1: To know there is a God
The Book of Knowledge
Fundamentals of Torah
To know there is a God (Exodus 20:2)
an ELDERLY MAN in a study
he is listening to a tape recorder
it is his voice coming from it
ELDERLY MAN’S VOICE
Notes on forthcoming monograph, The History of Nineteenth-Century Occultist Samuel Ludlum.
Date of research January 20th.
Lloyd G Bells’ comprehensive Ludlum: A History, published 1932, chapter seven on Ludlum’s theories of numerology, Reference is made to a figure called EL. Bells, footnote 42, “For more on EL’s influence on Ludlum see Ludlum’s own Stars, Numbers, God.”
Stars, Numbers, God being an impossible text to track down anymore, though by all accounts was Ludlum’s supreme accomplishment, we have only references to it in other texts, as best we can tell it was a systematic detailing of every star in the atmosphere, the organization of which quote, “did rip open the mouth of reality,” end quote, as Ludlum himself put it in a letter to his sister two years before the book’s publication.
Ludlum’s sister, Annabelle. wrote back to him. The letter in the archives is labelled 112ARL-T. “My dearest Samuel, I’ll ask you once more you stop this tampering with the unknown. Our activities this past summer were beyond foolish. I fear God has condemned us.”
Unclear what the “activities” were.
a click
the recording ends
ELDERLY MAN continues to sit there
a click
the next recording begins
Date of research February 1st.
In another letter to Samuel, Annabelle references EL.
Letter 487MID-X, “Please don’t listen to EL. He will only hurt you. He will only hurt you”
This letter is also quoted in McGowern’s most recent scholarly work published in Victorian Historians Quarterly. Published Spring 2023, “Victorian Anxieties and Demonic Numbers.”
McGowern writes, “References to malevolent influences in Ludlum’s life are a staple in correspondences with Annabelle. One can only assume she objected to the fringe academics Ludlum cavorted with regularly.”
Will reach out to McGowern for more information on the role of EL in Ludlum’s intellectual development.
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the recording ends
ELDERLY MAN continues to sit there
a click
the next recording begins
Bells page 782 footnote 1084, “By this point in his research Ludlum had deviated greatly from EL’s more radical notions of the materiality of the divine.” No more clarification offered. I’ll discuss with McGowern when she returns my emails
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University of Pennsylvania called me. They said they have never heard of a Professor Elle McGowern. They said they have never had a professor in their department with that name.
They said I’m insane.
I don’t understand.
Professor Elle McGowern is one of the most cited scholars on nineteenth century occult movements. We are a small field, we all know her.
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Except it seems nobody has ever met her. I’ve asked. Nobody has actually, themselves, met-
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In one of his minor works on the spiritual significance of landscape design, Ludlum’s references, “EL’s lascivious rejections of the material world.”
the ELDERLY MAN goes over to the tape recorder.
I do not understand how there is so little in the record on EL when his influence on Ludlam-
click
ELDERLY MAN has turned off the tape recorder
he goes and sits back down in his chair
long silence
the tape recorder turns begins fast-forwarding on it’s own
it stops
it begins to play again
And so it makes you wonder if all of it was all a lie, if McGowern is a concoction, then so is her research, she was involved in the inventorying of the Ludlum archives, but now that is all suspect, she got Bell’s history of Ludlum back into publication, but maybe that never existed either, and it makes me wonder what else isn’t true, is all ephemera of Ludlum’s life a lie, I can imagine how, some scholars being in on the joke of this made-up occultist, others scholars being too credulous, easily fooled into believing, they all begin scratching him in to existence, begin lodging him in the footnotes, stitching him into the journal articles, the conference papers, all of a sudden a corpus of scholarship, the records that reflect a life birthed into existence, and there’s no single source of the lie, and it is as though for all intents and purposes,
Ludlum having never existed,
Now exists.
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God is a lie because man is real, man is what we can see but God we cannot. But Ludlum is a man and not real, so we can only assume his God is real, EL is real, the only real part, in this world everything but God is a lie, but in Ludlum’s it’s the other way, and that means God is knowable, God is findable, God can be pinned down and prodded in the amphitheaters and documented for all to see.
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The daisies will come even in the rot, and you will find me wherever my soul wander-
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long silence
ELDERLY MAN goes back to the tape recorder
he opens it up
there is no tape inside
he breaks into a smile
he speaks for the first time
ELDERLY MAN
wondrous wondrous wondrous oh wondrous oh my
he tries to weep
he cannot
END OF PLAY