CHAPTER IX 



MY own pseudo-conclusion: 

 That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great 

 scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: 

 that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, 

 with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands 

 of good-sized fishes have anathematized us for laughing disrespect- 

 fully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the de- 

 sire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over 

 microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc 

 or fishes' spawn or frogs' spawn, have visited upon us their wan 

 solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons and mum- 

 mies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from con- 

 veniences. 



Or there is only hypnosis. The accursed are those who admit 

 they're the accursed. 



If we be more nearly real we are reasons arraigned before a jury 

 of dream-phantasms. 



Of all meteorites in museums, very few were seen to fall. It is 

 considered sufficient grounds for admission if specimens can't be 

 accounted for in any way other than that they fell from the sky 

 as if in the haze of uncertainty that surrounds all things, or that 

 is the essence of everything, or in the merging away of everything 

 into something else, there could be anything that could be accounted 

 for in only one way. The scientist and the theologian reason that 

 if something can be accounted for in only one way, it is accounted 

 for in that way or logic would be logical, if the conditions that it 

 imposes, but, of course, does not insist upon, could anywhere be 

 found in quasi-existence. In our acceptance, logic, science, art, re- 

 ligion are, in our "existence," premonitions of a coming awakening, 

 like dawning awarenesses of surroundings in the mind of a dreamer. 



Any old chunk of metal that measures up to the standard of 

 "true meteoritic material" is admitted by the museums. It may 

 seem incredible that modern curators still have this delusion, but we 

 suspect that the date on one's morning newspaper hasn't much to 



