Leverage

Perhaps one of the most momentous phrases of the ancient and departed West are these words of Archimedes on levers — δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω — as reported by Pappos the Geometer. In English, they might be translated, "Give me a standing-place and the earth I shall move." It is an ambitious thought, to say the least.

But that really is the reach of the levers of our mind. Sitting where I am, linked to the web (or net, or whatever poor Ariadne's distant child has become), I am able to move thoughts a world away, provoke action and evoke emotion, invoke intangible concepts from the vasty deep. I am able to draw data from the cosmos and drink it, transforming it to information or speculation as it courses through the bowels of my mind.

We are makers of our own knowledge. Yet in some ways, that's a trap we should be wary of springing. Sometimes, the philosophy we manufacture is a false love; it is a love of sophistry and not of sophia, whom the Greeks called Wisdom. I laugh at the epistemology of science: it is so because it is so, and if it ain't so, we will muck around till it matches. The truth is that we have made our universe in the image of whatever we can keep whole in the collective cavity of our human minds — and it might not be the Universe entire.

Perhaps Blake's outrageous ramblings were correct: "To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." You really have to sit through his Auguries of Innocence all the way to "God appears, and God is light, to those poor souls who dwell in night; but does a human form display to those who dwell in realms of day."

If you do that, you will pass by a lot of extremely odd lines, in which he talks about the triumph of empiricism and why states are doomed by licensed gambling and prostitution. But that was Blake, ever trying to shift the universe from the place where he stood in London. Poetry is a lever too, but the place it stands is really the mind of man.

Global Geometry

When Thomas Friedman says that the world is flat, it puts one in mind of an alluvial floodplain, so flat and silty that it poses no obstacle to the relentless spread of water, again and again, redistributing the chemical wealth for those inclined to take risks. And indeed, the major civilisations of the world have lived, died, spawned, suffered and spread by the dangerous wealth of the floodplains.

Globalisation, as Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and others have pointed out, is a phenomenon that has its roots in the human past of about 60 millennia ago. Humans spread. They move and bring culture, community, commerce and conflict. Where a dominant group meets one less dominant, the less dominant group learns more. This ensures that civilisations endure cycles of boom and bust; except that larger ones tend to go bust more slowly. The corollary to that is that when they do go bust, they tend to go bust with a boom.

For Atlantis, our small city-state whose insignium of the Lion of the Sea has spread to places like Venezia and Londinium, globalisation reared its head at least 700 years ago. Yet we treat the phenomenon as if it is ultra-modern, a thing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in this age of humanity.

There is a kind of secret that the Masons knew and which is also hidden behind the warning on the gateway to Plato's Academy. That warning reads, "Let no man enter here who knows no geometry."

That secret is this. The world is not really flat; neither is it really round. It is not an oblate spheroid as the geographers have it, nor an odd polyhedron as the geometers and cartographers require. It is a lump of rock, physically. But memetically, in terms of the ideas that drive the world of humanity, it is a furious and irregular tempest that is subject to no laws that humans have yet been able to discern.

As Qoheleth says in the book known as Ecclesiastes, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to them all." The marketplace of ideas is not dominated by the swift or the strong, or even the durable or diffuse; it is an agora where millions cry out and not all is understood, and even when anything is understood, it is sometimes understood too late.

Blake wrote about a 'fearful symmetry'. This is true to life. The symmetrical, the neatly-ordered ideas of MBA school and the human sciences of politics, economics and sociology — these are dangerous because they are not entirely true, but true enough to lead to disaster.

It is like a stack of bricks, each one placed slightly out of true; each is almost exactly in place, but not quite. That stack will eventually fall as the centre of its gravity is displaced further and further away from the centre of the foundation. Eventually, it will hang over nothing; as it says in the book of Job, "He hangeth the world over nothingness." What an image! What an idea!

I just wonder how true a description it is.

Lear & Present Anger

There are always strange things in Kent. A low but noble estate, some think of Kent as but a satellite of the grandeur that is London. But, yes, there are always strange things to be found in Kent, in its legends, in the minds of those who have served that almost-imaginary but all-too-real place. And here is Kent.

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You, O King, are the patriarch, the anointed leader of the green country, the pleasant land. At the zenith of your majesty, life and death, wealth and power, innocence and savage wrath, are in your mighty hand. Nobody gainsays your excellence, your achievement, your range of virtue and skill. You have called the beasts of the field to your service and the beasts of the wild to your hunt. All instruments of peace and war are subject to your intellect and will.

And you have surrendered land and, latterly, your dignity to the womenfolk of your high estate. Beneficience falls like summer lightning on the eldest; your malediction falls like winter hail upon the youngest. You exile those who serve you best, retain those who might secretly use you worst. And this is tragedy, a goat-song of the earth for all – for the king is the land, and the land is the king, as it has been since Adam's time.

I would be a disciple of that rarest of prophets, William of the Bleak House. Listen to what he has said, O King! Listen to the words of the prophets on the subway walls. Listen, and when the watchman has said that the day comes, and also the night, beware!

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Readings

Jerusalem by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

The Sound of Silence by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turn my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools," said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows;
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you..."
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence