Don't disturb! Philosopher at work!

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY

(unedited)

Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape!***

(subtitle: Who killed Curiosity?)

(or better still: The Philosopher and the Proctologist!)

By

Anthony Steyning

"Modern art is what you can get away with," Andy Warhol told us, suggesting 'artistic' works get approved not just by the few acting out of sometimes perplexing conviction, but by all those who mindlessly tag along. And in this way the limit of the credible often reaches a breaking point. The same may be said of conventional philosophy and religion, man's most venerated cerebral and spiritual enterprises. Unchallenged by multitudes thirsting for reverent fantasy and meticulous reassurance, their proponents take themselves as abundantly seriously as contemporary art's high priests do, but does something represent a truth merely because people no longer question it?  

Antonin Artaud said it all when he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stop this nonsense with our imaginary friend and the representatives of assurance. For if man needed to create myths or fairy tales to deal with his own mind and to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself and heal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength in the face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a time and despite built in and mostly silly taboos this was fine. But by beginning to believe his own embroidered fantasies, imposing them as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his own degradation. Because fable or myth is a series of pretty fibs and an elaborate lie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed of destruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.

Similarly, what's found at the opposite end of the scale is immoderate pride, as for its part formal western thought is built on the contention, its point-de-départ, that if we're not there, well then nothing's there. Plus, that while it ought to be philosophy's function to remove all nonsense from the world, we have never ceased creating it: all that sweet bunk, those exquisite fictions and tales of ours. I know, no 'sein' no 'zen', but notions like Heidegger's "sein" or Descartes' cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, both essentially flawed because when deprived of our consciousness, our "sein", we don't for a moment necessarily cease to exist. And in Descartes' case the most we could let him get away with: I think, therefore I am what I am (i.e. as opposed to others or to animals).

When re-reading so many hallowed texts then, consider the self-indulgent hokum often meriting some sort of stage direction saying: STOP! Here Mind Disappears Up Rectum! Because, one more time, after close scrutiny nearly all established conventions ultimately point in one single direction---they confirm our pre-eminence and successful continuity in the universe with a mind set far more interested in bunker consolidation and preservation than in keeping structures open to new thought. Man still secretly convincing himself he's the measure of all that matters, convinced there's some sort of finality to the scheme of things and that finality is him, when most likely there's not even a scheme and the earth not the center of anything, merely the third and most beautiful be it somewhat obese bauble from the sun. For so called nothingness and the absence of human existence or awareness are not synonymous. Eons simply episodes in which nothingness arising from emptiness is not only a non sequitur but a non plus, though the answer to the question 'What is is??' admittedly remains a tempting and elusive one. The body of western thought then having more than anything to do with the mechanics of thinking and formation of action in thought called will. With indexation and the providing of comfort through carefully constructed metaphysical truths no more real than large collections of inane wax figures in a morbid museum staring us in the face. Or something like Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World, a portrait equally grotesque and self-absorbed. And yet with ultimate intellectual perversion, some brazenly suggesting that we're not here at all, that everything is an illusion. (Even though, and after the onion soup, a bathroom door regrettably left ajar... would kill this notion pretty swiftly) Anyway, it did and does always come down to the same and unfortunately remains the canard: I know, who else's, but our take on the world and beyond rules all because no 'outside' condition exists showing us the contrary or tells us to buzz off.

My point then, with ultimate wisdom does there absolutely have to be a 'take'? For has the foul, this sudden other whiff of reckless certainty and learned self-importance not become quite unbearable? Doctors of Divinity and Philosophers at one point having to be dragged out of their own mind and returned to earth, a place where someone like their Proctologist might get them over themselves.

Let's face it, to a blind man all the world goes naked. Affirming that human perception and intelligence are wholly circumstantial and by definition conditional. And what about wisdom, knowledge's incidental step-child, isn't it also bewilderingly relative, particularly in the additional light of everything written in and around us having been so blatantly self-rigged? Oh dear, does this a sinner make, the refusal to be that submissive, ignorant Agnus Dei? (Thou shalt not eat from the tree of knowledge: Genesis, to which it's proper to respond Sapere Aude: Dare to Think.) Or a positivist and an irascible polemicist? A reductionist? A well-meaning, doubting relativist then? Well, no, no, no and no again because laborers in the sagacity and dignity trade measure learned nonsense against learned nonsense, and what is being attempted here is to remove beautiful irrelevance gently in its entirety from its august but withering plinth, placing it in the playroom, away from our addiction to predictable subjective, absolutist, deterministic thinking--- the battle between reason and desire, between fact and fancy having been uneven far too long.

