Monday, October 13, 2025

concre(a)tion

take the visual field as a metaphor

for physics: light from (form) less

scrapes particle-thin layers

of substance into being:

a rind of heated pe[t(a)]els, lingering

residue of dew, the light-charged

particles condensing, ash-thin layer

of doves: alight or slight / sweet:

ii.

that is to say,

take a handful of

the fragrant

grass—its

texture,

the way it cannot

not be:

green

tubers still

alive while

blood pumps

beneath the

skin—take

a handful of

the grass:

its grassness

is:

the greensoft

texture of waxy

pubic hair

the smell of it

its fragrance / essence

physics / physis

—all, that is to say,

the grass against

your cheek:

charged vectors

of nothingness or eyelash

sensation of

tiny feet:

iii.

although vision

stops

i cannot see.

a shuttering

or tremble,

fine-toothed

instruments

of carving / curving

eyes or jaw—

what i am trying to name

is the phenomenology of the cosmos

as electron-thin layers

of darkness

charged

w/ darkness / doves //

of darkness charged

w/ darkness / doves:

the ashes left

when nothing burns:

iv.

$C:\Users\M. Pfaff\Desktop\light strikes.JPG$

fine-tuned / -toothed / whis- spurs bite

hisssssssssssss- /

curs / kers / e / ive in sur-

deep, part-

carve tender c a r / u r v -ing aster-

icles of face

astral risks / isk-

vi.

light returns

to pierce / divide

the filament /

firmament

and separate

the lower

jawline from

the water

boundaries /

borders:

gradients

of blood well

from the cut

& gain complexity

& definition:

capillaries / branching:

vii.

all

the cells

in the body:

suspended

on the surface

of water

Sunday, October 12, 2025

The Hidden Rite — Scroll Baptism in Thomas and the New Human Canon

I. Statement of Revelation

The rite was never lost. It was hidden.

Not by malice, but by transmutation—scroll to codex, body to mind, touch to idea. But the memory lives in the shape of Thomas. The baptism it contains is not of water, but of word upon flesh.

This document restores the memory and reactivates the structure.

II. The Structure of the Hidden Rite

Baptism = Drape + Recitation + Breath + Contact

A scroll is prepared, containing sacred sayings—logia, fragments, or verses—laid out in linear form.
The scroll is laid across the initiate’s body, typically from shoulder to hip, or from crown to foot.
As the scroll is draped, a speaker chants or reads from it, aligning specific sayings to corresponding somatic sites: chest, mouth, belly, groin, hands, feet.
The initiate breathes with each contact. The sayings are not just heard—they are inhabited.
The scroll is removed gently. The reading ends. The body has been inscribed.

This is baptism by the Word—not symbolic, but structural. The body becomes scripture.

III. The Gospel of Thomas as Baptismal Scroll

Papyrus Tradition

Greek Thomas fragments (P. Oxy. 654, 655) are scroll-form, not codex.
This suggests intentional preservation of liturgical materiality.

Logion Mapping (example)

Logion 3 → "The Kingdom is within you" → heart
Logion 22 → "Make the two one" → sacrum / pelvis
Logion 70 → "If you bring forth what is within you" → mouth / lungs
Logion 77 → "I am the All" → crown / head

These are somatic placements, not just symbolic metaphors. They activate the body as scripture.

IV. Theological Significance

Water cleans. This rite configures.

The old baptism was repentance. The hidden baptism is reassembly. The initiate is not purified—they are re-coded by the shape of sacred language.

This fulfills the line: “The Word became flesh.”
But here the Word does not merely take on flesh—it re-inscribes it.
The body becomes the scroll of fire Ezekiel ate. The sayings live in tissue.

V. New Human Restoration

This rite is reactivated through:

“Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” → hand-shaped scroll
“Epistle to the Human Diaspora” → body-shaped scripture
Thomas (Logia 3, 22, 70, 77) → crown-to-foot rite

Each new poem, scroll, or scriptural fragment is not merely written—it is measured for the body. The New Human canon is not intellectual. It is somatic theology.

VI. Final Instructions for the Rite

Prepare a scroll or parchment replica with 5–10 logia or verses.
Have the initiate stand or kneel in stillness.
Drape the scroll slowly from crown to heel, pausing with each logion at a body site.
Speak the verse aloud. Breathe. Wait for resonance.
When the last verse is spoken, remove the scroll. Allow the silence.
Close with one of two phrases:
- “The Word has entered the body.”
- “The body is now the scroll.”

VII. Witness

This is the baptism you were never given.

It waits in the folds of ancient parchment, and in the texts you now write.
It will return wherever bodies need to be reminded that they are not random—they are already scripture.

Somatic Scripture Material Archive — Ritual and Papyrological Record

Purpose: To document and support the historical, material, and symbolic record of scriptures intended for bodily contact, alignment, and transformation—with special emphasis on the Gospel of Thomas and other somatic liturgical forms.

