Labour Day

As T S Eliot puts it,

The lot of man is ceaseless labour,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

Since the last time I posted here, two years have passed. In that period, I've entered an enterprise, missed two St David's Days, taught countless classes (by which I mean I haven't counted them) in literature, history, and hard sciences. I have read many books, wearied of many writers, and settled into a life of comfortable obscurity—only to be unsettled by various events.

I have walked as much as ever, but covered more ground. Whereas in the past I walked the same blocks, the same corridors, again and again in each interminable day for twelve years, I have been walking the streets and the drains, the hills and the hawker-stalls, and the small corners of the wide earth for almost a decade since.

Time wounds all heels, as an old saying goes. Your sole is hardened by much beating against the ground, like wheat threshed to remove chaff, or iron pounded in a flame.

And here it is Labour Day, and the idea of retirement irks me. After all, it was an idea invented by the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck of relatively ancient fame: he decided it would be good to support the infirm and insane in their old age. He excluded those still fit for work, which for the largest span of human history has been the norm. My forefathers trod their winepresses till they could tread no more, and I dearly wish to do the same. When a person will no longer work, there is no need for that person to eat.

But that state is, God willing, decades hence. And even if not, I'm happy to go when properly gone. For now, I'll just think my thoughts and measure out my life in coffee spoons.

All Hallows' Eve

Death is transfiguration and transformation. October 31 is the day on which we think about that. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do stainless steel rats dream of crystal spheres? Do we dream we are butterflies; or do butterflies dream they are humans?

I keep vigil on the night of October 31 not because I'm a Halloweenie. I do it because it is good to remember that death is a terminus — a boundary between two states. Whether you are religious or not, this is clearly true. You have certain rights in one state of being, certain rights (normally fewer) in the second state. You are someone much more interactive in one state, someone normally a lot less in the second.

But for me, the sober judgement of looking back through life and lives is an enlightenment. It lightens the burden of soul through the exploration of what it means to live and to have lived. And the light of the undiscovered country shines brightest on the boundary between the dying year and the harvest, and the living year and the spring.

The Work-Life Balance Hoax

Most people don't realise that work is a legitimate and valid subset of life. Hence you cannot balance the two. What you need to do is balance work against non-work elements in life. If you try to balance life against work, it will fail.

How do we know?

Try doing this. Stand next to a wall that is at least as high as you are tall, so that you are upright and looking in a direction parallel to the wall. This will place one of your shoulders, and the outer edge of the foot on the same side, against the wall.

Now try to lift your other foot without falling away from the wall.

Simple physics and many other forms of reasoning will show that you cannot balance the subset against the superset — except in one case.

That case is when both sets are identical, which in this case would mean that either your entire life is work, or your entire work is life. This gives perfect balance.

Otherwise, accept that work is part of your life, and that you will die without it. But do other things with your life, so that you don't die OF work.

And remember: there is no such thing as 'work-life balance'.

The Difference Cliché

"What a difference a week makes!" is one of those clichés that relies on truism. It's hard not to find a difference between snapshots of anything taken a week apart, especially the closer you look. But my life has changed a lot.

Some of you know about the Atlantean enterprise that has been launched. Is it possible to break the narrative of the burning books and launch a kraken into the gates of the Temples of Learning? We call on those who have such hopes to join with us — and it is a call we would not have dreamt of making a week ago.

Meanwhile, back at the Citadel, they've bid farewell to the busy one and will be bidding farewell to the business one. Will times change? Will the Pillars of Herakles still stand guard at the mouth of the 'Inmost Sea of all the Earth'? Only the long view will tell.

And we look further across the world, wondering how a contender for a throne of the world can fail to differentiate between 'wooden ships, iron men' and 'nuclear carrier battlegroup, Iron Man'. A week (as the other cliché goes) is also a long time in politics.

Expansion

I teach, and in the past, this was thirty or forty students in a room, with all of us going on a guided tour of some side street in the map of the word, mappa mundi. Of late, it has been a class of adults, or of colleagues, or a very small class of four or fewer young people.

