R&P: The Colour of God

Allah is composed of many colors.  Not only the natural ones—nipple brown, clit pink, semen white, puss green—and the unnatural ones—jejune hope, turgid justice, risible peace, odiferous faith, malefic love—but the ones forbidden to humanity, sealed forever in mirrors and eyes.

How did I learn the colors of Allah, their 99 billion names?  I was taught, long ago, before numbers had filled the bucket of time, by Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid, the great chromatic theologian.  The story was told of his journey to the palette that rests on the outer turrets of Jannah, occasionally tipping and spilling bright pigments on the earth; when that happens, there’s famine, pandemics, incest, nuclear mishaps, some common disaster—or a messiah’s born.  Whatever falls falls, as the Sunnis say.  Spilt crimson in Jannah, war in Tehran, as the Shiites say.

It has long been considered a critical debate in Islamic theology as to what conditions lend themselves to palette tipping and, more particularly, whether these conditions can be manipulated by humans to spill certain colors on certain parts of the earth—whether the holiest of men could even behave in such a way as to blend colors on the palette, producing new phenomena in history, thus seeing more of The Sovereign, All Compelling Seducer, and Protecting Friend.  The more heretical among the speculators have mused whether the most extreme of ascetic lives might be able to produce new colors in Allah, thus enlarging possibilities for troubled mankind; these heretics, however, have frequently been subjected to gruesome and untimely ends.

The debate reached a fevered pitch in Fes in 941 when two scholarly camps at the University of Al-Karaouine feuded one night over how many shades of grey co-existed in Allah—the Purists staunchly defending 0 (The Merciful, after all, could know no grey), the Minimalists defending 99 (The Compassionate, after all, must contain all colors, though the grey within Him was overwhelmed by an infinity of light).  All 66 scholars would have perished at the hands of each other if Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid himself hadn’t appeared above the carnage and said,

Alchemists, we, in our dark

night, labour to paint the world. 

Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! cried one of the few remaining academics who had not had his tongue hacked away.  Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! Tell us the story of your journey to the palette of Allah.

Ah, friends.  Ah, grey

scholars.  Ah, pale

pedants of twilit

moors.  Ah, sad shades

of sunlight.  Ah,

bleached and

cadaverous horrors of a

most wretched and

unreflective

moon.  Ah, wan and

waning philosillies.  Ah,

drab and doughy

…

This is the way Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid spoke, long and ponderously, in the manner of chromatic theologians, with a sentence’s last word frequently flung onto the next line.  And he paused after his noble salutations and told them of his great journey … a story so drawn out, so convoluted and tangential, that the last scholar expired long before Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was finished.

Some time later, weeks after he had described his perilous escape from earth—his emancipation from the Sartorial Angels, who stitch souls to bodies, his horrors with the fiery Archangels who incarcerated his soul in burning mud, his horrible combat with the voracious Principalities who guard the portals of our world; days after he had described his impossible flight from the sky—his mortal debates with the Powers who pace the clouds, his savage labors with the Virtues who roam the firmament, his chthonic humiliations at the wings of the Dominions who ceaselessly mock and abuse; but days before he described his cunning bolt from Allah’s mansions—his tortures by the Thrones who delight in the subjugation of man, his apoplectic miseries with the Cherubim whose food is swords, his energetic annihilations under the Seraphim who fly upward faster than ten thousand speeds of light; weeks before he described his destitution on the eternal plains, his desolation in the everlasting canyons, his devastation on the infinite mountains, and his final hopeless hapless approach to Allah’s holy palette, Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid noticed that the 66 scholars were dead and he was bereft of an audience.  Yet, as he longed for students and more for a witness, he summoned me across the sad meadows of time—not because I was known or worthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was talented or wealthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was kind—and I came (who wouldn’t?) and sat listening below the great one’s many feet.

When Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was done and had described the solitary palette and the 99 billion colors of Allah and under what conditions the palette tips and the glorious hues hidden from humanity forever, he wept from the sheer exhaustion of the retelling and I wept too, for no reason other than that weeping seemed appropriate.