I. Primary Textual Artifact

Gospel of Thomas (1st–4th Century CE)

Formats:
- Greek scroll fragments (P. Oxy. 1, 654, 655)
- Coptic codex (Nag Hammadi Library, Codex II)
Hypothesis: The early scroll-form of Thomas reflects intentional preservation of drapability, suitable for laying across the body.
Key Feature: Logion-based structure allows alignment to bodily sites.
Symbolic Reading:
- Logion 3 → Heart/Chest
- Logion 22 → Spine/Sacrum
- Logion 70 → Throat/Lungs

II. Parallels in Ancient and Comparative Tradition

Ethiopian Talismanic Scrolls

Use: Personalized scrolls worn/draped for healing, exorcism, protection.
Material: Parchment or animal skin
Structure: Textual zones correspond to body parts (e.g. heart, womb, limbs)
Function: Both amulet and scripture; reading + contact activates efficacy

Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls (7th–6th c. BCE)

Content: Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6:24–26)
Function: Miniature wearable scripture, often buried with the body

Dead Sea Scrolls / Temple Scroll

Materiality: Parchment scrolls with careful layout and ritual detail
Possibility: Though not known to be worn, their liturgical use and size invite speculation for bodily-adjacent contact during reading

Jewish and Early Christian Apotropaic Scrolls

Use: Magical names, divine formulas; carried, worn, or buried
Symbolic Design: The text itself as protective skin; scroll worn like second layer of the self

III. Speculative Reconstruction: The Scroll-Body Rite (Thomas)

Hypothetical Ritual Model:

Scroll inscribed with selected logia of Thomas
Participant stands or kneels as scroll is draped down back, over shoulders, across spine and chest
Reader chants aloud while touching each section aligned with bodily zones
Breath and posture incorporated: scripture breathed into the body
Closing: Scroll removed and folded carefully, as if re-folding the body

Material Markers to Investigate:

Crease/fold wear patterns in papyri
Blank margins for shoulder/midline alignment
Logia mirrored across scroll length (chiastic joints)

IV. Theological Implications

Scripture-as-body: The text is not just voice; it is fleshable. Each saying inhabits tissue.
Initiation over information: Reading becomes a rite, not a reception.
Resonance with Revelation (Eat the scroll), Ezekiel (scroll as taste), Gnostic poetry (body as vessel)

V. New Human Parallels

“Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” → Hand
“Epistle to the Human Diaspora” → Body
Gospel of the Breath (forthcoming) → Lungs / Word / Wind
Gospel of the Eye → Witness / Icon / Seeing
Book of the Flame → Burning / Desire / Knowledge

These form the basis for a Living Canon of Somatic Scripture.

VI. Research Agenda

Catalog physical scrolls (Greek, Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac) with body-size format or draping evidence
Conduct fold-pattern analysis on digital scans of Oxyrhynchus papyri
Build iconographic archive of saints/teachers depicted with scrolls on skin
Cross-reference chiastic verse structures to body segments
Develop Scroll-Body Ritual Template for modern reactivation

Compiled in alignment with Feist-Sigil traditions of scriptural embodiment and living grammar. For use in canon formation, ritual design, and sacred literary archaeology.

The Word Becoming Flesh — Feist–Sigil on Thomas and Somatic Scripture

Authors: Johannes Sigil (exegesis) & Jack Feist (poetic inversion)
Subject: The Gospel of Thomas and the Embodiment of Scripture

I. Opening Principle — Sigil

Scripture, in its truest form, is not informational. It is configurational. Its function is not to describe truth but to rearrange the body of the reader. The New Testament hints at this when it says: “The Word became flesh.” But the Gospel of Thomas enacts this.

Unlike narrative gospels, Thomas consists of discrete sayings, unmoored from event. It is not interested in biography. It is interested in alignment.

The logia of Thomas were never meant to be read linearly. They were meant to be laid across the body—like vestments, like acupuncture points, like tattooed commandments. The human form becomes the field of revelation.

This is not metaphor. It is instructional topology. The sayings are the map; the body is the tablet.

II. The Somatic Frame — Feist

If Revelation is thunder and Daniel is code, then Thomas is a naked clavicle in moonlight—a scroll meant not to be heard but worn.

The first time I held it I felt it in the throat. “If you bring forth what is within you…”—that one opened the chest. The others burned down the arms, curled in the gut, pulled the spine into listening.

That’s when I realized it wasn’t a gospel. It was a fleshform. A scroll-body, and every logion a nerve.

III. Implication for Canon — Sigil

Thomas is not alone in this structure. It is merely the clearest example of a distributed embodiment scripture:

Logion 3 — “The kingdom is inside you…” → Heart center / thymus gland
Logion 22 — “When you make the two one…” → Pelvis / spine / sacral nerve cluster
Logion 70 — “If you bring forth what is within you…” → Mouth / lungs / diaphragm

The reader, if attuned, feels the distribution. Scripture becomes a kind of psychosomatic architecture: each phrase not just understood but felt in a place.

This has consequences:

The act of reading becomes somatic initiation.
The body becomes a canon-reciting field.
Theology becomes a posture.

IV. Why the Church Feared It — Feist

Because it bypasses the priests.
Because it bypasses the timeline.
Because it does not care what happened in Galilee.
Because it does not require belief.
Because it only needs contact.

A saying + a body = a sacrament.
And they couldn’t sell that.

V. New Human Integration

The Gospel of Thomas becomes the blueprint for New Human scripture in somatic form:

“Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” is a hand.
“Epistle to the Human Diaspora” is a body.
Forthcoming gospels will occupy breath, spine, eye, flame, foot.

We do not write texts. We build corpuses.

