Sweet are the livers of the birds, but care reigns.

*exhales*

I've wanted to write the bit I just wrote, the tipping point where everything in the story changes, for a very long time now. I think it came out well, though it surprised me in the process. I thought I would use more words, but just a few words, then a lacuna, seem to do the job.

In other milestone news, this weekend I filled up the little quad-ruled Moleskine notebook I bought two Septembers ago. Way back when it was empty, I wrote this:

...instead of glowering into my cocoa, I took out my Moleskine and made some gray marks in it. It had been sitting in the breast pocket of my jacket since I bought it a few weeks ago, a heavy, malignant presence over my heart, worthless without content but somehow capable of being devalued by any content I might add to it. There was an urban legend going around recently about a Moleskine that stopped a bullet; the virgin telltale Moleskine I secretly, shamefully lugged about felt dense and stiff enough to really do it. Tonight, though, I opened it and wrote down two pages of religious background for The Slow Palace—and the only reason I didn't write my version of the Nicene Creed was because I didn't have the original to pattern off of. It's alive in my mind in a way it hasn't been for a long time.

Yesterday morning, I bought a second one, identical except for the unsmudged edges and the weight of lead.

Tangentially related (but uninterestingly so), I think it's time for a Mithraism revivalist movement. I ran across this amazing poem, found carved on the wall of a temple cave beneath the church of Santa Prisca in Rome:

Fertile earth Pales who procreates everything.
Rockbound spring that fed the twin-brothers with nectar.
This young bull which he carried on his shoulders according to his ways.
And after I had received it I have borne on my shoulders the greatest things of the gods.
Sweet are the livers of the birds, but care reigns.
He who is piously reborn and created by sweet things.
You must conduct the rite through clouded times together.
And here as the first ram runs exactly on his course.
And you saved us after having shed the eternal blood.
Accept, O Holy Father, accept the incense-burning Lions, through whom we offer the incense, through whom we ourselves are consumed.
Hail to the lions for many and new years.

Hail to the lions, good people.