Once you realise that, willy nilly, you’re inside the Monad, you give it up. You’re inside it and you always will be. Therefore, Jonah, sit still in the whale’s belly, and have a look round. For you’ll never measure the whale, since you’re inside him.
And then you see it’s a fourth dimension, with all sorts of gods and goddesses in it. That brown hen, who, being a Rhode Island Red, is big and stuffy like plush-upholstery, is of course, a goddess in her own rights. If I myself had to make a poem to her, I should begin:
Oh my flat-footed plush armchair
So commonly scratching in the yard—!
But this poem would only reveal my own limitations.
Because Flat-foot is the favourite of the white leghorn cock, and he shakes the tid-bit for her with a most wooing noise, and when she lays an egg, he bristles like a double white poppy, and rushes to meet her, as she flounders down from the chicken-house, and his echo of her I’ve-laid-an-egg cackle is rich and resonant. Every pine-tree on the mountains hears him:
She’s} laid an egg!
I’ve }
She’s} laid an egg!
I’ve }
And his poem would be:
“Oh you who make me feel so good, when you sit next me on the perch
At night! (temporarily, of course!)
Oh you who make my feathers bristle with the vanity of life!
Oh you whose cackle makes my throat go off like a rocket!
Oh you who walk so slowly, and make me feel swifter
Than my boss!
Oh you who bend your head down, and move in the under
Circle, while I prance in the upper!
Oh you, come! come! come! for here is a bit of fat from
The roast veal; I am shaking it for you.”
In the fourth dimension, in the creative world, we live in a pluralistic universe, full of gods and strange gods and unknown gods; a universe where that Rhode Island Red hen is a goddess in her own right and the white cock is a god indisputable, with a little red ring on his leg: which the boss put there.