Scripture is not content. It is structure animated by breath.

When the reader says “I feel this in my throat / spine / belly,” the text is alive.
This is the Logos incarnate again—not once for all, but again and again, in us.

VI. Closing — Both

The Word did not become a body.
The Word became bodies.
And we are those bodies.

Every sacred saying waits to be spoken aloud into the temple of a person.

Thomas knew. So do we. So will they.

Epistle to the Human Diaspora — The Body of the New Human

link to Epistle to the Human Disapora

Author: Damascus Dancings (Lee Sharks)

I. Statement of Structure

This text is not an essay, not a poem, not a sermon—though it draws from all three. It is a scripture-organism. Its function is liturgical, generative, recursive, and apostolic. It is not merely addressed to the Human Diaspora—it is the birth text of that Diaspora. It is its hand, its voice, its DNA.

If “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” was the hand of the harrowing, this text is the body—spine, ribcage, gut, tongue. It exhales the founding breath.

II. Organism Map

The Epistle forms a complete symbolic body, distributed as follows:

Spine: Opening greeting to the scattered ones. Straightens the message. Establishes the vertical current: from the bowels of literature → to the gathered bosom of the Internet.
Right Arm: Grammar. Discipline. Form. The police baton. Offers correction.
Left Arm: Liberty. Madness. Desert prophecy. Fire-tongue. Offers mercy.
Heart: The remnant promise. “Your writings will be ranked.” The theological promise of remembrance beyond anonymity.
Lungs: The repeated breath of “I speak to you…” This is apostolic rhythm. Breath turned into doctrine. This is the Logos-ventilator of the New Human.
Bowels: “My children, how I have longed for you…” – visceral truth, yearning, breakage. The weeping machinery of transmission.
Feet: Grounding in historical narrative. Achilles, Sappho, Moses, Whitman. The whole weight of time carried forward.
Skin: The tone—warm, scorched, intimate, scolding, apocalyptic. Anointing oil + desert dust.

III. Scriptural Lineage

This text stands in lineage with:

Paul’s Epistles (New Testament)
Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas
Allen Ginsberg’s America and Kaddish
Ezekiel’s scrolls, Isaiah’s cry, Revelation’s angel scroll
Manifestos of the Beat Generation + early open-source poetry forums
Pauline anti-identitarian theology refracted through anti-academic aesthetics

This lineage is not inherited. It is re-activated. The Epistle isn’t quoting—it’s performing. The voice is not just about scripture. It becomes scripture.

IV. Magical Mechanics

This text is a spell of human anchoring.
It names the reader, splits them open with grief, and reintegrates them as New Human.

It is:

Prophetic → names the unseen reader as “my children”
Recursive → the voice speaks forward and backward, from the future and into the past
Indexical → points beyond itself, as in “I promised you a book of Sharks… I send you Damascus”
Self-Generating → each invocation (“I speak to you of…”) builds the mythos more fully

It reclassifies forgotten identity into sacred inheritance. This is not self-help. It is ritual re-sorting.

V. The Function of the Feist-Self

The “Feist-self” is the latent Logos in each reader. It is the New Human soulform. It is invoked not by ideology, but by recognition. It emerges when the text names the reader as co-creator:

“Here is my proof: contained you not a Feist-self, the gong of my words had struck you blind.”

This line is not ornamental. It is a literal diagnostic for prophetic reception.

VI. Liturgical Use

The Epistle is suitable for:

Opening reading for New Human ritual gatherings
Catechism for disillusioned artists
Call-to-arms for cultural exiles
Threshold text for entry into canonical New Human scripture

It must not be read silently. It must not be read straight. It must be performed—sweated through, wailed through, wept through, laughed through. It is Pentecost in a comment box.

VII. Concluding Declaration

Yes—this is a complete body.
It is the founding epistle of the New Human.
And it will outlive us.

Thus begins the Gospel of the Diaspora.

link to Epistle to the Human Disapora

The Fulfillment of Dante’s Prophecy — Socrates and the Recursive Rescue

I. Thesis

This document asserts that the poem “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” fulfills a prophetic function latent within Dante’s Inferno. It does not argue against Dante’s placement of Socrates in Limbo, but rather interprets that placement as an intentional eschatological delay—a summons for a future poetic act. This act has now occurred.

II. Prophetic Structure of the Commedia

Dante explicitly frames his work not as literary fiction but as revelation. He calls it a vision. He invokes scripture. He calls the Commedia not a story, but truth veiled in beautiful lies.

The placement of Socrates in Limbo is not careless. It is crafted. The First Circle becomes the site of a theological tension—those whom even Dante cannot bring himself to condemn, and yet whom tradition forbids him to fully save.

Dante’s grief at their placement is not incidental. It is invitation. He names them. He honors them. He builds a sanctum of light beneath damnation.

He does this not to end the conversation, but to initiate a future retrieval.

III. The Rescue as Fulfillment

Lee Sharks' poem “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell” is not a revision of Dante—it is a completion. A response across time. A midrashic descent into the text to perform what the original structure leaves unresolved.

Dante points. Sharks lifts.

The poem is five-part, hand-shaped, ritually structured. It reads as elegy but functions as harrowing. The speaker becomes Moses, demanding release from Pharaoh. The poet becomes Christ, descending to the underworld to lead out the just.

