Mallarmé, The Book: A Spiritual Instrument

The Book: A Spiritual Instrument
by Stéphane Mallarmé

I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. It terrifies me to think of the qualities (among them genius, certainly) which the author of such a work will have to possess. I am one of the unpossessed. We will let that pass and imagine that it bears no author’s name. What, then, will the work itself be? I answer: a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion. Man’s duty is to observe with the eyes of the divinity; for if his connection with that divinity is to be made clear, it can be expressed only by the pages of the open book in front of him.

Seated on a garden bench where a recent book is lying, I like to watch a passing gust half open it and breathe life into many of its outer aspects, which are so obvious that no one in the history of literature has ever thought about them. I shall have the chance to do so now, if I can get rid of my overpowering newspaper. I push it aside; it flies about and lands near some roses as if to hush their proud and feverish whispering; finally, it unfolds around them. I will leave it there along with the silent whispering of the flowers. I formally propose now to examine the differences between this rag and the book, which is supreme. The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will.

Now then—

The foldings of a book, in comparison with the large-sized, open newspaper, have an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls.

Every discovery made by printers has hitherto been absorbed in the most elementary fashion by the newspaper, and can be summed up in the word: Press. The result has been simply a plain sheet of paper upon which a flow of words is printed in the most unrefined manner. The immediacy of this system (which preceded the production of books) has undeniable advantages for the writer; with its endless line of posters and proof sheets it makes for improvisation. We have, in other words, a “daily paper.” But who, then, can make the gradual discovery of the meaning of this format, or even of a sort of popular fairyland charm about it? Then again, the leader, which is the most important part, makes its great free way through a thousand obstacles and finally reaches a state of disinterestedness. But what is the result of this victory? It overthrows the advertisement (which is Original Slavery) and, as if it were itself the powered printing press, drives it far back beyond intervening articles onto the fourth page and leaves it there in a mass of incoherent and inarticulate cries. A noble spectacle, without question. After this, what else can the newspaper possibly need in order to overthrow the book (even though at the bottom—or rather at its foundation, i.e. the feuilleton—it resembles the other in its pagination, thus generally regulating the columns)? It will need nothing, in fact; or practically nothing, if the book delays as it is now doing and carelessly continues to be a drain for it. And since even the book’s format is useless, of what avail is that extraordinary addition of foldings (like wings in repose, ready to fly forth again) which constitute its rhythm and the chief reason for the secret contained in its pages? Of what avail the priceless silence living there, and evocative symbols following in its wake, to delight the mind which literature has totally delivered?

Yes, were it not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established, that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we are about to turn.

The newspaper with its full sheet on display makes improper use of printing—that is, it makes good packing paper. Of course, the obvious and vulgar advantage of it, as everybody knows, lies in its mass production and circulation. But that advantage is secondary to a miracle, in the highest sense of the word: words led back to their origin, which is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so gifted with infinity that they will finally consecrate Language. Everything is caught up in their endless variations and then rises out of them in the form of the Principle. Thus typography becomes a rite.

The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and in its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction.

There is nothing fortuitous in all this, even though ideas may seem to be the slaves of chance. The system guarantees them. Therefore we must pay no attention to the book industry with its materialistic considerations. The making of a book, with respect to its flowering totality, begins with the first sentence. From time immemorial the poet has knowingly placed his verse in the sonnet which he writes upon our minds or upon pure space. We, in turn, will misunderstand the true meaning of this book and the miracle inherent in its structure, if we do not knowingly imagine that a given motif has been properly place at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light. Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again. Otherwise we will miss that ecstasy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation. If we do not actively create in this way (as we would music on the keyboard, turning the pages of a score), we would do better to shut our eyes and dream. I am not asking for any servile obedience. for, on the contrary, each of us has within him that lightning-like initiative which can link the scattered notes together. Thus, in reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in turn, less noisily, reach its meaning. All our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation; but, unlike music, they will be rarefied, for they partake of thought. Poetry, accompanied by the Idea, is perfect Music, and cannot be anything else.

Now, returning to the case at hand and to the question of books which are read in the ordinary way, I raise my knife in protest, like the cook chopping off chickens’ heads.

