions with whom we had left the city two days before were actively moving about and making phone calls to Kabul and Boston. They seemed very busy. Jessica, the mother, was worried about her diet, she could not be around people who had eaten carbohydrates within the previous 24 hours, it was very important to her that we respect this. We had no phone though and there wasn't really anything any of us wanted to say, my children and I, to anyone we knew. We felt very far away, so far that no phone could ever span the distance we felt.

Night began to fall and the hall was still empty. The few stragglers from the boat before ours had departed at one, just after we arrived. We were absolutely alone with thousands of empty cots and all sorts of personal expectations that we knew could never be fufilled. We did not know how we felt yet, not really and somehow, I knew we wouldn't really know how we would feel for a very long time to come. Perhaps forever. We might never recover, I knew that much but also knew that recovery isn't always the best thing if it means there isn't a lesson learned or a price paid. We were paying dearly for something but didn't quite understand what or when the debt we had incurred would finally be paid in full. The numbness was profound.

I spent a few hours walking around the fairgrounds looking for others like myself or those even worse off, those in shock or perhaps even ill. I looked for tears and slouching and found a woman on a bench sitting all alone. I tried to comfort her with talk of God and she appreciated it even though we were of different sects entirely, whole different ballparks of understanding about our status and the cause of the invasion. The woman sobbed as we compared what we'd seen so far and how we feared what else it might be that we would see. She spoke of the sister she'd left behind. It was a kind of sad excitement that allowed the closeness to exist between us for nearly a half hour. I finally got up, held her her for a moment and said goodbye to her. I can remember her face as one of average intellect, average sadness and a complete sense of loss and frustration that aggravated the tiny lines around her eyes. Her face was already anemic from several days living under seige in the south of our country. She could have been a woman in a painting.

When I returned to the hall, everyone in my group, my children and my friend and her two daughters were already asleep or resting with their eyes half closed. No one seemed to have anything left to say even though we'd not spoken more than a few words to each other since the early afternoon. I hadn't slept for nearly a week. The last time I had slept I awoke to a thunderous explosion above our building which lit the sky like a match suddenly lights a dark room. No one moved or said anything as I prepared to lay down, not even a goodnight let alone, an I love you. Then I fell without even a pause to observe my last deep sigh into a dark and immense sleep.

I woke up suddenly but without being startled or disoriented. I had no idea how much time had passed but if time were to be measured as change it must have been years that I had slept because what I saw as I opened my eyes was a world which had completely changed.

The cavernous hall which had been so empty was now filled, every cot in it had a sleeping body there and some held two. None of them moved. I cannot imagine how they settled so close to us in such silence, the way an army of butterflies must arrive in a tree. Thousands more had arrived in those hours or moments of sleep of which I have no real record to refer to. They appeared to be dead rather than exhausted. There was only one soldier walking out of the hall who looked back over his shoulder briefly before disappearing and I sat alone looking over the great event horizon. I sat and waited for things to begin moving again, I was frozen in pain and wonder at the company of souls in which I was immersed as if in the clearest water on the highest mountain, a place where no one had ever been before or would ever go again. Here it was at last, Nirvana, wildly unstable and utterly somnolent. The darkest star on the brink of radiation over a graveyard of the living.

The two obelisks mark the driveway but I do not want to know what they mean. I only know that I exist on the corner of 16th and Central, 319 North.

Chapter from This Purgatory

Her mother noticed the vague intensity Sally expressed in the diner. As a mother leaning slightly toward the east in those days, it was quite difficult to manage a smile for her own daughter. A fight erupted over the tardiness of the waiter and she said, "He is such a loser." This caused Sally to launch into one of her popular digressions about being thankful for being in a diner and awaiting a bit of food.

"Oh for crying out loud Sally," was all her mother could say. For crying out loud. How does one explain to a Sally what is going on in the late night of a diner except in a story and so she did. She began:

"You know, I used to work in one of these, they're awful..." as if the children hadn't heard it ten times before or a hundred. "Your father would be feeding you as I left and my heart would just sink. In fact, I paid for your sister's homebirth by collecting just the coins in a coffee can. I saved all my coin tips and paid for the midwife myself because really, he wanted nothing to do with it all...before you were born that is," Ruth added in a conscientious way.

Sally just pursed her lips tighter and kept looking around, not realizing that she was even worse off than her mother who knew what it was all about now. Kids always think they know so much.

"But you know, it was also one of the best times in my life. I met people in the diner. All those old guys at the counter and Ultra, who thought he was Jesus. He didn't say so but it was pretty obvious that he looked like him and anyways, he didn't talk alot."

