John T. Smieska III

2 What is the case- a fact- is the existence of states of affairs.
The wife of Caesar must dwell above suspicion. There were rumors in the silt of your
passions. They would rise up and heat your blood. You could see them materialize, from
fantasy to life: midnight orgies with champagne stains, Josephine’s face twisted in the
excesses of pleasure. Greek gowns torn in the moonlight to reveal oiled breasts, and
necks bruised under the endurance of pleasure. Theresia and Fortunee writhing their hips
while their grey tongues curled at the tip. The rumors grew heavy; she was the lover of
Barras when you first met her. You wanted her: this woman whose body was a strategy, this woman who plundered her own pleasures.
The salt of desire can make a rust of trust. Rumors of Charles, of public and wanton
extravagance in the theatres: as if to point that destiny is a cuckold. Cannons through
the streets could not fight the logic of mobs turned against you toward a sky of
whispers. Her actions wrote the punchline to your praise. “Napoleon conquered Austria:
Too bad, he could not conquer his wife.” “In an hour Napoleon brushed away an army of
Mamelukes: An hour he should have spent brushing away at his wife.”

2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).
Had you loved your Josephine? Had you lost? Had you commanded?
Yes, of course. You love her. She is prized among the phantoms of your nostalgia. You love her ever more as a place, some garden in your thoughts. You hate her, scold her sometimes there, she is barbed and twined around these wounded passions that refuse to die. She is a treasure in your collection: your gilded box with rusty hinges.
You have merely chased and hounded so much smoke through the mist and fog. You have twirled and puffed through life planting your next fantasy in the belly of the one that houses you. You are the Midas of slipping: Everything you touch for becomes reaching.
You crave the next room and the exit within every thought that comes to let you rest: within every thought you have entered from the last.

2.011 It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs.
You are a hack philosopher dreaming in solitude. Your ideas were only small, urgent, and trivial enough to get realized; no reputable metaphysician would claim them. You have played Alexander, Caesar, Washington, Hannibal, and Louis XIV. You have ever been a great man’s double, the energies of the past had only burped themselves into the vapors of your actions. You are less a man of genius than a man immune to his own inexcusably contagious ignorance. It was told to the world that you were a condensation; that you were one thousand legends rising to the fashion of a second coming. Yet you could not claim to keep a measured strength between a cavalry and a navy. You could not simultaneously maintain some heir to the fate of your crown and still capture some internal destiny to hold an obsession for a wife.

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

There was a pause in the impression of your arrival. You were greeted at the hearth of the myth of Caesar; A foreign servant held his palms together in order to make his observances more expressive. The flies were so many and fat that they weighed down the lids of dead eyes. You held a watermelon to eclipse the sun, against a horizon of hardness, dry dust and rocks of chalk and clay. Blood dried quickly enough to flutter on beards like crepe-paper on cardboard carriages. Josephine was keeping all the servants in the garden house. Josephine was creeping up to Charles and his guest room on the second floor. Josephine was scoffing at your letters in the salons, and already you had slapped a soldier’s grimace with your gloves: and the soldier kept his ribbon because the scowl was caused by such a rosy posy poxy goiter that the plague had pulled the skin beneath his jaw. You had every newspaper, so this must not be an accident; this must not be a shame. You could omit the dying from the permanence of chisels; each independent brave display could become a chink within the mighty chain of your command. Even Caesar had a destiny with flowers like a dog that could not find the whistle’s edge. This must not be an accident. To perforate the suffering, to inhale flies and cough out air, you searched the lamps for any shadows of your kohl-eyed Cleopatra. In the silhouettes of army tents you found your own Bathsheba with her lips against a sword.

2.0121 It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own…If things can exist in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning. (Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.) Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so to there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. If I can imagine objects combined into states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.

