Paul at Damascus and Christopher Columbus
Only found what they knew
                        -- Momus, "Cibachrome Blue."

AROUND THIS time, a few people close to the little white mouse began to suspect that the mouse had gotten God.  This was because of the weird way the mouse was talking: about saints and martyrs and mystics and philosophers and infinity.  But not to fear, that wasn't the case.
        What was the case, though, was that the little white mouse was actually in the middle of feeling like not killing himself for the first time, in maybe literally years.  Or at least he was feeling like not killing himself more frequently than he felt like killing himself.
        This, of course, didn't last.  But then, nothing good ever does.
 

AROUND THIS time, the crow phoned the mouse and asked him to come back to Charlie's.  It seemed that they needed someone who could work the till and the computer system.  That's what the crow said, anyway.
        The mouse said okay, but only if it was part time because he had a life now.  He had more important things to do than waste his life ringing in sales 40 hours a week for very little pay.
        The crow said okay.
        And the mouse knew that if things got unbearable again, he could just quit again.  Somehow he found he'd caught a case of self-respect, somehow.
        So the little white mouse went back to Charlie's.  But only part time.
        And so the little white mouse found himself straddling two different sets or reality: on one had there was the Kingdom of The Eagle, and on the other the "real" world.
        And-- despite occasional bouts of crippling unfocussed anxiety-- he was actually happy.
 

AROUND THIS time the kitty cat went to Japan.  Then she came back from Japan.  Then the mouse wrote about her going to Japan in his whiney, crappy, badly-written, web column.  Because the little white mouse was still obsessively wasting his time pursuing his empty, hopeless writing.
 

THEN THE crow stopped working at Charlie's.  He had a big fight with Charlie and found his services were no longer required.
        The mouse still stuck around, though.  And for the most part, Charlie was nicer to the mouse than he'd ever been in the past.  This was probably due to the fact that the mouse was back in the Kingdom of The Eagle, and Charlie tended not to respect people who only wanted to work for him.  In fact, it seemed like the longer you worked for Charlie, the less Charlie respected you, and the less seriously he regarded you, and the more he subtly put you down.
        The mouse found this to be a curious way for Charlie to treat his employees.  But the mouse said nothing.
 

