A Readable Reader

1a. Introduction To First Loves

Bartleby Willard has decided to move into The Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Building and begin writing for Skullvalley After Whistletown. We at SAWB are extremely busy capturing, reflecting, and refracting the infinite worlds swirling outside and inside of us. As such, we do not have the excess time, energy, and focus required to explain to Bartleby that you cannot walk into publishing houses and declare yourself a live-in staff-writer. Also, on the whole we find him pleasant. Furthermore, since he sleeps on the SAWB premises, it is easy for him to have the coffee ready when the rest of us arrive at about 9:00 a.m. sharp each weekday.

Finally, he is very tidy and has adopted the kitchen and library, making these two ancient and wise rooms (if places can be considered wise — and why not?: what’s a human being but a place for the Something Deeper to live in and through?) sparkle with a youthful, nearly sexual (I said nearly!) vigor. I hasten to add that he’s achieved this sparkle without compromising either room’s fundamental decency. Kitchen and Library now have more energy — giggles bubble up more often; and the infinitely expanding and all-enveloping universes born of these giggles pop their infinitely long elastic/filmy/wet kisses with a louder and fuller smauack! than before — but their essential kindness remains very much intact.

Bartleby is writing a series of short stories entitled Love at a Reasonable Price. He’s become interested in a kind of funny idea: manufacturing Pure Love (an infinite and eternal love prior to mind/matter that infinitely accepts, lifts-up, cares-for, helps, and gives) in a fictional factory, transferring that Pure Love into reality, and selling It affordably yet still profitably on the open market. And voilà: the first truly useful business in human history!

We at SAWB understand that you cannot manufacture Pure Love in fictional factories, transport It into reality, and then market and sell It to other people. Additionally, we are not even sure that if you could, you should. But! of course you can’t. Anyway, Pure Love already gives Itself infinitely to everyone and everything, so selling it is even more ridiculous than selling air or that delicious self-dom sensed as you gaze out at nothingmuch, watching your own watching grow quiet and sharp.

Does Bartleby know all this? Mmm. He seems to consider this project of his a joke. However, he takes jokes amazingly seriously, so seriously that one is tempted to say, That man believes in jokes! My God! He really does!.

Let’s you and I resolve to be reasonable, to let him have his fun while we hunker way down into the wholesome knowledge that no one — not even the elastically spinning Bartleby Willard of the poignantly explosive Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers — sells Pure Love.

But what wares does Bartleby, face soot-smudged and battered tin cup looped into thick leather belt, peddle? Some stories about manufacturing, marketing, and selling Pure Love. And some other stories. And by stories we mean whatever Bartleby means by stories. And Bartleby Willard, himself a self-told tale, is not much of a literalist.

Bartleby will write what he writes and we’ll keep a running tally in the Chapters section.

....

And so it began, years and years ago now. I kept falling this way and that, but — one end of a thick, scratchy, fraying rope around my waist and the other anchored to a vaguely evolving plan — my staggering went round and round this project, winding me into it more and more; and now it’s time to push my long imaginary hands against the rusty iron bars (square staves twisted like drill bits) and shudder as the forgotten manor gate swings wide open with a piercing shriek or a mournful, yawning three-stage creak; or just squeaks a little forward and then, overgrown with vines not just emotionally but physically as well, bounces back at me.

I hope the project goes well. I hope it is good for writer, reader, and the space between. I appreciate you spending money, time, and focus on this book; I’ll try to make it worth your while.

Best,

Bartleby Willard

June 17, 2015, 7:35pm

Midtown Manhattan Library

PS: I think I’ll alternate stories of making, manufacturing, advertising, and selling Pure Love with stories about my life and times at SAWB.

Oh, and this one more time:

But though this venture is in part a commercial one, we still need our endeavor grounded not in profit-motive, but in kind-delight. So cross your fingers for us; say a prayer for us; keep a gentle but stern, a wary but hopeful eye on us. Help us try.

1b. A Couple Decides Whether or Not to Drink

[Editor's Note: This is part of First Loves's Customer Testimonial section. The other two stories there are From a Dissatisfied Customer and Hurt Girl / Girl by the Creek.]

They sold me this potion. Said it would make me. Make me strong and able, able to live right. They said if I drank this, I'd be a man, strong enough to love you right. I've got it right here. I've walked around with it all day clutched in my hand. The bottle has a small, spherical body and a short thin neck stopped up with a cork. It reminds me of the sorts of bottles I used to get magic potions out of in video games. I don't know if I've told you before, but in my hometown there was a small candy store with two stand-up video games by the banged-up front door.

You've told me before.

I'm a little afraid that this potion I bought will make me so strong that I won't need you. Then I'd be so alone! Of course, I guess I'd be so strong that I wouldn't need to feel mollycoddled by the body-, mind-, and soul-devotion of a physically, emotionally, and intellectually compatible woman. But somehow the idea of being too strong to need you really really upsets me. If I think about it too long, I end up stomping into fancy restaurants, pulling down the drapes and getting all tangled up and flustered in the thick fabrics. It makes me walk up to giant oak trees in public parks and throw all my weight against them so I can knock them down as a start to an epic rampage. So far the oak trees don't budge and I get grass stains all over my clothes. I wrecked my favorite slacks — the straight-cut light gray ones I thought made me look like an English farmer dressed in his finest, heading into town to talk with his lawyer, a kindly fat old man with a love of frilly shirts and phrases.

