Novalis, Ab Art fangt das Tor unzählig: Kryptisch Stoßtman’s Kompagnonsbuch (Frankfurt, 1802). Put into Flouzianian by Atoca Inhart as L’Art d’avoir popotin sans fin: Un furtif cours d’amour flou (Owlstain, Urdostoist Publishing Assn., 2008). — And should I tarnish a blackbird’s call by casting light on a child’s abduction? Paint scuff coat chip. Without transition, too much calling back might silt a mind’s untoward troughs. Scorn this unruly acquisition. Involuntary sting of what’s past. Flashflood blotting out of conscious sight. Call my wish vain, says Novalis in his famous manual (my translation), but this author longs for a world in which your typical community is not constantly afraid of a solitary man (or woman, I might add); a world in which a singular scholar humbly sitting, sans human or animal companion, in a city park or town plaza and gallantly watching a curious fritillary, or languidly flipping through a book on corvid biology, or simply smoking and staring off — stoic and studious — at yon horizon’s full, fat, soft, pouting bottom lip, is not an affront to public morality; a world in which a timid philanthropist — lacking offspring of his own — who throws his rich lot in with a poor parochial school or similar institution out of a spirit of humanitarian goodwill, faithful charity, and pious voluntarism is not thought of as a rapacious raccoon or rabid birdhound lurking in a poultry coop; a world in which this book’s many harrowing — nay, horripilating — words would fall as so much circumstantial rain into history’s cast-iron abyss of gray inquisition. (Novalis was not always your most sprightly stylist.) Cavorting parrots bark and laugh along its rim, and occasionally burst forth from a lush crown of bloom and fruit to flock frantic wings in that fuming volcanic maw in which tropical day, through a patch of cornblossom sky amidst cold, black bulwarks of cloud, burns only at high noon, though, far down, hot crust cracks, and lava churns. Pink puss oozing from a scab. Across thick tufts of dark moss clinging to a hollow oak branch, an orchid-munching phasmid daintily stilts. It too will fall, or fly off, or go into hiding, holding still, or swaying slightly to mimic sulfurous wind rocking a frail twig back and forth, back and forth in this world in which hypocrisy charms as no actor could, who, strutting rough boards of a fool’s production, would cup in his cringing fists a putrid skull and proclaim: “This kind of pain has taught us what is human!” (Classic Novalis, that.) But our kind of pain, it is obvious, has taught nothing at all to that gawking public which, in its popular “wisdom,” insists on making pariahs out of us, insists on making criminal our spartan sport of rigid flash, quick hot spurt, and limping panting jackboot dash back into that play’s dark wings. Suck cloudy blossoms from a turgid straw. O, you bright visions moaning in a spot-lit patch of moon, who shrink not from loudly rutting in front of window or mirror, who, with a walnut crush of boot on skull, think nothing of stamping out your many abortions just as, with cognacflask glass crunching, you stamp out your myriad glowing cigar butts — O, you bright window- and mirror-visions of glorious rut! Look not unkindly on us, look not without sympathy on us: whining bitchtoms who stalk in shadow, who can birth nothing but sackfuls of catclaws, and blood soaking through that laundry box, staining such luxury it contains...

Sorry, folks. Lost in a thought-oblivion of lap-purr, this author was dozing. As I was saying: Litigious morality, sir, is not an option, nor is judicatory sociotomy. Such “traditional” ways of isolating “rash symptoms of a contagious moral malady” (Lombroso, 1869), of aspirating “wanton tumors marring our community’s most upstanding body” (Worms, 1871), display a gross — and crass — misconstrual of human possibility. If our painful condition is thought of as a social pathology — and it is, madam, it is! — logically, thus, inclusion is your only valid option. But, alas! This world is not ours. And so I say again: Find a job that will bring you into contact, not just with most of your unwary victims, but with many an ironical satyr harboring outcast passions as fraught with livid obscurity as your own. A position, say, as instructor or administrator at a public boarding school or vacation sports camp is not at all a shabby occupation, though obtaining a principalship at said institution(s) would spark off a chain of chlorotic chills of indignation, splotching your aghast subdominant homologs’ damp quaking thighs. Similarly, though child psychiatrist at an asylum for lunatic orphans would not lack for pastoral charm, and, why not, an opportunity to adopt a minion or two, posing as an avuncular doctor, a sagacious bon vivant, at a compulsory labor camp is simply hors concours! (I would avoid working in a common prison — as what joy could obtain in subduing a strong spirit too similar to your own? Blissful subliminity, as you know, is to catch your frail victim off-guard!) In a word, I say, Hunt in packs! And bring along a woman or two or four or six. Align your polar axis to that of your surrounding community’s moral compass. Hypocrisy, as I said, works in situations that would kill a straight approach. In fact, why not form your own spiritual community? Is a shack for whipping young boys and girls so dissimilar to many a guilt-inspiring church? And I do not think it so vastly adrift as to color in tints of, say, calvary crimson and salvation saffron, an unwilling soul’s initiation into sodomy’s garish mud and blood and torn-up roots of sin... In addition, I will not fail to grant that taking a tour of various country outposts, making a bucolic noria as a nomadic spiritual advisor might chart its own tasty history of backwoods hospitality and family invalids all with wayward wombs and spastic groins and pouting lips to split with an avid thrust or fist of authority... Ah, but you say that sharing your trauma in support groups and workshops on social psychology and quora of common worship and so on is simply not your jar of hooch? Who am I to balk such a want? All I say is, Crypsis, man, crypsis!