The world is elemental, thought Martha Stewart, the infamous CEO of Martha Stewart Enterprises, as she awoke one morning, and in this she resembles the sixth century Milesian Thales. We ourselves could do with a morning reassembly, but Martha is calling us.

Bon jour!

Morgen!

These two philosophers, Martha Stewart and Thales of Miletus, millennia apart, confirm that consciousness at base abides in dualities. For Martha, however, separating the material world from the noumenal -- as Kant would have it; for Schopenhauer the so-called Will; for Plato the illusionary existing within the Ideal; etc. -- is more provisional, uncertain, subject to Heraclitean instead of Thalean waters.

My brother calls and asks me if lately I've dreamed Loretta Young entering our house on Rosetta Street as if it were her home. The sweeping skirt, the smile, the almost dance of her stride, key lights glistening on her large, liquid eyes. I tell him I have not, but I can understand what he means.

Some nights I dream I am an attendant in the house of Martha Stewart. All day I run up and down her stairs, bringing her tea and more tea and more tea, from Ceylon, India, Japan. I think: I am living with Martha Stewart, but in truth I am only working for Martha Stewart, which is not the same as living with Martha Stewart, and isn't this an outrage, what I'm thinking? How could I conceive that I am in any real or unreal sense living with Martha Stewart, I, her humble servant, slave, factotum, to whom I attend with a canine friskiness?

Who is more vital than Martha Stewart? No one.

Martha Stewart Living: Do you know this estimable journal? Four and a half million readers do. To my knowledge I must say I've never opened a copy, but my world view is that I've been lost for hours, years in the spell of its pages.

Of course the question arises: Isn't the ideal of innocuousness itself a contradiction? Nothing is less innocuous than the innocuous. And doesn't the innocuous cause us to experience a certain revulsion, the kind of sensation Roquentin had before the chestnut tree in Sartre's Nausea and I have if I happen to even glance at a Popeye cartoon?

Not that I'm saying that Martha Stewart is in any real sense innocuous. Quelle horreur! To me Martha Stewart is pure Gaelic or Gaul. In that Martha Stewart is America personified, she is no longer Martha Stewart.

Suddenly the sky fills with photographs bearing the face of Martha Stewart. You may take whichever one you like. I myself keep no pictures of her around, nor watch TV, yet I have no difficulty in conjuring her up at any moment.

Outside her door I pace in lemniscates, while she in her bedroom ponders the Infinite.

Is the "I" who is Martha Stewart really the Infinite, as the scholars contend? Quatsch!, she thinks. Being infinite is a limitation; not a perfection, but the absence of boundaries. ("Is that Aristotle or Cantor?" "Aristotle." "Thank you.") No, no, the academics can't even think past Plotinus, who knew that dualities cannot exist within the Infinite.

On and on. I out here, Martha in there. I pace, she thinks. She thinks, I pace.

Once while cleaning up her breakfast counter, I see a copy of Blood's Pluriverse (1920) beside her parsley-rimmed plate whose center contains the remnants of her scrambled eggs.

What interests her most is how to reconcile the many Marthas that Reason and Peirce tell her she is with the Martha of the One, the mystical Martha she senses both in the surround and at her ontological base.

But along these paths, like a lad out of a tale by Brentano, I may not follow her. The dark woods, the fairy-tale light through the fir trees of mysticism, these are for Martha to contest, not me. What she knows about German Romanticism and Capitalism far exceeds my knowledge, which seldom extends beyond that of an assistant page. Concerning inequality, for example, I am clueless, but not she. Of me no one has said: "I think you're awesome." Far from me to say, as did she: "I always see things before others do."

It goes without saying Heaven isn't something I think much about, but might it not be catered by Martha Stewart? This cheese-plate question I leave to the theologians.

Sometimes I cannot sleep because my mind won't stop thinking about the beneficent minutiae that find refuge in her spirit.

Her house has many rooms.

The Mysteries of Martha Stewart. The Metaphysics of Martha Stewart. The Death and Resurrection of Martha Stewart.

Even that?

Yes, yes.

And you really dream of her?

Last night I dreamed she told me she abhorred immortality and then gave me a hug and within her warm, chief-executive arms I vanished. I was no more, not a consciousness, not an unconsciousness, not a whim, not a fancy, not this or that or anything or nothing. What was I then if not the Not-I according to Martha Stewart we must not fear?

There is no madness in Martha Stewart. For that alone . . . .

We were walking together along the stream behind her house. It was fall and the leaves were turning. Evening light rippled along the path.

"Ms. Stewart?"

"Later," she said.