Motley Quotes

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

All men are fools, if truth be told, but the ones in motley are more amusing than ones with crowns.

Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!

Did I offend you?” Lannister said. “Sorry. Dwarfs don’t have to be tactful. Generations of capering fools in motley have won me the right to dress badly and say any damn thing that comes into my head.

You're our honorary sixth member with mysterious abilities and visions of the future. The Snow White to our motley group of dwarfs. Plus, you're way better looking than the rest of these guys.

Dani: Crank it up. Lets get this party started. *I hand Dancer my iPod.* Lor: What is this crap. Where the hell is Hendrix on this thing? Jo: Did you get any Muse? Dani: Muse is something you do Jo: Distrubed is something you are Dancer: And Godsmacked is something you get Lor: Don't you have any Motley Crue or Van Halen? Christian: How about some Flogging Molly? Ryodan: Whats the deal with all the Linkin Park, for fuck's sake. Dancer: Mega has a crush on Chester Jo: You got any Adele? Dani: Got some Nicki Minaj. Ryodan: Somebody kill me now.

Of course it's juggling,” the man in motley was saying [...] “You know what your problem is, Sir Grenall? You've been seduced by the lure of spectacle. Sure, I could juggle three or four balls and use two hands, and that would be very impressive, but then what would I do after that? Five balls? Three hands? You see how it goes? Now me, I'm an artist, trying to recapture the original purity of the art form. This” - the man nodded at the ball he tossing up and down - “this is the essence of juggling.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and out kids do scary things and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don’t know why it’s not more like it is in the movies, why things don’t come out neatly and lessons can’t be learned when you’re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace often come in such motley packaging.

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew, distinguished not only by our inability to explain ourselves to those who are more certain of their beliefs than we are but in many cases by our distance from the centers of our faith communities as well.

Lately, I haph startet painting my torso in pretty, motley hews. I sit in phront oph the mirror in the sleepy-room. I atmire my hantyworg. I am a hooman apstrat paining.

The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.

We are a motley bunch. But we more than make up for it with tenacity." ~ Ralston to Simon

This group had a kind of dark glamour within the castle. They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty.

„You're Ned Stark's bastard, aren't you?“ Jon felt a coldness pass right through him. He pressed his lips together and said nothing. „Did I offend you?“ Lannister said. „Sorry. Dwarfs don't have to be tactful. Generations of capering fools in motley have won me the right to dress badly and say any damn thing that comes into my head.“ He grinned. „You are the bastard, though.“ „Lord Eddard Stark is my father,“ Jon admitted stiffly. Lannister studied his face. „Yes,“ he said. „I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers.“ „Half brothers,“ Jon corrected. He was pleased by the dwarf's comment, but he tried not to let it show. „Let me give you some counsel, bastard,“ Lannister said. „Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strenght. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.“ Jon was in no mood for anyone's counsel. „What do you know about being a bastard?“ „All dwarfs are bastards in their father's eyes.“ „You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister.“ „Am I?“ the dwarf replied, sardonic. „Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure.“ „I don't even know who my mother was,“ Jon said. „Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are.“ He favored Jon with a rueful grin. „Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs.“ And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.

That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.

We slept beside them, fought beside them, bled beside them. We trusted them to watch our backs and save our asses – which they did, time and time again. And somewhere out there, between one gig and the next, something changed. We woke up one day and realized that home was no longer behind us. That our families were with us all along. We looked around at these miscreants, these motley crews, and knew in our hearts there was nowhere we’d rather be than by their side.

Cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say, as I wear not motley in my brain.

What's the best angle to cut someone's throat? Well, usually from behind. That's usually how it works.

On Ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson, so imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like.

Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes/I see the motley, mocking fool's-cap rise.

It is only as a unity in diversity that the Christian community will become an inviting community in a society which is otherwise pretty uniform. Creation is motley and diverse, and the new creation even more so.

