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.

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.