Those majestic sliding sky-doors of that old mosque on Mount Palomar slide back, expose a 200-inch lens to the moist atmosphere, say on a clear summer morning, to investigate, to penetrate the interstices of the blue sky at just about 2000 AD, or even to focus the sun as kids do with a Sherlock Holmes glass to a point of fire like a white-hot little star. Here: Take joy with me in that some time ago I let loose the bait of my ambition through the window of naïve grandiosity to unwind to the full length of the reel (real), that is, to anchor the spool with the thread tau(gh)t, and that it is still spinning. At any moment I expect my body to be thrown upright by a sudden inexorable vertical inclination, the entire spine to be as suddenly anchored, and the parameters of my ambition defined.

But what happens in the spinning? Love at the height of war--a cockfight, fluffed cocks circling: oxymoron, paradox, the "exvoluting" toroid or Möbius Ouroborous flatworm twist of ironies in the plicatures of particulars.

The serious commitment to whim--Irving Layton, who decided to "pitch his folly" in the camp of Spinoza and Nietzsche and the school (from, as we know, skola, leisure) of... what would we call it?--self-love--Spinoza claiming, if my memory is correct, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, Layton crying out "more space for these stilts! More space or I fail!"--and, good old Henry Thoreau writing at an early date, "I seek a garret." Well, I confidently assert that both Layton and Thoreau sought both more space and a garret (from OF garite, guerite, watchtower, deriv. of garir, guarir, to defend, protect) and, both as spiritual scaffolding, carrying the fruits of one to the other until these symbols mate.