Buddy Meier's Dream

"Where is the where-with-all?" Buddy's mummy coo-cooed from the gilt-edged cage of lace around the window behind the kitchen sink, as her eyebrows raised with imploring which scrubbed away the wistfulness, and the dream evaporated like a stain under the splash of her Clorox tears. The "where-with-all" he remembered, meant money in terms of material manifestation as though the motions of the spirit, Hylozoically, were taken merely for the motions of stuff in the Aristotelian sense of ule.

Buddy preferred to approach from the do­main of practicality, the "heerz how" of the causa efi­ciens: How'd he cum up with the bucks? As his charisma churned toward action, the iconic embrace of the Mother faded into afternoon shadows of an orange chenille house-robe and fantasies of survival in opulence, cre­puscular in the atmosphere of a backyard lawn, above which hung in the air a golden cloud of gnats. The mother space of mind and darkness seemed almost palpable, anima­ted by the beta-frequency buzzing of the light-catching diapterous beings. For him the how was in the doing, and SO to go, he went, to sit under the cloud on the lawn in the late raking sunlight, soaking up the rain of blessings like a pond bottom of parched mud receives the first rain. Across a toe of his left bare foot crawled an orange chenille caterpillar, its bristling hairs tickling the space be­tween his second and third toe (counting from the big toe as one).

Buddy brought up the foot from the half-lotus and gazed at the transmutable creature. Draped across the little bit of webbing which connected those particular toes almost to the first joint, the caterpillar raised itself to assume the posture of the pharoah's cobra, and swaying, addressed the good boy, "You are who...hu-hu-hu-hu-hu" (the caterpillar's pneuma became violently ill-disposed) "hoo-hoo-hooooooo,"and  so puffed-up was he with emphysemic affliction, his cough trailed off in a wheezing slough, up from which, after a while emerged the thin voice once again, with the widespread mantram of the American 17 (at this writing) billion "You: You're the ONE:" And Buddy's response, the stock take, "Who?" To which the caterpillar, "Yes you. Now, how?,'How?' was the correct question you asked, and so, as we see, I am here, now, in the late daylight of our diurnal round--happy to serve, one of the spiritual functions, let us remember, without detailing implications of the secret word of the RAINBOW-CHEZ ladies, save those which fall in the light of the O-range. Of course, the 'O' may be read as the token of closure and so we may take the token for the whole of it, toute entire, as per the concept of closure in the theory of groups. We (WHO?) are (WHAT?) now (WHEN?) here (WHERE)--that is to say, consciousness plus body in space and time: already, as we imagine, in a universe as complex as necessary for most of science--asking how: the quest for method."

Buddy (lyrically) "The sun is Westing, and we go Questing..." Caterpillar (trying to figure the angle)" ...unless or until we come to the WHY? and then, as in 'therefore' and not in time, we may find ourselvescrossing the bridge on the river WHY and HOW together."  Buddy confirmed the plotting, "All the real truths are in the tunes of the people..."

"And of the caterpillars. Birds sing and death comes from the air as the arrows of Apollo, while we crawling, listen to the sweet creaking of grass stems stretching, while the wind turns the cracked bamboo into Shiva's flute."

"And the French horn behind Frankie Laine: 'My heart knows what the wild goose knows, and I'm gonna go where the wild goose goes.' On which wild quest we may discover the answer."

"It sounds like the goose is the Anser. Either the syn­drome of laying the golden egg, or laying of the syndrome of the golden egg should resolve the quest for where-with-­all," indulgently sighed the caterpillar, "but we have just bought another question with 'Goosey, Goosey Gander, where shall you wander?' So how can we go-go this way?"

Buddy bent down toward his toe tips and whispered, "My heart knows where the wild goose goes."

"X-L-N-T!" declared the orange chenille caterpillar, a master clown of transformations, just as Buddy's mother called through the kitchen window, with her nose poking through the spines of several cactus plants flowering in the planter. "Tamale pie, Buddy boy, with four-and-twenty super colossal Lindsay olives. Mmmm MMM!"