Should I drink this potion? What if strength makes me into some kind of a Saint or Don Juan or some other type of being incompatible with married life? I don't want to be those things! I want to be a normal person who does his job and loves his friends and family and his wife too. Not in a needy, pathetic way — just how a man loves his woman because they know each other all the way and share themselves with each other all the way.

I fear the corruption of you. My possessiveness, the way my desire to please you and keep you sometimes endangers my own better intellectual, moral, and spiritual judgment. I fear the need to have you, to show off to you. And so I should drink.

I fear the vanity of strength. And of tossing you aside because I can and a fresher droplet’s caught my focus. I fear abandoning you, like it would be abandoning something in me, as if I were to go back in time to when I was a small boy — young enough to not be able to fend for myself but old enough to know that my parents loved me and would help me no matter what, maybe like seven — and convince my parents to ditch me in the mall of a far-away city, steadfastly denying the authorities’ claims that I belonged to them.

But then I think that must somehow be an error in me, this mixing-up of grownups quitting on their romantic relationships and grownups abandoning small, vulnerable children. And so I think I must drink this potion so I can know what it is to be strong. Then I can know if I turn myself so adamantly towards you because a man loves his wife and I consider you my wife, or if this constant guzzling of you springs from weakness — the fear of losing or of being alone, the vanity of wanting to be and/or be recognized as a real man, an addiction to you instead of a delight in you, vainglories masquerading as kindness and affection ...

What if it doesn't work? There's a money-back guarantee but I don't want my money back — I want it to work! I mean, that is to say, if I do want it to work. Which I might. At any rate, ... but would you like it to work? What if Pure Love makes us strong enough to know whether we really love each other or one or both of us is mostly just using the other to feel safe and strong and wholesome and worthwhile and all that? Then what? Then maybe we break up and right now that sounds to me like being smashed into a million pieces — like just now I notice that I am a small, clear glass figurine or maybe I become one when I think of you and I not together.

You know I'm made of mahogany, dewy roses, steam rising off rainforests, great steel factories and ships at sea — right? It's not just sugar and spice that I'm made of. Let's not forget the 'everything nice' catch-all. Now what would something made of everything nice want with something fabricated entirely of snips and snails and puppy dog tails? But I jest; I lark! At a time like this.

[She, a place soft kind safe but also firestorm, laughs free and easy like this snowstorm that once caught me high in the piney mountains of Idaho state.]

Let us, the two of us, a man and a woman who find themselves longing at each other and uncertain about the metaphysics involved, drink this potion together. I'll take a swig, then you take a swig; we'll just keep passing the bottle back and forth until it is all gone. And then we'll sit down on this sofa here and you can put your arm around me and I'll snuggle into your side and rest my head on your shoulder and we'll wait and see. Pass me the bottle.

OK. But promise you won't laugh.

I will have to laugh. Pure love is pure delight. It is an infinite giggle that bubbles up from the rift created by an Unformed Infinite so infinite that it gives rise to all that is differentiated.

I don't follow.

It's very simple. Viewed one way, infinity should have no limits and thus no borders and so no forms, no particular shape or particular idea or anything. However, viewed another way, infinity shouldn't have any limits and should therefore contain all possible particular things and thus all possible limits. But infinity is prior to how we think of things, and these two opposing views of infinity are really more like two opposing currents within infinity pushing against each other, creating a tension that erupts as a great giggle into reality as we know it: all possible particulars but with the formless, completely undifferentiated and thus timeless, spaceless, idealess, feelingless infinity shining through all things. The Unformed sits prior to and shines through every particular, but the Unformed is also the aggregate of all particulars.

Oh! That does sound pretty funny.

An infinite giggle creating, sustaining, and being all that is! That's not 'pretty funny': It’s hilarious! That's what I'm telling you. I don't know if we'll end up together or not after we drink this but we will definitely get a good, lasting, life-changing laugh out of it.

And we can't be together if we don't drink it anyway. I mean, not really.

It's a necessary risk for those who aim at human love.

I'm afraid.

Me too.

Author: Bartleby Willard

Editor: Ambergris Whistletown

Copyright Holder: Andrew Mackenzie Watson

Fictional Publishing House: Ancient Mariner Press

1c. Love Engineer

[Editor's Note: This story, along with Pure Love Factory Farm 1, Tainted Love Factory Farm, and Pure Love Factory Farm 2 is in the Manufacturing Love section of Pure Loves.]

William Walker, in black and brown paisley cowboy boots, suede chaps and vest, and soft brown Stetson, sits up tall on his mount. The horse fidgets into place: a bluff overlooking a sandy, prickly, shadow-darting desert. Walker smiles cordially, his round fleshy face flush with age and plum pudding. He fields questions from a young woman with a pixie face and short, dark, tidy hair. Her eyes are big, glistening, reverent. The cameras roll gently, deferentially.

Mr. Walker, you’re without a doubt the greatest engineer of the modern era — from the Hoover dam to the Panama Canal to the modern jumbo jet to the Allied Mustangs with Rolls-Royce engines to the Big Dig to modern nuclear submarines skulking and dreaming of doomsday to the space shuttles that didn’t explode — there’s hardly a major engineering feat that is not at least largely credited to you.

Mr. Walker nods a pouty bull-dog smile.

"With such an incredible oeuvre already behind you, many have speculated that this retreat to your ranch here in the Arizona desert