My cat nips at my heels, cries from the balcony, circles silently or stares at me from a facing perch, like an uneasy conscience. Most people don’t want to die, yet they believe that death will carry them straight to Heaven. But why would a trip to paradise commence with deportation? Is Heaven some sort of cosmic 19th century Australia–or Soviet Union? Humanity is supposed to be the mirror of God, but like fallen snow, a mirror so fragmented that it reflects no image back, just an indistinct white light.

Shit rules dynastically: from all the many colors, shapes and forms of the food they eat, people regularly give birth to a succession of near-unvarying smelly brown cocoons, like a butterfly’s metamorphosis in reverse. But yet these cast-offs retain enough value and fertility to bloom forth anew in plants and flowers and trees. And when such trees grow large and strong enough, humanity attacks them yet again to produce bleached white sheets of paper, like Platonic forms culled from their hides. Many people object to electronic voting, and insist on paper ballots. So: the gods of Greece may only have gotten a swine or ox as sacrifice a couple times a year, whereas we ought wipe out whole forests every year to show our love…for the swine. But these clean white voting cards pressed from resurrected dung still, as Darwin said, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origins. And so the dynasty reigns.

On the other hand, a sheet of paper, when a pen’s in hand, can be enough anchor home a mind adrift, the scratching pen like a bird’s claws scrabbling for a perch. Even if the writer is just plagiarizing their own unconscious.

The highest tribute to acting should be an exorcism. If life were really so perilous you wouldn’t get away with spending a third of it impersonating a corpse. I admire spiders: instead of getting ambushed by their past, they take the trace of where they’ve been and make a trap of it themselves. Camped outside its walls like bandits, literacy is the only treasure-house that the mob prefers not to pillage. So whenever it rampages towards the stars it discovers itself, as if for the first time, betrayed by the curvature of the Earth.

Do you think the Wright brothers, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong wanted to storm the heavens, or just to escape Ohio? Citizenship is a shameful proof that we haven’t yet taken residence in the sky. When aliens come to earth, what will they think of the state of its development when they find out the most widely spoken language on Earth doesn’t even use phonetic writing? Having searched in vain for God outside, above, I’m starting to suspect that I’ve been swallowed and digested by the cosmic spirit.