Virgil Speaks!

At least one of my blog readers is wondering what's become of Virgil. That boy alligator who knows "how life works" has his own weightless fame. He's created an image, like Andy Warhol. Virgil is definitely the alligator-who-has-everything, the-host-with-the-most on the ball. So where is he, anyway?

First let me make clear that I have no control over Virgil's comings and goings, even if sometimes it might look that way. Virgil definitely has his own life, a bit like Jung's Philomen--a sort of private mahatma who often said things to Jung which he had not consciously thought himself, but always offered superior insight. At times, Philomen seemed to Jung to be quite real, as if he were a living personality. He was a kind of guru conveying illuminating ideas, who had first appeared to him in a dream as a winged spirit with a lame foot, sailing across the sky. But then he turned out to be an old man with the horns of a bull, a hybrid being clutching a bunch of four keys. Personally, I've not made a study of Philomen so I can't tell you what the keys meant, but I don't think Philomen was possessed of quite the same quirkiness as Virgil, who seems to positively enjoy his role as the "rabbi of everybody."

Truth be known, I've been missing Virgil too. With some difficulty I was finally able to reach him on his cell, and told him some of us were wondering why he was playing dead.

"Not to worry," he said. "I'm just zoning out, doing a bit of spear-fishing again with King Leopold III of Belgium, and having a great time. But don't misunderestimate what I'm saying. There's no skittishness involved. Collaborating with you remains the most important political alliance of my career. But there are still limits. Even though I am a relentless, entrepreneurial, idea-oriented disrupter of the old order, I would never try, for instance, to eat an eel at the wrong time, or introduce sarongs to Muslim women. Basically I operate best in free fall, where I can play and dive and wriggle. (Just watch me go after a moving ruffle.) But right now, the scales have shifted. You're becoming a firebrand, jumping from one day to the next in and out of moral mazes. You've become a pressure group unto yourself, asking pesky questions, provoking knotty problems. And this difference changes everything. Taken to its extreme, this is the way social movements usually announce themselves."

As to whether or not he would be home any time soon, Virgil was a bit cryptic. "You know, I'm not interested in informing people of things. I just want to be evocative. However, like the angels, I will continue to demonstrate my presence through synchronicities, whenever conditions demand it. But don't expect me to be eating eel, unless the time is right."

With that, Virgil transformed himself from a solid into a gas, and hung up.