What does the Phoenix do after it rises from the ashes, I asked R. Gordon Shiplett's friend Deborah L. M. Humble as we walked in East Sooke Park. We both then asked R.Gordon Shiplett himself. "Oh, it goes to McDonald's," he replied.

After we walked a while he said, "it has its brilliant flaming day."

Or is it a bird? Remember, reptiles also come from eggs, and we don't have to buy anybody's assumption that Humpty was even an egg. We have to go to exegesis to conclude that Humpty was (a) an egg (may as well have been a... stockbroker...) and (b) a male. But, playing with egg. Humpty Snakety? Out comes a happy baby snake, to make its way in a complex world. Leave the fussers and the crowd trying to piece together the shell, for Christ's sake. Raise my sail like a cobra's hood and let me proceed, wind-driven. Let Christ's cross flare out into a hood, wind-driven, to drive him and it to plow furrows in fertile earth, alone along the rows, turning, back, combination plowman and scarecrow. Let Christs on crosses be set up at carnivals for strong men to hammer the feet--see who has the strength to drive the kundalini up Christ's spine and out the top. Light his halo, win a prize (Whoopee-ding!)

Joseph Chilton Pearce writes that when mammoths were found, grass in mouths, quick-frozen, "caught in a freak" by a polar freezedown, they had erections! Genital engorgement is natural in death, the body's last attempt to lure the soul back into it. By this account, especially since Christ presumably lost faith in his black moment, he died with a full erection. Paint that and hang it in a church.