The time has come to cease inventing certainties to cover that arse, hasn't it? For one time I saw an exhibition of aquarelles produced by Dow Syndrome children. They were the most unusual and unimaginably beautiful works of art that I have ever seen. Pointing towards a beguiling world all their own, not one beneath us, but rivalling ours. And by saying the body perishes and cleverly suggesting the spirit is immortal, where is this hidden world these children occupy to be found in religions and for that matter in philosophy? Do these 'disciplines' really have any idea what such a person sees and feels, presumably no less real to him or her? And will their 'soul' forever carry on this way? The one that wouldn't die? 'Truth' and 'relevance' only to be found in quantity, in volume, because fewer of these people here at stake? Yes, what and where is more real, decided upon by whom, especially when the choice is not between onion soup reality or illusion, but between reality that for one reason or another... is multiple? Like with sophistry and its many respectable guises, by implication presenting mostly soothing definitions, often suitable nonsense and not much more. Or mysticism, escapism of the highest order, even though mystics happily don't murder much. Alchemy and black magic then, treated with contempt these days, but not the rest of the hocus-pocus--- collective rationality somehow stopping half way down-road, turning itself inside out, rolling itself into a ball before getting kicked anywhere it wishes to go. Reason turning surreal, or at least slipping into the skin of completely irrational notions with nobody noticing or volunteering to admit what's going on.

All of this evolving in the epoch between Euclid and Copernicus, when we were visited upon by a thousand years of darkness, a time of reason lost, when most of the damage was perpetrated, the birth of insidious intellectual perversion.  And the reason early Greek and Roman thinkers such astute theorists mainly because they were free-thinkers, unburdened by intellectual straight-jackets, checks and other dogmatic smoked mirrors, double curtains and traps. No geniuses these chaps, just healthy, free and well-adjusted debaters when after a millennium or more of monotheism all we have to show for are murder, deceit, oppression and threats in massive attempts to corner fluid thought, coming up with proof upon proof that a matter is truth, when there's no proof the proof is proof. (Bring on the pagan pantheists?) And even now this persisting twilight, these lingering fogs in so many quarters on this planet plus recent, truistical so called Intelligent Design nothing more than yet another determinant 'truth' job by people making sure nothing interferes with their delusions. The elimination of which to them akin to some sort of dismemberment, when strictly speaking we can't 'know' anything. A gnosis never to be ours for the simple reason that truth is enormous and elusive, can't be copied, caught, contained or bought. Delusions that make religion so addictive, even to a paleontologist and scientist like Teilhard de Chardin who despite millions of years of overwhelming natural evidence to the contrary managed to remain a Jesuit priest and thus a creationist, the way apparently for some to legitimize themselves. Manifesting underpinnings of a near sexual instinct, sex so much more than physical, orgasmic, the blind drive of multiplication, at a deeper level confirming, making man feel not just accepted, but wanted, needed. With religion, while itself not in need of man, falsely I feel, seen to protect and thereby confirm and so, identically to sex, making people feel so very wanted. Sex and religion, both of them strong and irrational sentiments, if anything sharing an irrepressible desire for belonging, a lair for which many will kill when evicted from it. Or from where to prudishly divert eyes... from what's really going on.