She was your friend. You suffered through the nervous departures to uncertain wars. You suffered through sex and jealousy. You suffered through shopping and decorating and barren wombs. You suffered through luxury and endless workloads. You suffered through gossips and mobs. You suffered through these barriers because you wanted a deep witness to your remarkable life. Josephine was a deep witness to your remarkable life. She understood your life; she was your friend, she craved to be with you in your depths. You knew she would always be your friend. You feared the possibility that if your marriage had to end in friendship: than the friendship was the lasting thing and the marriage must have been a mistake. Could you imagine a marriage combined with no children, when you imagined a wife combined with no friendship? You wanted a deep witness to love you beyond your endangered life, to find your core and plant it in a time beyond your death. You wanted to be an intercession agent for the future historians, the people and the divine: a votive candle for Napoleon, patron saint of conquest, power, and merit. You wanted to feel like there were no combinations, possibilities, or accidents. The newspapers reported what you told them the news had to be. You wanted to live life as if you, simply, were remembering the future.

2.0122 Things are independent insofar as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is possible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves and in propositions.)

Your name is only a part of your legend.
Her name is only a part of your legend. The Josephine that is a part of your legend is different from the Josephine whose name is only a part of her own legend.
When you called her name, you conjured her; but you only conjured the parts of her that are within the domains of your own memories. You do not conjure the Josephine that comes back to her senses. You do not conjure the Josephine that could easily adjust her shawl or tuck in her dress. You do not conjure the Josephine that spills out like water into your cupped hands. You cannot conjure the Josephine that endures in the music of crickets or the pince-nez of a cadet. You cannot conjure the Josephine that reaches out into the vastness beyond the limitations of your own experience. Josephine disintegrates at the moment you begin to think about her. You cannot postpone her. She is opposed to copies and corners.
You carry her name in your hidden tensions and display her in last impressions; She is lost to new justifications for power and approval. She is a disturbance, and you lose her in sections. You lose slender arms, and the sound of her voice. You lose the species of dog she favored, and her wink from the prompt of seduction. You lose the jealous void and her words over Marie-Louise. You lose your fantasy of her holding the King of Rome as her own. You lose her breasts huddled in a corset. You lose the expectations of her comfort when you awake from dreaming that you have been split and torn by wolves. When you think of her, you can barely see a face at all.
Finally you lose her name.

2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later.

Without a strategic-objective, you are simply going through endless disjointed exercises of action.
You have, at any moment all that you need to penetrate your thoughts, your feelings, and your imagination. You have only to rely on art. You could spend your life searching for signs of God or the devil within the people that you encounter; this could be your strategic-objective. You could spread joy or comfort into other peoples’ lives. This could suffice for a strategic-objective: You could defame charlatans, or even seduce plain or ugly women.
So, Why are you going through these endless disjointed exercises of action?
If you know yourself, beyond your placement, beyond your name, beyond your yearnings, beyond your sufferings, beyond your memories: If you know yourself, beyond the way you think that you know others, beyond what you believe your influence may or may not be: If you know yourself, beyond regrets, beyond lessons or decisions that you wish you had not made in haste: If you know yourself, beyond what you have omitted, or what you have appropriated: If you know yourself, above all, you should never be surprised or caught off guard with what you find.
You must adjust your strategic-objective; To know yourself, there cannot be any possibility of action that you have left unconsidered. If you know yourself, each action works to fortify the next. You must adjust your strategic-objective. You must not wait until later to be born a king.

