As Louis Armstrong said, if they don't know what it is, then you can't tell 'em.
The first time I met Duane Thomas he told me about The Great Cosmos. The Great Cosmos was Duane's attempt to express the inexpressible, and he used the term like a new toy. It was an interchangeable expression of faith and fear, of love and loneliness, of infinite acceptance and eternal rejection, a gussied-up extraterrestrial slang that still hovered painfully near his South Dallas streets.
One minute Duane would be describing his teenage years: "Like both of my parents were dead and like I traveled a lot. This aunt in Los Angelesthis aunt in Dallas. Hey! you travel, you see things. One night I slept next to a dead man on a railroad track, only I didn't know he was dead. But you see things and, you know, you start to relate come together. I met The Great Cosmos out there. It's very philosophical, man. Like I deal in simplicity."