None of which goes to say that centuries of mainly self-stroking musings have been a complete waste, far from it. They were extremely useful in creating a system of ethics and making us understand the structures and mechanics of language and thought, never mind the hundreds of spurious conclusions that were arrived at: it was all part of our moral teething, of our growing up. Works, even though radiant considering the primitive times in which they were conceived, never to be taken as an end onto themselves. As is the case with Spinoza's dozen or so formulae first 'proving' there is a single creator and telling us God is everything, then concluding that on the contrary, everything is God but basically only turning his back on constructed religion. Or Kant's three pure "irrefutable" proofs of God's existence which now, bar the obstinate believer, mainly make shoulders shrug. I mean, how can one come up with this and still be called one of our first 'modern' rationalists. (Or as his old friend Johann B. growing up across the street in Königsberg already fondly told him: 'Immanuel, you're a real Kant!'). Just like Sartre defining freedom for us while being an unapologetic Stalinist, a more recent example of not only spurious but totally corrupt reasoning. Or de Beauvoir, in 1939 proclaiming that all fear of Hitler was grossly exaggerated, on top of this duplicating her stunning moral and political assessment when it came to Mao twenty years later. Let's just call a spade a spade and brand some of it pathetic practical intellectual posturing. So with modern language-based deconstruction theories which, pursued to their extreme, lead to a nasty case of... decomposition: intellectual figure skating all of it, with circles beautifully drawn, exquisite axles and soaring triple toe loops, just about choking the bishop in mid-air and much coveted medals in the end, searching, searching maybe, but with absolutely no place to go. Beckett stumbling upon it, in Godot, Lucky's soliloquy to be precise, suggesting that massive words don't constitute more life, deliver more meaning, deliver anything. On another level also this simple analogy to ponder: recently Swiss aero-dynamic engineers 'proved' (that word again) that it's quite impossible for our dear old bumble-bee... to fly! And what about all those notions of time? Besides the filling in of distance, isn't time mostly the mental space in which we move? Isn't our ontological 'zeit' immaterial in terms of the universe, given that in all our thinking the fatal inhibitor is our own ephemeral fire-fly status, that old three score and ten business, disqualifying us from dealing with issues of enormity, making much vaunted relativity theories so relative that strictly speaking they become null and void? Lost in the endless waters of space and motion, at least as far as physical man is concerned? And if you don't agree, Prof Dr Heinz Zweidrei and Herr Dr Schneeweiss of the Max Planck Institute of Extra-terrestrial Physics have accepted to investigate my point, but indicate they'll need 1.3 million 'years' to prove or disprove it. Yes, I jest, or do they? Because in biological terms aren't we mere temporary syntheses? In cosmic terms somewhat ingenious, electro-chemical flames? Yes, man the flame, extension of a larger fire until he or it or both burn out? Oh, certainly life repeats itself, but never by leaving things exactly the way they were.

So that in the same way that we must deal with inherited credo much more knowingly, we must equally accept that there are limits to our importance and perception. That looking at images of heavenly bodies reaching us but having ceased to exist ten billion 'years' ago, is a bit of an impractical, nay, futile enterprise at which point we may best sit down, have a cold beer, relax and enjoy ourselves, pretending that what we saw was a squirt of mayonnaise on Hubble's mirror telescope. That astonished as we are to find an atom is in fact another pint-sized universe, or at least a solar system with whirling bodies of its own, and earth, for all we know, a proton in an atom in a molecule of some giant leg of lamb, forces us to stand back and reflect at levels we never contemplated before. That a universe inside a universe inside a universe and so on is a distinct possibility and our 'playing with space', though all too human, is not uninteresting and representative of our remarkable intellect, but that Big Bang or Unified String theories should not come to obsess in that there could be many bangs and ripples, folds and strands beyond our mental range, imagination or sight. And that while not having to give up all exploration which is in our blood, man has to remain much, much more philosophical in the truest, purest sense of the word: above all no dogma or theory, por favor! For a single universe or megaverse of multiverses shrinking, twisting or expanding with black holes as mere maelstroms in huge rivers and oceans of gravity or the detection of the tides of space in general and figuring out what gravity is but not why planets spin (if they stop, would they be flat or will they fall, if so where to?): it's all very well and entertaining, but what does it really matter when there's every possibility the human species will have disappeared or been eclipsed in say 20.000, 30.000 years from now in the way that strains of insects were found frozen in time and inside droplets of primordial amber? Man the new fossil, our collective umbilical cord already stretched to roughly 200.000 years, isn't it going to snap at one point? There being only so much genetic mileage to be extracted from the overly complex human mammal, plus given that as organised societies we've been around a scant 8000 'years' (with our very limited perspective naively calling the first of these 'ancient', though happily one historian, when asked what influence the Roman Empire had exercised on modern western society, retorting that it was much too recent a situation for him to comment on!), yet not organised enough to suspend depletion of our planet when looking at its diseased oceans and forests, our festering coasts?

(Image provided by the magnificent young sculptor and sub aqua artist Jason de Caires Taylor, see Jason Taylor )

Of course it can be argued that nothing disappears in thin air, the earth forever feeding on itself in the way that forests live on their own fallen leaves, branches and trunks. Still, it seems we may be way too clever to survive, not a forest humanity, only one among those many branches, one becoming much too heavy for its own good, and ready to break perhaps. Or put differently: humanity one day probably found hanging from its own family tree, done in by natural factors that seemingly include ... itself!