ANYWAY, THE little white mouse listened to Kevin and felt really good and maybe even a little bit like he (the little white mouse) was worth something.  Kevin had that way about him.  He made people (and mouses) feel like they mattered, like they were special, and that even life itself was special and wonderful and-- dare I say it-- a miracle.
        The little white mouse was perpetually astonished by Kevin's humanity, compassion, and intelligence.  His love for life was infectious, and the way he carried himself in class was both authoritative and yet open.  He seemed as if he was learning as much from the students and they were from him-- which probably wasn't the case-- but that's how it seemed.
        So, every morning the mouse would come to Kevin's class and routinely have his mind blown wide open.  All sorts of ideas filtered in through his dense little mouse skull.  And they were all either ideas that he hadn't encountered before, or ideas that he had encountered but thought they were stupid and beneath him-- but Kevin showed the little white mouse that the ideas really weren't stupid at all.  In fact they were beautiful and thrilling and in a very real way had made the mouse what he was because they were the ideas that shaped all of society, whether anyone acknowledged it or not.  It turned out that this simple ancient philosophy class was neither simple, nor only about ancient times.
        The little white mouse was looking at the origins of everything, the beginnings of all thought: all science and philosophy and math and religion.  Or at least as close to the origins as we can get.
        He was at the point where differentiations had not been made-- the originary point where it all came into being, every idea and every trace of every other idea, the place where they all combined and blew outwards in a blast of white light and heat.
        The little white mouse had met a lot of smart people in his time-- some of them very smart-- but he had never before met an actual genius.  Kevin was his first genius.
        Kevin also had a British accent and a weird kind of charisma-- he was impossible to ignore even though he wasn't really a big guy.
        Kevin also sort of had groupies, too.  Little cheerleaders who would always go on and on and on about how brilliant he was.
        This kind of worried the mouse a bit-- partially because it seemed kind of mindless and cultish-- but primarily because the mouse himself was also starting to become one of Kevin's cheerleaders.
        Because of all the interesting stuff that came out of Kevin's mouth, it was easy to forget that Kevin was still-- despite his very real brilliance-- just some guy who knew a whole lot of stuff.  He was just, ultimately, just a person like you and me and not some kind of philosophical god-king.  But Kevin was also such a compelling personality, and all the stuff he said was still so very very smart and cool, and he was such an incredibly nice guy-- it was hard to describe him to other people without seeming like a raving groupie.
        So, all that was left was describing the classes Kevin taught:
        Kevin's classes would frequently start with him talking about one thing and then they would expand to encompass everything and anything, and then they would come back to his main theme and it would be time to go home.
        For example, maybe a class would start with Kevin talking about Aristotle, and then he would trace Aristotle backwards in time few years in order to talk about Plato and maybe the idea of Platonic Forms, because Aristotle was a pupil of Plato's and so was informed by Plato's own ideas.
        And then Kevin would mention that Plato's real name was Aristocles, and that "Plato" was a nickname that meant "broad," because Plato had a broad forehead.  It was a wrestling nickname in fact, and than meant that whenever anyone studied Plato they were in fact studying writing done by someone whose name was the Greek equivalent of Hulk Hogan or The Rock.
        And then Kevin would talk about some aspects of Christianity that borrowed a bit of their stuff from the idea of the Platonic forms.  This was partly because Kevin was a Christian himself-- a Catholic in fact-- which kind of stunned the mouse because up until then all the Catholics he'd ever met were dogmatic, close-minded prattlers who lived to condemn anyone who didn't believe what they believed to hell.
        Another reason Kevin would connect Plato to Christianity is that Platonic thought is actually all over Christianity, permeates it-- to the degree that christianity wouldn't even exist in its current form without Plato, and all the Greeks.  Try telling that to a born-again Christian and watch the steam fly outta his or her ignorant little ears.  Hell, even the idea of the Christian God has its roots in a Platonic concept (modified slightly)-- which is something the little white mouse just didn't know.
        And then maybe Kevin would talk a little bit about himself and tell a few stories about his wanderings around the globe, and somehow manage to relate the idea to Plato.
        And then, before the little white mouse knew it Kevin would be talking about Eastern philosophy and Arabic mathematics.
        And then quantum their and space exploration and the search for alien life and our own attempts to create artificial intelligence, and how we all have our own ideas about what consciousness is without any of us really being any less conscious than each other, and how because we have consciousness we all have different ideas about perfection which brings us back to Plato and those Platonic Forms again, and maybe then back to Aristotle who believed in something he called the unmoved mover which is kind of a modified platonic idea-- like, it seemed, most ideas in Western thought.  And The Unmoved Mover is the idea of some sort of perfect perfection, both inside and outside of time, static and always in motion, unmoved yet making everything else move, infinite beyond all comprehension, reconciling all the paradoxes of infinity and nothingness-- and then adopted by Plotinus centuries later and turned into his idea of the One.
        And then the class would launch off again, with Kevin talking about Plotinus and Augustine, and then later Einstein and Camus and Georg Cantor-- and making it all tie together like fine art.
        By the time the hour was over, the little white mouse usually felt like he'd actually, personally, honest-to-God touched the face of infinity and come back to tell the tale.  Frequently, his head spun, the world glowed, and he felt stoned for hours.
        He even read some Augustine, who was this guy who got converted to Christianity and was later made into a Catholic "saint."  And he wrote this book called The Confessions which was one of the first attempts at autobiography.  And, when the mouse finally managed to wade through all the obsessive prayers at the beginnings and endings of each chapter-- and they were obsessive-- he found it to be a pretty damn good book.
        Augustine traces his life from his birth to his conversion to Christianity, and in the early parts of his life he was kind of a horny scumbag, and then y'know, later of course he finds God and everything's just peachy keen-- we've all heard that one before.  But the cool thing is, the whole book is addressed directly to God.  And all through the text of the book he's talking to God, and he calls God "you" like it's a conversation-- and so he also addresses the book not only to God but also to whatever human being that's reading it.  And so when he starts praying to God he's also praying to the reader-- and so, eventually, you reach a point in The Confessions where you start feeling like you're God, because Augustine is addressing the book to both God and "you," and this causes you to identify with God and so blend with whatever idea of God you have.  And so he's trying to make you feel like you're one with God, like you're an infinite being that contains the entire universe.  And so you start to feel really infinite and weird-- and Augustine is aware of this, too.  He's aware of the effect he's having on you when you're reading his writing, and he plays with that, trying to make you fuse with your own concept of the infinite.
        It made the mouse feel even more stoned, and maybe even a little transcendent.  Like he was about to leave his body and become one with all the photons and the neutrons and the electrons and the mesons and the muons and the quarks, simultaneously expanding and contracting forever until he reached a state of existence that was neither being nor nothingness, but some other unfathomable third thing....
        And then, of course, he would start coughing.  And then he would cough and cough and cough, each cough ripping muscles in the mouse's sides.  And he would cough until his vision filled with sparkles, and he tasted blood.  And then he would vomit up bits of white foam, red flecks, and sometimes even a little meat...

Next:  Bob....
 

Epilogue 55.
Epilogue 53.
INDEX.
HOME.