Do you remember the unbidden summer rain Washing the dew from mulberries away? Can you forget the scent of honey over fields, And those amber-colored acorns beads… And crowds of singing motley birds Around the foggy, misty lake? That’s where our childhood mirth Will be remained as a fairy-tale…

I also did some jail time a few years ago. Spent a whole summer in jail reading books. I pumped a ton of new knowledge and new thinking into myself.

Motley's the only wear.

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue.

If a business isn’t efficiently utilizing resources, then it’s a bad investment. A wasteful business is an unprofitable business. That may or may not show on their P&L for the current year, but you better believe it shows somewhere.

Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intellgence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsory excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. (473d-e)

Oh, brother wearers of motley, are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and trembling and the jingling of cap and bells?

Invest me in my motley. Give me leave To speak my mind, and I will through and through Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world If they will patiently receive my medicine.

I wear not motley in my brain. Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.

It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Dutch (House of Orange) and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne. No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I. House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.

Monoculture wants you to forget that the joy of life is in the community of the village, where you can touch, taste, smell, feel and experience a motley potpourri of cultural vicissitudes.

And my cases end like all stories end: with a sunset, and a kiss, and redemption, and iron shoes, and a sear of light from the shadows, a gun-muzzle flash that illuminates everything as the rain just keeps coming down in the motley, several-colored light of the back end of the world.

To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new morning, in a perpetual revival of our emotional virginity – this, and only this, is worth being or having, to be or have what we imperfectly are. This dawn is the first dawn of the world. Never did this pink colour yellowing to a warm white so tinge, towards the west, the face of the buildings whose windowpane eyes gaze upon the silence brought by the growing light. There was never this hour, nor this light, nor this person that’s me. What will be tomorrow will be something else, and what I see will be seen by reconstituted eyes, full of a new vision. High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight weaves together with bright spots and shadows – you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what [I’ll be] tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there’s a mysterious longing and regret in their passing.

For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree. For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.

Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.

Dearly weird and motley beings, we're gathered here today for . . . yada, yada, yada. Seth say something profound and sweet to Lydia." Savitar "My Lydia is like a star rising to guide me through the darkest night." Seth "Look, kid, I can say the words for you, but I think she'd rather hear them from your lips. Ignore the assholes in the chairs. If one of them laughs, I'll gut him for you." Savitar Lydia laid her hand against his cheek and kissed his lips. "Hey, hey, hey!" Savitar snapped. "You're jumping ahead, woman. It's your turn to make a vow to him." "Love is paitent. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It does not proud. It is not rude. It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered> It keeps no records of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Lydia "Yeah, okay,beings . . . now you ." Savitar "Alright then, to the handful here, let me present Mr. and Mrs. Demigod jackal beings." Savitar "You know this would be much easier if some of us had last names." Savitar to Seth and Lydia "Would you stop ruining this for them?" Ma'at "I'm not ruining it, Mennie, I'm making it memorable," Savitar

Anyway, they took her body to McBurney's Funeral Home in Motley. They'll be planting her tomorrow.

Fitz!’ Motley greeted me. ‘Hello, stupid!’ she added. The

We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.

Wagner: Yet elocution makes the orator; I'm far behind, I feel it more and more. Faust: Seek thou an honest retribution! Be thou no motley, jingling fool! It needs but little elocution To speak good sense by reason's rule. It ye've a message to deliver, Need ye for words be hunting ever?

Midway through, a fuzzy-chinned young man approaches the desk with a battered copy of Dune and a motley handful of coins. Mo waves him away. “Oh, just take it, Felix. Spend the money on a haircut.

Away thou fondling motley humorist, Leave mee, and in this standing woodden chest, Consorted with these few bookes, let me lye In prison, and here be coffin'd, when I dye; Here are Gods conduits, grave Divines; and here Natures Secretary, the Philosopher; And jolly Statesmen, which teach how to tie The sinewes of a cities mistique bodie; Here gathering Chroniclers, and by them stand Giddie fantastique Poets of each land. Shall I leave all this constant company, And follow headlong, wild uncertaine thee?

strawberry roan, a black and brown skewbald and a motley assortment of buckskins and bays. At the rear of the herd was a grey mare and a chestnut skewbald with a white face, both of them with foals running at their feet.