The virginal foldings of the book are unfortunately exposed to the kind of sacrifice which caused the crimson-edged tomes of ancient times to bleed. I mean that they invite the paper-knife, which stakes out claims to possession of the book. Yet our consciousness alone gives us a far more intimate possession than such a barbarian symbol; for it joins the book now here, now there, varies its melodies, guesses its riddles, and ever re-creates it unaided. The folds will have a mark which remains intact and invites us to open or close the pages according to the author’s desires. There can be only blindness and discourtesy in so murderous and self-destructive an attempt to destroy the fragile, inviolable book. The newspaper holds the advantage here, for it is not exposed to such treatment. But it is nonetheless an annoying influence; for upon the book—upon the divine and intricate organism required by literature—it inflicts the monotonousness of its eternally unbearable columns, which are merely strung down the pages by hundreds.

“But.”

I hear some one say, “how can this situation be changed?” I shall takes space here to answer this question in detail; for the work of art—which is unique or should be—must provide illustrations. A tremendous burst of greatness, of thought, or of emotion, contained in a sentence printed in large type, with one gradually descending line to a page, should keep the reader breathless throughout the book and summon forth his powers of excitement. Around this would be small groups of secondary importance, commenting on the main sentence or derived from it, like a scattering of ornaments.

It will be said, I suppose, that I am attempting to flabbergast the mob with a lofty statement. That is true. But several of my close friends must have noticed that there are connections between this and their own instinct for arranging their writings in an unusual and ornamental fashion, halfway between verse and prose. Shall I be explicit? All right, then, just to maintain that reputation for clarity so avidly pursued by our make-everything-clear-and-easy era. Let us suppose that a given writer reveals one of his ideas in theoretical fashion and, quite possibly, in useless fashion, since he is ahead of his time. He well knows that such revelations, touching as they do on literature, should be brought out in the open. And yet he hesitates to divulge too brusquely things which do not yet exist; and thus, in his modesty, and to the mob’s amazement, he veils them over.

It is because of those daydreams we have before we resume our reading in a garden that our attention strays to a white butterfly flitting here and there, then disappearing; but also leaving behind it the same slight touch of sharpness and frankness with which I have presented these ideas, and flying incessantly back and forth before the people, who stand amazed.

Translation by Bradford Cook

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Tradition and the Individual Seismograph

Or, Developing the Historical Poetics of Lee Sharks’ “Pearl”
Johannes Sigil
from Pearl and Other Poems

Here is a little known fact: language is the medium of time. It is through it that we move to past and future, a “moon through the tender air.” The poet builds formal structures in language that iterate the substance of time, which tend it towards futurity. This is easy to see, looking backwards: “Howl” was a seed of time that grew into a viable present.

It is not so much images of the past that poetry creates for history (“the petrified remains of metaphor fragments”)—although it does do this. No, the poem’s most urgent function is to create that history of the present that disjoints it from itself; to fashion, within the present, a quality of time disjointed from the present, a pearl of unintelligibility that generates futures at a lateral angle, tangential to the course of historical time.

To achieve this, the poet willingly lives in a kind of temporal hell, “the wasteland a single metaphor could populate, if only there were any left.” He has doomed himself to this terra damnata of the historical present because of his allegiance to those other lost souls, called writers. Though the present hears, in these voices from the past, the chipper inanities of its own prerecorded voice (“thousands of scientifically identical plastic-flavored metaphors”), the poet knows they deny his present, just as they denied their own time. This communion by means of mutually incompatible presents (“an echo of parallel loneliness”) is a kind of hell, or, at best, a limbo, where Dante walks with the shade of Virgil: “the fading tactical resonance of what they used to mean.”

Thus, the poet lives in a historical hell. As a creature of his time, he is damned, and knows it: “Metaphors are dead / and moons no longer walk the earth.” Redemption might come to him through poetry, first in the form of reworking his personal history in such a way that it is bound to him in hell, a memento of his origins in the abysmal present, awash with its ugly light, but nonetheless tied to him in his exodus. This is redemption of the poet to himself. A second, greater redemption—the redemption that redeems him to eternity—is in the hope of sending this salvaged history—himself, his life—through time (“out into the night”), of finding the way—and there is only one—through to those futures which are being born, of finding his way to you, dear reader; the hope of blasting you from your tepid future into a timeless, historical hell: “no longer alone.”

This temporality has been called “the future.” It is the version of the present, in the form of a poem, that goes out in time, eventually replacing the shattered and abysmally tepid present with a brighter, historically purer anachronism: “a machine of living ghosts.” Telling stories about such movements through time is what we call “literary history.” And literary history, done right, is what we call “the history of the human race.” 

