It's Saturday night, baby, so how about a cheap koan fix straight from the Deluge Nations? 

If you, like me, find yourself drifting closer and closer each passing year to what I call the "William Blake sphere of influence", the artist-visionary's modus operandi, if not modus vivendi, that is, if you're attracted to the sort of brilliance that gives birth to cosmogenies as real as a lover's kiss or a toothache, then you may safely retitle this essay:

Something like "Proverbs of Hell".

Or, if you prefer:

The Proverbs of the Deluge Nations.

"What is a deluge nation, motherfucker?" you protest, rightly so. "I cannot keep up with this shit. Words are meant to portray, not dissolve." Yeah, well, tough luck, dear reader. I don the mantle of the Fool when I'm full of wunderbar, and tonight I am positively convulsing with the stuff. Man, what a life! What a glorious Saturday night!

So, without further ado:

THE PROVERBS OF THE DELUGE NATIONS

1)A boulder does what a boulder must. Yet even a boulder cannot act if the surface reflects nothing.

2)A dead man once asked a living man, "What is the meaning of life?" The living man screamed in terror and died on the spot. The dead man stared in angry disbelief, for he was certain that the man had merely avoided the question.

3)A sphinx asks, a man answers, a woman generates, a child forms.

4)Throw me in coals, dip me in the river, let me dry in tempest and then bury me under a great white rock: still I'll resume my duties and pray for convenient solutions to my death.

5)My heart of hearts, my brain of brains, my heart within the brain and my brain within the heart: to suppress them is sin.

6)If Titans bred like locusts, earth would be a little garden. Yet locusts should never be as enormous as a Titan.

7)An old woman traverses a dead wasteland every morning in order to water her lilies. One day she arrived only to find them eaten by a goat. She slashed the goat's neck and skinned its hide. She then wore the hide and proceeded to eat the remaining lilies herself.

8)Some believe that the end is near; some believe that the near is ending.

9)No matter the motion, the lines obey.

10)You cannot have a newborn's smile without a corpse's stillness. You cannot praise the living and ignore the dead. You cannot sing a hymn to the sun without paying respects to the entrails.

11)Shed your skin for this world.

As for the Deluge Nations: we are all full of little people, inhabitants of our own vast inner landscapes. Some of them eventually drown, yet drowning does not silence them.

I suppose this is where I'll leave you for tonight, dear reader.

Until next time: be fruitful and full of demons. Be barren and proud of it too.