And we parted ways, I back to the twenty-first century with its concrete and iPhones, he back to his sojourns in the elusive spectra of Allah, The Eternally Colorful, The Polychromatic, The Light.

January 23 - Saint Denis of Enlightened Largesse, Poetic Journalism and Encyclopedic Acceptance

Intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all men and to everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête.  He taught us three things:  the hope for posthumous fame in this world to replace the promised immortality which theology had located in the next; the chaotic irreducible relation between all objects and concepts; that ideas must be released from their mental chains to swarm in the natural freedom of the body.

In Langres France in the eighteenth century, a girl craved knowledge.  She fell asleep praying for it.  Then she would dream, night after night, of squawking screeching birds—some eagles, some vultures; others sparrows, ostriches—spiraling up a great column to an unseen canopy in Paradise.  She’d wake in ferocious sweats, and doves and songbirds would sit on her shoulder and sing to her and comfort her.   During one especially virulent dream, as birds thicker than death were shrieking on her tomb, the girl's cranium opened, exposing her throbbing brain, and an eagle of truth dropped a significant steaming turd into it.

Other birds noisily joined--the Berlepsch's Tinamou, Rufous-bellied Chachalaca, Vanuatu Scrubfowl, Handsome Francolin, Chinese Bamboo-Partridge, Satyr Tragopan, Moustached Puffbird, Cayenne Nightjar, Reunion Solitaire, Boat-billed Tody-Bully, Crested Shrike-wit, Hairy-backed Bulbul, Scaly-breasted Illadopsis-Babbler, Palawan Flowerpecker, Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, Donaldson Smith’s Social-Weaver, Slut-faced Hemispingus, Violaceous-rumped Euphonia, Pyrrhuloxia, and Giant Cowbird-Bobolink--all these and thousands more deposited their avian waste into her open skull.  Nine months later, on October 5 1713, she delivered a babbling Saint Denis from her brain.

While usually journalism is antithetical to sainthood—journalists being the boors and pedants of creation—St. Denis elevated curiosity and truth-seeking to aesthetic heights and embodied philosophy for a future age.  On July 31 1784, just outside Le Coude Fou on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, while telling nested stories to passersby and plotting a revenge, St. Denis was changed to a pillar of merde and brought by Persephone Herself down to Hades, where he was placed by the most polluted section of the Styx, where he still stands.

The Council of I elevated St. Denis to sainthood on July 26 2000 after two centuries of unbroken futile debate, not through consensus but exhaustion.  We honor him today because on this day in 1797 his daughter, Angélique de Vandeul, became a fatalist, as was written up above.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

Reveries and Prayers: Attributes and Principles of the Child of God

Attributes of the Child of God:

1. Doesn’t care for society
2. Is an exile in the world, given to another world that doesn’t exist to exist most fully in this world
3. Follows his heart without regard for consequence
4. Is animated by and animates everything around him
5. Never urinates standing up
6. Longs for worldly success but will never once deviate from these attributes and principles to achieve his longing
7. Knows that love is the dead and yet-to-be children of God chatting across time and space
8. Lives for love
9. Stays vulnerable—emotionally, financially, intellectually, socially—all the time
10. Is both the wind (a wind) and an object in the wind

Principles of the Child of God:

1. Most humans are more animal than animals
2. Children are the most human, all of life’s a crawling back
3. Myth, as the abiding truth, is constantly more real than history
4. Gas is the superior, pure, and noble state, liquid is imperfect, solids are evil
5. There’s only one day
6. The only masters are the clouds, the only slaves are those who answer their phones
7. Time weeps, but myth laughs
8. Beauty isn’t the only truth, it’s the only fiction
9. Farts are less transient than God’s children
10. If work isn’t play, it isn’t worth doing

Reveries and Prayers

Xavier Xavier de Xavier was a Vergobret crucified in Belgica Prima by his Council for taking certain Druidic practices beyond what was deemed acceptable by the tribe.  While he was dying—and the Guinness World Tortures lists his CDT (crucifixion death time) as the longest in civilization, clocking in at a whopping 21 years, 9 months, 12 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes, and 51 seconds—he dictated Reveries and Prayers to a local supporter.  While only fragments remain, it seems apparent that Xavier’s work consists of 81 pieces, radically different in form and orientation, direct utterances of the convulsing spirit, ecstatic and dolorous on the ridge between life and death.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to bring, under impulse, the more-or-less comprehensible fragments to its readership and likewise thanks Google Translate for translating from Gaulish to English.

