Maxims…

*

Fight fire with fire

And the world is burning.

*

Fight fire with water

And the world keeps turning…

*

Something fishy…

*

Vesica, vesica

Inscribed-on-the-land

Colour-it-fair

or

Colour-it-bland…

Count Jack Black

 

Amnesiac…

*

Spontaneous Internal Combustion.

You may have heard of the phenomenon?

It can now be regarded as the final death-knell for the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

It is hardly likely that any ‘new species’ would simultaneously errupt on the face of the planet like so many hot flushes.

Yet, once a memory is framed, and accepted, it can be true at all times and all places without ‘compunction’.

It also means, that we are born into a past that never happened,

and pass-on into a future that is real.

 

Bestings…

*

There is no better than…

Just be the best you can.

…Jack…

A Vice Called Cant…

*

‘Use every man after his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping…’

Hamlet, Act2 Scene 2

*

Hail, eternal plodders, hail!

Stretch-out, stretch-out the tedious tale…

Ignored, that wayward Talking Cricket,

Dull, of humour not a trace…

Pedestrian, turgid, commonplace,

Without genius and without spirit.

 

A Pound of Flesh…

*

For what doth it profit a nation,

To gain the world,

But lose its land?

 

Cycles of Life…

*

Does the religious life require leisure,

or the idleness of the leisured class?

Certainly, those classes have always held work to be degrading.

*

It is easy to see why.

Modern labour, predominantly indoors and sedentary can educate one into disbelief.

The past two-hundred years have shown us how work in heavy industry

is wont to render refinements of the soul redundant.

*

A generation or two after any revolution of this sort

and the very term ‘religion’ elicits only a dull, uncomprehending stare.

*

But could there be a correlation between religious sentiment and the natural life?

Most traditional deities slot seamlessly into the seasonal round.

And work in this realm serves to remind one of the greater cycles that govern existence.

One of which, it may be argued, is… religion.

 

 

 

Rather, a Neanderthal?…

*

If it were true

that we had evolved

and progressed

and were still continuing to do so…

then a thousand times, yes, to modern man.

*

Unfortunately, it is not…

and we have not, and are not.

Count Jack Black

Threat of the New…

*

The man who has plotted the course of science

will have discovered in its development

the key which unlocks the doors to knowledge and understanding.

Both portals have fictitious hinges and hypothetical handles.

By stepping beyond their frame our senses become subtle.

The eye reacts to ‘the new’ by immediately reproducing ‘the familiar’ as if in counter-point…

In this way can that which is ‘alien’ move secretly amongst us.

…The novel sound initially causes so much pain to the ear

that we even seek to model a foreign tongue

on our own meanings…

“Wie spate ist es?”

for

“What is the time?”

As if time were a mere matter of counting.

Yet, how many hours have come and gone

since the ‘beginning’ of time?

Precisely none!

…To be involved in exceptional experiences, therefore,

is to become, in part, their inventor.

In this our art knows no bounds.

Game of Bones…

*

With what gusto the horizons of our world expand.

Our enthusiasm grasps at each new enigma like a child its toy.

Perhaps one day the most solemn problems of the past

will appear as mere playthings to us…

The plight of the poor.

Souless wealth.

Our treatment of animal species.

Man’s inhumanity to man.

Perhaps ‘Old Man’ will then look for new problems to amuse himself.