"Follow it then, as far as to the bottom of the sea, charting in the house of memory the dream terrain as well as that co-ordinated in your Cartesian, so-called waking consciousness "

"X is the cross, and Y the motive. There is no crossing without motive. We may cross in consciousness, as we do nothing but in deciding, and in the decisiveness of our actions. It does not appear, however, that we may decide what to dream, for in sleep the Ys are the ever descending wisdom of integration, which we would know if only we could imagine such a chock-a-block whole." Buddy stared down at the caterpillar with the accomplished air of pandit who had rationalized a feeling he had read about, "Anyway, the Y is trivial." caterpillar replied. "And the (imaginary) state of your being is always marked with the X of existence--at least, let us assume, in this space, this time around."

"This, perhaps the last time around," said Buddy as his toe stretched out, swept in an arc, and with the cater­pillar aboard described a circle in the dirt and grass. Beside a tuft in the inscribed space, Buddy now saw a toad who had been bugging the conversation all along. As he brought his foot up underneath himself to squat and inspect the toad, the orange chenille caterpillar slipped off his toe-ride to land on the toad's back.

"Might as well let him know who he's working for," grunted the toad. The caterpillar curled up into a Kundalini spiral around a cluster of warts over the toad's third eye. "Hoo, hoo, hoo, " came the consumptive caterpillar's re­sponse as he relapsed into another coughing fit. "Que pasaba anoche? Commemoretivo in the hookah."

"Who is it to be for?" querried Buddy, "Myself or Mommy, numero uno or the altogether Zeroine?"

"As her voidness draws you now, syntonizing with the pit of your stomach, so you sustain a third chakra resonnance with your bio-occasional hostess, separated by two omphalic knots and a knife slash. Go fork an olive, Buddy," said the caterpillar resignedly, feeling counter-heralded by Buddy's mother's call for tamale pie. "Want to?" the boy asked as he plopped the toad into a loose pocket of his red embroidered shirt and set the caterpillar on his collar edge.

"The cloud of golden gnats," whispered the caterpillar as Buddy tore through the plate of sliced tomatoes, shaved iceberg, with a scoop of Best Foods real mayonnaise, corn nuts, rice and beans, Rancheria sauce and the featured item, "were Toad's banquet tonight, but now they have dispersed. with the sunset, so he will have to fast or move about for fare. Not much is offered by your pocket bottom, however, the lid of the brown sugar jar would provide excellent ther­apy for Toad, the throne-site surrounded by drysophila circling the rotting fruit in the teak-wood bowl of the breakfast-nook." Buddy set the toad atop the brown sugar jar, and it began zapping tiny flies, while singing, "Ah, Sue, sue, suzie, soo, soo, sooo! Sue-rounded by flitting flies for toad fodder. As family meals get odder and hotter, it's a wise child who knows its own fodder."

"Father, wrather," submitted the caterpillar. "And it goes, 'As sexual customs get hotter and odder, a pederast father knows his own daughter!'..no, no, no. Too outlandish for the intricately involuted psycho-net of transplanted central European sense of family style."

"Ah," mused the toad, "As ocean pollution turns water hotter, the kelp-bed crablets are fodder for otter."

Buddy readied an essay. "Oh blather! Me father, I would have him rather/ at home with a poem in a tome about Rome..."

"He can't finish it, Toad," cracked the caterpillar.

"But consider, Brother song-spirit," said the toad, "he still has rhyme-time for such superb words as: dome, chrome (and here reenters some of the Rhodesian-Angola angle-angula), and soma, the body, as in chromosome." With which the first light of a newly risen full moon illuminated the toad on the brown sugar jar on the table of the breakfast-nook, in the city called Berzerkeley, in the counting of wandering Amida (Amanita) or as Amitabha of the Dhyana Buddhas, in the well-provisioned provinde of Kali-formica ('Qali-' some would say, adducing the Arabic textual tradition, presumably transliterating from the Greek of to Kallon, the Beautiful--that is to suggest, the 'imaginary' state vis-a-vis the other quadrants of the matrix: True, Good and Real). Buddy Meier's mummy, with her nose just em-purpled by a swig of creme de casis, toasting the sunset, caught the fresh shadow of moolah magic moonlight on the cuff of the orange chenille robe as she served dessert which tonight was vanilla flan & caramel sauce.