Would you rather… ride the city bus or have your own car?

My dragons!' she insisted. 'She has finally found a flock to join,' he observed to me. 'Her own kind always pecked her. But the dragons have taken her in.' ...'If a flock of crows is a murder, what should we call a group of dragons?' ... 'A catastrophe of dragons.

The poem you brought yesterday,’ said Balbulus in a bored voice as he bent over his work again, ‘it was good. You ought to write such things more often, but I know you prefer writing stories for children or songs for the Motley Folk. And why? Just for the wind to sing your words? The spoken word is nothing, it hardly lives longer than an insect! Only the written word is eternal!’ ‘Eternal?’ Fenoglio made the word sound as if there could be nothing more ridiculous in the world. ‘Nothing is eternal- and what happier fate could words have than to be sung by minstrels? Yes, of course they change the words, they sing them slightly differently every time, but isn’t that in itself wonderful? A story wearing another dress every time you hear it- what could be better? A story that grows and puts out flowers like a living thing! But look at the stories people press in books! They may last longer, yes, but they breathe only when someone opens the book. They are sound pressed between the pages, and only a voice can bring them back to life! Then they throw off sparks, Balbulus! Then they go free as birds flying out into the world. Perhaps you’re right, and the paper makes them immortal. But why should I care? Will I live on, neatly pressed between the pages with my words? Nonsense! We’re none of us immortal; even the finest words don’t change that, do they?

the partisans, on one side were the backers of Caesar, with his popular political programme and clear leanings towards one-man rule. Cicero assumed that this was where the sympathies and interests of the poor naturally lay. On the other side were a motley group of those who, for various reasons, did not like what Caesar was up to or the powers he seemed to be seeking. A few were probably as highly principled as they were unrealistic; as Cicero once said of Cato, ‘he talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus’.

I've already spent ten years of my life apologizing for that band. As their manager, that's all I really did. Apologize. For years afterward I'd walk into a hotel lobby and the receptionist would call to me, 'Mr. McGhee.' And I'd run up and drop to my knees and say, 'Oh, Jesus, I'm really sorry.' They'd look at me funny and say, 'No, nothing's wrong. You have a telephone call.' And I'd breathe a sigh of relief and thank the good Lord above that I wasn't managing Mötley Crüe anymore. ~ Doc McGhee.

Dressed today in jeans and an ancient Motley Crue Theatre of Pain concert tee that extended half-way down her delicate forearms, she held the BB gun in one hand, and a tray of what smelled like fresh chocolate walnut brownies in the other.  Gun, Crue, and brownies?  I swear to God, I nearly came right then and there.

Whereas my tribe is motley and chaotic. My tribe is dense and tumultuous. We argue and tease and wrangle and goof and fly upside down. We are brilliant and stupid. We are lonely and livid. We lie, we laugh. We are greedy and foolish. Sometimes we all sing together. We tease dogs. We can be cruel, but never for very long. We just can't sustain it. If we could sustain and organize our cruelty we'd rule the world. But what kind of life is that? We all fly home together at the end of the day. We have no kings. We have no outlaws. We have no ranking. We have no priests. We have no status. Age confers nothing in our clan. Size confers nothing. We have no warriors. We have no beauties. That's just how it is. We all look the same. Our stories go all day long. We remember everything. Our life can be maddening. It gets loud. We never agree on anything. We bicker. We play jokes. We take chances. I have often taken refuge with your tribe just to escape the hubbub of my tribe. Your tribe is better able to be alone.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them passes a wild motley throng. Men from Volga and Tartar steppes. Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws, In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace in our ear, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew. —THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH, “UNGUARDED GATES,” 1882

Generations of capering fools in motley have won me the right to dress badly and say any damn thing that comes into my head.

I passionatly love the sky, the grass, the stars, pensive evenings and soft autumn mornings... in a word all that perfumes the sadly gay land of our motley life.

A motley crew of racist, sin-sick, spiritual zombies is now one body under Christ. And individually they are new creations walking in humility, gentleness, and patience

Our rituals are same. The commonality of a sky— The body is an instrument. A motley of sounds.

215. As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by DIFFERENT moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal—and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are MOTLEY-COLOURED.

A Poem of Madness Five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. There’s the primal urges, wound tight in nucleotidal strands. There’s the faith that surges through our clasped and superstitious hands. There’s the politics of kings and queens, and their many rules. There’s culture which forms mobs of motley fools. Last comes our decisions, stacked up in piles of regret that we long to forget.

Has it never occurred to you that that miserable clown may have a soul–a living, struggling human soul, tied down into that crooked hulk of a body and forced to slave for it? You that are so tender-hearted to everything–you that pity the body in its fool’s dress and bells–have you never thought of the wretched soul that has not even motley to cover its horrible nakedness? Think of it shivering with cold, stilled with shame and misery, before all those people–feeling their jeers that cut like a whip–their laughter, that burns like red-hot iron on the bare flesh! Think of it looking round–so helpless before them all–for the mountains that will not fall on it–for the rocks that have not the heart to cover it–envying the rats that can creep into some hole in the earth and hide; and remember that a soul is dumb–it has no voice to cry out–it must endure, and endure, and endure.

Never have I seen such a motley assemblage of characters. Except that we are at sea, I would believe that I had been abducted by a traveling circus. There are men here of every hue and size, also men whose race cannot be determined due to the indigo tattoos that cover their faces and arms. There are men with bullrings through their noses, with turbans large enough to hide a samovar, with gold thread braided into their hair, with scimitars lashed to their hips; some with teeth sharpened to points, some with no teeth at all. Many of the men have lost fingers, one has no ears, and not a few of them sport blistered patches upon their faces, necks, and forearms.

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present.

So while I do not expect to get over much, I know that my motley, beloved friends and I have only a short time together left on this merry-go-round, as it spins around the sun, rises and falls. At the same time, these friends are all sort of a marvelous mess: perfect and neurotic, driven and gentle, self-centered and crazily generous, fully alive and probably on their way out. They are chipped and slightly faded works of art, and they are the exact horse I’ve longed for, all my life.

In The Garret Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, All fashioned and filled, long ago, By children now in their prime. Four little keys hung side by side, With faded ribbons, brave and gay When fastened there, with childish pride, Long ago, on a rainy day. Four little names, one on each lid, Carved out by a boyish hand, And underneath there lieth hid Histories of the happy band Once playing here, and pausing oft To hear the sweet refrain, That came and went on the roof aloft, In the falling summer rain. 'Meg' on the first lid, smooth and fair. I look in with loving eyes, For folded here, with well-known care, A goodly gathering lies, The record of a peaceful life-- Gifts to gentle child and girl, A bridal gown, lines to a wife, A tiny shoe, a baby curl. No toys in this first chest remain, For all are carried away, In their old age, to join again In another small Meg's play. Ah, happy mother! Well I know You hear, like a sweet refrain, Lullabies ever soft and low In the falling summer rain. 'Jo' on the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of a wilful child, Hints of a woman early old, A woman in a lonely home, Hearing, like a sad refrain-- 'Be worthy, love, and love will come,' In the falling summer rain. My Beth! the dust is always swept From the lid that bears your name, As if by loving eyes that wept, By careful hands that often came. Death canonized for us one saint, Ever less human than divine, And still we lay, with tender plaint, Relics in this household shrine-- The silver bell, so seldom rung, The little cap which last she wore, The fair, dead Catherine that hung By angels borne above her door. The songs she sang, without lament, In her prison-house of pain, Forever are they sweetly blent With the falling summer rain. Upon the last lid's polished field-- Legend now both fair and true A gallant knight bears on his shield, 'Amy' in letters gold and blue. Within lie snoods that bound her hair, Slippers that have danced their last, Faded flowers laid by with care, Fans whose airy toils are past, Gay valentines, all ardent flames, Trifles that have borne their part In girlish hopes and fears and shames, The record of a maiden heart Now learning fairer, truer spells, Hearing, like a blithe refrain, The silver sound of bridal bells In the falling summer rain. Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, Four women, taught by weal and woe To love and labor in their prime. Four sisters, parted for an hour, None lost, one only gone before, Made by love's immortal power, Nearest and dearest evermore. Oh, when these hidden stores of ours Lie open to the Father's sight, May they be rich in golden hours, Deeds that show fairer for the light, Lives whose brave music long shall ring, Like a spirit-stirring strain, Souls that shall gladly soar and sing In the long sunshine after rain

What really gives people meaning and happiness is a combination of four things: Control over what they're doing, progress in what they're pursuing, being connected with others, and being part of something they enjoy that's bigger than themselves.

They were a motley assembly, each with some cause for anxiety stirring at his heart; though, after all, that is saying little or nothing, for we are all of us in the same predicament through life; each with a fear and a hope from childhood to death.

The Conqueror Worm Lo! 'tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And the angels sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

The Chorus Line: The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll Nine months he sailed the wine-red seas of his mother's blood Out of the cave of dreaded Night, of sleep, Of troubling dreams he sailed In his frail dark boat, the boat of himself, Through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed From the distant cave where the threads of men's lives are spun, Then measured, and then cut short By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent on their gruesome handcrafts, And the lives of women also are twisted into the strand. And we, the twelve who were later to die by his hand At his father's relentless command, Sailed as well, in the dark frail boats of ourselves Through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore-footed mothers Who were not royal queens, but a motley and piebald collection, Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped from serfs and strangers. After the nine-month voyage we came to shore, Beached at the same time as he was, struck by the hostile air, Infants when he was an infant, wailing just as he wailed, Helpless as he was helpless, but ten times more helpless as well, For his birth was longed-for and feasted, as our births were not. His mother presented a princeling. Our various mothers Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered, Foaled, whelped and kittened, brooded, hatched out their clutch. We were animal young, to be disposed of at will, Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used, discarded when bloomless. He was fathered; we simply appeared, Like the crocus, the rose, the sparrows endangered in mud. Our lives were twisted in his life; we also were children When he was a child, We were his pets and his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions. We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran as he ran, Though sandier, hungrier, sun-speckled, most days meatless. He saw us as rightfully his, for whatever purpose He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him, Rock him to sleep in the dangerous boats of ourselves. We did not know as we played with him there in the sand On the beach of our rocky goat-island, close by the harbour, That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold-eyed teenaged killer. If we had known that, would we have drowned him back then? Young children are ruthless and selfish: everyone wants to live. Twelve against one, he wouldn't have stood a chance. Would we? In only a minute, when nobody else was looking? Pushed his still-innocent child's head under the water With our own still-innocent childish nursemaid hands, And blamed it on waves. Would we have had it in us? Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood-red mazes, Tangling the lives of men and women together. Only they know how events might then have had altered. Only they know our hearts. From us you will get no answer.

Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, the one which was to rule the twelve tribes of Israel, and on earth, left crying out - My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendent in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth still walks barefoot.

Karl Marx already saw this in his time, writing in the Communist Manifesto: Wherever the bourgeoisie has come to dominate, it has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic conditions. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley bands that attached man to his natural superior, leaving no other bond between man than naked self-interest, inexorable “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentality in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

We came on the wind of the carnival. Eight and a half long years ago, on a wind that seemed to promise so much; a mad wind, full of confetti and scented with smoke and pancakes cooked by the side of the road. The pancake stall is still there, and the crowds that line the side of the street, and the flower-decked cart with its motley crew of fairies, wolves and witches. I bought a galette from that very stall. I bought one now, to remember. Still as good, just the right side of burnt, and the flavors- butter and salt and rye- help reawaken the memory.