Still, Sally didn't budge. She felt sorry for the waiter. Her mother kept an uneasy eye on the food window and felt certain that their order was just sitting there and getting cold. Oddly enough, she didn't usually care this much about a slow order but for some reason, this time, she did. She didn't want her children to suffer so much. She'd been watching too much news and for crying out loud, had even ordered a collection of Carol Burnett shows from an early morning advertisement there. She just wanted a little "pick me up" as in the way her own mother used to "put on her face" to go out back in the old days when her mother was actually alive.

Ruth was born weighing only five pounds and was put directly into an icubator. This fact somehow made her feel very special throughout her life but she didn't think about it often, just once or twice in twenty years but when she thought of it, Ruth's special nature just seemed to crystalize completely in her own mind. I was in an incubator! Like an egg, like a very precious egg. The reason she was such a lightweight however was because her mom was such a heavy smoker and the fact was in one of her most coveted photographs in which her mother sat slouched and very pregnant on the tattered couch with a menthol held delicately between the tips of her fingers. She'd tried to abort Ruth with a certain drug that gave Ruth cervical problems when she was only fifteen but always held that she had taken it to prevent another stillbirth. Her mother had had two of them and would talk about those once in a while. The only one Ruth really remembered though was the one that fell out at the breakfast table, a little boy. She had lost two brothers! And one of them literally fell out at the breakfast table and for whatever reason, Ruth believed it happened in a diner. It provided so much evidence to Ruth that, yes, she was supposed to be born and yes, she was very, very special.

When the food finally arrived, Josh the waiter begged the pardon of his “clients” as Ruth liked to think of herself when in any service situation, obviously worried about his tip in light of the fact that he’d read Ruth’s look as well as Ruth had read Sally’s and Sally had read her mother’s. Sally’s brother Joseph hadn’t really said a thing about it all because he was just trapped, entirely trapped by two females whom he knew only too well, or so he thought. His mother contemplated the irony of their relationships as all mothers do and often told him, “You were in my uterus you know, I know everything about you.”

Sally still looked distressed. She said, “This place is so scary.”

“There you go again! What do you want me to do about it Sally?” Ruth couldn’t explain what she knew, it was entirely too frightening to let on what it was she knew very well. Sally got even more agitated and pursed her lips even tighter and barely touched the food which looked quite delicious to Ruth who had ordered her usual eggs and biscuits instead of what she really wanted.

“Do you want some mom?” Sally couldn’t resist making a point of offering it to her mom.

“Oh no sweetie, you eat it. If there’s any left I’ll take a bite later.” Ruth’s eggs drooped in front of her on her plate and she slid them around in a puddle of fat, they were half done and the hashed browns were a sorry sight. The biscuit was pretty good and she used it to sop up the luke warm watery eggs. Joseph shoved his food down as fast as usual and Ruth couldn’t help but notice he didn’t know how to cut his baked potato so that he could eat it without messing around with the peel.

“You do it like this son,” she said in a matter of fact tone. He rolled his eyes and just looked helpless. “Your fingers are too long you know, it isn’t really your fault,” and she tried to make him laugh but it wasn’t really very funny. He’d heard it so many times before and pretty much, resented it.

“Oh well, what can I say?” was the only thing she could think of to make it all better, this situation in a cruddy diner in a city that existed mainly to serve the needs of the US military. Everyone in the diner looked the same and outside, just about every car had a bumper sticker on it with the American Flag.

Ruth thought once again how hard it is to live in purgatory without being able to tell anyone about it. It was her secret although she knew that there were others who knew it too. People like Ultra who instead of talking, just imitated and tried to look real.

Chapter One

"Nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon the world. While I have it there shall be nothing exquiste or unique in it. Nothing to anchor me." T.E. Lawrence

It is true that most stories end right where they began. They wouldn't be stories otherwise. I had just received what I thought to be Lanny's last letter. Lanny and I had been writing to one another for years but it seemed something had changed. Even he couldn't understand what it was I was trying to say about things but I sent my response along anyways hoping that he would choose the right thing and remember the advice.

This is the last thing I think I ever said to Lanny whom I often called doogs. Doogs was his dog that had perished before I ever met any of the men on Cloud's Hill.

I was his one motivation and he, was mine.

To Mr. Lanny Muss:

Oh, if there is ONE person in the world that I get a
letter from and am not surprised but delighted, it is
doogs. Thank you doogs. You know, it wouldn't be a
birthday without one!

