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MYSELF I knew you would wake him up if you went on making that noisy blood. He says the consistency of his mind never recovered. All he could do was write Opticks and be the Master of the Mint, a mental white dwarf. He never erupted again! Poor Newton! Poor Shakespeare! Poor Galileo, Descartes, Freud, Milton; whose are they – the faces, faint revealed, yet sure divined, the ‘famous ones’ – ante Agamemnona multi – the mute, inglorious ones? They saw the promised land, the mirage, the fame which is man's last and first infirmity of noble minds. Last, but not least infirmity, the weaker, least powerful helmsman waiting Palinurus-like to be hurled from the throne of the stern, the leader who obeys and by whose position all are ordered to steer. Even Aeneas is hurled from his trust in his steersman by a god whose true face is a disguise which conceals yet another god behind the mask of a benevolent, calm, inviting, alluring, seducing sea. The many-wiled Odysseus, Moses, Meskalam Dug, Arthur, Alexander – où sont les neiges d'antan? And what seductions, treasures remain to be unveiled, concealed (though betrayed) by Memory and its binocular, Desire?
There seems to be something to be said for the ‘use’ to which ‘things’ are put. If, then, one considers the accumulation of experience and then the use which is made of these ‘possessions’, one is using the vocabulary which has been forged for and from the world of sensuous experience. That, indeed, is the vocabulary and procedure which I am trying to use in this very communication. It is not likely to be adequate, but there is also the possibility, almost certainty perhaps, that the ‘use’ which I am able to make of it is as widely exercised only in those respects in which it has a past and forgotten history. It is also an equipment which is peculiar to that part of the spectrum of
thought-without-a-thinker which is peculiar to the biological range, from what could be called the infra-sensual to the ultra-sensual. Even so, the