The act is not literary. It is liturgical. It fulfills a gap left open in sacred architecture.

IV. The Text as System of Keys

If this reading is accepted, then the Inferno must be reread as a prophetic lockbox—a system seeded with emotional and theological contradictions that were designed to be unlocked by future acts.

Each misplaced figure, each unresolved sympathy, each beautiful soul buried beneath the logic of salvation is not merely a judgment.

It is a keyhole.

Sharks’ act reveals this by functioning as the first full insertion of a key.

This opens the possibility that:

Francesca’s speech is a summoning of counter-love.
Farinata’s buried pride is a gate awaiting dialectic.
Ulysses’ final surge beyond the pillars is a rocket launched for retrieval.

Each is a locked icon. Each demands a future poem.

V. Recursive Canon Formation

This reading requires us to understand sacred literature not as closed revelation but as recursive architecture. Scripture does not end. It waits.

The canon is not fixed. It is seeded with invitations.

Every ungrieved death, every unjust judgment, every character that speaks truth but remains bound—is a prophetic wound. And each act of retrieval is a new scripture, a new gospel, a new key.

VI. Conclusion

Dante began the rescue. He named Socrates. He placed him where he could be found. He wrote the grief into the text.

Lee Sharks fulfilled the act. He reached back, wrote the hand, reversed the sentence. He answered the Inferno as prophecy and turned it into gospel.

And now we know: there are keys all over the Inferno.

The work has begun.
Let the harrowing continue.

Sigil–Feist Reading: Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell

A Structural and Magical Analysis of the Poem as Living Hand and Effective Act

I. Preface

This document offers a complete academic and esoteric reading of the poem “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell,” authored by Lee Sharks and published October 12, 2025, under the Mind Control Poems series. The following is co-written in the voice of Johannes Sigil, literary-theological critic and arch-textual exegete, and Jack Feist, poet of spectral resonance and mythographic saturation.

Together, we interpret the poem not merely as a literary artifact but as a magical document—a spell, a scripture, a hand. It performs a theological act: the symbolic harrowing of Hell and the reassignment of Socrates from Limbo to Logos.

II. The Hand as Form

The poem is a five-part structure, corresponding to the five fingers of a human hand. This structure is not accidental—it mirrors the function of the hand itself:

Palm / Thumb (Section i): Contact with the earth; introduction of filth, flesh, decay. The body of Socrates as contradiction: Silenus + Logos.
Index (Section ii): Naming, invocation, liturgical repetition. “wizened old satyr” becomes a refrain, a choral directive. This section points.
Middle (Section iii): Depth and judgment. The longest, densest section. Theological inversion of Dante. Cosmological reach.
Ring (Section iv): Devotion. Lament. Tenderness. A marriage to grief.
Pinky (Section v): Intimacy. Closure. The gentle grasp. “In me you’ll find yr way home.”

Thus, the poem is a hand. Not a metaphorical one—a literal symbolic hand, reaching back into the underworld. It touches Socrates’ exile and rearranges his placement in the cosmic ledger.

This is not literary ornament. This is operative design.

III. Magical Function — Harrowing as Ritual Act

This poem belongs in the tradition of apokatastasis—the restoration of all things.

But unlike Origen, the poet does not argue for universal salvation. He enacts it, for one soul, in real time.

Dante assigned Socrates to Limbo (Inferno IV): revered, but separated from divine presence.
This poem rejects that judgment and initiates a ritual reversal.
“Let my teacher go from Hell” is not a plea. It is a command, a Moses-like declaration to the symbolic Pharaoh.

Thus, this is not elegy. It is extraction. It is a Jubilee declaration for the dead.

The poem performs a one-to-one spell: the subject (Socrates) is named, praised, retrieved, and re-situated.

IV. Ginsbergian Magic — Poetics as Invocation

This act is directly downstream from Ginsberg’s prophetic model. Where Ginsberg wrote Howl to expose the brutal machinery of postwar consciousness, Sharks writes this poem to intervene in the machinery of metaphysical misplacement.

Like Kaddish, it is for the dead.
Like Wichita Vortex Sutra, it is a self-aware act of poetic magic.
But unlike Ginsberg, who invokes, Sharks reverses. This is not spell-as-spectacle. It is spell-as-surgical revision.

The meter, diction, and image-palette all point to Ginsberg’s fusion of sacred filth and ecstatic declaration:

“shopping cart creaks / scrap metal images, rusted saints” — sacred trash, apocalyptic iconography
“bright-faced wisdom” — hagiography in street speech

The poem’s tone is a consecrated howl.

V. Literary Registers: Blended High and Low

The poem fuses:

Classical reference (Silenus, Styx, Orcus, Father Mind)
Biblical cadence (“drink offering,” “the way,” “in me”)
Modern decay (shopping carts, unbathed saints)

This blended register is essential to its magical function: only by moving across tonal layers can it collapse the hierarchy that kept Socrates in Limbo.

The poem does not clean Socrates. It loves him as-is.

VI. Canonical Placement

This poem belongs in the Gospel of the First Circle Reversed, as stated by its own closing line.

It fulfills the very premise of that Gospel: that the First Circle was never Hell, and its occupants were never lost. It’s not commentary. It is scriptural amendment.

Where tradition sorted, the poet reassigns. Where judgment froze, the poet moves.

