Dis-Appointments

This morning's newspapers brought yet another pustule to the boil (so to speak) as an educational leader in eastern Atlantis was removed pending investigation. Allegedly (and perhaps apparently), he had hired a consultant for his temple to education, and used that consultant, a friend of his, to intimidate the staff (or maybe, they just felt intimidated). It is all murky, as Shakespeare might have said in Macbeth.

I was absolutely entertained. It makes me want to propose that educational leaders in other parts of Atlantis should also be investigated. Should one hire a full-time chauffeur and 'personal assistant' to drive one's golden chariot? Should one hire a retiree at high pay-rates to order food for one's official functions? It is amazing! I should get my list of 'The Top 50 Initiatives of a Creative King of Moral Progress' and send it to the powers on the Beautiful View!

But whatever for? After all, the subtle screw is already at work, ready to pop the cork on the vintage wine that has been fermenting for the last two years. Ah, the sweet fragrance of success! The powers deserve a quality award for all their hard work. They actually have been doing the due diligence.

Rest assured, of course, that I shall never ever seek to be such a leader. I, in keeping with the admonishment to those of Thessaly, seek only to lead a quiet life and not bother with affairs of such great public weight and pressure. But I am amused, entertained, and wholly joyful.

Full Marx?

There's this wonderful argument going on here. I feel like joining in, simply because it is centred around that horrible and uneducated person, Richard Dawkins. There's a good critique of his work here, based on that woolly-minded (and best-selling) tome, The God Delusion.

Ah well. Temptations, temptations.

The Greater Trumps: (25) The Moon

Above all things beams the Moon. No innocent face this, but a face both wise and winsome, half in darkness and half in light. Twin pillars frame a gateway beneath it, and a river, its tide both rising and falling, runs through it. At the edge of vision, wolves howl, and odd creatures respond in their own peculiar ways. Everything is secret, and yet everything is seen; everything is possible, and yet everything seems impossible. This is the secret of the White Goddess.

Whether Selene, Diana, or Artemis, the moon in its phases has often been a symbol of fortune and of womanhood. But it would be unwise to see it as unrestrained and random fortune. Rather, just as womanhood is the source of birth, and the moon goes through both waxing and waning phases, the moon is generative and cyclical. You can ride it towards insanity or genius. In this light, the Moon therefore stands for Delusion (Deception?) or the creative productivity of the unfettered Mind.

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When I think of the Moon, I am irresistably drawn to the nightmare quality of Robert Graves's scholarship. In his odd anthropological opus, The White Goddess, he sculpts an image of mankind's religious history that is unsettling, and perhaps a little deranged. But oddly enough, I am drawn also to Khonsu, the Egyptian power of the Moon. Unusually, he is male, a god of knowledge and time. He was also a power of healing, and of madness. I think of Khonsu because, quite often, people tend to think of men as sane, stable and boring - hysteria, for example, comes from the Greek hystera, which means womb. But Khonsu shows that a male power can be pretty odd too.

Dylan Thomas was one for the odd visions. Here he is, in an excerpt from I See The Boys Of Summer:

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon - and midnight as she blows.

It's hard to imagine that he could say more about the moon. But he did. You'll have to see for yourself.