August Personage, about to leave the phone booth at the Automat on Fortieth Street and the Avenue of the Americas, catches a flash of plastic on the floor. Bending, he picks up a pornographic tarot card, which he quickly shoves into a pocket to be examined at leisure later.
It was the Five of Pentacles.
And, when the throne room was empty and the believers had departed in wonder and redoubled faith, Hassan knelt and separated the two halves of the vessel which held the head of Ibn Azif. "Very convincing screams," he commented, slipping the trapdoor beneath the plate; and Ibn Azif climbed out, grinning at his own performance. His neck was thick, bull-like, undamaged, and quite solid.
THE FIFTH TRIP, OR GEBURAH
Swift-Kick, Inc
And, behold, thusly was the Law formulated:
IMPOSITION OF ORDER = ESCALATION OF CHAOS!
–Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst,
"The Gospel According to Fred," The Honest Book of Truth
The lights flashed; the computer buzzed. Hagbard attached the electrodes.
On January 30, 1939, a silly little man in Berlin gave a silly little speech; among other things, he said: "And another thing I wish to say on this day which perhaps is memorable not only for us Germans: in my life I have many times been a prophet and most of the times I have been laughed at. During the period of my struggle for power, it was in the first case the Jews that laughed at my prophecies that some day I would take over the leadership of the State and thereby of the whole folk and that I would among other things solve also the Jewish problem. I believe that in the meantime the hyenalike laughter of the Jews of Germany has been smothered in their throats. Today I want to be a prophet once more: if the international-finance Jews inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war the consequence will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." And so on. He was always saying things like that. By 1939 quite a few heads here and there realized that the silly little man was also a murderous little monster, but only a very small number even of these noticed that for the first time in his anti-Semitic diatribes he had used the word Vernichtung-annihilation- and even they couldn't believe he meant what that implied. In fact, outside of a small circle of friends, nobody guessed what the little man, Adolf Hitler, had planned.
Outside that small- very small- circle of friends, others came in intimate contact with der Fuhrer and never guessed what was in his mind. Hermann Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, for instance, was a devout Nazi until he began to get some hints of where Hitler's fancies were tending; after fleeing to France, Rauschning wrote a book warning against his former leader. It was called The Voice of Destruction and was very eloquent, but the most interesting passages in it were not understood by Rauschning or by most of his readers. "Whoever sees in National Socialism nothing but a political movement doesn't know much about it," Hitler told Rauschning, and this is in the book, but Rauschning and his readers continued to see National Socialism as a particularly vile and dangerous political movement and nothing more. "Creation is not yet completed," Hitler said again; and Rauschning again recorded, without understanding. "The planet will undergo an upheaval which you uninitiated people can't understand," der Fuhrer warned on another occasion; and, still another time, he remarked that Nazism was, not only more than a political movement, but "more than a new religion"; and Rauschning wrote it all and understood none of it. He even recorded the testimony of Hitler's physician that the silly and murderous little man often awoke screaming from nightmares that were truly extraordinary in their intensity and would shout, "It's HIM, it's HIM, HE'S come for me!" Good old Hermann Rauschning, a German of the old school and not equipped to participate in the New Germany of National Socialism, took all this as evidence of mental unbalance in Hitler…
All of them coming back, all of them. Hitler and Streicher and Goebbels and the powers behind them what look like something you can't even imagine, guvnor….
You think they was human, the patient went on as the psychiatrist listened in astonishment, but wait till you see them the second time. And they're coming-By the end of the month, they're coming…
Karl Haushofer was never tried at Nuremberg; ask most people to name the men chiefly responsible for the Vernichtung (annihilation) decision, and his name will not be mentioned; even most histories of Nazi Germany relegate him to footnotes. But strange stories are told about his many visits to Tibet, Japan, and other parts of the Orient; his gift for prophecy and clairvoyance; the legend that he belonged to a bizarre sect of dissident and most peculiar Buddhists, who had entrusted him with a mission in the Western world so serious that he vowed to commit suicide if he did not succeed. If the last yarn is true, Haushofer must have failed in his mission, for in March 1946 he killed his wife Martha and then performed the Japanese suicide-rite of sepukku upon himself. His son, Albrecht, had already been executed for his role in the "officer's plot" to assassinate Hitler. (Of his father, Albrecht had written in a poem: "My father broke the seal/He did not feel the breath of the Evil One/He set It free to roam the world!")
It was Karl Haushofer, clairvoyant, mystic, medium, Orientalist, and fanatic believer in the lost continent of Thule, who introduced Hitler to the Illuminated Lodge in Munich, in 1923. Shortly thereafter, Hitler made his first bid to seize power.
No rational interpretation of the events of August 1968 in Chicago, satisfactory to all participants and observers, has yet been produced. This suggests the need for value-free models, inspired by the structural analysis in von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which will allow us to express what actually occurred functionally, without tainting our analysis with bias or moral judgments. The model we will employ is that of two teams, an uphill motorcar race and a downhill bicycle race, accidentally intersecting on the same hill. The Picasso statue in the Civic Center will be regarded as "start" for the downhill motorcar race and "finish" for the uphill bicycle race. Pontius Pilate, disguised as Sirhan Sirhan, fires the opening shot, thereby disqualifying Robert F. Kennedy, for whom Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, as recorded in the most trustworthy tabloids and scandal sheets.
THIS IS THE VOICE OF YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER MAN SPEAKING. YOU MUST REALIZE THAT YOU ARE NOT JOSEPH WENDELL MALIK.
Hell's Angels on motorcycles do not fit the structure of the race at all, so they endlessly orbit around the heroic statue of General Logan in Grant Park ("finish" for the uphill crucifixion racers) and can be considered as isolated from the "action," which is, of course, America.
When Jesus falls the first time, this can be considered as a puncture and Simon operates an air pump on his tires, but the threat to throw LSD in the water supply constitutes a "foul" and this team thereby is driven back three squares by Mace, clubs, and the machine guns of the Capone mob unleashed from another time track in the same multiverse. Willard Gibbs, far more than Einstein, created the modern cosmos, and his concept of contingent or statistical reality, when cross-fertilized with the Second Law of Thermodynamics by Shannon and Wiener, led to the definition of information as the negative reciprocal of probability, making the clubbings of Jesus by Chicago cops just another of those things that happens in this kind of quantum jump.