It All Comes Down, As It Must,

If Patterns Of Ones And Zeros Were 'like' Patterns Of Human Lives And Death, If Everything About An Individual Could Be Represented In A Computer Record By A Long String Of Ones And Zeros, Then What Kind Of Creature Would Be Represented By A Long String Of Lives And Deaths?

The Saint Whose Water Can Light Lamps, The Clairvoyant Whose Lapse In Recall Is The Breath Of God, The True Paranoid For Whom All Is Organized In Spheres Joyful Or Threatening About The Central Pulse Of Himself, The Dreamer Whose Puns Probe Ancient Fetid Shafts And Tunnels Of Truth All Act In The Same Special Relevance To The Word, Or Whatever It Is The Word Is There, Buffering, To Protect Us From. The Act Of Metaphor Than Was A Thrust At Truth And A Lie, Depending Where You Were: Inside, Safe Or Outside, Lost.

Real Flight And Dreams Of Flight Go Together. Both Are Part Of The Same Movement. Not A Before B, But All Together.

It Is A Curve Each Of Them Feels, Unmistakably. It Is The Parabola. They Must Have Guessed, Once Or Twice - Guessed And Refused To Believe - That Everything, Always, Collectively, Had Been Moving Toward That Purified Shape Latent In The Sky, That Shape Of No Surprise, No Second Chance, No Return. Yet They Do Move Forever Under It, Reserved For Its Own Black-and-white Bad News Certainly As If It Were The Rainbow, And They Its Children...

Liebig Himself Seems To Have Occupied The Role Of A Gate, Or Sorting-demon, Such As His Younger Contemporary Clerk Maxwell Once Proposed, Helping To Concentrate Energy Into One Favored Room Of The Creation At The Expense Of Everything Else.