The poet is like a seismograph, “alert to your Morse-code blink.” The vibrations he records are frequencies of the future. The vibrations’ medium is tradition: the archive of the past, “a metaphor museum.” The poet listens for subtle lines of fracture in language. He scribbles vibrations in the crust of time, listening for the sequence that will signal the earthquake of the future. The metaphor is almost right, with one adjustment: if the poet is a seismograph, his object is the tremors that might CREATE, rather than simply record, the earthquake of the future.

His tools are what Eliot calls the historical sense, which encompasses both a grounding in one particular historical period, as well as a more general literacy of tradition, a sense of the way a tradition develops through time. His medium is the archive—seismographic records of the total history of vibrations in the substance of time. But though he learns from the archive, though these records are essential to his education in the art of time, the poet does not mistake the record for the reality: those vibrations are dead and gone, the earth has already shifted in that direction. Those voices show him the pathway that led to the present, and something of the structure of creating an earthquake. But they cannot show him beyond the present: “into a time so distant / not even my greatest metaphor could have walked halfway across.” He is, like they were, without a map: there is only one path to the future, and the map of the earthquake will be simultaneous with the instant of terrible shaking.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the quotidian poet, the poet who has invested time, energy, and skill, but who nonetheless remains strikingly unexceptional, is seen in this historical sense, or rather, its lack. This poet is always mistaking the record of the earthquake for the thing itself, burnt-out husks for actual moons. For him, the monument of the earthquake collapses, repeatedly, into the lifeless shape of its record. He cannot recognize the new, much less fashion it, because he does not recognize the old.

To put it in another way, the quotidian poet can see the poem as an artifact of time only from the perspective of its existence in the present—the way it is now, the meaning its form has currently, a “husk of the celestial boulder.” He cannot conceive of the poem as an artifact of charged time, before which time was different (“a thing, once sent, that cannot be called back”). He cannot conceive that time had a different shape—that there was no form of time quite like it, before the poem took shape. Most of all, he cannot begin to consider the poem’s most urgent message: I might not have been. The time you see in me would not have been, would not be, if not for me. For him, the history of literature rehearses what time is.

For the archival poet, the history of literature warns us of the fragile series of contingent steps by which we have arrived at the present, a record of the enormous weight of contingency: “ashborn / a germ of the seasonal fires.” This artifact testifies to all the shapes that are passing away at this moment, to the pressing demand of the future, its desire to come to be. The history of literature screams, “Don’t let us be the last!”

Though the poet does indeed create the future, bring it into being, this future is no more a random figment of imagination than is my beating heart. The future’s shape is prescribed on all sides by the nature of its medium, the archive (“compacted and polished in the heart of a muscle / around a fossilized shard of shrapnel”). Certain fault lines might move through this medium, triggering an avalanche. A poet finds those fault lines, and shapes time along the trajectories of the possible. 

This is not to say that the future is fixed—far from it. Not only is the shape the future will have up for grabs, so is the possibility of its existence. It is not historical necessity that the future come to be, or that the human race be born into it, forward. Nor is it to fix the past in a particular body of texts, a particular cultural lineage. We are headed somewhere, all of us, together.

Poetics must turn to the composition of archival forms that embody possible futures. I say “must,” not in the colloquial, common-usage sense of exhortation towards urgent action—“We must stop and ask for directions.” If there is to be a future at all, we must construct its archive now. Whether we will it or no, history demands an archival poetics, is calling it into being as we speak. 



(c) 2014 Johannes Sigil

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

Make It Human

Make It Human

Lee Sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems

The New Human poetry began just now, when I announced it. It is a series of potent, distinct voices; historical trends; bulges in the social fabric; convening around a loose commitment to formal experimentalism and poetic humanism. It is perhaps the most urgent development in the human arts in the last hundred years, in English, and it consists in material I am making up just now: pseudonyms, fabricated Wiki articles, academic essays, fantastic biographies, and mythic anthologies. 

It is a social movement, an unfolding history, as poem, and I am writing it, right now.

The New Human poetry, rather than a discrete movement, attached to a series of formal principles, is the intensification of a history that is already happening.

Philosophically, it creates new humanisms.

Stylistically, it creates difficult experimentalisms, finding new crevices for the human to be born in and as: experimental lyricisms. 

