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Hylikos

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"We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved."
- Valclav Havel


FILENAME: METATHESIS

The face is all cheekbones.

The demiurge, having fallen from Heaven, is corrupted by desire for Sophia, and subsequently falls into the abyss and is eaten alive by his own flesh. Valentinian as opposed to Sethian. All the world's corrupt, a crawling excrescence of embodiment, your fragile material nature dissolving and mine accreting, livid and fixative! Old friend, I've been laboring under the delusion that out of the three of us you were the one with membership in the pneumatikoi, and yet now I see you consumed like any common hylikos, and you tell me the flames are of your own devising.

Our devising, I correct myself, I type into Abulafia and it erases the shame of my sidestepping all innocuous, as if it had never been there. Our devising. You say to me, Diotallevi, collapsed and dabbing at your mouth with a wet handkerchief to get at any moisture, that it's the Plan that's killing you.

We invented it. It's an illusion, maya, a collision of facts! You watched me program it myself, saw how Abu spat it out at us. If impossible profundity a, then necessarily conspiracy b, syllogisms and machine logic. A random number machine for gematria.

You tell me: all of gematria's a random number machine, and that's the problem. We're rewriting the world.

The hands are all fingers.

What are cells, you tell me. The answer being, impossibly, also a random number machine for gematria, or at least your cells being so, CAG CAG CAG CAG CAG disassembling into a slurry of extraneous multiplication. An excess of creation. A unique, private history. All of my histories have been unique and private. To have them be otherwise is to submit to an ecstasy of assumption. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to read the electronic scrawl that I've subjected Abulafia to. Poor Abu. If he was in fact a he and not a mechanical device that encourages arbitrary linkages, he would have long since stopped allowing me to type out the verbiage of inaction all over his bits and bytes.

This is perhaps the worst thing, old friend: I am no longer sure I possess the option of cowardice; speaking as a lifelong coward, I don't know what I can do without it. Tres, which I recall inventing with Causabon and a sufficient amount of whiskey, are real enough to demand that I come to Paris and explain to them the nature of the Plan. Agile's managed to arrange it so that either I arrive in Paris, Templar map in hand – nonexistent map in extant hand, and is sophia poison fruit if it's invisible, or is invisible fruit Sophia? -- or else all the forces of the Italian police will come down on me. I'm framed for a murder I did not commit, a terrorism I am innocent of!

So it seems you're correct, and we have rewritten everything. I'm a demiurge right along with you. I have sunk from my high estate and dwell in Chaos along with forty-nine demons and a river of pitch. When the consummation of all things comes I, along with the rest of the material world, will be cast into the depths while everything else gets to be made of light and return to the Pleroma. Ye are from the beginning immortal and children of eternal life, and desire to divide death amongst you like a prey, in order to destroy it and utterly to annihilate it, that thus death may die in you and through you, for if ye dissolve the world, and are not yourselves dissolved, then are ye lords over creation and over all that passes away--!

I can play this game as well as any Diabolical. Which has done me no good at all in convincing Agile that that map does not and never has existed, except as a figment of electrons inside a machine. An invisible connection, zero flips to one and the Templars go to Provins. One flips back to zero and the German contingent never hears from the French, that's how we started, Causabon finding holes in the story of the world and using Abulafia to patch them with syllogistic logic. Logic is a poor game to play, full of faults.

But your attempts at – anagrammatizing the Torah, as you said tonight -- were always contemplative. An ever-evolving mechanical heaven of classification and observation, your creation, a thing that recited itself while awaiting the names of God to come out clean. Shuffle and reshuffle, Diotallevi, that's all your cabalism boils down to, so how can you say it's killing you? What is happening to you is a tyranny of genetics. It has nothing to do with our Plan. It'd have happened anyway.

That was a cruel thing of me to write, even if you'll never see it.

Very well. The police are after me for the same reason you have cancer. And I'm off to Paris to seek the principles of neoplasm!

This is ridiculous. It's a letter to a dead man, written by a man who is running out of time. I should have Abulafia delete it all. I won't. Perhaps that's a last act of cowardice, an attempt to leave a trail before I go. I've called De Angelis and he's refused me. I've called Causabon and left a message. I am terribly frightened for Lorenza, in ways that shame me. He calls her Sophia, that one. Perhaps she's the poison I've eaten, even if such ingestion is impossible for you. See, we are not at all ruled by the same stars.

If I go to Paris I shall insist on arbitrary connections, the disintegration of cells that is undecreed by God. I fail to believe in Him in any way He would like, regardless. I could have Abulafia print up a suitable map for Agile, I could tell him everything he'd like to know about Tres, and I refuse, I apologize, forgive me, my friend.