2.01231 If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties.

To the world’s dull eyes, the emperor has stayed inside to avoid the rain. You have locked the doors to your own bedchamber. To the world’s dull eyes, he has relaxed his voice and dismissed both his secretary and valet. You have drawn the curtains by yourself and lit the candles in the chandelier.
You hold an empty glass vial with a leather strap. It contained the poison you would drink, should you be captured by the Cossacks’ hordes. You drank the contents empty long ago: It was a long ago moment of fear. Now you hold an empty vial, like a private sign from destiny. You are swimming in the current of your own vital force, there was never a friendly shore, and your feet cannot touch the bottom. You are only swimming in the current of your own vital force; to the current you are indiscernible from a branch, or a barrel, or a corpse.
To the world’s dull eyes, the emperor is privately planning some festive parade. The worst part is that you require a high degree of gross incompetence surrounding you at every given time. You are a man who spoils the spectacle from the balcony; you shout through the hushed suspense because you’ve seen it in the dressed rehearsals. You marvel at your own command and insight into the human stage. The worst part is that they revolt from the art every time that they call you their king.
To the world’s dull eyes they are whispering oaths and loyal to their emperor. Even now, you depend only on the incompetence of Bourbons to be remembered. You made yourself the Emperor: now, some other has made you the emperor. No one understood: you were more than an Emperor; you were the Emperor-maker. You could make kings and widows and nations and heroes. You could make Empresses, Princes, prisoners and generals. You only spoke what you saw underneath, and the exterior changed to become what you saw.
To the world’s dull eyes you have only lost status, or power, or rank. Do not gaze too intently into the world’s dull eyes, when perhaps, you have lost the privilege to speak or even the privilege to see.

2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.

All change is only a mingling or separation of things. Within everything there must be a portion of everything else. Elba must contain a little bit of France and France must contain a little bit of Elba. If there is water in your breath there must be a portion of your breath that has dispersed into the water. If you are Napoleon and Elba and France, you are also Alexander and Caesar and Josephine. You are Octavius, Lepidus, and Antony. You are Jacquard, John Dalton and Louis Lenormand. You are the star of your destiny and all the stars of Joseph Lalande. You are a cuirassier’s scabbard and the dagger of Marcus Brutus.

If your island is the world, then all that can happen in the world, can happen on your island. The predominant qualities are founded upon a mixture of all the possible qualities. Does this define the stability of category: some rough proximity to sameness? Is there some obtainable command of the constituents that rules what ever seems to be?

2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of logical states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.

You are alone, and no one misses you.
That is what it means to be exiled; it means that you are alive, but existing apart from the relationships that you long to interact within. You are separated from the meaningful joy, and the meaningful sadness. The absence is not meaningful, because distance does not feel like permanence; you are still faint and barely legible, but you have been erased, you must only wait until the moment when you have been written-over entirely.

You can no longer impress the person that you yearn to impress. Each action is contained; it is stifled even in the impulse to perform it. It is foolish to speak of sadness, as if it were some independent mood, when each action is connected to some audience that can never be again.
The absence is not meaningful, because it is never real or truly absence. The moments are never empty; they simply mix with impulses that must fade. The sunrise happens, and you want to tell your feelings to your Josephine but she is not able: so the sunrise dies as each feeling to share it fades within your heart.

Exile is a relentless course of pining. Either: You must begin with your meaning from a new fresh start. You must hook your thoughts and accomplishments to the small things that happen all around you. You must make a universe of your stump, and compare it only to the sapling that you planted yesterday. Or: You must count the days until your sweet desired life can learn of your accomplishments apart. You must imagine future encouragement as a reward for every bead of sweat. You must live your life as a story you are waiting to tell, and catalogue the days, with marked consistency, until you tell it.
Sadly, exile will tangle your will. Your fresh start will burn your catalogue one day, and then the next; your story will fall into the pit that you have made, of a prison for a stump.

2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. ( A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some color: it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch, some degree of hardness, and so on.

Do not grip that thought that makes you cry: that thought that wants to make you cry.
You must not push it back into a basket of other distractions, diversions, and thoughts. It only rises up again, like it has always been there. Each time you push it down, it rises up, larger and with more purity. Speak it. Let it go. Give it to the breeze. Do not let it agitate and inflame your brain; release it, give it wings, and let it fly. You know that this is the secret life of many powerful men.