And then came the suggestion — why not five or more, why not ten? Why not start a small school with small classes? Why not make it worth their while for students to learn something, in the odd and frankly rather peculiar ways of teaching you are renowned for?

Something in me cracked. I hope it wasn't a joke.

Endings

31 July was when it ended. My parents got married two years before they became my parents, and they were no longer free. That, at least, is one interpretation of it all.

But now, many many years later, they are free even though that which made them unfree is still in effect. Lesson learnt: you grow into freedom, and freedom grows in you, and it is not a right any more than being matter is the right of a molecule.

I love watching my parents. They do so well together.

The Night Circus

It is a dark tale and yet light. It is like two ravens, except that where both might be black and stare with amber ruby eyes, one here is white like a tall tower in the morning sun and has the blue eyes of that particular day.

I played the game, and then I read the book. And my heart is like a red banner, a bright flag of the many things I hold to be true while knowing that I do not know whether they are or not.

If you, gentle reader, come across Ms Erin Morgenstern's book, The Night Circus, read it and try not to weep. One cannot really lose what one never really had.

But, oh, the pain of loss even if that is true!

Journeyman (Part 1)

It has been a strange journeying. I find myself straddling worlds, a charioteer guiding many horses — the pale horse of the sciences, the red horse of the arts, the black horse of the humanities, and the white horse of faith. In each realm, I am doing something new. It humbles and terrifies me all at once, and yet I am not engulfed.

Turnover Time

Things turn over time, and when turnover time is due, things turn and some of them do not return over time. But sometimes all things are made new, and what is new was never there to be turned over anyway, any time.

Score (Part III)

For years I ate the hot crispy noodles from the same stall, every morning, at the same times each week. The kind folk who supplied this sustenance would put chili on chili, sauce and fresh and dried, with pepper ground and split, making food that would raise a hellish sweat. I loved it. The heat in my body and the increased velocity of blood from caffeine (long hard black from the other stall) prepared me for each hard day.

I was on top of my game. Everyone said so. But it wasn't the game that mattered to the Dark Lord on his Dark Throne.

Innocently, I taught, I learnt, I walked around. I was given a Ring of Power, but I never really used it. Still, there was fear. As a wiser and older colleague pointed out, the insanity of ambition sees competition in every minion; those who lack it are often victims of the sudden strike, the knife in the dark.

The Dark Lord said to me once, "Do not dream of building an empire. I will raise to eminence only those who will do my bidding and will not contend against me."

I had not thought of building empires, rising to eminence, or contending against him. Unfortunately, I was soon to realise that I would not always do his bidding either.

Feathered Glass

Why is the glass feathered?

Am I seeing the light layered
light upon light
like the essence of the pearl?

Or is there tracery of line
like laughter's faint
footprints on a distant face?

I think hawk, but see mist.

The unicorn blinks knowingly
life upon life
in the corner of my eye.

This moment an airplane summer
exhausted clean,
shivered timbers, back to work.

=====

Note: I spent last night reading a whole year's entries in somebody else's blog all over again to capture the essence, but it eluded me. This is all I have for now. The rest is filtering through and I expect to collect more residuals, for which poetry may barely be sufficient, and my skill not at all.

Social Networking

Not the online kind, but the kind in which you catch up with old friends and share joys and burdens. And also, you get to see sunlight, the dappling of shadow on café walls, and move amongst real people going about real business in the real world of forest green, concrete grey, and steel blue.

Whether you are sociocultural, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, or sociohistorical, there is something for everyone not totally sociopathic (or socioapathetic). Ah, life! Thanks be to God.

See What Has Become Of Me

This is not the first time, nor should I imagine it will be the last time, that I am quoting from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. I have a noted affinity for songs like The Sound of Silence and Scarborough Fair/Canticle; I've used them in lessons before.