And even miraculously starting another cycle on another planet representing only a stay of execution, seeing how we constantly foul our nest, some day probably bequeathing eerie, ghostly piles of vine-covered rubble formerly known as New York, Cairo, Shanghai: Angkor Wat on the Hudson, on the Nile, on the Yangtze. So that you can forget about walking your dog along the Milky Way any weekend soon, today everyone fighting over how it all began, biological evolution or creation, but nobody asking how it'll all end. Not apocalyptic claptrap this, only that at one point there'll follow an organic scaling down, a drastic planetary housekeeping of Permian or Cretaceous proportion, and not because anyone says so but because of the way things work, the chemical seasons of all living matter, everything chemical, the majestic but unequivocal seasons of being. That constant molecular processing and being processed is the only way there can be delicious life and why even our august Queen defecates or the living human mouth at any given time contains more active bacteria than Mexico City has inhabitants. With this I mean let's move away from sophisticated sentimentalism, and inject some pragmatism and realism. For when two of millions of galaxies collide, events taking tens of millions of 'our' years to culminate, how can Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and so many other gentlemen for instance really, really believe this is all because of or for them? Beliefs, customs, traditions and institutions, the eminent Dr Lévi-Strauss tells us, a mere by-product of a world that started without us and one day will end without us. So that for now let's at least accept that tectonic plates move and are still capable of making mountains come and go. That a small planetary wobble can make all mammals extinct including man, that ice ages covering most of Eurasia and North America with hundreds of meters of unliveable deep frost are not a thing of the past, in short that life and terrain have not stopped evolving now that we're here. That lush northern Africa was turned into the burning Sahara as recently as that stretch between 3000 and 6000 years ago and had absolutely nothing to do with human behaviour, activity, punishment or salvation. And so that while it behoves us to clean up our act, greenhouse periods also form part of cosmic seasons and any other scenario's a fairy tale because we're only that flame in the pan, that off-spring of light, that spark with attitude, that short wild dance in the universe, together with our bosom friends the plants, insects and those sometimes bizarre looking striped, spotted, scaled, horned or feathered cousins of ours. A ball too crazy, too magnificent to end until the fires die, only to spring up elsewhere in that long, long night... probably with entirely new creatures in attendance. We, that third force between volcanic and solar action only until these very fires through exhaustion, eruption or collision decide to alter everything and we'll be asked to quietly dematerialize. Adaptation by disappearance, as it's called. And NONE of this adequately reflected in contemporary philosophical treatises and dissertations, still carefully looking the other way, carefully building outmoded thought on outmoded thought only for academic purposes, meaning removed from new realities, devoid of common sense just like religious contemplation anywhere. As if the word 'new' itself anathema. Good grief, do some hang on to that Messiah and Moses lore, but what about the very Mount disappearing? Wouldn't that change the story somewhat? And as for the rest of our thinkers, this has nothing to do with the quality of their reasoning, but, over the centuries and even now, where they STOP! Drawing lines in the sand where none can be drawn, carefully constructing sometimes admirable but nevertheless incomplete thought.

Because slow, essential change like this making all things tick, is assuming that somehow we're above it all, not part and parcel of it, not a little silly or worse: the height of egregious arrogance? For what are those 20.000 or 30.000 man years anyway but a quick drop in the ocean of cosmic 'matter/time/space', organic or not, in a place where in human terms when all is said and done and except for brief but enormous and violent outbursts, nothing much takes place? Not inherently of course, but because of our abysmally limited perspective, that severely curtailed and therefore insignificant presence. We, sadly, the universe's ephemeral and totally immaterial witnesses? Making that even should we be the universe's prize biological trophy, by implication also represent its failure, unable as it is to sustain us beyond the fleeting and the contingent or for that matter prevent our very self-destruction? Human minds then, capable of spanning the ages but in an immediate, searing physical sense remaining brutally perishable; brilliant bubbles all too soon and often rather senselessly it seems, electro-chemically animated then built to burst. Poof! Poof! Pity! Next! Suivant!

No, with all due respect, what we as fire-flies ought to be doing is turn A Brief History of Time into A Timely History of Briefs and String Theory into as many Air on a G-String Bach melodies as possible: precisely the down to earth joy that's missing from most 'traditional' thought, except perhaps for Socrates suggesting that a personal life in itself left unexamined to the fullest is not worth living: examined he said, not (re)manufactured, not devised! Because again, besides the real but perhaps impractical, however elegantly dreaming up the rest is not the same. In fact it's damned dishonest and either way, no longer acceptable. Like making up the news.

