Seq 0: Quietism > Suetonius

/||\ Today we will contemplate omphaloskepsis, the practice of navel gazing (noting at this, the beginning of e*sequiturs, that Adam [the first bereft {no word for male divorcée}, having been abandoned by the unsubmissive [adult content] Lilith {who claimed to be his equal...} {the teatmilkless screech owl storm demon rapista who dared utter the Tetragrammaton {"Ineffable Name"; see*sequitur 25}] and compliant Eve [G*d's second try] are claimed by Last-Thursdayans [kissing cousins of time-dunce Presentists and Preformationists {FACT: Did you know that you came from a homunculus living either in Adam's scrotum (and see Panspermism) or Traci [adult content] Elizabeth Lords' (just kidding, Eve's) Fallopian Tubes (let's pause briefly to maliciously contemplate the number of acts of incest [and the Mendelian origins of sign language in institutional management of inbred nobility] by this pair and their offspring required to populate the earth)? And that Occasionalist Nicolas Malebranche (contemporary of Pepys) posited Matryoshka doll embryos? Now you do.}] to have had none [Mike B. apparently didn't get the [adult content] memo; nor did [adult content] Nonconformist Dissenter Billy B.), as the metaphorical expression of self-absorption and self-ishness (solipsism); practiced, apparently, during the Roaring Twenties (and perhaps earlier) by the idle rich in the age of fashionable Freudian self-analysis; compare yogic chakras (wheels or circles), and of course, omphalomancy (divination) and the omphalopsychic ("gazing at the navel as a means of inducing hypnotic reverie"). This in memoriam to the Maharishi, which leads to early (! we haven't yet begun, thought [the AIWS-Lilliputian / Brobdingnagian-hallucination-suffering {i.e., macropsic / micropsic}] Alice) e-sidetrip-sequiturs to the Indian

e*sequitur 1: caste
system of Varna ("varnas comprise Brahmins [priests, scholars and teachers], Kshatriya [warriors and rulers], Vaisya [traders and agriculturists], and Sudra [manual workers] and the Untouchables, [who] were called pariahs...") and Jati (tribes); Scheduled castes and Other Backward Castes(!), and exasperation at humanity's base encoding for social hierarchy (this obsolete circuitry requiring disconnection). This leads to a better understanding of the word analog, as in "analogical" arguments: something that is analogous is "along the same reasoning as..."> ana-leptic (e*sequiturs defined in a single word) > ana-lytic (dissolutive [not dissolute]) > the infinite ana-lemma (note Ptolemy's sundials and advance to M.C. Escher in e*sequitur 46, but let's not fly away so fast...) > and Confucian analects (The Mandate [decrees] of Heaven; distilled: hierarchical respect for elders and fundamental societal continuity/tradition, in case you're wondering which culture will win the next [second global, England's sunsetless orb being first] round) and

e*sequitur 2: Celtic Fairy Tales
from the Internet Public Library - e.e. cummings' (that's Edward Estlin Cummings' to you, "as when the heart of this flower || imagines the snow everywhere carefully descending") re-production of Joseph Jacobs' text. The geist-ly (ghostly) oral traditional tellings of Connla of the Fiery Hair (who willing went against his ward's wishes with a fairy maiden in a curragh [crystal canoe] over the sea); and Guleesh from the County Mayo, who heard the fulparnee and folpornee and - rap-lay-hoota and roolya-boolya - abducted a Frenchwoman -

"... the loveliest woman that was, he thought, upon the ridge of the world. The rose and the lily were fighting together in her face, and one could not tell which of them got the victory. Her arms and hands were like the lime, her mouth as red as a strawberry when it is ripe, her foot was as small and as light as another one's hand, her form was smooth and slender, and her hair was falling down from her head in buckles of gold. "

You know the rest: As told by birdeen (wee, as we shall see - don't miss the poetic coda in Seq 7); neither cark nor care befell them. In

e*sequitur 3: The Annals of Tacitus
we meet Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. This Brit-ish (hyphen intended) queen was disgraced by cruel stripes (whipped) and her daughters ravished/outraged (euphemisms) by the Romans; she fought Suetonius' army on the field. The Britons were routed; by Tacitus' account, perhaps 80000 (euphemistically) fell. Suetonius the general was not the Suetonius who wrote

e*sequiturs 4-6: Lives of the Cæsars
- always worth reredeing, with stupefying anecdotes of Nero (matricide, the noun as actor) and Tiberius... a populist he (Suetonius [and mustn't forget Petronius, elegantiae arbiter, who previved him, and whose Satyricon, a medley of prose and poetry {e*sequiturs antecedent}, was spectacularly brought to cinematic life by Federico Fellini {here the Story of the Widow of Ephesus: a bonus if you understand Italian, quite clear in pantomime}], anticipating Sade), whose missing Lives of Famous Whores is, indeed, missed and predates by a millennium Sei Shonagon's (she famous [and technically a whore]) Pillow Book (a personal favourite, and the laserine lens on her essential self):

"Unsuitable things... Snow on the houses of the common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it."

Not to put too fine a point on it, as they say, but a "human" wrote that. Suetonius on Tiberius:

> This family too, though of plebeian origin, was yet of great prominence and had been honoured with eight consulships, two censorships, and three triumphs, as well as with the offices of dictator and master of the horse.
> He issued an edict forbidding general kissing...
> He established a new office[:] master of the imperial pleasures...

The*sequitrist's (elided form) natural reticence forbids further elaboration, but do make a point of redeing this document during your lifetime, either from prurience or as a cautionary tale about the ab-uses (and note the lexarcana) of power, including

e*sequitur 7: obiter dicta,
rationes decidendi and stare decisis - Latin legal terms relating to things judicial said in passing, reasons behind decisions and respect for precedent (in re The [irony alert] Hon. F.S. "Johnny Snake Eyes" Perjuror ;;-) [and Plenist v. Vacuist] [if five textualists were to interpret the First Amendment literally and determine that books and other expressive activities were not, say, technically "speech" {i.e., protected}, any could at last again be banned as specified by philotot{alitarian and sophist} Plato {Mao, voracious reder and biblioklept, would later heartily agree}, who {for those reders who may have forgotten} said in his Republic {Book II} of 385 BC:

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. and

... the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.

{Thank G*d someone recognised the dangers of bad poetry!} As the reder considers the future, Eisenhower's 1953 rebuttal bears notice:

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

Short required reading list here.]). With our cultural heritage in mind, we rededicate ourselves to constructive creativity and the enrichment of our species.

How fine to travel with a mind.

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Image: White Rabbit
illustration by John Tenniel from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (nom).