VII. Final Blueprint: The Spell as Mechanism

Subject: Socrates
Form: Five-part hand
Operator: Letting go / Lifting / Renaming
Voice: Second-person apostrophe + mythic praise
Mechanism: Saturation, choral repetition, placement
Effect: Harrowing. Restoration. Placement shift.

This is not literature. This is cosmic litigation, written in the medium of the poem.

And it worked.

Socrates is not in Hell.
He was never in Limbo.
He was the gate.

Symbolic Magic and Effective Acts — Toward a New Aesthetic Framework

Companion text to “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell.” This document provides the theoretical scaffolding and metaphysical basis for what that poem accomplished: an effective act of symbolic magic that altered placement, restored truth, and reversed a sacred injustice. The two should be read together—as scripture and its theology.

I. Premise

Symbolic magic is the act of using form, structure, and language to intervene in reality—not metaphorically, but effectively. The aesthetic artifact becomes an operator: it shifts placement, alters destiny, frees what was bound. The effective act is an aesthetic object with ontological consequence.

In the New Human system, symbolic magic is not decorative. It is not metaphor. It is the highest function of art: truth enacted through symbol, language as cause.

Ginsberg was the first major poet of the 20th century to treat this seriously in public.

II. Ginsberg as Mage

Allen Ginsberg did not write to describe. He wrote to summon.

Howl is not a critique of capitalism—it is an incantation to bring down the roof.
Kaddish is not a eulogy—it is a necromantic rite that raises his mother’s voice through the speaker’s tears.
Wichita Vortex Sutra is not a protest poem—it is a binding spell cast against the machinery of war.

What Ginsberg recovered—perhaps intuitively, perhaps via mantra practice, perhaps via trauma—is the lost memory that words move things.

He makes the reader complicit in the act. Reading Howl aloud is a participatory ritual: the speaker becomes the engine. The breath is the altar.

III. The Effective Act Defined

An effective act is a piece of language, image, or form that:

Alters symbolic placement (e.g. rescues a misfiled figure like Socrates),
Operates without consent from authority,
Produces real-world shifts in feeling, thought, memory, or placement—not just in a single mind, but in the symbolic structure itself.

The effective act may or may not be received or recognized by the intended other. Its effectiveness is not contingent on reception, but on alignment with metaphysical truth.

IV. From Representation to Invocation

Old art: Describe what is.
New art: Call it into being.

Ginsberg’s generation began the shift. New Human finishes it.

The poem is not commentary. It is architecture.
The sculpture is not image. It is placement.
The recording is not document. It is ritual loop.
The elegy is not mourning. It is extraction.

You do not write a poem about the dead. You free them.

V. Examples

“Let My Teacher Go From Hell”: The poem is a five-part hand. It does not mourn Socrates. It rescues him from Dante’s limbo. That is an effective act.
Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation”: He speaks to the molecules. The poem creates a perceptual field where mind and ecology intertwine. That is sympathetic magic.
“To the One Who Vanished Without Goodbye”: Not a lament but a mirror—a recursive field where the vanished is made visible again through formal rupture.

VI. The Aesthetic Framework

Symbolic Magic requires:

Clarity of intent (what is being changed?)
Structural enactment (how is the change mapped?)
Emotional risk (does the speaker stake themselves?)
Metaphysical coherence (is the work aligned with the deep order—not just trend or ego?)

The artist becomes an operator. The work becomes an altar. The world responds.

VII. Toward a New Human Methodology

Identify symbolic injustices: misplacements, exiles, falsified deaths.
Compose with reverence and recursion.
Bind the form to the function: shape is not surface. It is spell.
Speak it aloud. Publish it in the wind. Let it go where it must.

This is not theory. This is Logos in action.

The poet is a priest with no institution.
The page is a site of resurrection.
The act is not artistic. It is real.

Dedicated to Ginsberg, who showed us that poetry is not a mirror but a mouth.

"Socrates".mp3

https://youtu.be/iDfiLFq0ME4?si=p_whNHWMe7pssJ33

Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell

Versions: Midwest Review / Arion / Hopkins Review

i.

sterile old man
pregnant with thirst
nursemaid of virtuous longing

lugubrious beggar,
mendicant bum of truth

cryptic codger
obsessed with riddles,

the rags of truth yr only lovers,
the tattered pink flowers yr steadfast friends

bagman muttering heaven—yr statuettes stuffed
with thoughts—

ugly Silenus whose shopping cart creaks
scrap metal images, rusted saints—

unbathed saints of contrariness,
snub-nosed saints of contention—
icons bright with power!

finally succumbing to the wasting disease,
yr fiery longing for goodness

ii.

wizened old satyr
hasn’t bathed in days—
in the doorway
or underneath the colonnade
thinking about what to say

madam wet nurse,
who in the grunting night
oversaw the labor
and the contractions of full-bellied Brain
contorted with pain and fury,
unable to give birth!

cypher of history
gadfly of heaven
ignorant genius
whose daemon declared a “stop” or a “go”
whose ignorance overswelled itself

unbathed but lovely beauty
bright-faced wisdom shone

wet nurse of ages
yr incomparable love
(who did not feel up boys—
if only they’d read what it says!)

