CYCLE NINE

1. No doubt, the fact that women are more closely associated with water than men, as in the civilized bias of the tongue and the womb, is what makes it feasible for them to shed tears, which fall, it seems to me, in star-like radiance from their eyes. A man would normally disgrace himself by crying, but a woman only confirms her femininity, or rather superfemininity, by shedding tears.

2. Probably tears stand to the eyes as milk to the breasts, and I fancy that, given their proximity to the 'fiery' realms of the eyes and the heart, both alike are noumenal contexts, with a closer correspondence, in consequence, to barbarism than to civilization.

3. Broadly, fire and water being feminine elements, one could argue that Summer and Winter are feminine seasons, in contrast to the masculine essence, in earth (vegetation) and air, of Spring and Autumn. Certainly, this would apply almost literally to Winter and Spring respectively, while the gender attribution to Summer and Autumn would have to be weighed against the diabolic and divine correlations which accrue to the 'noumenal elements', viz. fire and air, and their closer association, in consequence, with superfeminine/subfeminine and submasculine/supermasculine alternatives.

4. There is a sense, though only a relative one, in which the manner of a person's dying would determine whether he went to Heaven or to Hell, the former as a spirit and the latter as a soul. By which I mean that a natural death would suggest the salvation of the spirit to Heaven, in terms of one's having 'given up the ghost' with one's last breath and accordingly become subject to the passage of spirit (breath) into air (Heaven), whereas a violent death, particularly one that resulted in the flow of blood from a wound, would suggest, on the contrary, the damnation of the soul to Hell, as blood trickled into the earth, or whatever, and effectively eclipsed, in the horror of its unfolding, the fate reserved for the spirit. Hence although a violent death would still entail one's 'giving up the ghost', such an inevitable process would effectively be overshadowed by the seepage of blood from a wound, and accordingly it would be logically feasible to maintain that visible loss of blood would tip the balance of Judgement in favour of the damnation of the soul (blood) into Hell (the depths and, from a Christian standpoint, fiery core of the Earth). Such, relatively, would be the contrasting fates to which a dying person could be regarded as being subject, though only of course from a narrowly Christian and, in some sense, factual point of view. For damnation and salvation, as outlined by me in terms of ascents or descents (depending on the context) from sensuality to sensibility, are really very different from that, as is the concept of Eternity to which the mature part of my oeuvre, with its evolutionary perspectives, has long been partial.