To be a king is to be a disappointed man. The thought that wants to make you cry can only make you cry because you assign to it the quality of sadness. It is a sad thought because you accent its sadness, the very way that you might innocently declare a string of notes to be a melody. On its own, the thought is just a thought. With proximity and continuation for other maudlin and pitiable ideas, the thought becomes a sad one. A sad thought is just a thought situated within sad space. A sad thought lingers, there is a harmony with the sad space. If the mind yearns for beauty, then there is a consonance achieved by a sad thought resonating perfectly and surrounded, like a chord, in the holy body of sad space. The mind yearns to hold it, because it seems to yield significance and meaning to the landscape of sad space.

Make dissonance your art. Be dissatisfied with everything. Find fault and cheated expectations. Declare that the thought that wants to make you cry is not sad enough to break your heart. Rummage every word choice for a sadder expression to throw into the tragic space of sadness. You must seek to find a thought so sad that no substitute will fill your need, your living hope for sadness. If you can stay in the scarecrow long enough to make a simple art of sadness, then you might be well set for the comedies of any other passing moods.

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

You may experience peace; but you will never experience a moment of stillness. Abstractions crumble into the curl of the concrete, as generalizations move towards specifics. They dip away and swirl into the pool of contrast. At some level they are disbanded into the procession of similarity and caked again into the concentrated sludge of some basic generality. This is the revolution, the geology of concept: your identity is merely a strategy of this effect.

2.0141 The possibility of occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object.

Nothing expresses the conflict you held between love and family like the blooming of red carnations. You once anticipated and marked their days; you and Josephine would speak of the progress of the carnations in the garden. You purchased still-lives of tinted glass vases holding fresh bouquets of carnations set in gilded frames, in the winter, to remind you of the springtime and the pact of observation that you shared. If the clock was the time-piece of the hours, then carnations were the time-piece of the seasons. The carnations gave you and your Josephine a peaceful sort of progress, away from any man-made empire or conflict. You would make innuendos about jealous carnations and their love affairs with honeybees. Sometimes this play would continue, until you and Josephine made love.

After the king of Rome was born, you asked Marie-Louise to view the garden from the window; you asked her impression of the carnations in their bloom: she was apathetic, but wondered if there would be ham for supper. She was an indoor wife, with a penchant for daffodils and primroses in arrangements. The springtime would bloom in carnations, but their simple seasonal majesty was lost on Marie-Louise.

You would look out at the garden alone. At first the carnations seemed different; they must have been more beautiful with Josephine: but these were the same carnations. You would look out of the window alone; perhaps Marie-Louise could be convinced to appreciate the carnations, she could learn to appreciate them through patience: but appreciation would not affect the garden in its blooming with carnations. The garden was still beautiful, perhaps more full and bountiful than it had ever been. The carnations must contain both possibilities; perhaps they grew more beautiful, more worthy of appreciation, once they contained the possibility for apathy and invisibility: these were the same carnations.

2.02 Objects are simple.
There is nothing complex about an hour.
A day is simply a day. The heart is easy in its beating; death is easy when it stops.
The breeze feels good on your face, not because it has traveled across oceans and mountains and wheat fields and lovers and peasants and empires and forests and lumber mills and sawdust. It feels good on your face because it is here, now, and able to make itself available. Your face is here, now, and able to make itself available. The reasons are simple and shared between your face and the breeze that makes it feel good. The breeze and your face are the same: they share in a moment that is simple. The breeze is as simple as your face: they are the same for a moment, and what they are is simple.

2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely.