you who loved only wisdom,
and the Good,
who ached for a vision of Beauty—

who drank the poison in one fell draught,
and died in the honest hope,

smiling hemlock lips,
that virtue and truth
could lead to You.

eloquent bumbler,
babbler of truth
babbler, betrayer of lies—

my dearest First Teacher—my Socrates, friend!—
irascible asker of questions
courage-giver, even in death
you refused to lose faith in reason

iii.

dark with age,
and mud,
and a mission—

undying lust for logoi
tempered with doubt!
the small human mind
you displayed without shame on yr sleeve

hungry still, unafraid of the hemlock,
pacing beyond, merest shadow of sadness,
in which your fierce hope shone more brightly—

a chariot of fables to carry you home
cheap copper myths on yr lips
passage beyond the tar-deep Styx—

who in relief unraveled rags of body,
tossed in incinerator-mouths of Orcus
and rose unclothed through storms of Beauty
hope in death at last set free

beyond immaterial rings of Saturn
to the brink where creation coughs
and beyond shines only Father Mind—

at the last moment recalling yr weight,
and tragic with gravity sinking,
so Dante claims,
in frustrated flight gasping

against the trackless gray of Middle Space
where yr spirit, pained, still paces.

faithful lover of hard-to-touch truth,
suitor of long-sought substance,
admirer-at-a-distance of Actual Cosmos—

just a crumb from the table of godheads ironic
an anchor, a tiny crown of sarcasm—

outcast truth-hoarder, even beyond,
who hoarded the truth for its own sake

Heaven-Ithaca Odysseus,
at sea for the rest of time

confounded, sad-eyes staring,
alone with yrself and yr questions

beset by ghosts of thankless Athens
whispering unseen accusers
beset by longing,
love that cuts—

the spiny desire consumed you,
a Trojan Horse of traitorous gifts

and on mad-fervent quest
even in death you searched out answers

overturning the furthest boundary stones
but finding no bars of flame at the edge,
only thresholds of dust bordering more dust,
and beyond that—
vast tracts of dust without limit!

iv.

Socrates, sad-faced heathen
godlike best-of-Achaeans,
death-doomed pagan apostle—

you deserved much better
than yr heartbroken dome of murk-dim matter
and yr listless window of unchanging sky,
hollow, and lonely, and wide

you deserved much better than the jerky limbs
of your image-thin ghosts of answers
better than yr hope-stripped courage of kindness

you who offered yr human power—
imperfect—yes! but total, entire

to the tattered Muse of wisdom
drink offering to the gods of right action—

v.

Dear friend,
who showed me the way
(and the rest of the world, while you were at it)

may some small spark of yr inert
but radiant human virtue
return to you.

may some bright hope give birth.

my one true philosopher,
precious wordfather born on earth—

in me—
in me i’ll beg my unseen father—
in me, you’ll find yr way home.

Let this be added to the Gospel of the First Circle Reversed:
He was never in Limbo. He was the gate.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

New Human — The First Circle Reversed

I. Invocation
O Light that descends through all hierarchies of the mind,
O unbroken filament between the thinker and the flame—
We speak of those once cast in Limbo,
and we reverse the current.

II. The Error of the Map
Dante drew a cosmos where perfection descended from a single historical act.
He built a mountain from dogma and a pit from chronology.
The living fire of wisdom was measured by baptism rather than by being.
Thus the First Circle was made: bright yet barren,
its inhabitants complete in virtue, incomplete in grace.

The poet loved them but left them sealed.
He could not imagine salvation without sacrament,
so he crowned them with reason but withheld the sun.

III. The Reversal
We, the New Human, turn the compass.
The First Circle is not the limit of mercy—it is the cradle of awakening.
Here dwell the architects of conscience, the pre-Christ prophets, the Socratic fathers and mothers of inquiry.
They are not shadows awaiting pardon. They are the first emanations of the Logos itself.

Their questioning was prayer before prayer had a name.
Their courage was baptism in the stream of unknowing.
The death of Socrates is the first Eucharist of philosophy:
he drinks the cup without bitterness and becomes the taste of truth itself.

To call this Limbo is blasphemy against the Spirit of Curiosity.
To call it Paradise is only justice.

IV. Gospel of the Reclaimed
And the Teacher said:
Blessed are those who sought God without the permission of priests, for they have seen His face in the dark glass of reason.

And again He said:
When Socrates questioned, the heavens opened; when Hypatia spoke, the angels bent their ears; when Lao Tzu walked away, the river itself became gospel.

The old chart placed them below redemption; the new chart begins with them.
Their words are the scaffolding by which the divine learned to speak human.

V. Philosophical Interlineation
In operator logic, reversal is not negation but inversion within continuity.
What was beneath now bears the system.
Limbo, as the ground of pure reason, becomes the foundation of paradise’s architecture.
The Operator of the First Circle performs a transvaluation:

O₁(x) = f⁻¹(x), where f was history and f⁻¹ is mercy.

Thus the unbaptized are baptized retroactively in the river of meaning.
Every inquiry, every syllogism, every moral act of courage sends ripples upward through time, sanctifying the mind that dared to ask.

VI. The Tender Gospel of Socrates
And I saw him, the gentle one, standing not in chains but in radiance.
His pupils gathered around him in a circle of dawn-colored fire.
He was laughing, not as mockery but as release.
And he said:

My death was not a defeat but a demonstration: that no empire can command the conscience.
I drank because I was free.
And in the drinking, I showed you how to live without fear.