The significance then of most pioneering philosophers, those Greeks, then Hume, Hegel, Rousseau, Wittgenstein et al, remaining mostly a historical one and after close reading their thoughts to be affectionately set aside. Especially Wittgenstein's maintaining there cannot be absolute truth as mathematics are unable to prove this. But it dawning on many that mathematics are imperfect and finite in their capacity to embrace all of reality for the simple reason that not all reality is logical, but random and fluid at best. The Stoics coming closest to understanding what life here really has to offer, but far too self-centred for a world by definition needing to be shared, even though once in a while they could look over their shoulder and conclude that only a good man can be wise. Or Erasmus of Rotterdam, showing us how difficult it is to become and remain a humanist, while exposing many of man's ugly faces in In Praise of Folly. A work so earnest it must have been close to heresy in its day, a hay-day of artificial truths. He an anti-philosopher really, who to his credit rejected silly, arid, punctilious rationale in favour of passion---a measured dose of sweet madness. Not bad for a fifteenth century chap, traveling on a mule, who didn't take himself all that seriously but had trouble separating himself from the Church. Then again who hadn't during the times Rome had a suffocating, totalitarian hold over every aspect of society? And then there was Nietzsche, the first to break the mould, that hold of a priori divine presence over nearly all traditional western thinking, in the end spoiling things with incoherent, syphilitic twaddle or losing the plot after getting hit by that horse in Turin. A superior thinker tragically turned into Stuporman with no consistent line of thought, an extremely lucid but hit-and-miss canon with highly interesting but also disconcertingly dispersed shots.

So that yes, these men and so many others have made an indisputable but transitory contribution to our development as speaking and reasoning beings, if anything by showing us how no longer to proceed. We, the blessed who through enlightened, break-through scientific investigation (from Galileo and da Vinci through Newton, from Darwin through Planck, quantum physics, paleo-anthropology, the double helix and modern evolutionary molecular/cellular biology at its deepest level, neutrino technology, the isotopes and so on) are now able to assess by new means. Set free of cumbersome, preset pieties and begging to differ by placing mind over myth and matter over mind even when this means cutting our own species down to size. Regaining that natural sense of awe and joy we nearly lost through all that artificiality, all that learnedness, all those utterly contrived formulae and 'revelations'. As for morals, it is clear by now that tolerance and compassion are entirely linked to developed intelligence, the lack of it, coarse stupidity, producing inequity and social cruelty of the most grievous kind. Nature is unforgiving and immoral, only man can be considerate, in addition the purest and noblest among us those whose generosity comes without held out reward or some 'divine' trade-off, the real saints. Secular souls, unheralded, unpaid, remaining completely anonymous while others appropriate religion and go to Calcutta to elevate themselves, as if there can be no goodness without the circus of incense.

Realistic, total re-self-assessment has thus become a distinct possibility as we no longer need to be governed by primitive impulses like the physical one-upmanship, territorialism, awkward philosophical theory and religious doctrine that marked us for a millennium or more. In other words: in an immediate sense we're free, free at last, but only if we want to be. No more beautiful bullshit that once saw us through, but also kept us down. No more child-like exalted fantasy, no more deliberate mystery and obscuration. No more subjecting, horoscopic, all-fitting texts. For only this last century or so, while in possession of the hard, straightforward facts, the simple truth and a sense of proportion can we ordinary citizens stand back in large numbers and truly contemplate our common, limited yet quite fascinating destiny with unadulterated appreciation.  

We've been to space and found neither heaven nor hell. Even looking back at Earth seeing absolutely nothing, not even ourselves---only a blessed, precious, blue heavenly body circling an amazing mass of light and warmth! So is this not the moment to accept the magnificence of life on its own unique terms for perhaps only the second time; first then, so innocently, in the very, very beginning, and again only of late? Without the intervening interference of sanctimony, of artificial despair, silly threats of damnation, the torments of a sulfurous hell, the fire, the brimstone of it, the deliberate perdition of it, places where even seraphs fear to tread? Without the feeble crutch of tailor-made eternity or sainthood and all its supporting ritual and dogma, without feeling that for us, here, there's no grand role left to play, that we have lost our 'other' purpose, as if we ever really had one or for that matter....really need one!? Not as übermensch, superman, but simply as man. Man whose only greatness lies in his capacity to face and manage, if not completely influence, his own destiny. For haven't we put far too much capital in the search of 'meaning' and if there is some other, higher purpose at work, do we think it will reveal itself by our crawling, by our writing sainted comic-strips or our preemptive sucking up? For now, we are our own meaning, isn't that obvious? Besides what happened to dignity? Do we know? Shouldn't we?

