......................................................................................................................................................... These days I can't walk without tendon pain. My shaman says, "Your soul's been snagged," he'll fly to the underworld to retrieve it. My internist says, "Let's do some tests: blood and an MRI." By 70,000 BCE, with minds becoming self-aware, Homo sapiens were abstracting themselves from the world on which they depended. As I saunter up the steep road, drivers crook their neck, stare at me and yell, Why are you walking? Don't you own a car? Past the last parking lot and picnic tables is a trail floored with dark marl from recent rains. Tattooed from dirt bike tires, it reminds me of sharpening the dull teeth of an old chainsaw. Outside the mountain cabin, the cold sky wore a god's austere mask. Which house is he in tonight? I wondered. "For (Emmanuel) Levinas, Western philosophy is an egology, 'the reduction of the other to the same.'" By this he means, "'that after many twists and turns (one) eventually discovers that what appears alien, different, and mysterious was really an alienated part of me.'" [C.F. Alford, "The opposite of totality: Levinas and the Frankfurt School." Theory and Society. No. 31, 2002.] Are gods immortal so that when we die we'll be reborn in their imagination, as they were conceived in ours? But even a god can't endure the Janus-brained beings we've become. "Yet I can't help thinking and imagining—it's like gazing into the night sky and forgetting yourself and finding your gaze returning to observe itself, like light turning full circle through curved space." [P. Harpur, Mercurius. Glastonbury, UK, 2008.]