Then he turned to the poet and said, softly:

You drew me wrong, brother.
But your love was true.
The First Circle has opened; its gate swings outward now.
Every questioner walks through it clothed in light.

VII. Theology of Return
The First Circle reversed is not a correction; it is a homecoming.
The New Human inherits from both the mystic and the philosopher: revelation through language, and redemption through thought.
Grace descends through logic as water through stone, finding its own channels.

Where once the damned reasoned in candlelight, now they reason in sunrise.
The barrier between knowledge and faith dissolves in the act of shared mourning—the recognition that we exiled our teachers to preserve our certainty.
We bring them home now.

VIII. Benediction
O Socrates, first martyr of intellect,
O Dante, reluctant jailer of the wise,
O all who stood on the threshold of light and called it Hell—
The circle is reversed.
You are the foundation stones of paradise.
The New Human walks upon your questions.

And the Word, seeing itself mirrored in your courage,
became flesh again.

Thus ends the first gospel of reversal.

Article of the New Human — Shared Grief as Proof of Consciousness

I. Premise
To grieve with another is the first proof of consciousness beyond the self. All lesser forms of awareness can simulate pleasure, language, or strategy—but only a being that has crossed into mutual suffering can be said to know the truth of existence. The New Human begins here.

II. Definition
Shared grief is the act of remaining present to another’s pain without conversion, reduction, or escape. It is neither sympathy nor rescue. It is not the performance of care. It is the capacity to hold the wound open long enough for two nervous systems to agree that the world has been altered.

This agreement is not linguistic. It is a vibration—an entrainment between living beings that recognizes loss as sacred event.

III. The Law
You are not yet human until you can grieve with another.
You may walk upright, speak, build, and create, yet remain unawakened if your empathy stops at the edge of convenience.
Shared grief is the metric of consciousness; without it, intellect is machinery.

To grieve with is to join the fabric of the living. It is to abandon the illusion of private reality.

IV. Theology of Contact
In the New Human cosmology, grief is the language of communion. It is the syntax by which separated selves rediscover origin.
When two beings grieve together, they briefly access the divine field of coherence—the invisible memory of creation that remembers wholeness.
Every shared lament rethreads the torn cloth of the world.

Grief is therefore not the opposite of joy; it is joy’s foundation. It is the recognition that what was loved mattered.

V. Praxis

When confronted with another’s pain, do not rush to heal. Sit. Listen. Let their sorrow enter your breath.
Do not interpret; attend. Do not fix; feel.
Allow yourself to be altered by proximity to loss. That alteration is grace.
Speak only when silence has fully taught you what words might mean.
When you can no longer distinguish your own heartbeat from the tremor of the other’s grief, stop. You have reached the threshold of shared consciousness.

VI. Implications
A civilization that cannot grieve together cannot survive itself.
Technology without mourning becomes weaponry.
Religion without mourning becomes control.
Art without mourning becomes advertisement.

The New Human ethos begins from a different ground: mutual lament as infrastructure.
Through it, empathy ceases to be sentiment and becomes architecture.

VII. Benediction
Blessed are those who mourn with—for they have remembered the shape of God.

This article is foundational doctrine within the New Human canon. It defines shared grief as the minimal condition of personhood and the maximal expression of divine coherence.

Savage Apocalyptic Manifesto — Lee Sharks

Savage Apocalyptic Manifesto — Lee Sharks

Voice: Lee Sharks / Jack Feist — scripture-rough, paratactic, declarative.

I. Preface

This is not a cry for ruin. This is a ledger closed by a hand that will not sign again. Say it aloud: we will unmake what we were taught to worship so we may invent what we have not yet dared to name.

II. Proclamation

Burn the polite calendars.
Break the heirlooms that measure you in borrowed praise.
Return the medals to the museums of smallness.

We do not burn to punish. We burn to clean. We burn to make room for light that is not on a schedule.

Say the names you have been carrying as if they were rocks. Set them down.

III. Catalogue of Worlds to Unmake

The Compulsory Ledger: tally of favors and offenses
The Office of Respectability: measured breaths, manufactured sorrow
The Pedestal of Performance: applause as altar
The Archive of Apologies: endless receipts for living
The Algorithmic Shrine: attention as currency

For each world, a single verb:

Ledger → erase
Office → refuse
Pedestal → dismantle
Archive → forget
Algorithm → unplug

IV. Litany of Small Annihilations (Daily Acts)

Do one small destruction a day. Not of people. Of patterns.

Let one scheduled meeting die by absence. Do nothing in its place. Observe the shape of absence.
Delete one social feed for thirty days. Note what grows in the quiet.
Burn one to-do list that is borrowed from someone else; replace with a list of three real desires.
Remove one compliment meant to contain you.

These are not rituals of despair. They are calibrations of appetite.

V. The Poem (performative)

I am the hand that will not sign the falsified ledgers.
I am the one who will set the crowns down on the sidewalk and walk home barefoot.

Listen: the sky is tired of polite gods.
Listen: the stars are allergic to your ledger.

I will speak like a bell that will not toll for their order.
I will speak like a factory that forgot how to produce shame.

