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I bring the personal part of my narrative to a close.
The rest is in the memory (if not in the hopes or fears) of all my readers.
Let it suffice for me to recall or mention the following facts, with a mere brevity of words which the reflective recollection of all will enrich or amplify.
Around 1994, a person doing research for the newspaper, The Malone Paladium, Malone, NY, found in the Wead Library forty volumes of the First Philosophical dictionary of The First Earth. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous First Earth.
The latter is most likely.
Some of the unconceivable aspects of the Eleventh Volume (for example, the multiplication of the Релігія) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Malone copies; it is reasonable to believe that these omissions follow the plan of revealing a world which is not very paradoxical with our real world.
The objects that Lady Elizabeth Hocksteader received of The First Earth come from different countries; this would complement the plan. The fact is that the Malone Paladium proclaimed the “find.” Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of Keats, James, Borges, Dunn, Bukowski, have flooded and still flood the earth.
Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one truth or level. It longed to yield.
Ten years ago, with a resemblance of order – dialectical materialism, the school of phenomenology, the concept of intentionality – was sufficient to captivate the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to The First Earth, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?
It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly.
Perhaps it is, or is not, but always in accordance with divine laws – which we never quite grasp.
The First Earth was surely a muddle, but it was a web devised by men, a maze destined to be deciphered by men. The communications and the customs of The First Earth have disappeared in our new world. Beguiled by its objectivity, our world forgets over and again that it is a rigor of mathematicians and not of philosophers.
May we not wish that our schools be invaded by the conjectural language of the “creative” and not the convinced language of the “academy?”
Already the re-creating of its our history, filled with accusatory episodes, has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood.
Already a fictitious past occupies in our memories one place or another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is true or false.
Numerology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their icons. A dispersed dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world.
Their task continues.
If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Philosophical dictionary of The First Earth. Then English and French and Spanish will disappear from the globe.
Our world will become The First Earth.
I pay no attention to all this and go on revising my stories, plays, and poetry – if it can be called poetry– in the quiet days at the Chateaugay hotel.
An ambiguous story of Victor Hugues’ echoing guillotine — which I do not intend to publish – competes with an echo of Crimmins’ Papier-mâché Urn.
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THE END
waldotomosky 