"Like silver streaming into garment nets after the prospect of gold has set, so shall our fortunes be replenished, Buddy Boy, wherewith perhaps tonight in dreams we will meet our where-with-all." She poured her tea and reached for sweeten­ing, palming the toad which peed in her hand, then hopped onto a grapefruit in the bowl. "Mighty swell! Try some of this, a Buffo- float for your flan." A few drops of the psychotropic exudent floated in the caramel sauce. Then she licked the toad-pee off her fingers like -others are sometimes supposed by young men not to know how. "Miss your daddy, do you Buddy boy? Well he is a logger in the forest of night, logging a long cruise like a wallowing Walloon, your lowland version of a Flying Dutchman, who may now be wending the tortuous way home to the Rome of our beautiful apple pie perennial, cooling atop the oven, guarded by the Aegis of Athene, the Gorgon's grimace, kiln dragon and emblem on your crane-skin traveler's folding item. Better the family should celebrate the breaking of  bread together, feeding the belly-glow, fat show and fart blow, but your daddy's duties as Chief Chef/Writer for Tantradine International keep him at the eating club until after your bedtime, jotting down all the details of what passes into the entrails of the monthly meeting of Omasters. For it is full moon tonight, and once again the occasion for the Eclipse Oracle. Mom's apple pie will welcome him home about the time the bats make it back, but before then we will review our emergency proceedures for taking cover in advent of Japanese incendiary bombing, brush teeth, and caress the worm of sensuality in the sauce of sweetness."

So into bed after wash-up he sprang, and just before a tuck-in he got a story read with his mommy and the big book on the side of his bed. "Which would you like to hear?" she asked, fluttering the pages of the fairy tale book. "What about 'Hunting Frogs with Snakes'?" Buddy asked. "That's one of my chanteuse blues tunes," she demurred, shunting a Cher shoulder up to her cheek. The caterpillar and toad, who had made it piggy-back into the bedroom by this time both shuddered at the association, between themselves and the tune title, too near to be missed by such subtle sentient beings in terms of the vibrations of hippocampic microwaves. "Where is the question, where shall we being here on the threshold of entering the form of the book begin?"

"At the beginning again? How Grimm." Der Froschkönig once upon a time dived into the pool without bottom to fetch the golden ball of the sun for the princess anima as she threw her gauzy web of sleep over the eyes of the boy. Toad stood guard at the head of the bed, underneath the hanging pot of a blossoming wandering Jew, zapping mos­quitos out of the air above Buddy's head, and caterpillar curled up under a leaf of the book which was left lying open on the bed bottom, when the mother-love trailed off with youthful denials of the call. But the sound of sweet voices screwed themselves deeply into Buddy's ears as he slept attended by his two new boon companions, and he chanted with them in time with the wave breaks of a primal ocean inside the placenta of all remembered sound, & sweetness.

"Could his father really be Daniel Doo-doo Daddy-0, of the Senior Space Science Psycho-Squad?" wondered Buddy, dreaming, chaperoned by a dog-faced larva and warty hopping aide. "Who was he?" ran inverse to the life flow in the branch of a tree, for the genes of his Mother, named Gene­vive in his dream, and his Daddy Dan flowed into his disentropic phenomenal flash with the clarity of moonlight into the room. His wheel of being revolved like the spinner of a board game, its quadrants marked:

xy   |   xy
-------
xy   |   xy

wherewith was displayed on the screen plane of the brain pan of the dream plan, something looking remarkably like Table 3.3 'The Functions of Two Variables', on page 47 of The Principles of Switching Circuits by Frederick H. Edwards (The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England) 1973, $15.50; set in Univers Medium by Science Press, printed on Decision Offset Smooth by Colonial Press, and bound in G.S.B. S/535/Flame #12 by Colonial Press in the United States of America).

Sixteen probabilities lit up like Candles on a Birthday Cake. The moonlight night filters in past the pineal gland's light receiving threshhold hyper-extended beyond its extraordinary range in the agony of intercourse between the molecules of bufotenine like magical keys fitting the locks, or molecular bonds, of his own naturally synthesized pineal secretions, serotonin, melatonin.