We'll try to begin tomorrow with our first fragment, before returning on January 23rd to the Proper of Saints, on which we celebrate the Feast Day of Diderot.

January 19 - Saint William, Mythmonger, Silliman, Poet

Far, far away, a long time ago, in a hut made of potatoes overlooking the shelly Sligeach, lived a bitter sentimental woman with her 23 children and drunken husband.  The last of the litter, an ethereal runt who survived only because he began eating the walls, was named not by dad, who was long past being able to name anything, nor by mom, who only called him tuilli cac, but by a pleasant gathering of … well …

Sometime before he was named or numbered, when the sky was lightly leaping through a pack of clouds and the sun was chomping on a distant rainbow, Táin Bó Cúailnge felt herself desiring a child.  Lithe as love she was, and just as wily.  She gathered her friends, Old Yellow Lecan and Druimm Snechta, and said, We cannot breed the way humans do, which is good, because who would want a man anyway?  And the three cackled lightly, to the detriment of a few nearby stars and roses.  Which is bad, because it means when we want a shiny cutsie baby to play catch with, or to pitch through an eclipse to see it shatter, we don’t have one.

We have the dindshenchas, said Druimm Snechta.  And Old Yellow Lecan said, Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

It’s true.  But the dindshenchas only assume human form and only pretend to explode.  If they don’t feel like screaming, they don’t, because they’re not really scared of us.  They’re only good in certain moods and times and rhythms and lights and feels and wants and airs.  Plus … and here she paused to allow the darkness to take form and wrap itself around her … we cannot send the dindshenchas back to earth stuffed with the magic to upset and the silliness to confuse.

And so Táin Bó Cúailnge’s true intent became obvious, which delighted her companions.  They ordered a flock of flaming meteors and took off their bright fashions and danced until their little feet sizzled with naughtiness.

And who would have guessed that on their earthbabe hunt they flitted up Sligeach disguised as snails?  And who could have known that they found a babe so undecided between life and death that they almost thought it was their own?

They returned with the wraith-boy to their wimsy kingdom.  Táin Bó Cúailnge stood on Venus and Druimm Snechta on Jupiter and Old Yellow Lecan on Pluto, and they tossed the human faster than light between themselves.  They threw him hard through galactic eclipses and he exploded the way an earthboy should.  I haven’t had so much fun in moonbeans, said Táin Bó Cúailnge.  He’s better than the dindshenchas, he screams, said Druimm Snechta.  Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui, said Old Yellow Lecan.

But when the time came that the boy started growing hair where there was once only smoothness, that his voice started clambering down the ladder of sin, Táin Bó Cúailnge said, He is becoming a man.  And they sang the Ugh Ugh Song and got to work.  They replaced his soul with Lebor Gabála Érenn, his heart with Tir na nOg, his genitals with Lebor na Nuachongbála and his brain with Oidheadh Clainne Lir.  They filled his veins with monkeypiss and gave him three extra toes as a joke.  St. William he was named, and the number 0 he was given, and he was sent back to the rational planet, escorted by Hy Many, Ballymote, and Fermoy, to make sure he didn’t escape.  He landed on June 13 1865 in the home of John and Susan, where he was fed properly and exposed to the blue and mannered order of the world.

Now I would like to ask you something, biped.  I want you to judge between the heavens and the earth.  Who could have done more to form a poet than the faeries?  Wherefore, when I look on earth for swooning sounds, does it bring forth only clunks?  I will tell you what I will do to poets who think rocks make good poems:  I’ll fill them with rocks and send them to neveretherland for pixies to dance on.  I will command the world to praise them for a second and forget them forever.  For the people of earth look for animation, but—only tedium; for inspiration, but—journalism.