But one song which always hit too close to the bone (in a subtle way, like a stiletto, not the rock-hard clout of I am a Rock) was A Hazy Shade of Winter.

Time, time, time, see what's become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities...
I was so hard to please.
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.

Hear the Salvation Army band.
Down by the riverside,
It's bound to be a better ride
Than what you've got planned...

Carry your cup in your hand.
And look around,
Leaves are brown,
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.

Hang on to your hopes, my friend.
That's an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend that you can build them again.
Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It's the springtime of my life.

Weaving time in a tapestry.
Won't you stop and remember me
At any convenient time?
Funny how my memory skips
While looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme...

Drinking my vodka and lime,
I look around
Leaves are brown now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.
Look around
Leaves are brown
There's a patch of snow on the ground

Indeed, what has become of me? It's been an interesting journey; it looks set to continue being interesting. I await Mondays with a fierce joy, knowing that they WILL be interesting. *grin*

Julian

Here we go into the second half of 2011. It will be so much more interesting than most of the last few years. That, in itself, is also interesting. I love my life.

Endings and Beginnings

This is the end of the year of the Golden Tiger, a year of financial and social upheaval, according to traditional beliefs. It also heralds the beginning of the year of the Golden Hare, a year of plenty, and of social comfort. Within months, the Citadel will see a new lord and the High King will no longer have to fill the lands with war and rumours of war. The former is certain, the latter is wishful thinking.

For me, personally, the year of the Golden Tiger brought nothing but sought-for upheavals. It has ended with me realising how stress I have been under and how much faith I have unknowingly been using. It has left me mulling over the strangeness (in a fundamental sense) of God, and yet how difficult it is to become truly estranged from Him. Once a son, always a son, as they say.

I have renewed old friendships in startling ways. Old wyverns still carry their stingers, and old venom is more powerful than young. The truth of the wyvern's venom is that it is not the evil of gossip and rumour, nor the scorpion's backbiting sting; rather, the wyvern's venom is an alchemical catalyst. It forces change: "Change or die!" is its motto.

But why is that the case? It is by change that the best is yet to be. As an older sage once put it, "Old things are passed away; behold, the new has come." All things that one wishes for can only come if present circumstances change.

Every Egypt will one day have a new Pharaoh; if the new one has forgotten Joseph, then Israel mourns. But it the new Pharaoh makes Egypt not the ancient tyranny of the past, then Egypt become something new, not-Egypt in a sense.

As a child of two calendars, I get to see the grace and glory of God twice in the special way that a calendar offers. A year ends, a year begins; in one year and out the other. But something always happens in between, and as I grow older, I have learnt that each year means opportunities offered to be wiser.

Thanks be to God.

Feeling Good

In the day just ended, I felt good.

I ate a bit of chicken. And some unidentifiable leaves. And listened to some amazing stories about peculiar happenings in the boondocks of the Middle Kingdom, from my tall and elegant musician friend.

Then I buzzed off to the place named after my maternal grandfather's clan and bought reading material. And I walked back to the Edges and bought more. Thus did I use up my many 20-ducat coupons which I had farmed during Üllertid.

Next up was the small haul. A haul is divided into three parts, as Kaiser Iulius might have said.

The first part was assembling the haul. It reminded me of one of those games where you wander around collecting odd pieces of clothing. The second part was conveying the haul to a place on the edge of dangerous, barbarous lands. And the third part was waiting in a dangerous place for a beautiful young lady to collect the haul. And well, to haul it away.

In such games, this is not your lady, but someone else's. Although you do get something nice as a gift, much appreciated.

Which reminded me of an old book on the games people play. This one, if I recall correctly, is White Knight, one of the few harmless and actually beneficial games that people play. I'm quite happy to be a White Knight, although my friend Wolff might snigger a bit, having been a real one himself.

When I got back, the mail had arrived. The Aedificium of the Triune had sent me a little package. Joy! Two copies of the latest journal, to which I had contributed a short article on finger food. Well, not quite.