The muffled purr of a 1940 Plymouth sedan wound into Buddy Meier's eardrums. His eustacian tubes popped, equalizing pressure so that the tympani--neither inside nor outside--remained in equilibrium, and hypersensitive to the sound waves, the ocean of pressures in the ambient atmosphere. That part of his liberated psyche, trans­formed in dreamspace from the boyhood orange chenille strings of his mothers garment, from the archetypal scarf of Isadora Duncan, veil of Salome, sash of the Great Mother's negligee, apron string, or orange chenille, hairy, dog-faced caterpillar, now flew in the divine wind of love in the state of consciousness called rMilam in Tibetan texts on the Secret Yogas, like the butterfly Bakavi, Psyche beloved of Cupid and protected by lovely Venus the Mother.

The orientation of his Cartesian mind spun, counter‑clockwise, down in a Maelstrom spiral, through the fluids of airy consciousness, emotional streams and eddies, the mire of sensoria, seeping through granite body, flushing away feldspar, eroding being to the crystal of silicon quartz in a hexagonal prism, as a tiny grain of sand, token of the vast abundance of grains of sand of the Ganges, and of Ganges upon Ganges, the Sahara and the Rub' al-Khālī. "So the sandman (cheery, cherry, sherry blossom time, O Sakura) cometh in a Plymouth sedan, opalescent in dreams and pearl gray in the driveway. Here is a paper tuft from the rib bone of a rack of Spring lamb: a miniature chef's hat, and a kiss."

Suffused with new energy, the polarity of Buddy's magnetic field surrounding the mesencephalon fluttered with micro-wave frequencies, and the rapid eye motions beat like the wings of a great orange and black Monarch multiplied into a cloud of butterflies in a migrant swarm over the shoulder of the mountain, down the shadow of the glacier, and swiftly moving wind up over the cornice of snow at the crest of the volcanic cone, into the sunlight and crisp air, high up and on wings of the royal heart.

Wonderously appeared a curious gentleman, laden with collection of exquisitely woven baskets: baskets from everywhere, Harrar, Hopis, Eskimo, China, Pomo, and one which he pronounced to be "Wappo." "Where are the Wappo?" Buddy asked. 

"Truly where. Where to be sure? You are asking me? Very well then. Aha! I have already given you one valuable clue--but then all of this is a clew, one of the braided skeins like horsetails, leading horses, drinking—Oho! but we are men of culture and so we take the water out of the well and then we put it into the trough for the animal friends--for we must help them with water which sustains life. And we must honor the well, and preserve its purity. When is a well a bell, Buddy Boy?"

"If we are gentlemen of culture, then surely we ought to be introduced before riddling one another, in addition to which, I asked first where the Wappo were."

"That will cost you, lad. That counts for a WHO, and the way you put it, overrides your previous WHERE. Who, who, who? Who in very deed! I am a phantom flower growing from your secret seed." The apparition blossomed into an extraor­dinary display of tiger-lilies.

"I remember you from Alice," Buddy declared.

Pop! The vision transformed into a flourishing poppy plant with at once orange, red, white and blue flowers. "The flower of state. Ah, but which state?"

Unpop. A gentleman scholar in red robes sat before an oaken table on which a candle stood with a wisp of smoke curling up from its dowsed wick. "Thus shall the presence of God, Buddha-nature, or the Great Beyond be tokened: entering the form and once again returning to the Void." The candle spontaneously gleamed again. The gentlemen scholar rose and bowed, and untied the bows of his rose-colored mantle which he offered to Buddy to keep him warm. And there, on the bed in the morning, was the red hunting shirt that Daddy wears.

