Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no “moments of truth.” It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one’s own unanswered.

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth’s soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here – kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken… plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert… but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition… to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste…

The famous old soldier killed by a loose Venetian chandelier

The man in vegetable oils opening a fish restaurant in Paris

The black-clad investigator selling the latest key to dreams

The suffering “word-snuffer” messing around in old bookshops

The domino-playing rodent who feasted on dried-out Edam rind

Robinson Crusoe leading a very decent life style on his isle

An international thief taken to be a high-ranking magistrate

The widow with her souvenirs wrapped in old weekly magazines

The Woods & Water Dept. official opens a sanctuary for birds

The billionaire sporting knickerbockers to practice painting