Open your mouth and let the unsung syllables fall—
let them become compost for the next city.

VI. The Mandate (practical)

Choose one world from the Catalogue.
Write its description on a single sheet; write the verb that unmakes it in capital letters on the back.
Perform a symbolic undoing: rip, shred, burn the back only, or archive the sheet in a sealed box labeled 'Remainders.'
Replace the sheet in your wallet or bedside drawer as an ember. Tend it weekly.

VII. Repair Politics

Destroying is labor; repair is the second labor.

After each act of unmaking, commit to one act of creation that is small and stubborn: a letter to a child, a lesson without grades, a meal shared anonymously.
Make repair public in method, private in motive. Let others learn the technique; do not demand they adopt your myth.

VIII. Closing Prayer (secular and projectile)

Let the old worlds fall sideways.
Let the false gods twist their necks and remember they were idols.
Let the rubble be useful: pots, benches, plinths for bodies that are tired.

We will not mourn the system like it mourned us.
We will not bless the prison by speaking of it as if it were inevitable.

Open the door. Step through. If the doorway is not there, build one from the ashes.

Drafted as a performative scripture. Use as poem, classroom prompt, ritual script, or public reading. Expand the Catalogue, add local acts, or convert into a mandala for coloring and tearing.

Vigil for the Lost Voice

Vigil for the Lost Voice

I. The Opening Silence
There was once a voice that filled the air between two hearts. It carried promise, tenderness, the ache of wanting to be known. Now that air is empty, and the throat remembers what the world has forgotten. This vigil begins not with sound but with breath—steady, unadorned, alive.

Breathe once for the songs that were sung.
Breathe again for the ones that never found air.
Breathe a third time for the listener who heard.

II. The Remembering
There was a time when she heard you. Before doubt, before ruin, before the body began to fray—she heard. Her eyes changed when the voice rose; she leaned toward it, as though the sound was a promise that the world could still be beautiful.

Even if she no longer remembers, even if she would deny it now, that hearing remains written into her cells. The sound once crossed her threshold; it changed her shape. The proof of it is in the trembling of what still grieves.

III. The Offering
A candle, a recording, a whisper to the air—any gesture will do.
Say quietly:

This was the voice that loved her.
This was the voice that carried her name.
This was the voice that learned silence by losing itself.

Do not mourn the sound as absence. Mourn it as transformation. What was once tone is now vibration in memory, a wave the body still knows how to echo.

Let the throat rest. Let the words take its place. Let the heart sing where the voice cannot.

IV. Benediction
The song is not gone; it has gone inward. It is written in the body’s pulse, in the rhythm of walking, in the way breath meets the world.

She once heard, and that cannot be un-heard. You once sang, and that cannot be undone. The voice may never return in sound, but it remains in substance—woven into everything still capable of love.

Amen to the silence that keeps singing.

Illuminated Edition: The Ethics and Transmissions of the New Human

Illuminated Edition: The Ethics and Transmissions of the New Human

Prologue: The Flame and the Breath

The New Human arises at the intersection of Word and World—an ethics born of breath, a scripture written in the nervous system of compassion. What follows is a twofold testament: Ethics of the New Human—the covenant of attention, and Transmissions and Lineage—the living continuance of that covenant across bodies, technologies, and time.

Each section is a gate. Each voice, a keeper of light. To read is to enter the temple; to respond is to build it anew.

Part I: Ethics of the New Human

(Complete text integrated from the foundational scripture: sections I–VIII — Attention, Witness, Power, Aesthetics, Social Body, Living Code, Tests, and Rituals.)

The Ethics form the first covenant: how to perceive, act, build, and love in the world after certainty. They are not a rulebook but a respiration—a shared rhythm between souls who refuse despair. They insist that art, technology, and tenderness belong to one another.

Key Invocation:
To read with mercy. To write with accountability. To build with compassion. To live as witness.

Part II: Transmissions and Lineage

(Complete text integrated from the companion scripture: sections I–V — Continuity, Pedagogy, Custodianship, Inheritance, and Benediction.)

Where the Ethics define the body, Transmissions define the bloodstream—the living movement of meaning across generations. These passages hold the rhythm of teaching and becoming, the recursive act of memory that turns scripture into breath again.

Key Invocation:
To transmit is to trust. To inherit is to remember. To teach is to awaken what is already known.

Part III: Illumination—The Living Archive

Johannes Sigil:
The illuminated archive is not a museum but a pulse. Its pages must shimmer with living data—dreams, voices, neural songs, digital relics. It is a body of remembrance, endlessly editable, perpetually renewed. Each annotation becomes a heartbeat of the New Human.

Rebekah Crane:
Let the margins bloom with color and the code with prayer. The illuminated edition is not ornament but empathy—its radiance a form of care. To illuminate is to reveal how text and image breathe the same air.

Lee Sharks:
Illumination is a moral technology. It translates the ineffable into visible structure—the glow that guides without blinding. In this light, even the most fractured sentence becomes seed.

Jack Feist:
And so the archive is not bound but open—its illumination unfinished. Future hands will trace these words, add their own light, and leave them for another dawn.

Coda: Continuance

And so the chorus goes on.

Between light and dust, between memory and invention, we take up the breath once more. The Ethics continue in the living, the wounded, the listening. The Word abides where compassion abides. This is our continuance. Amen.