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a pantheistic deity. The normal mind is only aware of its trinity of subject, agent, and object, such as when a man says I know myself . This is obviously a little different from saying I walk the dog because in the former the self is divided into three parts: the subject I who has the power or agency to know the object myself . Of course, Saint Augustine used this minor trinity as an analogy of a Triune God, and the saint’s presumption—once again, of course—was divine arrogance in microcosm. Following him, this spirit of confidence began to fester in the western world, and it spread into every appendage, until even the dirty, toothless peasant boys were professing that man was the center of the universe. It was a pandemic disease. The Cartesians, persisting under the same delusion, convinced themselves that I think was a sturdy foundation for certainty. We remained solid and certain for centuries, so we powdered our white wigs and swallowed the keys to the locked boxes of our maidens’ crotches. That was all splendid until our arrogance slowly began to crumble, and the body—which had been suppressed by our arrogance—began to figure as the main factor in our thinking. But we weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Diogenes re-lit his lantern. Philosophers started carrying hammers into the marketplace. The psychologists then came along with their scalpels and cut up the subject I into little bits, and they replaced the soul with a void. The first premise I —let alone the know and the myself —was all mutilated.
    Now, we have the soulless man living in a fractured mind.
    We can’t ask the soulless man who he is, nor categorize him by characteristics and qualities. Once possibility becomes as real as actuality, man is nothing definite but everything potentially. In man, the order of being has been reserved. At one time, Aristotle would’ve had us think that prime matter was at the lowest echelon, as some type of gob without form, just waiting to be shaped—while at the highest echelon was the wholly actualized and definite, pondering its own perfection. But now, in man, the definite has become the limited, boxed in, and stifled, though still pondering itself under the delusion that it is a whole. Yet the soulless man is as polymorphic as prime matter; he is always becoming but never being, and though he is becoming, he becomes toward no end—
    Or better yet, just forgive me now. Just ignore me. My god, my god, my god. Like any normal man, or even like a twelve-year-old boy, I should be able to speak clearly, without all this rambling. Yes, I confess, I was horny. After my anxiety had left me, I languished alone in my apartment, feeling the tug of desire. All my babbling has come to this little head: I was desperately and wickedly horny. But for my body, my body, my body. Hungry and obsessed with food, I starved myself, and all my rationalizations and reveries fail to explain such desiccation.
    Some women have beautiful mouths, and some women rise out of chairs, and they sit down in chairs, and some women tilt their heads, and their skirts sway with the movement of their hips, and some women yield a power in their eyes, which is soft and kind and warm, and more alluring than a siren’s song. All the while, their limbs exude sexuality like a sticky scent. They move among us, in the office, on the college campus, at the checkout line in the grocery store. These women have become their bodies. Most women, however, reserved from moment to moment, become their bodies more fully when the lights are low; against the drowsy backdrop of night, against the rhythm of a beating heart, something inside of them begins to hum and glow. But meanwhile, in a sad city apartment, a tall, awkward, pale man leaned over his sink, conscious of his own absurdity. His sexuality wasn’t so much a lure, an enticement, as it was an offense.
    Although this thought bothered me for long stretches