Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 223
part of any war in inches or feet or miles anywhere at any time for any cause.
"Major Strasse from Sirius has been looking at you, kid."
At Brandywine in 1777, Colonel Muadhen—or Colonel Moon, as he was
then calling himself—was shot right off his horse by a Hessian bullet. He
had only one thought as he fell: Bejesus, but my career as an officer has been a short one.
He was quite convinced he was dying—a man hit by a bullet that knocks
him off his horse doesn't have time to wonder where he was wounded. He
simply assumes the matter is very serious.
He never hit the ground. Instead, he made a sharp turn in mid-air, rose
rapidly, and found himself looking down at the battlefield.
Oh, good Christ, I'm on my way to heaven, he thought.
A singing light approached rapidly, covered him in a glory of golden love,
bathed him in motherly kindness. It was better than sexual orgasm: he felt
himself literally bursting.
He came apart into two stars.
—Oh, you damned eejit, look what you went and got yourself into now,
Seamus Muadhen said.
—You aren't real, James Moon answered. I must be having a fever. I am a
wounded man and you mustn't bedevil me. I think I was hit in the leg and
the doctors may be after sawing it off on me.
—This is no fever, and you are no James Moon. You are me, and I am you.
—A name is only a name. There aren't really two of us in a news-reel clip
on the screen just because I have two names. This is all a hallucination. I
have been shot and this is a fever.
—Then why are you answering me?
James looked down. Men with a stretcher were carrying his body back to
the field hospital. He could see blood gushing from his, or the body's, right leg.
—Oh, be damned to it, there are three of us. You and me and the body
down there on earth. This war has been a fair bugger for a year and now it
has driven me mad entirely.
—Never mind that. It is time you and I had an understanding. You have
been keeping me in an underground jail of your mind too long.
—And what kind of talk is that? In jail, is it? You are only a name, not a
person.
—I am a person as much as you are, James. More than you, bedad. I am
the true man, and you are only the masque. The shadow of the man.
—Talk sense, man. You sound like you've been drinking the poteen.
—Every Irishman has two selves in inches or feet or miles, James. His true
self and the masque he learns to wear in dealing with the conquerors, the
sasanach. You have become the masque and lost the true self. Once we were
all stars and we've been after making Punch and Judy puppets of ourselves.
—And I would be a great fool to believe such madness. You have a few