16 november 1995 (fragments from notes and memories after a computer crash!):

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They show me that to dismantle (the hierarchic centre) is to remove a cloak, to unconceal, to remove or to mix up what has been separated, like cream, to shake things up, to remove occasion for false fears or other emotions, perhaps, to undo or take away the need for the 'Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers' to which I notice John Milton keeps referring in that book v of Paradise Lost, in which the reasons why Satan and his followers left Heaven (when God introduced more hierarchy than there had been, by putting his Son above the other Heavenly Beings) to initiate a separate realm of evil, separated from good. Is this one of the sources of the dualism that pervades and wrecks industrial culture?

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Somehow these vivid examples of showed me that I am not as ignorant of the old meaning of mantle as I thought I was and they interest me greatly.

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. . . So there is much to be dismantled though I will no longer think of it as taking things to pieces but as removing superfluous distinctions or additions.

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This mantling.