VOLUME 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS A TOPAZ UNDER MY PILLOW FEBRUARY 17, 1600 Giordano weaves in and out of consciousness, in and out of immortality, hovers above his body. The time between then and now is an instant and all knowledge comes in the shape of one's metaphor by which he is judged.   "I feel cheated, robbed, hoodwinked, bamboozled, wool was carefully maneuvered over my eyes, noodles were cleverly draped from my ears, my life was parlayed into a poker-faced lie."   "Good luck, to all of you in the future, swaying the world with your private set of life defining, crowd controlling symbols. Good luck cramming that cholesterol sausage down throats of ordinary, TV enlightened beings. Good luck keeping the eons of forbidden knowledge away from information junkies and gossip peddlers. God speed, you third millennium, give 'em hell, you snarky little techno-babble-talkers." *   It could've been so much easier just to say what Coleridge was trying to say: seeking a language of symbols for something luminous already inside. Hidden truth or internal nature, my inscape sustains me as a word, a symbol, Logos, Creator, Evolver!   Divine creative power in Man gives the world its form and significance, fulfills a need. You can't burn it, singe it, tear it out, unlearn it, scare it out of anyone who knows, firmly, now that the man behind the curtain, so easy to expose, is no longer in charge.   To think that men slept in their own fear, mediocrity and narrow-minded, misplaced, imported culture for over a thousand years before one dared to pursue an original thought!   You could SAY it was the printed book that carried knowledge to the masses at the price of excluding all but the rarest, quintessential thought, dragging its bare-walled austerity along like a celibatarian, monastic world order.   Readers of the pure and impartial word, keepers of the busy hive of ideas. Ferrymen of the vast ink, river of stench, clink of silver, shuffle of rags and curses; and all men possessing the power of God yet could not even turn like worms from their own disaster, their howling star.   Desire, secretive and deadly, a murderous creature... waits like a scorpion to get what it wants intrigued by all the misery in the world. Could I, Giordano Bruno, best-known philosophical mind of the Italian Renaissance, a Dominican priest, be accused of heresy?   I, Giordano Bruno, who slept with a topaz beneath my pillow, culling the embers of my dreams, savored the teary glaze of pure intention frozen by love. I, who taught theology at Toulouse, who found favor with Henry III, Giordano Bruno who went to England and taught at Oxford? read my own poetry aloud to Queen Elizabeth. Who went back to Venice only to be imprisoned by the Inquisition and refusing to recant all those love poems to God, was burned as a heretic? Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake like a devil's disciple?   Desire, secretive and deadly, a murderous creature, her secrets, her jealousies drive me to rage, and sharp tempers pull me closer to the edge.   My philosophy owed much to Aquinas, and Copernicus, how his Sun heats up my world, John Scotus Erigena, Nicholas of Cusa, the old Hermetic, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico the cabalist. ...De Umbris Idearum In my book On Shadows of Ideas, I picture nature in all its diversity, one pan-ecclesiastical magic, diving down from supernal unity, and down to matter and darkness. I distinguish God from the world, yet hold that God is everywhere. This is divine immanence, reality constituted by the mind. Both Leibniz and Spinoza agree with me ... now.   Earth or man are not central to the divine, we are accidents of a single living world substance, the weight of every human heart in a metaphor, because one dared to touch earth and in that pure rapture of understanding became the universe, became the Sun.   O Venus, my starry eye, my feather; your secrets pull me closer to the one.   image from Wikipedia   bkgr: singed, JWDesign 2011 poem based partly on Magus,  a thesis by Amanda Yates * partial quote by John Malone of TCI, 1990's music: GabrieliCansonePerSonareLaSpiritata.mid   ©Jimmy Warner Design, 2011