Beauty is frightening," they will tell you — Lazily you will arrange A Spanish shawl on your shoulders, A red rose in your hair. "Beauty is simple," they will tell you — Clumsily with a motley shawl You will cover a child up, A red rose on the floor. But, distractedly heeding All the words sounding around you, Sadly lost in thought You will say about yourself: 'I am neither frightening nor simple; I am not so frightening, that I would simply Kill; I am not so simple That I do not know how frightening life is.' ("For Anna Akhmatova")

Jack watched as the rats saluted Motley then scampered back onto the window ledge. Motley gave Orin one more stern look. ‘Hope that’s a lesson to you!’ ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t allow females on the watch… too dangerous… their pelts are softer… make better hats.’ Orin

Why this book is disliked by gay readers: Captain Ernst Roehm, was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A.... (...) Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes. (...) The brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. (...) [Hitler] who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. (...) Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a café frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin S.A., had alerted the storm troopers...

At least he kept trying to express himself, his real self, as motley and inchoate for now as the outfit he was wearing. And maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something to work against, to press upon, as you attempted to fashion a self from the lump of contradictory impulses and emotions and paradigms that your mind and your culture presented.

The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it.

And heart's frosty discipline Exact as a snowflake. But here–a burgeoning Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits Into vulgar motley– A treason not to be borne. Let idiots Reel giddy in bedlam spring: She withdrew neatly. And round her house she set Such a barricade of barb and check Against mutinous weather As no mere insurgent man could hope to break With curse, fist, threat Or love, either.

The zero card–Le Mat, the Fool–has been likened to the material universe because the mortal sphere is the world of unreality. The lower universe, like the mortal body of man, is but a garment, a motley costume, well likened to cap and bells. Beneath the garments of the fool is the divine substance, however, of which the jester is but a shadow; this world is a Mardi Gras–a pageantry of divine sparks masked in the garb of fools.

Simple carbohydrates such as sponge cake, rice, or pasta make it through to the small intestine pretty quickly. There, they are digested and rapidly cause an increase in the levels of sugar in our blood. The doorman detains proteins and fats in the stomach for considerably longer. A piece of steak may easily be churned about for six hours before all of it has disappeared into the small intestine. This explains why we often fancy a sweet dessert after eating meat or fatty, fried foods. Our blood sugar levels are impatient and want to rise quickly, and dessert provides a quick blood sugar fix. Meals rich in carbohydrates may perk us up more quickly, but they do not keep us feeling full for as long as meaty or fatty meals. Small Intestine When the mini-morsels reach the small intestine, the real process of digestion begins. As it passes through this tube, the motley cake mush will almost completely disappear into its walls—a bit like Harry Potter on Platform 9¾. The small intestine pluckily pounces on the piece of cake. It squeezes it, hashes it up from all sides, wiggles its villi in what we might now call the cake chyme, and when it is thoroughly mixed, moves it on down the digestive line. Under the microscope we can see that even the microvilli help it along! They move up and down like tiny trampling feet.

A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; a miserable world! As I do live by food, I met a fool Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, Andrail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms and yet a motley fool. 'Good morrow, fool,' quoth I. 'No, sir,' quoth he, 'Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune:' And then he drew a dial from his poke, And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.' When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time, My lungs began to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative, And I did laugh sans intermission An hour by his dial. O noble fool! A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.

The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn't Michael at all. It was her. You fool...And which one was he? The Magician? She'd thought he was. She'd thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his cross tree. Unable to go backward or forward

So it is when we measure ourselves by God, we fall infinitely short; and when we compare ourselves with many who have given us inspiration, we feel a deep sense of unworthiness. But behind it all, and despite all of this, there is the tremendous consciousness of the mercy of God. He did not call angels to be priests; He called men. He did not make gold the vessel for his treasure; He made clay. The motley group of Apostles that He gathered about Him became more worthy through his mercy and compassion. I

Just as a countless multitude of churches, of monasteries with cupolas, domes and crosses is scattered across holy, pious Rus, so countless multitudes of tribes, generations and peoples throng in motley diversity and rush over the face of the earth. And each people that bears within it the pledge of mighty powers, and is filled with the creative capacities of soul, with its own bright singularity and other gifts from God, each has marked itself in its own original way with its own word, through which, in giving expression to any subject at all, it reflects, in so expressing, a part of its own character. With a deep knowledge of the heart and a wise grasp of life will the word of the Briton resound; like a flippant fop will the ephemeral word of the Frenchman glitter and burst; ingeniously will the German contrive his shrewdly spare word, which is not accessible to all; but there is no word so sweeping, so bold, so torn from under the heart itself, so bubbling and quivering with life, as the aptly uttered Russian word.