Your fate is made of so many trivial moments and each has appeared to be an independent choice. The sum of your decisions provides the range for all of your possible decisions. Any point of memory seems to explain some aspect of your condition now. You have held your son. You held him in your arms. You smiled into his face and let his fingers wrap around your hair to pull it. Your infant son pulled your hair while you imagined how many armies he would command. You imagined how many armies he would command. You imagined how many subjects would bow, how he would expand the empire and do honor to your name. He, like the old good Roman sons, would one day announce his father to be a saint, or a god.
You were frustrated when your child could not add. You lost your temper; it came on suddenly, but now you know why. His difficulty in performing the simplest additions marked him as separate from you. If he could not add, he would have to rely on advisors and confidants. If he could not quickly add sums, accurately in his head, he would lose time; he would be unable to plan the speedy movements of troops across maps. He would neither know the days nor the supplies needed to carry an army of mass and charge to the point where they might witness their victory. If he could not add sums in his head he would be a victim; he would invite betrayal.
Whether they are born to outlive them through betterment or through shame, through neglect or hagiography: All sons are born to outlive their fathers.

2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.

Your island has dimples, and each rock contains a goddess. Symphonies are waiting in the mud to pass through the vegetables, into the stomachs and into the inspired heads of your countrymen. The breeze is not simple; it is the vehicle of poems, waiting to rip the poetry from the lungs of poets and snag with it some gossip and praise. That is how a man owns the breeze: he sings a song into it. A man can use the breeze to plant a song inside of it, and suddenly, he owns that section of the breeze.

You have planted your life inside your name: you have planted your life into some stories about your life, and those stories you have planted into some other stories about your life.
In the future, another man may claim your name and claim your stories, because he has claimed your name.

Why then is it that goddesses do not contain rocks? Why don’t dimples hold islands: why don’t symphonies contain mud? Why don’t breezes plant themselves into poems without movement or wind?

You have organized the world by possessiveness. The generative qualities of creation, inclusion and ownership illustrate: Possession is a kind of success. You are practical to speak of successes, you can learn from your successes. People respond to stories of success.

The goddess tried to contain a rock but she failed. Dimples tried to hold the islands, but they failed. Poems tried to exist without language, strategies without plans, models without representations, and symbols without concepts. The symphony tried to contain the mud; but they all failed.

A man who tries to take your name cannot take your life. Your name is more than what it possesses; it, too, is in the service of possessiveness. It is contained by and to be many things; most of your name has already been conquered.

Your name was just a small poem planted into a section of some wind: that you never really planted, and that you never really owned. Your life has been so much aggressive dishonesty: it is the oldest story; it is about a man who tries to convince the world, beyond a doubt, that he can own a section of the wind.

2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.

There is an elusive sort of madness that seems only to depend on the magnitude of your desire to live in a fantasy world. You begin by quietly thinking: I am heroic. Perhaps, because you feel like lately you have been a coward. The thought turns; it fights against the cowardice; it spits out another thought: Napoleon is heroic, like George Washington. You feel this, now, like an extreme example, but you remember this happening. You were like a child: you vividly, lucidly imagined George Washington. The cannons became fresh; the drills and exercises became rampant sieges against the Redcoats: You were a ragged General in the Revolutionary Continental army. The idea twisted through your skull; you became fresh, your posture changed. You were a dry sponge that soaked up everything in the character of George Washington; you became sopping wet and sloppy. You commanded men, you were contagious; you devised winning strategies under the grammary; you were a conduit: you effused the mystique of Washington into the phantom landscape of his battle.
This is your elusive madness. You are afraid of being bored or having a moment of self-loathing; you are so afraid that you take to a sort of drunkenness. You lose your mind and become tipsy on a chain of propositions. Your revelry can go on for months or years; depending on the magnitude of your fear of confronting reality, a fear which seems to grow: you would change the world around you, you would march one hundred thousand soldiers to the gates of their genocide: you would fill your streets with cardboard parades, rather than quit the fantasy.

2.0212 In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false).

You have a picture of her in your mind. She was so young; her face is the face of a young woman: you were just a boy yourself. It fades and grows stronger, this motherland of passageways, you can almost exist in the memory vision; but, it blurs, and then, it becomes confused.
She is there; the sunlight has made so many light hairs on the dark skin of her forearm. They are soft and wild. You know they must taste like salted rose petals. She is luxurious; there are creases in her billowed cotton sleeves, tied to ruffle at a velvet ribbon’s cinch. Beads of moisture trail like drops of dew to the wetness at the center of her breasts. It is gone now; the sunlight is a blur, the garden is a flash of mist, the balcony has no color for its paint.
She is there, again, but different now; you feel the hard contour, the carved oak of the chair you grip. You are wild to prove your value. You are a young man grabbing your chair in her library. You speak of equality and vehemence; you are the youth of the revolution; you’re voice can pull a crowd to tear the devil to the gallows. Did you pound on books with your fists? Did you shout of equality? Of the rights of her citizens? Of eternal lasting brotherhood?
She kept none of your passion; she regarded you like a nun regards a madman; she was detached and cool to your rustic dreams. She was no prisoner to the hopes of equality. She kissed the valet on the cheek. She looked directly at you; she rolled her tongue around her lips. She looked directly into your eye. She slid her hand, with her fingers spread wide across the valet’s waistcoat. The valet was frozen; afraid of one hundred nights of empty desire. She stopped; she gently stopped, and as if arranging flowers she straightened his jabot. The valet closed his eyes; he relaxed; a thin line of blood gathered at the corner of his mouth, from where he bit the inside of his cheek.
She would have none of your boredom and rustic passion; she was a woman of sophistication, a woman of high culture and ripe desire. She would destroy you and prove you a hypocrite: equality is not jealous; brotherhood and community would not tremble in shame, or covet the lust of another. She wanted pleasures to feed her sexual lust; she was an elitist and shameless to share the private shadows in her warm desire. She would teach you; you could have no room for brotherhood: your desires must be stronger, if they ever hope to conquer hers.

2.022 It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something- a form- in common with it.

After Egypt, she knew this was not a game. She felt the deep pull of symbolism; she read your fortune in misprints, in teacups, in eavesdropping moments, through the curtains and the hoof clops, outside the carriage door. Your name was everywhere; it was in the flight of birds. She felt she had been handed a gift; she was the fool: she was the last to take you seriously. She would be a fool no more. She would take you seriously. This was not a game.

You would cry out from sleep, choking in the night air: trying to breathe with deeper breaths, craving for wonders, deep capacities overlaid with shallow aims. You were haunted by the terror of your deeds, your lies: small satisfactions given grand names. You were haunted in the dreams of night, balanced between rejection and faith, trying to outwit the thunder of some true self: she would soothe your brow and gently hum above your restless head to keep a watchful eye and let you welcome sleep into your shame. She would hum to let you heal your troubled guilt. This was not a game.

Why do you remember so much happiness? Why does it seem that you were so much happier then than you are now?

You remember after Egypt, she had gone home early. You went out into the festive streets of Paris by yourself. You were powerful. Men respected, feared, and toasted you: women adored you; they opened themselves easily, even to your bluntest seductions. You insulted them, and they blushed to meet your discretions. It was a game.

You walked through the streets of Paris: the soft cheek and sad eyes of one delighted your eyes; the willing eyebrows of another made you wonder for her firm contours; the thin forearms and graceful sway of yet another made you ponder how her perfume would taste upon your lips.

How could she do it? How could Josephine resolve to love you, and to love you without room to be the mistress of another? How could she so instantly escape this primitive desire for attention? How could she so suddenly transcend the transactions of attention: to feel it extended, met, or revoked, without attributing it to other things? How could she surrender all desire for attention, and make it depend solely on a single source?

As they became more unobtainable, the women in the streets became more beautiful. They were softer than the necks of swans; they were smoother than silk: lust was building inside of you like an inevitable ruin; the pressure was increasing in collusion with the discharge of a function. If marriage is good and the desire for good is based on lust; it is not good: it is merely lust. These women in the streets, to feel their tongues against yours, to feel their soft thighs against your hips, the lobe of their ear might be teetering between your teeth. This was just a game.

