12 November 2023 William Blake, artist, writer, poet, philosopher, mystic, priest. Mist, diaphane, Daphne, diaphanous, translucent like beryl, emerald, emerald beryl. I will try to remember who you are. I will paint a portrait of you, an image; you will give me a map to guide me. I will draw closer and closer to you; I will lose my way, and you will pull me back. I am here, you are here, but for me, you are there. A gap lies between you and me, me and reality. All I need is a heart that yearns for truth and a humble awareness that I will never fully attain it in this life. But could I glimpse it? The golden fleece and show it to others? Dive down to the ocean floor and retrieve the pearls from the seabed? Ever elusive, chimerical, ethereal, in flux, undetermined, vague now this, now that, yet at the same time true? Is truth a fixed thing? Are you a fixed thing? It is not about being fixed, taking form; it is about me in you and you in me. Hear my voice; you are my sheep, but you are a mountain sheep, a sheep with gills and fins and wings and hooves, sheared and then not. The analogy doesn’t always fit. I don't want perfection; I just want your heart. Engage with me all the time, and of course, when you stray, come back. Let's figure this out together. Their gaze is not your responsibility. What a powerful spell that is! I want them to look, but I don't want them to look. Teach me how to care and not care. Drip, drip, drip, drip; rip, rip, rip, rip; the devil likes to annoy me constantly, not destroy me, just annoy me perpetually, make this oh so small and mundane. Childish like an ice-cream truck tune. Is there an ice-cream truck on the map? Will it show how to deal with it? How to destroy it without ending up in prison? Shamed, guilty, not even you backing me on what I did. Trails of prophecy issuing from the white circles, ah-ah-ah, like music that I can see. A choir singing with wide-open mouths, pain, suffering, terror; we wanted to live forever without God, but now we can barely move, forever separated, hell. There is a boy tip-toeing across the sand, walking in a way that mimics the sand's vibrations so as not to attract the sandworm, but the sandworm has detected him nevertheless. My brain goes ah-ah-ah; I cannot hear my thoughts, like bla, bla, bla, ah-ah-ah. The long-eared hare has a decidedly dignified air about him in his white robes. Where did the preacher go? I can barely make out a white shape where he used to be. A sheep peering at me from behind some bushes, hiding. There is something like a hand pointing at the rabbit. Atlas holding up the earth, wearing the belt buckle of white eternity stones. I am blinded. I cannot see. A clown, an apprentice, wearing the pied black and white prison garb, being taught by his bull-headed master; they both wear academic caps. A bully, looking quite like a matador, intimidating a smaller figure holding a number of pearls.