St. William’s life was chaotic, his art metered.  His life was messy, his art pure.  His life looked to the future, his art the past.  His life was silly, his art serious.  His body was owned by the earth, his soul by the cackling creatures who named him.  After his mortal death on January 28 1939, a few strange wailers slunk to Sligo, singing,

Earth to earth and dust to dust

The beauty the beauty the beauty of it all.

Birth to birth and lust to lust

The beauty the booty the duty of it all.

Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

After his mortal death, the faeries died and Romance swooned before her lover cold.  Ireland grew weak and Unity divorced Fantasy and Venus was just Venus and Leda was no swan.

After his mortal death, the Council of I deliberated the question of elevation—who could elevate this saint since he never really descended?—and finally concluded on April 27 1953 that, while he couldn’t be elevated, he could be left where he was, bouncing on the soft heather of the milky heights.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

January 15 - Saint Wolfgang of the Aphoristic Werthers

It is common for saints, like others, to be bred from the union of male power and female lechery, politics and poetry.  However, in rare cases they are the product of lechery and lechery, a Sapphist extravaganza.  So it was with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt am Main to Katherine Elisabeth Textor, an older lady of the cloth, and Ulrike von Levetzow, a younger woman of the flesh.  They met for one night where words and ideas failed on a bed of blooming lemons, after which Ulrike died and Wolfgang was brought forth from his mother's right breast on August 28 1749.  After troubles at school, he received at home an exceptionally wide education. At the age of 16, he began to study law at Leipzig University.

St. Wolfgang was a curious son of chaos, who was not omniscient but knew a lot.  Deciding early to be a hammer not an anvil, he refused to know himself and erred in proportion to his striving.  He received roots and wings from Helen of Troy on his 26^th birthday and subsequently enjoyed what he could and what he had to.  In addition to a tasteful imagination, he never placed things that matter least at the mercy of things that matter most.  Shaped and fashioned by what he loved, his life was simpler than you think and more complex than you imagine.  Widely criticized, he neither protested nor defended himself, but acted in spite of his detractors, who gradually yielded to him.  Part of that Power which always wills evil and always procures good, he attained a happiness which he did not deserve and which he would not have changed with anything in life.  At the end, when he had grasped by art all that he had felt, when he was too old for mere amusement, too young to be without desire, specifically on March 22 1832 in Weimar, Ulrike von Levetzow descended from Heaven, grasped St. Wolfgang between her buttocks and took him to the Lēsvos in the sky.

A Wolfgang of all trades, he was a secular prophet and a pithy generator of wisdom; his very body was the bridge between Enlightenment and Romanticism, his spirit the chasm of modernity.  He loved more than he was loved and was more the text of a zeitgeist than the author of a text.  He paved the aphoristic way to Heaven and foretold and incarnated life's domination over art through his subjugation to the eternal Muse.

We honor the saint today for Gérard de Nerval completed his French translation of Faust on this day in 1828 and experienced his first nervous breakdown on the same day in 1841.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1889.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh. 

January 13 - Malfeasance of Children

When is the child born, why does the child die?

Is the child born on its mother’s tears?

Does the child die in her secret smile?

The child rose from its bed of play,

saw the shy world hiding, said, Come here,

I’m a princess and you’re a crocodile.

The world said, Sure, I was bored anyway,

but you be the croc and I’ll be a deer;

let’s rickshaw to China then skate on the Nile.

The two friends wandered that day,

ate rabbit delight and elephant ears,

composed a petunia and put broccoli on trial.

It wasn’t as if their mothers or they

hadn’t heard of textbooks, ethics or years,

but that that diet wasn’t their style.

You possibly haven’t or possibly may

have heard of a place where everything’s weird;

it’s not very far--just none or woo miles.

The world said, Well, it’s time to go away.

I’ve got commitments, I need a beer,

my voicemail’s ringing, which makes me feel virile.

The child lay down on a bed of grey,

saw shadows fighting her electric fears,

dreamt that night of God, gold and guile.