"Je m'appele suis--and you must forgive me for bluffing about in so many erudite tongues--me llamo, my name may be called, 'Professore Dottore (those are just some of my titles!) Jose Godolphin Que y Porque.' That is an uncommon name, and all for a reason, you may well wager. Ch'ing! I've said it again. Well, to quite correctly answer your wary WHERE query, allow me to state that we can only, by convention, come to some kind of a mutual recognition of where we are by acknowledging through some medium of com­munication, or more generally and less cognitevely, communion, certain formal relationships which we may identify with certain states of being or not as fancy dictates, but relationships as processes or events when experienced in the domain of space and time, but which are themselves, save say, eternal, not of any space, not in any time, which is to suggest that we settle for being here now.  And then the WHERE quest becomes manageable, in the sense of having grasped the tail of the serpent--although one may yet have not even the anticipation of what the serpent's head will look like, nor the sharpness of fangs. At which mention, if you will notice the rustling in this basket, the cobra stirs, its eyes are firecoals glowing cherry-red. But let's keep the lid on until you have a chance to practice on the shenai, should your lips lead you to join the reed heads, dancing upon the wind-column of your own diaphragm drum. The archaic techniques of ecstasy indicate painting the ikon of, say, a swan or Great Goose, upon the drum-head. Where one dances with the drumbeats, there one follows the wild goose in flight over the tundra, the taiga, over the tops of the snowstorm cloud and through passes in the rock well around the roof of the world. There are limits, some say up to about 29,000 feet above sea level; others, however, say that the Way of Paramahamsam, the High Flying Gander, leads all the way to the Light. This is easy to hear as testimony, but hard to ascertain as fact. As I am a scholar, naturally I recognize that a fact is what one makes of it. In the making lies the art, or in Greek, the poesis, whereby we may acknowledge the world as Factum Ars Poetic-tic-tic.

Practically considered, however, let's get on DOWN. To divine is to see what is inside, or underneath. And so the dowser holds the stick, points down, as the Nagas, serpents, water sprites, swirl down in a slowing spiral away from the spinning equator. Down to the core where the myriad separate existences coalesce in a space without time, in a simpler and prior order of being. Oh, it is not easy to enter here any easier than to Visit the Interior of The earth and Rediscover Inside Olive Lapis--Stone-­Pit, What is it?"

One of the olive pits from the tamale pie rolled out of Buddy's mouth, down the pillow in a rivulet of spittle, and worked its way under the covers to where, when he rolled over it was between the mattress and a spot about two inches below the navel.

"Having psychically consumed the divine seed, through the agency of the spirit of Athene, et cetry, we may now begin the work known as the Preparation for the Journey, although the word journey implies a trip of one day, one day's-trip, that is to say, the solar adventure--whereas the trip of a month belongs to the moon. This excursion is outside time, or if we care to regard it as an incursion, then inside time. You are prepared with five sensory weapons, antennae modes of the peripheral nervous system, like Five Weapons of the Jataka stories, Tar-baby swallowed a rDorje, lightning, diamond. The six faces of the quartz crystal have trans­muted into the sixness of carbon, atom of life."

Buddy allowed himself to be led, according to the teachings of the sutras, as it were by a golden chain, to the thresh-hold of an imaginary oscillation between two states of what may be technically called by the common name "TIME"--yet time of two distinct orders. Buddy counted the seconds in the second order of time. The pulse beat seventy two times during the duration of sixty seconds (one minute). One minute, counting by the sexigesmal convention, with base six, considering the world in its basic aspect of sixness, tokened by snowflakes and the carbon nucleus, and by the eternal, non-material qualities of sixness, long known in the lore of number theorists as the FIRST PERFECT NUMBER. "What a way to begin the spiral into eternity, with the illusion of perfection--that should be with caps: PERFECTION, in the relation of sun to moon.

There leaning his spine, draped in red plush robes up per­pendicularly against the soft curve of the moon gate in the paradisical garden scene of the dream sequence, Buddy addres­sed the Tulpa, a phantom, whose name curiously he seemed to know, "Norman Akaya." Norman pressed his hands together in front of his heart, in the traditional Vajrayana form of greeting. Buddy observed himself clad in a pair of green corduroy coveralls, with an orange and brown striped (hori­zontally) tee shirt. There was an embroidered emblem on the corduroy bib, as a pactoral, iconic response to Norman's religious salutation. Its form was vague, something like a tortoise swimming in a tight circular pattern, or a whirli­gig waterbeetle. Between the foreheads of Norman and Buddy twisted a spiral and counter-spiral of subconscious psychic energy, as if two eyes flashing red and green, successively opened and closed, so that one's reality-value was the other's afterimage.

