It has occurred to Tom that the world should have direction. That it is not merely Tom, or the people, or the dead that should be awakened. There is something missing in a world, in an entire existence, that is dumb and mute and blind to dreams and the sacred fire.<\/p>\n
That the work of his hat cannot be complete \u2014<\/p>\n
That the lens of his kether-hat cannot be complete \u2014<\/p>\n
Until the entire world is driven by it, animated by it, perfected;<\/em> caught up by and refined into a single dream.<\/p>\n There are moral issues here. He ignores them.<\/p>\n There are conceptual issues. These receive more of his concern. He is a generous master and a generous servant; he does not want the world to be bound exactly to his<\/em> dream, but to awaken to a purpose of its own. Yet it is transparent to him, who has never seen the first of the sene-goats, that the world is only his conception \u2014 that the drive in him, the life, the dream, the purpose, that which he calls the sacred fire, is bounded entirely within him, a thing arising only when<\/em> within him, rather than being something he can simply cut his wrists and pour out onto the clay.<\/p>\n So he pulls up a chair.<\/p>\n He sits before his private pair of scissors.<\/p>\n He stares.<\/p>\n He tells them: \u201cI seem to have made myself into one thing, and one thing alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Light glints from his eyes to the scissors\u2019 blades, and light they glint they back.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have already known this,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have already been \u2014 two things, made one, and jointed. A dead thing, made to live. A single thing, brought by reflection and transmission, into part of a greater whole. I know that you are evil.\u201d<\/p>\n He reaches for them. He looks down. He lets his hand fall.<\/p>\n \u201cI know that this is an error. I know that you don\u2019t want<\/em> to help me. But you don\u2019t have to be bad. You don\u2019t have to be wicked. You are probably the only inanimate object in all this great world of inanimate objects that can possibly \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n Tom shrugs.<\/p>\n \u201cUnderstand. You would have been \u2014 I mean, if you weren\u2019t just a pair of scissors, you would have been welcome, you know? We could have been, like, Tom, Linus, Edmund, scissors, and Jane.\u201d<\/p>\n If there is anything in this hypothetical invitation to the Doom Team that moves the nonexistent heart of the pair of scissors floating in the vacuum environment in the middle of Tom\u2019s upside-down Vault of Forbidden Things, they do not show it. They simply float and engage in rotation, there, glinting and gnashing their two shining blades.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, anyway,\u201d says Tom.<\/p>\n He dries his eye. He grins.<\/p>\n \u201cTime for science.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The scissors have always had a data channel. There has always been something in them that would listen to the voice of light, and speak it back.<\/p>\n He pulls down his scissors shades over his eyes.<\/p>\n He squints. The pupils and the irises of his eyes reflect a light. They gleam with dream-wroth; they send it out; and modulating it \u2014 bit by bit \u2014 through his scissors-shades, he offers them himself, unspools the whole of him, turns it into data, speaks it to the scissors-mind as a single word: TOM<\/strong><\/p>\n Or, arguably, LIFE<\/strong><\/p>\n As if to say: I am here, I am I, and you are here, and you are you; let us not be alone.<\/em><\/p>\n And because he is Tom, the scissors understand him. They take him in, the whole of them. They feel the truth of him.<\/p>\n Then they scissor, and Tom is cut.<\/p>\n Thus do scissors always deal with those who are One Thing, when they encounter them. For it is the role of scissors to make one thing, into two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has occurred to Tom that the world should have direction. That it is not merely Tom, or the people, or the dead that should be awakened. There is something missing in a world, in an entire existence, that is dumb and mute and blind to dreams and the sacred fire. That the work of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-5-33-experiment-58","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Scissors-Large.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6053,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5667\/revisions\/6053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5667"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}