Sickness Unto Death

I read an eye-tracker study that showed most people, when they read web pages, DON'T read anything but the first two lines. This as the latest in the barrage of factoids to human finitude. After an hour's lecture, people remember exactly one sentence. They revised the capacity of human working memory from the "magic number" seven plus or minus two to FOUR. There we have it. Creatures of fourness. Of quaternity (here I can begin to rant because, odds are, you won't read this far). We might as well go all out: plagiarism is now allowed. I feel tempted to post the text of Rilke's Duino Elegies here in its entirety and take credit for it. Maybe I'll make slight alterations: angels are now the shaven-headed lamas, the great lovers are the ascending medial foerebrain dopamine systems (with modulation by cholinergic projections with a little help from the endo-opioids), the saltembanques the lonely symbolic, atemporal, being, control system in its cage, enveloped by an uncooperative "hot" system, the song of wooing now the shilling of the white van speaker scam guy, the pregnancy in the summer dawn will forthwith be known as the Ganges delta, the spire an Aztec pyramid, castle duino an empty promontory in Wessex, or a moor, or a swamp, oor the flatness of Antarctica, Kergeulen the desolation archipelago, the no-thingness and non-duality implicit in the first elegy the still waving of the creepers on the Aztec temple, in the land before time was an object, when history was cycle, when the arrows of time were not yet constructed as protective and isolating bastions in the human psyche.

You have to create your own system, or be a slave to someone else's.

If I am sick, will visions come? Will they never come? Will myu only transcendence be though this thermal expansion of my skin and the uttelry circadian-less clock in my brain? What happened to the great blood trees of the past, the batles, the maidens, the lazy summer days, the creepers, the water snakes, the mice, the kittens, the lovers, the skinny dippings, the riffs resolving into an upper exhoic chamber, the nights glowing white with the might of human art, the moments of dipsomania, the laments, the longings, the intent searching for a non-specific face in a crowd, the rubbing of the temples to release the gray smoke of Shangri-La? All down the American river? A dream of life a nightmare?

The literature of happiness is substantially more difficult.

Consider: "In the begining the universe was made, this made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move."