"Picking numbers out of a hat," babbled Norman, as he swept a tiger-skin sleeping cap around with a grand gesture. The dream drone soundtrack welled with the litany of the National lottery in Mexico City. Norman offered the extraordinary cap to Buddy for a selection from the many little carved seedpods inside. When Buddy' fingers emerged with a ball, it blossomed forth with light and became Joe McDokes peeking out from behind his eightball, the signature shot opening and closing each short subject from the time warp of the forties. "Numero ocho. El OCHO. HUIT."

"Huit de la nuit," Buddy rhymed. "Huit Clos, no escape, nor­mal escapade. STAR, STARTRE, ASTARTE. I'll start with EIGHT, ATE, eight." Buddy burped tamale pie.

"We'll do it by the numbers then--although we note that this then is logical, which is to say, not in time."

Too late the phallarope. Here was a silken cord tied in a bow-­line around the head of his furless penis, jiggling it up and down, a Phallusrope. "NOT-IN" time, being one's vacation, and Justin Time, of the same band of Justins as J. Case, and J. Specting, J. Spiring, J. Tensions. In any case, Justin's or otherwise, the Jays ("J"s), Scrub and Blue, Stellar and Hermit are all of a lot, counting in the English language, according (braided, of silkworm Mulberyy exudent, or of hemp fiber, quipu) to the twistings and undulations of the Mystery of parallel 38 degrees north, 27 on to 28 minutes, being the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the sigmoid quivvering in tempo of laurel leaves chewed with the saliva of some mad and lovely maiden dedicated to the spiralings of the Great Pythonness, Tiamet from Sumer, a river winding, the coil of dessicated umbilical cord in the turtle talisman of the Native American so-called Indians.

Buddy's head now bristled with the coronal peace of a war bonnet made from green quetzal feathers, and found himself sinking into a whirlpool of deep cenote consciousness, theta rhythms, lotus relaxed on the surface of a green velvet cushion, facing Norman Akaya in red. "Let us join ends of the chord," Norman suggested, extending his open right hand in the tra­ditional gentlemanly gesture. They shook and shifted smoothly to the hippy thumbclasp, with an "Aireee!" from the Green and an "Eh maka-ala ka ko!" from Akaya. A scotch mist descen­ded and swaths of moss blossomed. Gene Kelley could be seen dancing over a bridge in the middle distance.

"By the numbers, not in time, then." They spoke in harmony a seven-word instant mantram.

"Let us begin together with eight, and so we have a system in its eightness not only numerically, but also lexically, in consonnance with the etymology of 'system' being a set of elements distinguished in seven-fold ways, as the intervals of  notes in an octave, where the first distinction, of halving the string say, gives a fifth." A fifth of Johnny Walker Black Label, ice and glasses are on the patterned copper tray offered by Professore Dottore Que.

"How can you tell," Professor Que inquired of the two, "if your notes, or tones, are whole of necessity in the system of the Western musical octave, so-called?"

"It doesn't matter. The stars are matter, as avowed and affirmed by the Sutra according to Captain Beefheart. But Buddy just chose "eight" from out of the tiger cap, and so we would begin by the numbers with an infinite loop, electro-chemically through our right hands and left eyes--as tokens of states of consciousness associated with the lateral differentiation of cortical hemisphere activity--sooo! Let me present to the mini-circular shrine of the copper tray, one of the high material manifestations of hookah-dom, the Adamantine Toker."

The orange chenille caterpillar, wearing epaulets emblazoned with "D-8," in golden thread, approached the gathering which floated in an oriental garden of network paths all atop a gigantic lotus lily pad in the quiet inside sea. "By the numbers I see, in any case, we are whole, one body," said Que to the Caterpillar, said to be one (the one in the O-range) of the Four Qtubs of Constantinople, in this instance identifying himself as an element of the Imperial Tetrarchate, of the domain of the space entered with the fourth crossing from the void. "This view can be foreknown upon the under­standing of the four-space before time wherein, for the first time--ha, ha--although we are not in the first time of no duration "yet," we can distinguish the Truth (with respect to the other three quadrants: mappable; for example, in the domain of number, by the four forms of unity."