You must make great things of this life. You must use this life to make great things. This carelessness of attention is merely a symptom that you have persevered in uselessness for much too long; you are idle and easy. You did not want to squander the heart for a blur of awkward pleasure. You were strong in the moment, but you lacked the imagination for a long deliberate plan. If, in our lives, we die not once, but again and again, by degrees: then this immediate success, this shortsighted blindness has been many times faithful, and many times your murderer. Even in love, your pride and your thirst for some meaningless acquisition prevented your appreciation of the bounty that rested around you. You should have learned: this was never a game.

2.023 Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form.
You have marinated in your failures: secretly. You have carried nothing with you through your transitions; those mementos from humble beginnings, in the centrifugal swirl of human experience, might cause you to remember your dog-like wagging gratitude: you cannot look outside for approval; you must look within. But, you are simply the man who is trying to control his own fear. You are simply a man who is trying to control his own fear in front of other men who look to you for lessons as they attempt to bring their fears under their own control.
Men seek the idea of truth. But you have driven yourself from the stream to the brook, you have dripped outside of your bucket because you fear some commonality.
You cannot live in a life where you share your fears in common with other men.

2.0231 The substance of the world can only determine a form and not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented- only by the configuration of objects that they are produced.
Your ghost is steadily forming
 an army of dead soldiers in the back
 of your living skull. Should you fear the death that keeps you company, a death so seductive to others? Should you fear her when she comes for you? What will she promise you? An army to command against angels? A legion of wasp bitten thieves? A symmetry to make sense of your life? Should you fear her when she tempts you, so powerful that she can use your own thoughts? Let her promise you Josephine in a dream. Let her promise you Josephine with a blue rose in her palm, like a vision of the holy mother. Let her feed the hungry hope that you may say what you must and keep what you have trampled by conquest.
You are as feminine as Echo; you would accept death cheerfully, for some private eternity where you could gaze upon Josephine. You pine for her; you would gaze upon her even in stillness, even if she could not see you. But you fear that others may see you crippled by some unreturned desire more than you fear death. You are worse than an actor; you have modified your life to suit the audience’s eyes. You have charged under the footlights to proclaim the man alert to his destiny; but you have clamored spouting falsehood: you have denied all depth of desire, you have allowed ambition to rule you, you have censored your heart into a mockery, you have made a myth of love.

2.0232 In a manner of speaking, objects are colorless.

Maybe there is something sidetracked in your name that wants to remain a boy, a recipe, in parts, for an artificial adolescence: a life in the shadows of your righteousness. Maybe you churn in the sleepy past to thicken and unify, to control everything in the magic touch of your answers. You have begun so many times, with confidence as the goal of your confidence. You have destroyed and replanted the soil and the laws, and the roads, and the families to always remain new to yourself. Maybe you have lost your life gradually, in pigments; small arrivals became stones for the pyramids of the skeptic’s afterlife. There is will and there is force and there is volume and there is law; the adhesion between answers is stronger than the answers themselves. The workers are busy with the whips on the scaffolding, under the weight of your commandments, and everything must hold while shooting cannons at the rain.
You are only a vicar, a pope in a new religion, where every element of alchemy spins and screams around you, like the birth of a meaningless dream wanting to become a meaningless truth: fire and blood in the wet wind storms, stones and earth hurling themselves to the sky. You will never have a nightmare from which you cannot walk away, you will always view yourself under the control of your own command.
You are so much more than you are not. The world needs you to make it exist, to bring it into the future. You ignorance is insignificant, because it is your ignorance; anything of value must come to you in order to be given life.
Maybe that is why you are an artificial boy. Maybe you are killing everything that does not please you, everything that does not promise to please you because you have a childish sense of hope, preserved in an ancient tantrum you have learned to call your mind.