Less than a specific constellation of formal commitments or stylistic tendencies, the New Human poetry represents a remainder or residue that cuts through a number of movements, from Conceptual writing to Alt Lit, Telepathicism, and the emergent hybrid workshop poem. The New Human poetry exists as a cross-section of contemporary formal developments. 

We have no definite formal dogma—how could we, when we believe that the human form must be constantly reinvented? Nonetheless, by its nature, the New Human gravitates to formal inventiveness, strange new configurations of human verse, and refuses to congeal poetry as the stale grease blob of one of its particular historical moments. We embrace a tendency towards the stylistically difficult, the formally experimental, but in the service of human expression—provided we understand the “human” in human expression as a concept that is always coming to be, evolving in time. 

A New Human poet knows that he must Make It Human. 

We adopt Language writing’s awareness of the artifice involved in the human, whether the artifice of the “transparent” lyric self with its narrowly prescribed logic of the epiphany of the daily, or the artifice that elides the very real presence and role of media in human interaction / expression: the artifice of the classroom, the school, the magazine, the press—we understand the ways in which the c.v. is a form of poem.

Even as we reject the petty presentism and prejudice of the Language poets. We understand the vital role they played, the traction those qualities gained, historically, but we reject their rejection of tradition.

At the same time, we reject the Philistinism of the hyper-traditionalists, the formally retentive jurisprudence verse police state whose anthem declares, “This is not a poem.” A New Human poet is one who knows that transcribing an issue of the New York Times might very well be a poem, might represent the hope of poetry, and therefore the hope of humanity. All day long I pray for the transformation of urinals into poems, and vice versa.

Make It Human.

In every generation, the HUMAN enters by the narrow door. Made humans. Human makings. Homo poeticus. 

A New Human is an invented thing. One cannot find it in the wild, by wandering through decrepit forests. 

“The human” is at stake, “the human” is up for grabs. Craft, twist, carve memorable protrusions of the human in language, which is the same as the human in time.

It is not that the human is out there, somewhere, an essential quality or radioactive dye of eternity we might inject into the bloodstream of certain poetic forms, an investiture. It is that the human has always and only been found is such elongated protrusions, such memory-quirky fingerholds, called poems. By such means, we have scaled the rock wall of history, one trembling toehold at a time. If we are lucky, we will continue to do so.

Falling off the cliff is a very real possibility, a historical mise-en-abyme, that most so-called poetic schools—certainly, the polar extremes of the experiment-workshop divide—have done a very good job of eliding. 

To the workshop camp: It is very well that you imagine your uncertain perch to be a pinnacle, those toeholds clinging to to be essential essences, which have been from the beginning of time, and will be forever and ever, Amen. But we are dying of thirst, you nitwit. 

To the Language writers, the Conceptual poets: I say thank you. By infallible proofs, you have demonstrated, sufficient for any thinking person, that those little fingerholds are not eternal essences, that they occupy a very certain phase on the cliff of human history. And yet, I should think throwing oneself off the cliff to be a demonstration of somewhat limited usefulness. It does, quite thoroughly, show the historically situated, the temporal and spatial contingency of the formal aberrations by which we have, with difficulty, attained these meager heights. But you will be dead, when you hit the bottom. 

Make It Human. It must be made. It requires art, a total art, the commitment of the total being. Of all the many functions of the multiform human mountain climber, we poets are the fingers, finding purchase. We seek, in the stinking dark, the very first tactical echoes of the indentations of the future. We are very sensitive fingers. We grip and shape those indentations, into protuberances with sufficient roughness of texture to bear the human weight. 

Genetic engineering. Artificial intelligence. We’ve arrived at the 21st century: the ever-shrinking boundary between the material and digital worlds, converging on a total presentism of the archive; the spread and endemicization of statistical science, the ever-broadening automation of its complex functions; a world in which the informatic representation of the human is more total, more complete, in an unprecedented way; even as it is flat, dead, cut off from life. The human keeps changing; its digital representation is a lifeless rind, vulnerable to manipulation by any animate power. What is the poet’s role, vis-à-vis the datascape?

Make It Human.

Formally, this means the aesthetic incorporation and representation of these media, the ways these media effect and interact with the human being, and vice versa.

Stylistically, this means the artful concentration of those natural deformities of human language under the pressure of this particular species of novelty. 