Still, despite one Spanish thinker whose name escapes me reasoning that as they haven't contacted us provides definitive proof there's intelligent life up there, another Spaniard, the mathematician Sampedro, tells us that a powerful metaphor is so much more useful than any mathematical equation, which by itself is so very, very wise. Nonetheless, dog-fighting over notions like these or not, research rather than repentance (that annoying guilt-tripping) or mere phrase-making should be our game, while remaining practical at all times and not elevating modern science to the status of another religion with all its hierarchy and horrible power-seekers. And always bearing in mind that man can grow but create not one single melon or strawberry.

It should be clear then that true discovery and the inevitable victory of real knowledge over biased pontification should lead to victory over our lingering cowardice, testify to our ultimate maturity and final peace. So that all guiding philosophy, like all guiding religion, should sooner than later be put out to pasture and into the realm of children's books where surely they belonged all along. Leaving us with only one broad formal philosophical and theological discipline, termed perhaps (studies of) The History of Unfinished Human Thought. Or is it The Redundant Plea Contained In All Past Human Rumination And Reflection?! In his Library of Babel the opposite of what Borges calls a detailed history of the future. Because we should study, precisely so we don't repeat... Something the comfortable clerks of philosophy and creed, adorers of the established, have been totally removed from. And what a terrible state of affairs, those in charge of stimulating intellect, killing it. For who killed curiosity, but them?

Giambattista Vico, a XVIIth century Italian philosopher came close to this position attacking the Church and also the reigning brain of his day, Descartes, who pretended to be a supreme anthropocentric rationalist while thriving on 'methodical doubt', but managing to remain a devout Catholic all his life (as Pascal already said of him: talk about triple contradictions, talk about confusion...), the former saying man had successfully faced three ages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes and was now embarking on the Age of Man, with no further need for morale boosters. Vico also talking himself out of a comfortable job at the University of Naples in 1699, selling all his worldly belongings to prove his point and going on to starve to death for lack of income. But this no longer needs to happen to men of utter intellectual integrity.

In addition, here, now, today, and in conclusion there are a handful of myths and faerie or fairy tales from which we needn't escape, from which we needn't be set free. We don't have to deprive ourselves altogether of our fantasies. We only need to carefully remember how perverted political and religious romanticism have accounted for much abject cruelty and suffering, ignominiously producing millions of dead; belief systems and doctrines still thriving in too many places out there. These other fables then the happy exception: bereft of the inherent dishonesty of all the rest of them. Differing from your run-of-the-mill, multi-striped scribbling and scripture in that they attempt to unmask ostensibly benign falsehoods, near hypnotic to so many, while neither creating nor perpetuating them. Like from the other side of the mirror, Alice in Wonderland coming to mind (contrariwise, continued Tweedleedee, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's the logic.) and also of course The Emperor's New Clothes. Or what about toothless Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh, isn't he absitively, posolutely honester than most of us will ever be? With one superb quote remaining to end this brief exposé and somewhat personal tour d'horizon, not intended to offend but to set free the slaves and even though so conditioned that in their bewilderment, and as a primitive response, they'll probably first attack anyone attempting to liberate them. How bizarre, slaves rising up to remain slaves, but it happens moreoften than not.

The quote then from another one of these rare works, The Wizard of Oz, the old fool just caught in the act of deception. Dorothy's exclamation to be precise, on the farm, at the end of the tempest, after she awakes:

"Auntie Em, Auntie Em!

There's no place like home!...

There's no place like home!"

That's right, there is absolutely nothing wrong with home: our here and our now. Human existence needn't be fraught with feelings of fear or a colossal sense of futility once official fairy tales have been exposed for what they are. Simply put, we must cut out the crap. At the risk of sounding like Peter Sellers as Chauncey the dim-witted gardener in Being There, I truly think it's what Voltaire meant a couple or more centuries ago when he closed Candide with the open-ended Il faut cultiver notre jardin, urging us to value our delicious earthly garden, retrieve lost dignity and move on to living authentically. Never missing a beat, a notion to which before him Plato and Montaigne were no strangers, both moralists of the first order to whom pleasure remained essential. Lusty moralists they, if not moralistic sybarites.