2.0233 If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different.

Immortality has chosen you, and you must determine which expression best suits your taste. You must choose the immortality that you are best prepared to believe in. You are already the talk of biographers. You are the study of poets. You have conquered pyramids and princesses. You rule your eternal subjects as the subject of so many paintings. You are haunted by your own legends. You have become the saint that you petition in your own prayers.
This is not death; this is not fragmentation: this is not Elba. You are not ripped away from empire and jeered at in a cage. You are not a tiger that they starve of its meat. This is no zoo for great men.
This is only immortality showing you her settings; she is polishing you and cutting you with facets. You are a jewel she will use to garnish her crown of history. You are the same man who rose through the hopes of France, aren’t you? Yours is the name that makes Europe bow, isn’t it? Yours is the fist that commands, as nations follow and tremble. It is the same fist, the same name, and you are the same man. Immortality may cut you with facets, but shine through; do not let her workings dull your luster.
Shine through death. Shine through fragmentation. Shine through Elba.
Let immortality set your life in a way that sparkles and tells a story of life as majestic in all of its sundry possibilities.

2.02331 Either a thing has properties that nothing else has, in which case we can immediately use a description to distinguish it from the others and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things that have the whole set of their properties in common, in which case it is quite impossible to indicate one of them. For if there is nothing to distinguish a thing, I cannot distinguish it, since otherwise it would be distinguished after all.

What has changed in you? You were a boy, so content for a uniform, a horse, and a kiss. If you had been given a small governing office, even on no salary, you would have made revenue and increased your holdings. Somewhere you are still this penniless boy. He is scornful inside of you. He chides you. He calls you fat, and greedy. He calls you wanton, and spoiled, and complacent. He wonders why you drift and lumber around your solitary island so morosely; he looks at the empty pockets of his empire and asks you what you have truly lost as you gaze across the horizon of yours. He would intimidate you. You would have the police arrest him. He would spur you even from the tower. He would tell you that he could do a better job than you; he would remind you that you are self-absorbed and wasteful. He would build better roads in Elba. He would conquer other islands. You are lazy. You are no emperor, no leader of great men. You only know how to build a government that pleases the fresh officers of your armies. Your power is to keep lazy, by claiming to oversee men who want to preserve do-nothing offices with as little effort as possible. You are the fat king of cowards, cuckolds, and conformists. You are the vanquished hope for vanquished fools. You prance and make some theatre of shouts, as if your blood were to boil. The young soldier in your heart sees the peacock you have become.
You have no income. You have only your pantomime. Even from within, your legend decays in its force of belief. You are impotent and can effect no change in the world that surrounds you. When the gold vanishes, so will your power; with your power goes your friends. You are sliding out of the carcass that you are becoming, and evaporating into the sea mist and fog. You are weak and unnoticed in your agony. You join the world in the act of forgetting your life. You are soon to be replaced by a boor.

2.024 Substance subsists independently of what is the case.

You have seen too much of the unnoticed world to make you want to please people. Perhaps this makes you loose and unpredictable. You are sudden in your boredoms. You are violent and competitive in your desire to be necessary.
There is a conspicuous greed whose diameter begins in your unintended heart and feeds on all claimed and weak or disorganized horizons. You push your advice and your laws of guiltless conquest onto unsuspecting daydreams. You infect the will toward goodness with a delirium of ambition. You give this, unsolicited, and then boast that you are generous. You credit yourself with the actions of others, and show them in a light of disregard because they are mere pawns who need your gifts of will and jump at your decree. You have made yourself the center of everything.
You liberate so much existence into the world; for nothing can exist in which you are not the liberating center.

Death is the collective.
An episode of strategies and traps,
living, for most, is preparing for the collective.
How restless, that the moment of death
is the agony of the last moment of the individual.
How contemporary, to parade that everyone dies alone.
How constrained, to wish to be remembered after death.
Some cannot imagine immortality outside of any community.

You are at the center because you hold tight to the reigns of community.