Does she ‘go crazy’? No, not at all: after a few moments of bewildered fugue, Heather Lelache accepts the ‘new’ world as the ‘true’ world, editing out the point of suture. This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.

But, without preaching, the truth may surely be borne in mind, that the bustle, and triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair exhibits in public, do not always pursue the performer into private life, and that the most dreary depression of spirits and dismal repentances sometimes overcome him. Recollection of the best ordained banquets will scarcely cheer sick epicures. Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties. Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object--to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.

Malcolm Gladwell put it best: "Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head -- even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

The gnarled pine, I would have said, touch it. This is China. Horticulturalists around the world have come to study it. Yet no one has ever been able to explain why it grows like a corkscrew, just as no one can adequately explain China. But like that tree, there it is, old, resilient, and oddly magnificent. Within that tree are the elements in nature that have inspired Chinese artists for centuries: gesture over geometry, subtlety over symmetry, constant flow over static form. And the temples, walk and touch them. This is China. Don't merely stare at these murals and statues. Fly up to the crossbeams, get down on your hands and knees, and press your head to the floor tiles. Hide behind that pillar and come eye to eye with its flecks of paint. Imagine that you are the interior decorator who is a thousand years in age. Start with a bit of Tibetan Buddhism, plus a dash each of animism and Taoism. A hodgepodge, you say? No, what is in those temples is an amalgam that is pure Chinese, a lovely shabby elegance, a glorious new motley that makes China infinitely intriguing. Nothing is ever completely thrown away and replaced. If one period of influence falls out of favor, it is patched over. The old views still exist, one chipped layer beneath, ready to pop through with the slightest abrasion. That is the Chinese aesthetic and also its spirit. Those are the traces that have affected all who have traveled along China's roads.

Declining peoples first lose their sense of moderation. They strive for isolated particulars, they fling themselves shortsightedly on narrow and trifling things, they raise the conditional above the universal; then they pursue pleasure and sensuality, they seek to gratify their hatred and envy of their neighbor, their art depicts what is one-sided, what is valid from one perspective only, then what is disjointed dissonant bizarre, eventually what excites and tantalizes the senses, and at last immorality and vice; in religion what is innermost degenerates to mere form or to opulent effusions, the distinction between good and evil fades, the individual scorns the whole, pursuing his pleasure and his ruin, and so this people falls victim to inner disarray or to an external foe more savage but stronger.

Let’s treat each other well, making more space for every sort of ragamuffin. We needn’t mistake unity with uniformity; we can have the first without the second. The breadth of God’s family is mercifully wide. Grace has no discernment, apparently. Jesus created a motley crew, plucking us from every context and inaugurating a piecemeal clan that has only ever functioned with mercy. We should be grabbing hands, throwing our heads back, and laughing that God saved us all, because surely this is the messiest family ever and He loves us anyway. Our shared redemption should keep us grateful and kind, because what other response even makes sense? May the world see a thankful, committed family who loves their God, adores their Savior, and can’t get enough of one another. This is a story that saves, a story that heals, and the right story to tell.

Has it never occurred to you that that miserable clown may have a soul–a living, struggling human soul, tied down into that crooked hulk of a body and forced to slave for it? You that are so tender-hearted to everything–you that pity the body in its fool’s dress and bells–have you never thought of the wretched soul that has not even motley to cover its horrible nakedness? Think of it shivering with cold, stilled with shame and misery, before all those people–feeling their jeers that cut like a whip–their laughter, that burns like red-hot iron on the bare flesh! Think of it looking round–so helpless before them all–for the mountains that will not fall on it–for the rocks that have not the heart to cover it–envying the rats that can creep into some hole in the earth and hide; and remember that a soul is dumb–it has no voice to cry out–it must endure, and endure, and endure.

