Power originates in depth, or winds up there. One or the other, I forget. The principle is one that causes great misery wherever it crops up, yet still we hanker after it much the way we wish to eat pancakes every morning. Should we overcome this desire, another one very similar to it in appearance shows up immediately and we don’t so much start over again as pretend to have everything under control. Deep down inside, where the memes are hard at work like termites, where the brotherhood of rarely-intuited motives is forging bonds of the sort we normally associate with members of the high school track and field team, we know the best, the most rewarding parts of our existence have disintegrated more or less permanently. There will be no re-casting, no more solidifying around moisture. There will be nothing in the way of counter-clockwise motion. It is Beulah lying headless on the floor, the result Anda tells me of my own intoxication, of the paste spread so liberally across my lips. We have been planning this for months, she says as she leads me back up the stairs. We just had to have someone of sufficient size and emotional instability to get the job done. Nothing personal. From the shadowy back passages below, the tormented screams of Beulah’s idiot progeny rise up as the other former captives are having at them with implements I try hard not to imagine. Once you set yourself a goal involving the elimination of images, you are bound to fail. The mind has an agenda that is hard to fathom, but rest assured the primary item is one involving liberty even in the face of the inconsequential. Stubborn assertion of its own will before the will of he who claims to possess it. The same applies to the surface of the earth where you will find, should you go looking for them, organisms of every size and shape and configuration arrayed against the soil itself in a battle which has been raging since the very earliest days of the planet, but which we have only just recently begun to recognize as something more complex and meaningful than just scenes for our common edification. Perhaps what occurs does so simply because the alternative is unthinkable. Space turned vacuum inside another vacuum. Nihilism without some bizarre bearded Russian around to comment on it and turn it into something of interest when we all know such terms hold no inherent interest in themselves. They don’t even enlighten the situations they were coined to describe. They simply float about on the air for a while waiting for someone to snatch at them with his dirty fingernails, and then they disappear forever. They ride the currents north into some verbal or conceptual equivalent of the arctic and rise -- there being neither natural nor unnatural ceilings there to prevent their limitless ascent.