Noah Eli Gordon
from The Source

The tongue tastes the flavor of soup with the same speed with which the Source demands one to continue eating. There are always different schools of skeptics, philosophers doubtful of the possibility of effective knowledge in this or that matter, and their existence is perhaps the surest sign of the heat and sophistication of the Source. Certainly, some great teacher is here indicated, one of so great knowledge that to her own followers she may seem not only to know such things as are human, but even to be able to foreknow things that are post-human; and thus, the holy fruit matures.

Will those whose ideas are few, but who possess a wonderful mastery over them in the long run prevail? Evidently we need first to eternalize the Source. Only a vision directed exclusively at the eternal, to which our human world is irrelevant, makes a concept consisting of nothing but its distinguishing characteristics, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions.

Just as soldiers find fragmentation mines useful to set up around a bivouac at night, so we too, when considering the Source, mix ideal with empirical, empirical with ideal, over-investing in such impermanent perimeters. The remains will not be identified using dental records. There are other methods for suppressing dissent.

 

 

The Source is more than a tourist attraction to the countless speakers who have used metaphor to move from a village, make a fortune by enterprise, climb the social ladder, and occupy a niche much different from that of mother and father. This is how one enters the realm of professional secrecy, exiting the subway and glancing at the spot on one’s wrist where there is no watch.

Increasingly discontent with complacency and a feeling of anxiety that impending disaster may be ahead and that the problems of the world are slipping beyond control, the reader will decide where within the Source to take refuge, and when to use it as the instrument it is. Unofficial action against it is an oxymoron. Does our present system really engender the desire for greatness in multitudes, who, sooner or later, are bound to feel frustrated when they discover that they lack the talent?

These are issues the Source must leave aside, as it is not innate in the human mind, then so entrenched in human sensibility, which is why we don’t need a difference between common sense and science to bring us to the present, and yet another view of the desk stacked with account books of the various charitable organizations with which we occupy our ample spare time.

 

 

My single confidence is that the conviction with which those who study the Source have devoted their intellectual lives will before long again be widespread through math, science, mythology, and the shadowy light flickering upon its walls. Gruff and timid children often turn into lively and sociable adults. Any talk about the Source is bound to unaffectedly spiritualize secular things and secularize spiritual. The existence of stops to self-knowledge is vanity and will pass.

The Source has experimented with determination to find some bedrock on which to build. Could you really look on it as a great system, consider it with all the means of the observing and inquiring intellect, and never think of its beauty as an informant of pleasure?

It is after you have realized that there is a real table, and an object upon that table, and that you have broken that table and whatever it displayed—it is only after all this, and not a moment sooner, that the Source begins to speak.

 

 

The hounds wail for the dead.

Acknowledgements are made.

I call them all to mind; and see each confused in dust, mixed in one wide ruin.

And so the Source is the lens collecting rays of light and projecting the image of which they are the components upon us; one doesn’t see this lens, but one couldn’t see without it.

 

 

I love people who make speeches at the table. Why had I not known this before? It is appropriate that the diction should become more elevated, that one feels it to be a location rather than a settlement, some place farther from home, where small experience grows. Such liberation can come only through the Source. Some special, subtle charm of chastity and sanctity draws us to the opposite quality of each, which leads to friction, aspects of our interconnectedness that a butterfly seems to have left upon a little of its colored dust as it alights and pauses, rebuking us for idle, unnecessary, and too curious questions. In fact, a number of them, in widely scattered places, are doubtless affected by an ingrained habit of solicitude for the helpless dependents who support them. They dwell in a perpetual fog, worse than oppositions, conflict, oppressive hierarchy or repression. You will translate their thoughts better when you live among them.

 

 

It is difficult to grasp that the Source, remaining as it does in its ecstasy, is nevertheless intimately concerned with our affairs, demanding that actions identify as closely as possible with the characters they portray, that reason come out of dock and drop its moorings, that we bring the world a charge rather than an apology, going on greased wheels, repeating odious grumblings about smallness and poverty, and professing an unbound respect for debate after a few beers.

This is not to raise a flag on its own sapling staff. Land takes its name from the people deserted by its inhabitants. Never imagining that passports might protect them from the disagreeable scent of skillful social climbing, the mastery of desire, cycles of suffering, and the promise of salvation, those who become an organ of the Source are enlivened by poetic illusion as much as by anything as it is. But is this even possible? and isn’t the mere supposition of its possibility a vile slander upon the face of the Source? To pour forth like wave after wave of barbarian hordes or to cluster as mice bewildered by fear around a pile of nuts—such is the split for those who follow the Source with some curiosity: war on reason and feeling—the twin forms of human communication illustrated with infantile stories. What we really are takes the Source to tell.