We’re going into the greeting card business.
Here’s our Zazzle site: Pure Love Industries
Here’s the text of our first card, called “A Desperate Greeting”:
[Cover Image is the “Love at a Reasonable Price” cover]
LEFT SIDE OF CARD:
[Begin Greeting Card]
Bartleby Willard, who never was and never shall be, wanders into the Wandering Albatross Press Building in Somewhere, Sometime Wall Street, Isle of Manhattos, NY. What’s he doing there? What does he hope to find? What’s his angle? What’s his major malfunction?
“Friends, it’s quite simple: We’ll manufacture Pure Love in fictional factories—a fantastical silliness which all will agree rests squarely within the bounds of the fun, frolicsome, beauty-laughing rules of aesthetic production. Then, wedging and weaseling ourselves into and out of realms imaginary, Real, and experienced, we’ll contort and push and pull and somehow—for what could be more natural??—finagle 100% Pure Love out into this workaday world, where we’ll sell It at a reasonable price upon the openish-markets of the pretty-free world!
“You heard that right: 100% Pure Love, the fundamental stuff of both the undifferentiated Light (shining through, creating, and sustaining all things) and the infinite giggle roiling off that Light (and being every interlinked shifting-sand thing in this roiling, boiling, merry-go-blossom mind/matter slush)!
“You heard that right: Finally a product worth having! Finally a capitalism that’s truly capital! Absolutely capital!
RIGHT SIDE OF CARD
[Card Continues]
“Ah, but, to greet ..
“A card for to greet …
“Yes, well, I certainly hope you are well … and that the love we humanthings all share will become more and more its truest, most essential self: that inifinite eternal never-flagging, only-giving and more-giving, knowing how to help and actually helping Pure Love that keeps on calling us back to Itself, back home, back to the heart of it all.
“Oh gosh … I mean … I want things to go well for you and me and all of us here falling so quick-zoom through timespace.
“If my—why lie??—oh-so-lonesome-desperate enthusiasms have overshot the mark, allow me to apologize, please accept my apology, please
“Oh dear, ah well
[End Greeting Card]
BACK OF CARD
This has been a PL Industries production
Please just let it go by; we don’t mean no harm.
Text and Loneliness by Bartleby Willard
Copyright Andrew Mackenzie Watson
NOTE TO SELF: As soon as I figure out how to edit this card, I need to add the following:
The painting is “Titus” painted by Rembrandt in 1665. The young boy at the writing table–forefinger slung over quill and thumb contemplatively plying the lull between full cheek round chin, is the artist’s son.
To consider purchasing this and whatever else cards we come up with, please visit:
Pure Love Industries” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>PL Industries
Critical Review:
What is the purpose of this card?
Bartleby Willard starts out giving his standard pitch for creating Pure Love in fictional factories (with the assumption that aesthetic laws will allow for what physical and metaphysical ones won’t) and then wrangling it out into the open market (don’t physical and metaphysical laws come into play here? don’t they forbid this maneuver? well, let it pass: we’re critiquing the card, not the business model).
Then he looks around, realizes and/or remembers that he’s authoring a greeting card, and wishes the card reader well, looping quickly back into a larger spiritual project (the push for human love to be more and more in sync with God’s eternal, infinite, 100% selfless love). Then he tries again for a more standard, personalized expression of friendly fellow-feeling, before faltering into an apology for (yet again) overshooting the mark.
What is the purpose of all that?
Who would want to get this card?
Who would want to give it?
It is a failed greeting card.
As a greeting card, it completely fails. Instead of linking two humans together with a mutually-experienced greeting-sentiment, the card allows a third person, quite outside the relationship, to carry on about his pet projects and otherwise flail self-indulgently about.
This Logbook becomes a chapter book at Logbook of a Pure Love Mogul: Chapters
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson