CHAPTER XV 



SHORT chapter coming now, and it's the worst of them all. I 

 think it's speculative. It's a lapse from our usual pseudo- 

 standards. I think it must mean that the preceding chapter was 

 very efficiently done, and that now by the rhythm of all quasi- 

 things which can't be real things, if they're rhythms, because a 

 rhythm is an appearance that turns into its own opposite and then 

 back again but now, to pay up, we're what we weren't. Short 

 chapter, and I think we'll fill in with several points in Interme- 

 diatism. 



A puzzle: 



If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute, the 

 Positive Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining, 

 itself, via a third state, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that 

 we're trying to conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Uni- 

 versalness from Nothingness. Take that up yourself, if you're 

 willing to run the risk of disappearing with such velocity that 

 you'll leave an incandescent train behind, and risk being infinitely 

 happy forever, whereas you probably don't want to be happy 

 I'll sidestep that myself, and try to be intelligible by regarding the 

 Positive Absolute from the aspect of Realness instead of Universal- 

 ness, recalling that by both Realness and Universalness we mean 

 the same state, or that which does not merge away into something 

 else, because there is nothing else. So the idea is that out of 

 Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of Universal- 

 ness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness. 

 Just so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that mate- 

 rialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or 

 books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness 

 in relative terms. It would seem then that Intermediateness is a 

 relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. 

 But the absolute cannot be the related of course a confession 

 that we can't really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit to 

 the unlimited. Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflec- 

 tion that we can't do worse than has been done by metaphysicians 



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