We are fine here....we have food and water and a DOG!
A wonderful mutt without a name. We cannot find a
name for the poor guy. A pitbull mix, a just add
water kind of dog that may not beg and roll over but
knows where his bed is and when to be exceptionally
kind to us.

Truth be told however, we are in a miserable state but
opt not to talk too much about where are hearts are
right now and instead rely on the position of our
minds. One needs a good mind to digest it all right
now and plan ahead, so to speak.

As far as the literature is concerned, there was a
terrible yet miraculous falling out of friendships
only weeks before the Great Event which we witnessed.
One of the lesser compatriots in the group took it
upon himself to ask a question of me i.e. what do you
mean by this Zionism? Oh and then he vocalized such
miserably shallow contempt for folks "like me". And
who is like me doogs? I'm sure there are many who see
things as they are instead of how they want them to
be. Some of us learned the truth in various ways and
others learned in various other ways. Some of us were
shown the truth in our dreams and the truth was:

you have it now, go out and do not stand down unless
you are too tired to fight anymore and even then, just
remember to hang onto yourself until the bleeding and
killing stop. Try not to lose consciousness during
the battles raging all around you.

When at first the question was asked, I did what I
know to do and bracketed the contemplation in basic
truths about the "God-ness" of the situation scholars
of the sect like me know so well: There is no
coercion in religion. When we choose to ignore that
it can only be the greatest risk and nothing less, to
say what must be said. We have ways of knowing and
seeing things that are "all the way" not just part.
Someone once said, "It is not the almost good Quran or
the partly correct Quran, it is the Glorious Quran."
Can it be that there are still those who do not
understand the forked road down which that leads?
Those that do not comprehend that every kind of malice
and every kind of benefit is described within that
text and in some places outside of it? The road down
which that leads is certainly haunted by demons that
cannot be described except to those who have at least
seen the road from a fairly close distance let alone,
traversed it. Some of those know what is being warned
of but others just prefer to paint the demons on the
roads below, their own color. There are other roads
of course but the view is not quite as majestic from
those several paths that criss cross beneath our own.
And when a person gets far enough down the second of
the forked paths, they start to lose contact with the
others who know that one person has chosen that hard
path with certain knowledge about the path (unlike the
very lucky travelers who never considered another road
ever..those are the lucky ones). They, those below,
are on their own paths but do not understand the
weariness of the other paths nor do they comprehend
the junctures at which the other roads pass under our
own. Worse, they resent the flighty calls we use to
remind them as if we mimic the call of certain birds.
They often say to others, "those 'up there' are
obviously insane to be making such noises".

We have become many on this majestic path...although
some of the travelers here are not so judicious in
their warnings and others hoping to either keep the
peace or at least, describe what peace might look like
lose the ability to remain patient. It doesn't
resemble what most people think. It, "the peace"
looks more like determination and less like simple
giving up and submission to faulty human desires:
fame, wealth, love.

There is a point on our road that has a sign that is
very clear, This Way Out. No one however that has not
seen that sign in particular believes that it is
there! I've seen the sign with my own eyes and heard
the creak of it (the winds here are harsh and have
voice) with my own ears. I physically lifted those I
could to the level of seeing it as well, dragged their
little bodies and minds up by force and am exhausted
from that activity and the activity of keeping them
there as if held by the finest threads of a spider's
web...this is parenthood and wifehood. The rest I
cannot drag nor hang onto but I did attempt to once,
just a few months ago. Those compatriots were almost
there or at least, one of them was or maybe two. Then
it (a mysterious stack of cards) all fell down because
one of their own path guides took issue with my
leadership and perpetrated a mutiny, a mutiny I had
seen in his eyes for a very long time. I caught him
in his mutinous deed and what does one do when at that
particular point in time but show one's sword? I
asked, Do you like it?

It is sharp and very. It cuts and does not make
hostages. Hostages I am not able to sequester or
return if need be.

I believe that when one shows that sword then there is
no option but to cut the ties, the very thin ties one
has weaved with one's own hand. There is one final
moment however, when the followers can choose either
way, to hang onto what they have been so desirous of
seeing by the second hand logic of description or
else, they can let go and allow their feet to fall
back onto the old road thinking that the old road is
still what the old road was. It isn't! It is a
vaporous road, ancient and changeable anymore but
looks solid to the untrained eye. What can I do to
describe to them the nature the old road and its
destructions and brilliantly reconstructed bridges and
landmarks? The landmarks there look almost real but
they are only copies carved out of memory, from books
and ideas. In fact, they have their own illusions
about the illusions and will swear to one of us that
they know the brilliancy of illusions. Everytime one
of these cautious followers reaches one of the fine
statuaries on those old roads they feel cheated even
though they once again, swear they know they were
going to be cheated by the fake marble. It is then
that they start shouting at us above (whom they cannot
see but know we are there still calling to them about
the looks of things)...they shout about our deeds as
if our deeds were recriminations or violations
which...well...they were but we told them so, we told
them that if you choose to ask deeply of certain
things, you will get an answer and you will be forced
to make a decision.

