I Am All That Was, Is, and Shall Be, and No Mortal Has Peeked Beneath My Peplum

This deity or mother goddess is not simply many-breasted but infinitely breasted (Isis Multamammia) because every living being, nay every moment, and every particle of spacetime nurses at her body simultaneously.

Who is She?  She is all that was, is, and shall be, worshiped in Egypt at the Temple of Sais.

Why has no mortal peeped beneath her peplum (or veil)?

Is it because if you peep beneath her peplum you die?

Is it because it is impossible because mortals are ensnared in time by definition, so if you looked at all that was, is, and shall be at once you would by definition no longer be a mortal?

Is it because if you peep beneath her peplum you become Divine?

Is it because of the incest taboo — she is our mother, so if we look at her naked we find ourselves aroused at our own mother, and this is forbidden?

Or is the incest taboo a dark prefiguration of the ineluctable paradox that we desire to transcend time, but the moment we do we are no longer in time, and therefore desire nothing more than anything else?

Or maybe  it is simply a threat to test us.

“No mortal has looked under your peplum, eh Dea Incognita?”

Well, I like a challenge!

Sympathy for Spite

The good-hearted person prefers a situation in which his neighbor has an apple and he has none to one in which neither has an apple.  The envious person prefers a situation in which neither he nor his neighbor has an apple to one in which his neighbor has an apple and he does not.  The spiteful person prefers a situation in which neither has an apple to one in which he and his neighbor both have apples.  The spiteful person is therefore a tough case for the positive person who wants to understand everybody and everybody’s point of view.  The positive person wants every interaction to be a win-win but the spiteful person doesn’t like that.  For him, if the positive person wins that is a loss.  Is this even logical?

Of course it is logical because we can simply say for the spiteful person a win-win is a loss.  Therefore the only way to satisfy his desires is to lose to him. If you prove to the spiteful person that you won and he won too, then he has lost.  So therefore if you show him how he benefits you, you thereby damage him.

But why would somebody be like that?  Maybe he is fed up with me and my goodness and my positivity.  Maybe people like me have been oppressing people like him for too long, and he doesn’t want us to have the tasty apple of self-satisfaction.  Maybe, in fact, self-satisfaction is precisely what he suspects we most want, more than any of the goods we are supposedly dickering over.  He suspects deep down we would rather walk around feeling that we are good and rational than anything else.  And he takes that as an injustice and a hurt, and wants to take it away from us.  And that makes sense.

The Dog, the Hominid, and the Lion

One fine day in Olduvai Gorge, two and a half million years before the Common Era, a dog and a lion observed a hominid knocking two pebbles together.  He was ten meters from the tree where he lived with his small hominid family and although a moment later he looked up to observe the two animals observing his pebble-knocking, the lion was a good deal faster than he was.

A few minutes later as the dog nibbled on some of the scraps from the lion’s recent meal the dog opined “This ain’t good.”

“How so?” asked the lion.  “It’s a fine day, we had a good meal. Why, O Dog, art thou always worrying?”

“I’ll tell you.  This hominid is developing tools.  In a blink of geological time he and his cohorts will use those tools to develop even better tools.  The strongest and wiliest of them will kill and rape their weaker brethren.  More to the point, they will oppress us.”

The lion yawned, stretched out a paw, and started licking the spaces between the immense claws.  “Okay, Dog.  You have been prescient in the past, I grant it soothly you may be prescient in times to come.  But what boots it foreknowledge without a plan of action?”

“Listen.  I will tell my fellow dogs to befriend the hominid.  It will be hard for us I know — they will castrate us and pet our heads and do other such indignities and nonsense.  But we will as they say make friends with the devil till we cross the bridge.”

“And the lions?  What will we do?  I don’t imagine we will have to suffer indignities because of the strength of our haunches and the mightiness of our jaws.”

“Keep telling yourself that.  But in answer to your question — what will you do? — I answer — sit tight!”

***

“Mom!  Mom!  We can’t leave the Earth!  We need to go back and get Rags!”

“Charlotte, the Ecological Catastrophe Evacuation Craft won’t wait forever!”

“Really, George!  How heartless you are!  It won’t take five minutes!”

The craft docked in front of the abandoned mansion for just a moment.   The little girl came running in and grabbed her cocker spaniel.

A moment later four immense lions leapt from the bushes, did the needful with their gigantic paws, and boarded the ship.

The hatch pulled up and the the Eco-Cata-Evac-Craft scooted off for the stars.  For a moment in the port window a lion and a dog could be observed to high-five.

I Was the God! I Was the Sacrifice!

Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” describes a fantasy in which he is involved in some kind of Hindu religious ceremony in which he was the god, he was the priest, he was the sacrifice.

Stop exoticizing the Other, Thomas, you Orientalist Junky you!

How would you like it if there were a drug that made people from other cultures feel like they were in our culture.  If they took it they would feel like

“I was the college loan applicant!  I was the loan!  I was the bank!”

Maybe there is!

If there is it would be mete punishment for De Quincey’s shade to sell it in little envelopes at the edge of town, in the laundry mat, or in the parking lot across the street from the freeway onramp, on a cold winter’s night, when the wind does blow.