CYCLE EIGHTY-FOUR
1. To rise from the dullness
of intellect to the lightness of spirit, but to fall from the brightness of
soul to the heaviness of the flesh.
2. To be borne away on
the lightness of spirit to a heavenly salvation, but to be cast down on the
heaviness of the flesh to an infernal damnation.
3. Man per se fears the Devil as much
as woman per se fears God. For
man can be eclipsed by the Devil, no less than woman transcended by God.
4. The more godly the
man the less he has to do with woman, while, conversely, the more devilish the
woman the more she has to do with man.
The godly man is a saint and the devilish woman a whore. The one rises up on the lightness of spirit,
while the other sinks down in the heaviness of the flesh.
5. It is impossible to go from the heaviness of
the flesh to the lightness of the spirit.
For such extremes are mutually exclusive, and he who gets bogged down in
the heaviness of the flesh, which is mortal sin, cannot rise up on the
lightness of spirit. Only when he ceases
to sin and is saved, through Christ, to the dullness of intellect ... can there
be any chance of his passing on, via the Second Coming, to the lightness of
spirit. For spirit is
the heavenly goal that awaits those who have done their penance in Purgatory. Catholics know and understand this perfectly.
6. Man is effectively an animal until he becomes
a Christian and renounces as 'sin' all those heathen passions to which ungodly
men are subject. He may still continue
to sin, but so long as he knows that he is
sinning and is ashamed of it, he will not be a heathen animal but a man, and
thus a being on route to God, a being for whom the dullness of intellect takes
precedence over the heaviness of the flesh, as Purgatory over the World.
7. Generally men go on two legs and animals on
four. Could it be, I wonder, that the
distinction between two-wheeled vehicles, like motorbikes, and four-wheeled
ones, like cars, is analogous to that between men and animals? If so, then there are a lot more mechanical
animals on the roads of
8. Broadly, cars correspond, with their
extensive seating, to the heaviness of the flesh; motorbikes correspond, with
their extensive engineering, to the dullness of the intellect; bicycles
correspond, with their extensive spoking, to the
brightness of the soul; and scooters correspond, with their extensive
panelling, to the lightness of the spirit.
Or, put differently, cars have a mundane correlation, motorbikes a
purgatorial correlation, bicycles a hellish correlation, and scooters a
heavenly correlation. Though, bearing in
mind the dependence of cars, motorbikes, and scooters on petrol, it is
debatable as to how seriously one can take such correlations in relation to
properly omega-oriented worldly, purgatorial, and heavenly alternatives. However that may be, there is clearly a moral
as well as a physical distinction between those different modes of private
transportation, and I wager that a person's preference for one rather than
another is partly conditioned, if subconsciously, by ideological or cultural
considerations.
9. In relation to the above, one could speculate
that the moped, structurally a sort of cross between a motorbike and a bicycle,
has a 'burning cross' correlation such that suggests a Nazi connotation by dint
of its having a mechanical, and hence lunar, standing which yet leans, in
paradoxical fashion, towards the pedalling Hell of a bicycle sun.
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