We are told about these violations..this act of
telling the others, describing to the others the
majesty we are seeing. They begin to hate us after we
cut the ties even though they chose to take that old
path. That old path that leads to the weary
conclusion that the road was rebuilt by those who use
roads for robbery rather than travel. That road below
is just chock full of demons that look fairly smart
and clean, less alarming. The demons up here are not
so devious because they know what we know and they
know where we also go....with them. They wear their
own clothes and you cannot mistake them for anything
but what they are. Our demons travel with us together
and know what we know. I say it once again but
differently this time. We know that when we have
reached the sign This Way Out that we also know who
helped us to get there and who helped them, in fact,
who posted them there. It is as if our demons, the
obvious ones are put there merely to keep us busy or
fatigued. When we reach the door, we know without any
doubt what was told us, was told to us clearly. We
understand the questions on the other side of the door
will consist of very important details of which only
the text provides the answer. I'll tell you what it
is doogs, the answer so that when you get to the door
and move beyond it...you will have the proper
response.

It will be asked:

Who were your helpers?

You are to say:

I thought it was this one. You are not to say, "I
didn't have any." This is an obvious lie, I must just
say it to you directly. It is an obvious lie. There
is no passage through that door without certain kinds
of help and we all make it through that door
regardless of what path we took to get there.

The next question will be:

Where are your helpers now?

You are to say something like:

They are no where to be found, they were false or they
were a bit of trickery, we may have believed them for
whatever reason but we do not deny now what their role
was.

Then, you will be asked:

Who is your helper now?

You are to say:

Allah. There is only one Allah. You are the one who
posted the demons as guardians of many things and
caretakers of even more. (You must know that some
demons can be seen right now, inside...they whip and
torture some so obviously that you can literally see
their heads warp from the blows or see them scurry
away under the thrust of the demonic whips...like my
poorest brother John..last time I saw him, he was
being whipped sorely by one of these shaitans...not
clear whether the shaitan was whipping him for his
failure to bother me on "his advice" or whether it is
just one of the tedious Shaitan that knows he has one
soul and just lazily whips away like a person who
whips a half dead horse).

You might then be asked to question one of the demons
or perhaps even one of the more pleasant looking
pretenders. And I know what any of those false
helpers will say.

They will say:

We didn't ask you to follow us did we? We follow
Allah also. We never told you to take our advice, you
only took it because of your disillusionment.

Oh sure..they are cunning little fellows on THIS side
of the door but inside the door they are merely doing
what it is they were told to do. And to state the
obvious.

Allah does not leave any one without supervision if
they so choose. And most certainly, Allah created the
demons as well (which is a fine point of contention on
the other paths but not ours). We know that no thing
or place or road was left without guardians of the
highest order: angels. All sorts. Of death and more
importantly, the greatest one of all, Iblis. We do
not bow to him but respect his position. We do not
follow his advice but know what purpose to which his
advice serves. Ah! It serves as a rejoinder on the
other side of the door, a final proof. Perhaps a very
painful one for some. A horrid one. One that will
make anything more than that unimaginable. Especially
if they have been shown a sword from one of us. They
will remember that sword in the worst way. The sword
that they basically asked us to show to them, to check
in some way, "our seriousness".

And still...I am not through that door...all I can do
is wait where I am. Hold onto what it is I know I've
pulled up and just stand, dig in. Dig my heels
literally into the path there. All the while I must
watch some very terrible things all around. Majestic
is what majestic is. Like any mountain described
accordingly it is a landscape of sharp edges, huge
drops and dark crevices. Beautiful isn't a descriptor
there. Unless you say, Terrible Beauty. It is a
terrible kind of beauty. Sometimes, it scares me.
Luckily though, those that were already by the door
remind me that all is normal. This stuff is normal,
get used to it for now. It won't last too long but it
might seem so.

All for now doogs. Thank you for my birthday present
which is not only a greeting but an invitation to
digress on these sorts of things for whatever reason
one does that.

No swords for you.

M

Ma'jnoon'ah