Alan Halsey

1. The author is discovered in a chapel dedicated to the memory of his vaunted ancestors.

2. He is surrounded by marble busts. There is also a knight's helmet and a carved upraised hand clutching an amputated bird's leg, claws pointing to the ground.

3. There is nowhere he can look without seeing his name.

4. Here is Ethelbert and here is Henshaw.

5. One went to the New World and came back. The names of those who did not return go unmentioned.

6. One was an unbiased and uncorrupt Senator, indeed a Virtuous Citizen. He recommended his Soul to his Maker without a Sigh or Groan, Aged Fifty seven Years.

7. The author is also 57 years old.

8. A cherub is turning the pages of a marble book, displaying the text Blessed Are The Dead Which Die In The Lord. Flaxman Fecit.

9. They were all swallowed up in the great deep in one instant on their passage from Genoa to Marseilles in the Errolano steam packet which was sunk with almost all the passengers by a dreadful collision with another vessel off Antibes, on the night of April 24th 1854.

10. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided.

11. Lector, ab Sinc æternitatem cogita.
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It is good when reading Seneca sometimes also to read Gertrude Stein.

Seneca and Gertrude Stein lived as regularly as they could.

Gertrude Stein could certainly have helped to regulate the unfortunate habits of the emperor Nero but Seneca's plays are very much crueller than Gertrude Stein's.

Fury and folly filthily falsely forge and feign.

1. Seneca committed serial murder only in the plays he wrote and was teaching Nero.
2. Beginning reading is never the same as continuing reading.
3. Obviously blood can be squeezed from syllables and mischief sustained with revenge.

Different enough but easy to know: to drown himself in a lovely pond as if Dis sang ditties in an empty vein.
Stein: Due tie due to die due show the never less more way less.
Seneca: So much the more because so much you may.
Stein: Do, weigh the more do way less.
Seneca: If they might be wayed can sure so great a number make.
Stein: Let us call a boat.
Nero: A light thing it is to be just.

Seneca whom it behoved to think of Athens while he lived in Rome did not expect America to be as American as it proved to be. The same that declared to whom it is cruel but did Nero listen? It is said that Seneca wrote some of the emperor's not so good songs.

Stein: He that from which was every thing then existing.
Seneca: An upset sunset or where courage outrage.

Writing plays can be a welcome destruction. Nero could have been anyone but did Seneca listen? He spent all day at the circus wishing for a cinema but as it is a show they all fall down and back bent to hell thumbs.

When not writing plays or teaching Nero Seneca wrote letter after letter as if every thought needed frequent saying. As if it were regular to regulate a life or in Nero's understanding and Seneca's plays many deaths. Since good if considered as an end cannot be derived from power or syntax or celebrity enemies and realists are not all stoics. Watch any tyrant's trial on reality TV. See Nero leaving Rome with a handkerchief. Ask any member of the occupying forces what loyalty means too late. Consider if sympathy has any plays or a place.

Because the failure of diction leads to contradiction the lessons of fate are repeated. While Seneca makes scenes for Nero to ignore necessity will not of necessity cease. Later he wrote how much he may if so be he be provoked.

Fury with fire fearless and with one frenzy, a face.
Seneca: He is nowhere if he is one that is everywhere.
Stein: Surely there is the safe persuasion.
Seneca: Nothing is contenting without a companion.
Stein: If there is not any time all there is is reason.
Seneca: Something I composed in itself was troubled.
Stein: There is no example in a relation.
Seneca: A few suffice but one and none is enough.
Stein: This one certainly is often listening.
Seneca: We are a theatre for one another.
Stein: If the three are one they do not have a voice.
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Like fingerprints there are no two leaves or sea shells, for example, the same. Inside each piece is an original work of nature - a real leaf, a real shell or even a sea horse. Each is authenticated as such with its own individually numbered certificate. The present as return of difference, as repetition styling itself as difference, affirms once for all the totality of chance.

Il cherchait des sentiments pour les accommoder a son vocabulaire.

Ellesmere Port taxi driver Mr Robert Phoenix leaned down to the window and said "Christ is the only mediator between God and man."

To illuminate a large number of repetitive phenomena that are continuously appearing with such disconcerting randomness as to seem chaotic in the mindlessness of their repetition and the unmotivated gratuitousness of their patterns they cannot and perhaps should not correspond to pre-established laws except (one supposes) those of repetition and chance although I doubt that my vocabulary can go beyond the unmotivated gratuitous effect down to its last momentary statement.
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‘Extra and in union.
Not and seen nearly.'
Gertrude Stein
Egyptian ghost cars made in Japan. One hieroglyphic ace and a club of flagpoles. As for me I am inside Exhibit A.

The first doll was black and naked. The second was peering at the third who was dressed in pink and had lost her left arm. That February day could have been the same as a Saturday in June or October.

The frame might be fuzzy but the border must either be crossed, filled in or fitted into or out. Graffiti shows that only details count when conventions abound. Stains and chips in the paintwork must be distinguished from longterm erosion.

Terror can be recognised by definite articles. Keeping memories safe turns mountains dark so that only icebound rivers remain visible. As anything scanned doubly as a port or a coast shows its grain or other trace: grain or granite leaving you or leaving you or us.

Torsos indistinctly map. If everybody were to read everybody what if anything would happen? The wooden whale leapt across the harbour and everything went blue.

Beware the eye which stalks the beholder. Reverse hybrid entities take nothing lightly. Lightly itself will likely not take easily lightly.

Pro[em]blematic.

A hours. I.e. Today is Monday. And the hearts say: the heart.
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