The child is born on the wing of a word.

The child dies when it first denies.

January 10 - Saint Thomas and the BCPs

Agnes Hatfield was a virgin of the highest order; with both her biological and spiritual hymens intact, she longed only for the fiery phallus of God to fill her core.  She imagined God’s member as the pillar of fire which led the Israelites by night through the Egyptian desert--8100 cubits high, with the density of a Pharaoh and a temperature that made the sun an ice cube.  One night during Complin, on her knees and filled with thoughts of God, the candle by her bedside grew in wisdom and in stature and spoke to her, saying, Agnes, get thee on thy bed and raise thy petticoats; I shall fill thee with manifold Tongues of Fire.  And Agnes, being pious, obeyed, and the night unfolded according to the candle's counsel.  The substance of her desire was Thomas Cranmer, brought into the world in great pain and peril in 1489.

St. Thomas was educated at Cambridge from the age of 14 and, in 1530, became Archdeacon of Taunton, during which tenure he had a tryst with his lifelong muse, Catherine of Aragon.  He wrote one of three texts that decided the future of a world language and for this primal contribution he suffered agony and anguish in doubts and compromises, he wavered like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, he reluctantly sacrificed the blood of many lesser Englishmen, he was marched, deathly pale, to the stake outside Balliol College, Oxford, on a wet and blustery Saturday in March 1556.

His text reached forward to an age of English domination and vernacular democracy, reached backward to the cadences of faith, down to the roots of human imperfection, it reached up to the destroying flames of God.  Such is the spirit and substance of all holiness.  We honor the saint today for this is the day of his first conjugal relation with his muse on the windowsill of the Second Turret of the King’s Guard and the dictation of The Order for Copulation; the Council of I elevated him to sainthood on May 22 1980.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

The Mantis, the Bedbug, and the Spider

A mantis, a bedbug, and a spider lived with reasonable camaraderie in the House of If, a dilapidating castle in the south of France.  Each had her own specific task, which complemented the others, and gave meaning to her life.  The bedbug gathered food every night, the spider prepared the food the next day, the mantis prayed to the gods for good health and peace, and they all dined together every evening, promptly, at 1800 hours, in the lower east kitchen.

One meal, somewhere around the seventh of May, the conversation went something like this—

Good spider, said the bedbug, rubescent, notwithstanding, ripe (this is the way the three friends spoke with one another):  this curdled curry from lower fibula is stunning.

Beneficent spider, said the mantis, thick and leggy and not of wings, the wise and crunchy bedbug has spoken justly:  the curdled curry from lower fibula is indeed the best of curdled curries from lower fibulae.  I swoon.

The bedbug and the mantis waited patiently for the spider to prepare her response.

Diverse and fast friends, said the spider after some minutes had passed, you who eat and trample time, oh future gods of all the present lords of earth:   I am unworthy of receiving this, the highest praise, from two such worthy culinaires.  Pray eat your curdled curry from lower fibula and do not make me eat your praise.

Nay, said the bedbug.  Your appointed task is high, higher than the other tasks:  my task, the task of Mantis.  It’s true—I gather the food, Mantis prays, and these are not without their substance in the eyes of the ancient darkness.  But you—you, create the great digestibles of which we all partake and swoon, the great creations of spectra and squish that we daily shove into our hungry mouths.  Mantis and I have been talking.  We know it to be true.

A few threads of silk escaped from one of Spider’s spinnerets.  She caressed them lightly with her fangs while raising two of her other, hairier legs.  You have been talking?  Spider tightened her spinnerets, her hairlets tingled.  We all know the eyes of the ancient darkness—we talk together or not at all.  We all know the eyes of the ancient darkness—our tasks are equal; we walk together or not at all. 

The remaining curdled curry from lower fibula cooled as the friends sat slowly in the new information, as they listened to the distant sounds of the humans preparing to become horizontal and offer themselves in their eternal destiny as nightly sacrifices to the bedbug’s rounds.  Bedbug and Mantis glanced at each other through their many eyes, a spectacle that was not unnoticed by Spider.  Time fermented slowly and the table was silent.

