Fragmentary

You might have noticed that August's posts are misbehaving. They are all over the place, and you will find me posting my usual fragment of Atlantean-Day thought soon, more than two weeks after the event and yet dated 9th August.

Yes, it is a season of fists and fellow food fulness, the gifts of the entertaining sun. My mind turns out into the living space around me, and back in upon itself. Like a man looking through the chambers of a nautilus only to find himself amongst the orbitals of an onion, I am seeing too many things and not enough.

Augusts are ever so. I have sealed and unsealed records, blog posts, golden apples and silver ones — and they were all date-stamped in Augusts past. For August is the season of breaking up the plenitude of the land and distributing it in odd ways to all the people. It is harvest, and hear I am sitting bemused in the storehouse again.

Catalyst

It has occurred to me that some of my most serendipitous moments of reflective insight come when the cat has just stuck his claws into my foot. Pain-mediated enlightenment. Feline ideation.

Insighting

I walked a long way today, my first long walk in a long while. The physical exertion of walking great distances generates better thinking than the mental exertion of attempting to generate better thinking. It's like this: you think about globalisation, and there is no reward for it. You walk around the globe, and you find that you know a lot about globalisation.

I am reading Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen stories, about an Oxford don who has a remarkable breadth of learning and a truly irritating way of using it. He solves mysteries, normally backwards and upside-down. Apparently, Crispin (not his real name) wrote nine detective novels from 1946 onwards. He listed his recreations as excessive smoking, Shakespeare, idleness and cats (among others). He also listed his antipathies, and made sure that his characters displayed interesting traits.

Reading Crispin is like taking a long walk in somebody else's head. Taking long walks in Singapore is like taking a long walk in Lee Kuan Yew's head. It is all very terrifying and reminds me of Escher prints, especially the one in which the monks walk around in endless circles; I think it's called Castrovalva.

Dispensability

I am totally dispensable. I have frequently admitted it. Especially when told that I am; I am positively effusive about my dispensability. This is greeted in some quarters with consternation and admonitions to be more ambitious.

Actually, I know I am unique. In one sense, I am not dispensable - nobody can exactly replace the sum and product of what I am, what I was made to be, what I do, which hole in reality I fill. However, all my many tasks, duties and responsibilities can be given to others who will do better in each area. I remember when I made my first great dispersion of powers. At least six different people took up my various tasks, and I still was not done.

I was curious. I experimented. I disbursed and devolved, resolved never to take my own authority seriously again unless accompanied with true responsibility and power and the blessings of the Spirit. And I found nothing but freedom in the exercise. It was a surprise to me, even though the theory had always pointed the way; even though the theology said nothing but that.

And I learned something else. Sometimes, it isn't the 'killer application' which wins; it isn't always the ability to do individual things excellently which is the gift. It was my ability to link all the tiny things together in a way useful to other people which, in some arcane way, was the 'killer application'. The odd and sideways percipience, the peculiar trajectory, the weird web of seemingly disparate pieces of different disciplines - these were my forte. And since they weren't tangible and measurable, they were dispensable.

If we thought like that of the Holy Spirit, it would be dispensable too. Thank God we don't.