(i quattro coronati of the exarchate, now in Venice, St. Marco)

"By colors the case is curiously, confoundedly clear," con­fessed Jose Que, in a confidential manner behind the palm to Norman Akaya, of the Red Lotus Persuasion. "We could say, at the beginning that it were a question of black or white. Or red all over, har, har! Anyway, Norman, remember that NEWS, when read as the points of the compass, indicates a figure eight sequence: North, East, West, South. Now that  is the way to read the news." Que spun clockwise with a loose foot sweep."Consider the findings of the research axis Berlin and Kay--relate that phonopaeically if you will--in re il QUAESTIO-NUCHO--meaning wither a great big question or, question number eight, sp.-OCHO, the quest being a voyage without return as to the final Tushita Heaven of the Bodhisattva. Check your Dharma Credentials for Believability Quo­tient. It's a measure for a measure, by the platinum, density 21.5 metre della latitude di Parigi, or by the yard, in Eng­lish inches, coordinated as they be with the Truer geodeisic standard--that is, with respect to observations of distant stars as a standard for precision, as employed by the ASTRONOMER (Namer of Stars) of nineteenth century eminence, Sir John F. W. Herschel: criticizing the French meter as being erratic and variable from country to country because the earth is not a true sphere, and each meridian of longitude would therefore be different. The French derived their standard from a curved meridian of the earth through the longitude of Paris --what's more, they erred and produced a meter that is .0002 too short. So sez p. 73 in the Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Peter Tompkins, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, $12.50, one bit, or an eighth part of a dollar. The axis of Berlin and Kay (University of California Press, Berzerkly, 197 ) posits black and white, as the first two colors as indicated by their theory of language with respect to Basic Color Terms. In the tables all other languages start with "WHITE" first, except for English, which begins with "BLACK." No mention is made of this switch by the authors. What are we to understand?"

"According to Herschel the only really reliable basis for a standard of measure was the polar axis of the earth--the straight line from pole to pole--which a recent British Ord­nance Survey had fixed at 7898.78 miles (by taking the mean of all the available meridians measured). This translated into 500,500,000 British inches, or an even five hundred million inches if the British inch were half a human hair's breadth longer.
          Herschel suggested that the regular British inch--which was officially computed as the length of three grains of barley taken from the middle ear and placed end to end-‑be arbitrarily lengthened by a mere one-thousandth part in order to obtain a truly scientific, earth-commensurable unit exactly one(five-hundred-millionth part of the polar axis of the earth."

"And the fruit of that, if we turn to the other side, counting: page seventy-four," Que quoted,

 "Fifty such inches, Said Herschel, would make a yard--ah, here we have it, how to make a year into a yard--that was exactly one ten-millionth of the polar axis, and half that measure, or 25 inches, would make a very useful cubit.
          By coincidence these were the cubit and the inch which John Taylor, editor of the London Observer, had found to fit the Great Pyramid in multiples of 366."

"So it is with numbers," said Norman, "their numbers are un­ending." "Rather more than Legion," affirmed Que, "and of a different order of moreness."

"There is, as we see by the star," said Buddy, "the matter of one missing mile, considering the computations of the International Geophysical Year 1957-58, which obtained, from research data compiled by orbiting vehicles, a figure of 3949.89 miles for the polar radius of the earth, which would contrast with the 7898.78 diameter of the British, a new measure of diameter miles 7899.78. So there is either an error, or one missing or one extra mile."

"Or the earth grew, or shrunk--with, if we like, the rest of the universe." The D-8 Caterpillar Qtub struck a light, and commenced toking the hookah.

"If we are going to begin with an eye for precision, in order to more clearly lead those epigone who follow our rMilam flow then we had best come together with respect to some standard. Shall we consense (in the active sense) with an English (Her­schillian) inch of exactly one fifty-millionth part of the polar axis. D-8, will you assume the position?" Professore Que held the orange caterpillar in the palm of his hand as the larva twisted into a figure eight. "By the micrometer, from outer bristle on the curve, to outer bristle, we are a tight one English inch and half a human hair's breadth." The chenille caterpillar undulated his hairs as Que then set him on a glass plate of the micrometer for confirmation. A search was initiated for harmonies in spectroscopy, and for the real set.

"I am a wandering Scotsman," sang the new Tulpa to enter the lily pad circle, wearing the badge of the badger, "Although a cousin through marriage to Teuton stock, called Adolph, the Bad German, not a dolphin as you might imagine, By my criss and by my cross, plaid double-cross (to cross again is not to cross, whereas two wrongs, as in "Rong-Rong," "Wrong: Da Doo Wrong Wrong," etc. ever make a wordwright, let alone two lefts.