Things are not the way they were, said Mantis after long digestion.  The eyes of the ancient darkness grow dim and horny lips cast the shadow of our table aside.

Things will be not the way things once were, said Bedbug.  Things are never ways.

Ancient friends.  Raw and toasty members of the ancient order, said Spider.  Mantis has her praying paws, this is why she prays; Bedbug has her bloating belly, this is why she feeds; I have my web and sputum, this is why I cook.  What strange and stranger strangeness would you have us do?

We will not retreat, said Bedbug.  This is the mouth of all the futures, time’s extended tongue.

We have consulted ourselves and we shall be what we once were no more.  There are no ancient eyes, said Mantis.

Spider paused to contemplate some silk and then, seeing things as they had become, said, The way of the future is the way of the past.  That is why we are bugs.  Nevertheless.  We are kinswomen in The Great Kingdom of Bug.  My kinswomen have spoken.  What shall we do?

Bedbug and Mantis made various sounds they were inclined to make and Bedbug said, Mantis shall prepare the meal.

And Mantis said, Bedbug shall pray.

And the two said together, And you shall gather the food.

And Spider, spinning silk and thinking deeply, said, Nay. Mantis shall gather the food. Bedbug shall prepare the meal. And I shall pray.

More sounds were made, more awkward motions, more knowing glances from the many eyes.  

I do not find reason to dispute, said Bedbug.

Spider has joined us in the spirits of the ways, said Mantis.  She should therefore have her simple way in this.

You are equally and both the friends I have imagined, said Spider in response.  Let us take our new tasks and hold them firmly in our guts forever.

Not forever, said Bedbug.

Until such time, said Mantis.

Not forever, said Spider.  Until such time.

And the three friends departed, each scrambling her new and separate path, into the night.  Mantis disappeared and Bedbug disappeared and Spider wove a vast elaborate web and prayed—

Oh Eyes of the Ancient Darkness, be far-near.

Time touches time and eyes are eyes and shall be evermore.

And she stayed still and prayed long into the night and she did not move but only watched and prayed through her many eyes.

The first eve of the newly assigned tasks, at 1800 hours, the three friends gathered once again in the lower east kitchen.  What spottled sweets might be our delight tonight? asked Spider.

Gangled toejam of geriatric, said Bedbug.  With oofed baloog.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The second eve, the three friends gathered again in the familiar kitchen and Spider said, What spottled sweets might be our delight tonight?

Miffted earpoof of aging ponderousity, said Bedbug.  With poodled noof.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The third eve, once again at 1800 hours, the three were gathered and Spider said, not entirely without surprise, What spottled sweets might be our delight tonight?

Sligs of middling middles, said Bedbug.  With granch-granch.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The fourth eve, at the appointed time and in the appointed way, the lower east kitchen found the three friends gathered and Spider saying, What spottled sweets might be our delight tonight?

Mashley klabb-frigg of upandcomings, said Bedbug.  With melly ondiments.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The fifth eve was not unlike the others in gatherings and space and time and so it was no misfortune to anyone particular when Spider asked, What spottled sweets might be our delight tonight?

Long lineaments of lustables, said Bedbug.  With lollilols and slolillol and olilsloll.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The sixth eve, notwithstanding much or once, at 1800 hours, at the height of gathering, those present in the present kitchen heard the question that had been asked before.

Biggon of gabette, said Bedbug.  With many floopy iths.  And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.

The seventh eve, with the ancient sun spinned and spun and nothing really new, those destined in the kitchen waited for the question but there was no question and in its absence Bedbug spoke.  Old Friends. Tonight, to celebrate our buggy flexibilities, a delicacy of ofty tofness:  veltmeats of crambled tenderosities. With elfovers.

And Mantis and Spider said yumyum and many other fineries and the three friends talked in ways that old friends do.  And on that same night, not long into digestion, on the seventh night after the newly assigned tasks, full of prayer, the spider ate the bedbug and the mantis and clambered back to her web and lived alone in the House of If in the south of France and prayed without ceasing until she died.