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by Handel. Fat and I used to listen to my Seraphim LP of Richard Lewis singing it.
Deeper, and deeper still.
    Once I told Fat that another aria on the record described his mind perfectly.
    "Which aria?" Fat said guardedly.
    "
Total
eclipse,"Ianswered.

    "Total eclipse! no sun, no moon,
    All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
    Oh, glorious light! no cheering ray
    To glad my eyes with welcome day!
    Why thus deprived Thy prime decree?
    Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!"

    To which Fat said, "The opposite is true in my case. I am illuminated by holy light fired at me from another world. I see what no other man sees."
    He had a point there.

3

    A question we had to learn to deal with during the dope decade was, How do you break the news to someone that his brains are fried? This issue had now passed over into Horselover Fat's theological world as a problem for us -- his friends -- to field.
    It would have been simple to tie the two together in Fat's case: the dope he did during the Sixties had pickled his head on into the Seventies. If I could have arranged it so that I could think so I would have; I like solutions that answer a variety of problems simultaneously. But I really couldn't think so. Fat hadn't done psychedelics, at least not to any real extent. Once, in 1964, when Sandoz LSD-25 could still be acquired -- especially in Berkeley -- Fat had dropped one huge hit of it and had abreacted back in time or had shot forward in time or up outside of time; anyhow he had spoken in Latin and believed that the
Dies Irae,
the Day of Wrath, had come. He could hear God thumping tremendously, in fury. For eight hours Fat had prayed and whined in Latin. Later he claimed that during his trip he could only think in Latin and talk in Latin; he had found a book with a Latin quotation in it, and could read it as easily as he normally read English. Well, perhaps the etiology of his later God-madness lay there. His brain, in 1964, liked the acid trip and taped it, for future replay.
    On the other hand, this line of reasoning merely relegates the question back to 1964. As far as I can determine, the
    
    
    ability to read, think and speak in Latin is not normal for an acid trip. Fat knows no Latin. He can't speak it now. He couldn't speak it before he dropped the huge hit of Sandoz LSD-25. Later, when his religious experiences began, he found himself thinking in a foreign language which he did
not
understand (he had understood his own Latin in '64). Phonetically, he had written down some of the words, remembered at random. To him they constituted no language at all, and he hesitated to show anyone what he had put on paper. His wife -- his later wife Beth -- had taken a year of Greek in college and she recognized what Fat had written down, inaccurately, as
koine
Greek. Or at least Greek of some sort, Attic or
koine.
    The Greek word
koine
simply means
common.
By the time of the New Testament, the
koine
had become the
lingua franca
of the Middle East, replacing Aramaic which had previously supplanted Akkadian (I know these things because I am a professional writer and it is essential that I possess a scholarly knowledge about languages). The New Testament manuscripts survived in
koine
Greek, although probably Q, the source of the synoptics, had been written in Aramaic, which is in fact a form of Hebrew. Jesus spoke Aramaic. Thus, when Horselover Fat began to think in
koine
Greek, he was thinking in the language which St. Luke and St Paul -- who were close friends -- had used, at least to write with. The
koine
looks funny when written down because the scribes left no spaces between the words. This can lead to a lot of peculiar translations, since the translator gets to put the spaces wherever he feels is appropriate or in fact wherever he wants. Take this English instance:

    GOD IS NO WHERE
    GOD IS NOW HERE

    Actually, these matters were pointed out to me by Beth, who never took Fat's religious experiences seriously until she saw him write down