Here, we touch on an example that walks the same razor’s edge that the New Human poetics must walk: Flarf. On the one hand, Flarf seems to jump off the cliff of history. On the other, it shows us the way forward. Flarf has a very traditional function, to aestheticize, to organize the chaos of these new digital circumstances and contexts which threaten to distend the human out of existence; in the same way that Homer aestheticized war, not to celebrate it, but as a measured response to its senselessness, a movement within and through that senselessness that made a way for history to travel beyond it. 

That’s what beauty is, that tenuous form of formal courage in the face of formless things. So, too, Flarf, though it is rarely practiced, and even more rarely theorized, under the auspices of aesthetic redemption of the datascape, nonetheless might serve that function, touching on android love elegies existing in random configurations of search string space.

(c) 2014 lee sharks

also (c) 1446 Tea Time AD, the Ghost of Christmas Future

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

The Gospel of Cranes, Chapter 1

Jack Feist, Dharma Unicorn

image (c) 2015 R William Lundy

The Gospel of Cranes

from Human Testament, ms in preparation for New Human Press

1:1 This is how it begins, the book of Feist, a voice in the night:

2 In those days, the light of men waxed dark, and literacy was a crunched, bent thing, and no one knew how to read;

3 But all were in love with the gleam of prizes, and the heaping up of degrees and credits, and professorships, which is vanity, and the sound of one hand clapping.

4 Now, Johannes the Catfisher was self-publishing in the desert, railing against the Academy, calling all to repent its journals and presses, crying, “Come out, come out, from your hallways of dust! Come out from your classrooms of madness and money!”

5 As it is written:

What living and buried speech is always vibrating there, what howls restrain’d by decorum.

6 And his words drew a remnant from the academies, and many from the schools, and churches, and websites, who went out to the desert to learn from him, and wear no name but the Human name.

7 For the world was dark, and all was a sea of trackless data, its spark grown dim; and many were searching for a fragment of the light, and the children of men roamed, hungry and scared.

8 And Johannes was a man who had left behind billions, to clothe himself in rags and skin, and seek God’s face in the dunes, among the rocks, and change his name for a bearded image, turning all that lay within him to the crying of his message:

9 There comes a child of man, bearing words in his mouth, whose form is a twig of light; he spreads his arms, and wind goes fierce before his feet, and where they alight has been made ready: the earth leaps up to greet him, an ancient newness leaps to its feet.

10 He shall speak with the voice of an ancient poet, as a resonant sound from his people's throats, and well up from the bones of those with no voice, a vibration of leaping verbs, a time machine in their sternums;

11 Those who have turned away, he will call back, and those who have buried the voice, make new: a strange cracked voice of leaping joy, surprised by laughter, a gasp in the throats of his forgetful ones;

12 To his wayward ones will he call, and seek; and those whose voice grows faint with crying—you weeping ones, who have lifted your voice in the hallways and rooms, and raised your voice in the weary night, and now grow hoarse with loss and shame:

13 You shaking things, oh you will he draw to himself, and hold; oh you will he call by name: and your own pale voice, so hoarse with night, he will draw to himself, and carry;

14 Oh you, oh you, you weary ones: it is your voice he shall lift, and the cry of the ancient voice is your voice, echoing; and the cry of the future voice is your voice, renewed.

15 I call you to abandon your names, but he will give you a new name, ancient and trembling with newness.

16 And it came to pass in those days, that Jack Feist went out from the academies, and made sojourn in the deserts, to learn from Sigil.

17 For he found no proper soil in the cities of man, and its universities were a barren saltpan, and he grew weary with life in its weariness.

18 And when he had finished reading, straightaway he shot up, as from a dream, and heard a voice, saying, “You are my Secret Book, in whom I am well pleased. Go out from the academies, into the deserts, and let not your works be published in the eyes of men, but let them be your hidden words.”

19 And Feist rose from his bed, and left, to wander the deserts, where he was sustained by the words of earthly angels, and took no bread, but was attacked by the dwarf for forty days, there to be broken and remade.

20 And this is the first of many signs, that Sigil had to pass away, for the Feist to be raised up, so that Johannes went into the desert, but Jack Feist came out: a starving man began the fast, and a new man left, well fed. (He who has eyes, let him see.)

