TO GO KILL SANTA CLAUS—Jason was saying, and I was listening intently—one has to shoot him down with the T-square of the Mechanical Engineers. Santa Claus—Jason continued—to both children and adults is the perennial inhabitants of the world of the World of Christmas. This is home to him, a vast sheet of white blank paper, which is sky-high and space-infinite; but contrary to public opinion, there nothing is white, ever; everything is the color of cream of pomegranates. Its center, like a Qabbala of Incendiary Serpents, is rose and fire.
Before the incursion of time, there never was a Santa Claus. After time was invented—the work of the sleight-of-hand agility of The Eternal, perhaps to warp the consciousness of the future man—there were several audacious men, divided by aeons of life, who attempted to go kill Santa Claus, because he made children and men extravagant and spoiled. There never was in the minds and hearts of children and men the uncontrollable urge to give gifts, this duplicity of giving gifts being solely the right of The Eternal. The Ill Locus of this uncontrollable urge, the mindlessness of this destruction, was the vanity of The Eternal come down to men.
These few valiant men failed in their attempt. These men failed simply because Leonardo, the greatest of the geniuses, had not been born then, and the Plane of Trigonometry was not invented by him yet. When Leonardo was born and he grew into manhood, and his mind was constantly hot with ideas, he began to invent the Plane of Trigonometry; and hence was born the Relation Function, the curves and the half curves, the angles and the half angles, the parabolas and the planes, and the Quadratic Equation.
Before Leonardo, the world was flat as a sorcerer’s whimsy. After Leonardo died, Santa Claus became our religion implanting in ourselves the religious impulse; and Christmas became our church. But in reality, men became normally insane, so obsessed with Love and War; and destruction became second nature to them upon this cranking earth. The Truth was an unknown gender, because Einstein had not married Kepler yet, and Newton was nowhere to perform the connubial rites.
To go kill Santa Claus—Jason was saying again, and I was listening more intently this time — one has to say Eureka! three times up to sixty-nine times, before holding the T-square of the Mechanical Engineers like a laser gun and shooting him down. But he is unkillable! There lies the irony.
You see, the children of this world must all arm themselves with T-squares. But this is quite difficult, because they have to possess firsthand knowledge of the Plane of Trigonometry and its functions; and second, they have to assume the personae of the angles, half angles, curves, and the rest.
And third, they must possess in their virgin bosoms purity of heart and a purer, and personal, relationship with the Eternal. And fourth, though not the last, their minds have to be exercised by a legerity of spirit, and a calculus of the soul.
You see, knowledge can be easily acquired by anyone who desires it.
Hence, the prolific growth of centers of knowledge; like the schools, colleges and universities sprouting like giant mushrooms all over the earth. And these institutions will never lack for professors. But these, and their professors, breathe and live amongst objects that are better left buried and forgotten. The dehumanization of the human being certainly began after Leonardo died. Santa Claus and Christmas gave men the tenacious urge to give gifts, and to celebrate gift-giving as though it were the most important act of the human being this side of the heavens.
Certainly the more difficult to acquire is the knowledge of the self. There lies the greatness of man, that he give himself this kind of knowledge. For the giving of giving, one has to be in harmony with the mind, the feelings, the emotions and the spirit and the heavens. When this happens, the divine right of The Eternal becomes the divine right by conquest of the human individual. He therefore breathes, as the poets aver, in (maybe) God.
Hence, for as long as all the children of this speedy earth can never attain the wisdom inherent in the flames of the Plane of Trigonometry, and be able to assume the various personae of its functions and formulas and resolve, once and for all, the Problem of the Spiritual in man, the phoenix-paradoxes of Life, one can never kill Santa Claus. And he will continue on growing like the imminent threat of Total Nuclear Destruction.
With these final words, Jason , with his liquid brown eyes and a toss of his curly faded-rust mop of hair, gazed out of the window and regarded the sky imprinted there with a haughty eye. His five-year old body trembled gently like a leaf in storm. “The rain has grown harder,” I thought I heard him mutter to himself, more than to me. Man is the Quest!
But in an instant he had turned his full gaze upon me, like a searchlight grazing the heavens. “Santa Claus!” I choked on the words. Jason had already pointed his T-square at me. “Merry Christmas,” he grinned, and fired.Ged.