"Like one of the Kelvinator dozen? A cold egg." The Scot declared.

"A culled eight? My culled eight," Buddy suggested.

"McCullough or McCulloch?" querried Que.

Judging from the McCullough effect of the red and the green interface of aurae between the green Bud and the Red Blossom, we may imagine the black bars of the tartanic icon woven into the lambswool of the Wanderer's hat, and the persistence of an oscillating effect in higher mammals for periods of up to a month.

"And there are the two assistances of Marcel Duchamp in Pharmacie, one of the last masterpieces, being the touches of inspiration to an otherwise banal winter landscape, or even judged "a particularly banal, popularly printed winter land‑scape scene, such as can still be seen in some crass quarters today in the resplendent images of calendars in cheap dentists' offices." The touches, of red and green paint are indications, we are led to believe, of the colored water phials commonly displayed in the windows of pharmacies. Divinely elegant alchemical reference by the suave, sophisticated (no good? no bad? If one does not follow the four precepts, as complicated as they may seem, then one had better be SURE to 'Be here now!') Marchand deSel, spoonerism for Marcel Duchamp, Tulpa form: MARQUE DUTCHHAM, who will trade his "que" for a "K" any day, and his extra "H" in the Low Germain Pig Meat ('Mark him!' said the Lawd of Cain. Pig Meat Markham sang the tune).

Marque Dutchham offered a plate of very thinly sliced Deutscher Lachschinken all around, with a plate accompanying laden with Triscuits. Marque called for wine and the sommellier arrived with a Bordeaux bottle of clear glass, with the conformations of a Chateau d'Yquem, but bearing the label: Chateaux du Marquis de Lui-même. "The name has become corrupted in the jaundiced eye of the--how do we say?--'Controllation Nationalistigue du Champion Vin,' tu sait, who gets the very finest. Well sallow palettes attended the last tasting when the bottles of '71 were up for pops. It was our own livers that might have just as well been patéd, troufféed, and sautéed in an artichoke heart, Heloise! St. Aloysious! How luscious, frittata from Castroville--which, although there are many who to this day remain confounded, declares itself to be NOT the Artichoke 'Capital,' nor 'Capitol' of the World (the latter which might seem absurd at first to those not familiar with the uniquely Surrealistic potential for California architecture, as the climate and the psychic level of the people permit structures to emerge as giant Artichokes, or Oranges, Lemons, Hot Dogs on La Cienega, or whatever: and as one such artichoke-architectural exemplar still stands at this writing, albeit incorporated into a more recent addition, we merely refer the studious reader to the article by Kurt von Meier, "Surrealism and Architecture, Artforum (Special Issue: Surrealism) Vol. 5, No. 1, September 1966, pp. 60ff., especially, page 61. No, my friends, the sign over the main street of Castroville-nawt named after the Cubano Premiero-- sez: The Artichoke Center of the World. CENTRE in English, but C-E-N-T-E-R on the sign. 'Just so, our name, popularized, becomes Limon, after the giant yellow chemise of my lascivious maiden aunt, Leah Monera, who mothered a whole generation of Ma Fie scoundrels back to health in her secluded spa on the outskirts of Miasma Bitch. Aunt Leah's own dotable dotter who was kept technically virginal by the fiat of her Mother, has agreed to accompany me on this excursion to stimulate consumption of our exquisite produce on this Western swing, attending to all the little nice things I like to serve up for myself and my friends when it is time to take a little respite and to pour a cup of tea. Cousin "Leahlita' we call her (and she comes:) Leahlita!" He calls. "Unhhh! Oooh. OoowhoAOW! Unhhh. unhh. Oooh. oh! Aireeee."

"Here's Leahlita--can't slip into the room without little specks of juice-spots on the Ardebil carpet," Marque intro­duced his cousin Leahlita. She stood cutely in starched bright yellow dotted Swiss, with a bow in back and a bib in front underneath which bulged two big suntanned breasts still heaving in an obviously erotic rhythm of passion.

Kurt von Meier
1975