Put differently again this represents the last phase, the First, at the dawn of 'our' days, one of light and innocence, the Second, one of fear and survival, the Third, one of fear and sustenance, the Fourth, one of fear, fantasy and order. The Fifth, one of power, fear, fantasy and enslavement, followed by the Sixth, one of self-induced darkness and the beginning of the struggle to free ourselves, then more recently the Seventh, one of drift into despair and a sense of the absurd as reflected in bleak XXth Century theatre and literature, but possibly the time ripe now to do away with all that fear, irrational fear, and more of it: there's nothing to be afraid of, nothingness as such does not exist, therefore nothing can be 'absurd' except perhaps wasting our stay on this heavenly body. What's nothing to some is every bit as magnificent as the small piece of art, man represents. Except that this piece of art has attitude, cannot abide its own ultimate insignificance and seemingly mere decorative property, incapable of submission to the whole and as such nature's only sad rebellion. Yes, sadness is man, for despite that fleeting magnificence still perhaps the cosmos' sole failure. Unless we cease to make it so; majestic, heroic after all!

Now if only all would listen, instead of throwing those nasty, archaic bombs in the name of, yes, nothing. Because really, from any perspective, besides untimely death, man's only persistent enemy is incomprehension. And he doesn't improve matters with his lagging awareness, by not 'farming' himself more responsibly, by the fear induced abnegating of a good slice of his intellect, by denying himself a real joie de vivre in the face of the miracle of this life, by thinking that dignity's putting on a uniform or a robe, by favouring myopic arrogance over suitable humility and huge, elaborate lies over simple courageous truth: man the abdicator, the conformist, the great pretender. Don't let him fabricate, especially purpose, like some existential alibi: living's not a crime and something that cannot easily be explained not necessarily absurd and empty. And while Signore Vico called it the Third Age, why don't we just call all of this Phase Eight, and see what happens?! If lived and shared equitably, it causes fewer murderous, societal convulsions and may even fight heartburn. Paradise gained at last, paradise for all: the last leaf turned!

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***Fairy Tales (Merriam-Webster Dictionary): A story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending. Hence the suggestion of achieving a narrow escape from 'improbable events' or for that matter apocryphal endings, by inching back to something closer to probability but still rather good. Like saving the life of a girl trapped in some sordid comedy. Cinderella, stepping into our living room, wiping her brow, exclaiming, phew, finally got out of that goddamn fairy tale, may I come in?

Everything you've read here has been said or written before. This is a summing up by an ordinary XXI Century citizen, independently arriving at his perspective, therefore without 'formal' indoctrination and pre-acquired certainties of any sort--- just common sense, absolutely no despair and a good pinch of ontological courage, though I have bad days too. Yes, cognition commotes, is not for the fainthearted, but priceless if you have balls.

Accompanying seminal prose poem

A FUNERAL FOR IMMORTALITY

(Subtitle: The Lodes of Time)

There is no sweeter contingency

Yet consider the promise of endlessness and finding all things good, become all hell

So that the possibility of immortality's own death sneaking up, to this deception we should not over-react,

cuddled as

we were

by her

only

when still in need of

nurture

Indeed, if immortality were a woman who had a certain way with us, holding herself out, making us go and go on, when otherwise and long ago we would have given up: yes, such is the power of suggestion and the degree to which our fears and at once the self-preservation behind our beliefs, do stimulate

The terrible power of fantasy, as it is called

For as it turns out her generosity always exactly mirrors our generosity towards ourselves

Now one day such a lady surely deserves a warm-hearted elegy, seeing how before our very eyes she suddenly grew so very old, and cold. Or was it slowly, but nobody paid attention? The cause of death, since you ask, usually ignored in as formal an outpouring as an obituary, and futile bringing the matter up except perhaps for those themselves blindly moribund. And having loads of time coming up with a suitable epitaph, there rarely existing need for impatience or thrusts of other sorts

For it is nearly impossible to write a well-reasoned prose poem on something that isn't quite real, something like a real enough obituary or elegy for immortality and the reason lady-embodiment serves us well. For in defense of things it must be given a try as life only valued as a constant 'raging against the dying of the light' so often leads to the de facto denial of one. Like the stating, as so many do, that wisdom is 'accepting life's limitations' and from there swiftly going on to suggest how terrific and infinite and un-'limitated' the next one is. Commencing the search for the holy grail of this immortality, even when there is not the faintest hope of finding it, the real, organic universe unable to function in this fashion. Or as a friend of mine expresses it, immortality having no future

And which I only now begin to understand

But let us return to the task of burying a lady: it is not easy celebrating someone who never was and could not be, someone comforting and fanciful, alive superbly in our desires, one we only recently and to our great shock learned no longer lives among us. Gone, defunct, dead and needing to be buried with great pomp, out of respect for what we perceived were her extraordinary accomplishments: dishing out limitless, beguiling reward as recompense for our own perceived victories and qualities. A spell-binding, an overly generous lady, deserving an elaborate grave, a solid grave, for she was uncommonly elusive and thought to be extremely tall, with all of us knowing her but none of us ever really seeing her, even though, incredibly, we would kill for her if we had to, chips down and seemingly in the service of some deep need of ours