I spent most of the afternoon tempering the new batch of couverture and working on the window display. A thick covering of green tissue paper for the grass. Paper flowers- daffodils and daisies, Anouk's contribution- pinned to the window frame. Green-covered tins that had once contained cocoa powder, stacked up against each other to make a craggy mountainside. Crinkly cellophane paper wraps it like a covering of ice. Running past and winding into the valley, a river of blue silk ribbon, upon which a cluster of houseboats sits quiet and unreflecting. And below, a procession of chocolate figures, cats, dogs, rabbits, some with raisin eyes, pink marzipan ears, tails made of licorice-whips, with sugar flowers between their teeth... And mice. On every available surface, mice. Running up the sides of the hill, nestling in corners, even on the riverboats. Pink and white sugar coconut mice, chocolate mice of all colors, variegated mice marbled through with truffle and maraschino cream, delicately tinted mice, sugar-dappled frosted mice. And standing above them, the Pied Piper resplendent in his red and yellow, a barley-sugar flute in one hand, his hat in the other. I have hundreds of molds in my kitchen, thin plastic ones for the eggs and the figures, ceramic ones for the cameos and liqueur chocolates. With them I can re-create any facial expression and superimpose it upon a hollow shell, adding hair and detail with a narrow-gauge pipe, building up torso and limbs in separate pieces and fixing them in place with wires and melted chocolate.... A little camouflage- a red cloak, rolled from marzipan. A tunic, a hat of the same material, a long feather brushing the ground at his booted feet. My Pied Piper looks a little like Roux, with his red hair and motley garb.

We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated. Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, “Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China.

It was this motley band of modest peeps and plovers on the beach who reminded me of the human beings I loved best - the ones who didn't fit in. These birds may or may not have been capable of emotion, but the way they looked, beleaguered there, few in number, my outcast friends, was how I felt. I'd been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize, but I could no longer remember why. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in other species, not to see them in yourself. To be hungry all the time, to be mad for sex, to not believe in global warming, to be shortsighted, to live without thought of your grandchildren, to spend half your life on personal grooming, to be perpetually on guard, to be compulsive, to be habit-bound, to be avid, to be unimpressed with humanity, to prefer your own kind: these were all ways of being like a bird. Later in the evening, in posh, necropolitan Naples, on a sidewalk outside a hotel whose elevator doors were decorated with huge blowups of cute children and the monosyllabic injunction SMILE, I spotted two disaffected teenagers, two little chicks, in full Goth plumage, and I wished that I could introduce them to the brownish-gray misfits on the beach.

Lo! ’tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly — Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama! — oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased forever more, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out — out are the lights — out all! And over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

There is, perhaps, no class of men on the face of the earth, says Captain Bonneville, who lead a life of more continued exertion, peril, and excitement, and who are more enamored of their occupations, than the free trappers of the West. No tail, no danger, no privation can turn the trapper from his pursuit. His passionate excitement at times resembles mania. In vain may the most vigilant and cruel savages best his path, in vain may rocks and precipices and wintry torrents oppose his progress, let but a single track of a beaver meet his eye, and he forgets all the dangers and defies all difficulties. At times, he may be seen with his traps on his shoulder, buffeting his way across rapid streams, amidst floating blocks of ice: at other times, he is to be found with his traps swung on his back clambering the most rugged mountains, scaling or descending the most frightful precipices, searching, by routes inaccessible to the horse, and never before trodden by white man, for springs and lakes unknown to his comrades, and where he may meet with his favorite game. Such is the mountaineer, the hardy trapper of the West, and such, as we have slightly sketched it, is the wild, Robin Hood kind of life, with all its strange and motley populace, now existing in full vigor among the Rocky Mountains.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, the one which was to rule the twelve tribes of Israel, and on earth, left crying out—My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendant in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth still walks barefoot.