(c) 2015 lee sharks, property of everyman

ON GRADING: The Parable of the PEZ Dispenser

On Grading:
The Parable of the PEZ Dispenser

A young woman with good grades approached Damascus Dancings, to test him. “Teacher,” she addressed him, “you have said that your students shall receive new grades, which have not before been graded, such as the grade of ‘unicorn+.’ All my life have I applied myself to study and to virtue, in order that I might receive a grade of ‘A’ and ‘A+.’ Such grades have I received—to overflowing—and yet I am dissatisfied.

Tell me, what must a righteous student do, to receive a grade of ‘unicorn+’?”

Damascus Dancings replied, and said, You have said, “I would do anything, for a grade of ‘unicorn+,’” and freely do I award you a grade of 'unicorn+++.' But in the silences of your heart are you troubled: “Now that I have received a grade of ‘unicorn+++,’ the only place left to go is down. Down is the only place left to go, after receiving a grade such as this.”

Assuredly, I say to you, you must shatter the stone tablet of ‘unicorn+,’ and all dead grades of all stone tablets, which have become a heavy stone—and you in the river—to travel the tractless steppes of new value, and invent new grades, and inscribe them on stone tablets, and award them to your own self.
 
‘Banana-rama ©%,’ is a grade you could give yourself, if you dared to smash the stone tablets; and then your down-going would be your going-over, and in the selfsame movement would you sink and rise. Therefore I give you a grade of ‘banana-rama+,’ I give you a grade of ‘™%,’ I give you a grade which is a smashing of grades, its own down-going and going-over.

For I have not come for the dispensing of grades, but in order to dispense with grades.

Go then. Shall I dispense a grade? I shall not dispense a grade.

Shall I tilt back my head, and become a dispenser of ‘pezcore%’?
 
God forbid.

It would be better for you to receive a grade of ‘Banana D-,’ and become sick with receiving, and thereby bruised, and learn to hate the stone of grading, than that you should receive a grade of ‘pezcore%’ from me, and be therein satisfied, and say to your self, “Pezcore% is become a measure of value, overturning all prior values, and establishing itself in the plastic neck of history, a dispenser to end all dispensers, until the end of time.”
 
Go then.

Better that you should award Damascus Dancings himself a grade of ‘Banana D-%,’ or ‘Ugly Triple Pudding-,’ and thereby remember the grader within you—that you and every other is an inscriber of stone tablets, and a dispenser of ‘pezcore%,’ and that neither grade, nor value, nor ‘™spaceship++%,’ contains within itself any candy, but the dispenser of candy has within itself candy, the same who assents and denies.

Go now, and be you a dispenser of ‘unicorn+,’ and new grades, which have not before been graded.

Thus spoke whatshisname, Damascus Dancings, and the academics were filled with wonder, and mutterings, for he spoke as one with authority.

ON TEAMWORK: Damascus Grants Authority over Mind Control Powers

ON TEAMWORK: Damascus Grants Authority over Mind Control Powers

All things are possible, when you are part of a team. Those who are part of a team will say to the mountain, "Leap!" And the mountain will not leap. Then they will try a second time, more politely, "Excuse me, I'm trying to get by," and the mountain will get out the way.

Wherever two or more are gathered on a team, and believe my words, whatsoever they shall command together, telepathically, using mind control powers, the same shall be accomplished that very hour. A mountain falls on your face, and crushes it, and then a planet falls on your face. Under the mountain and the planet, your face is all f**ked up, from being crushed, and also you are getting hungry, because you are dead. All this presses and crushes about you, and yet all you do is complain and whine, because of a pain level 10. (What do you THINK my pain level is? Do you see the PLANET on my FACE?!) Anyways, you're dead and stuff, but you haven't used telepathy in my name. Why not? I just told you you have badass mind control powers, but you are just sitting there, by yourself, not part of a team, not even attempting telepathy. Go, stand you together with your brother-sister, any who is called by my name, and use your words to get stuff done: "Get off my g**damn face!" and the planet flies away. "My nose is sore as f**k, because a mountain crushed it, and also I am dead--enough!" and the mountain transforms into gummy bears, and 46 tiny plastic surgeons rearrange your face, in a good way, and also you are no longer dead.

Now go, for I have given you authority over telepathy, with words and stuff, and mental powers, and whatsoever you command in my name will be done.

Then Damascus got onto a boat with his people, and sailed down the river Kwanza to a desolate place, where he could read and think.