With an elegy or obituary that could say a lot or not so much, because she meant a lot or not so much, depending on to whom one spoke. In fact there could be more than one of each, the irony that she knew so many and survived such a long, long time in the minds of most. Longer, and get this, than all her admirers, adherents and good friends put together. The Daily Telegraph probably celebrating her service to King and Country. The Times her estates. The Guardian her fellow man and Radio Four her forceful voice. And that is because we are all so very much inspired by anything or anyone confirming what we already stand for, making every attestation like it rich, because... in fact... our own

Though strangely, dead or simply disappeared, she keeps on popping up, sighted by those who can't give up, wanting to have a fresh go at her. When the only thing the poor dear wanted was to be remembered, not be seduced again or in the other extreme driven to exhaustion. Or ridiculed by some, because that's the way we are: sometimes good, sometimes nasty, just don't push and as long as either way we bag redemption. But seriously and swiftly removing tongue from cheek, is it not the premise of promise of such another life, the one after the one we know to be so short, precarious and cruel, the sole element of change that possibly makes sense? For what is the point of extending life with one just as fraught with uncertainty? And therefore making the dreaming up of one that is neither, such a perfectly natural endeavour? Putting to good use the one faculty making us differ from all other living creatures: Need something you cannot have, thus badly want? Why, invent it, of course!

Then buy it! And need itself then, so very facultative. And artificiality on the surface so very beneficiary. For it certainly seems to work in other parts of our existence, like matters economic: half the world living decently by the fabrication of products that are useless or invisible. Goods and services based on fear and contingency. On mere impression and suggestion, with them crazy or smart enough to provide the stuff and us daft enough to buy it. Yes, along broad lines it works, just like the Cold War. The economic catalyst without which we would all have been eating dirt and for decades fostering industry upon industry keeping us directly or indirectly in a job. Though nothing ever happened, no shots fired, only those empty, angry menaces and threats. And what did Yves Saint Laurent ever do for Joe Pizza? Sodomy and velvet hats? Just what everyman was pining for? Of course not, but let the poor designer be, you do get the point: he successfully employed thousands of us in hundreds of stores in a dozen countries, or more. But in the end, both Yves and the Cold War tired and went. Yet fatuous immortality, despite all funerals, ever so kept her allures

For on a further level it seems self-evident that there can be no life without death. So why then eliminate death? It is like trying to steal the horizon: it cannot be done and to begin with does not make sense. But by insisting on doing so, by trampling on others in the act, by being blind to every breath-taking landscape on our way, what are we achieving, anyway? To a growing number of us the secret lying in staying away from this sort of thing, by overcoming existential fears and silly ambition. Not craving immortality and reward the answer,  ignoring that innate vulnerability to incentives of the kind. For it may be that in this ignoring and the human dignity it engenders lie the only timelessness that matters. Additionally and as a by-product, a delightful element of discovery left to our children, a stretch of road truly their own, nothing handed down or for much longer. The case before. Yes, not having their existence cut and dried after the ignoring... no longer ignored

Is this not the very least we can do, bequeathing them life's magnificent sense of adventure, the one that we are busy claiming on the late side? Therefore, besides her obituary, the funeral for immortality, our lovely but somewhat sly and once ancient lady, should be an extremely joyous and even repetitive one. Itself an unending New Orleans jazz funeral with laughter and dance flowing through the streets of five continents. Listen! Listen to the sway of that music, slow drums rolling, brash brass and soft reeds blowing, all feet moving, all man's skins aglow

What a way to live

as live we must,

within thin

lodes of time

the party

far from over?

(Conceived just prior to Fairy Tales, the Essay)

P.S: Yes, I'd be most impressed meeting someone who's not a slow-burning chemical reaction. Someone not taking in 3 times a day, excreting no waste. Someone equal to the Universe, not a slave to it, not a senseless bubble. Without a penis as a link, born as and staying like a rock, himself a small roving planet. Man, the Planet. Truly significant, not insignificant, not even Promethean, know what I mean?

- The Pope farts?

- Oh, yes. Calls it 'contemplation'! Alone, in the gardens of  Castel Gandolfo, Cardinals chased well away...

-No kidding!

-Of course! Why the hell not!? Isn't he just another walking combustion, be it a fancy one?

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