More leaves for dinner. But also a large and well-stuffed omelette and a large bowl of porridge, with chili and ground pepper.

I had a good day, mostly. The cat was a bit miffed, though. He felt slightly abandoned, despite the fact that he had deserted me when his supper was served. Ah well, can't win them all.

Apprehension and Comprehension

There is a vast difference between apprehension and comprehension. The problem is that these days, they are too often mistaken for each other.

Apprehension is what happens when you make contact with something, most often through your senses. Comprehension is when your mind wraps around something and understands it.

These days, with soundbites and summaries, abstracts and action plans, everyone thinks they 'get it' when all that's happened is that 'it' has got them. But that's nothing new. As it says in Ecclesiastes chapter 8:

When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth — there are those who do not sleep by day or night — then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.

Even with a 24-hour work cycle or news cycle, there is too much going on. The sheer complexity of life defeats all attempts to observe or understand it all. When we have gained the whole world, we have gained nothing. It is all a striving after the wind.

That is why the message of Ecclesiastes is that people should try their best without burning out. There is no point wasting your time on earth when you don't know if what you do is of any good. You can't comprehend it all.

There are thus two kinds of advice given in that book: 'whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might', and 'enjoy life while you are young'. It's all about balance.

Get it?

Day 930

I actually hadn't realised almost a thousand days had passed between Monday 18 March 2008 (Day 000) and Monday 4 October 2010 (Day 930). Time's winged chariot hustles along, outpacing the doom of the Shining One by a goodly margin, and two and a half years have zipped by.

In between, I've written quite a bit. Poems, papers, presentations. I've been a busy person, earning my own keep, enjoying my own time, living with wonderful people and taking pains to look at all that I missed in the dim years of Egypt.

It occurs to me, though, that there is so much more I could have done in 930 days if I hadn't been watching the heavens so frequently. But that's where the signs were, so to speak, the auspices (bird-watchings) of a better time.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an illusion, but a necessary one. The word comes from Latin privus, which means "one's own". The idea that we can own something that nobody else can touch is what makes us persons; if everything we had was shared to some extent, then the only unique thing about us would be the specific configuration of things we shared.

But this age of free information flow is beginning to deprive (to separate, to alienate) us of privacy's illusion. The logical consequence of everything about you being shared to some extent by others is that you may no longer be a unique identity; your information can be duplicated and the sum of what you are may be shared.

Hold on, though. Most people would agree that a person is more than just a state of being, but a time-bound entity filled with memories and experiences. That, unfortunately, is more accurately described as 'an entity with the perception of being time-bound, filled with edited information purporting to be a record of past events, bearing the marks of experiences which are ill-defined and sometimes imaginary.'

The problem, as we have learnt over the last 20 years, is that our brains are always shifting. The curse of humanity, we have come to know, is not that our brains don't regenerate, but that they do, and they also shift configurations and modify memories and change the nuances of what we think, even before we know anything is there to be thought. We are the sum of mental processes we can't control, if we are the sum of such things at all.

In fact, some people have come to realise that the more people share a person, the more that person lives on in more dimensions. A person who is 'larger than life' is simply one whose total impact on others is much more than the usual. My grandparents, all deceased, live on in some legendary sense — people who were taught by them, who had experiences with them, tell me stories that seem true to me (and probably are true as far as those people know) about them. When we say that memories live on, that is true; but like living things, they change and mutate before reproducing again.

This is a problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography. You grow up in an environment. You tacitly learn its rules. You learn what you can say, what you should do, and so on. But if you don't commit all these things meticulously to another medium, it remains tacit knowledge, shifty and ill-defined. It becomes private knowledge, set apart only for you, and perhaps applicable only to you; in the extreme, there's something schizoid about it.

But all cultures thrive on shared experiences and shared rules, no matter how untrue or unreal they are. That is how myths and legends define societies — in this day and age, none more so than the myths and legends of science and information technology. 'Privacy' used to mean 'deprivation' — it may yet come full cycle in this age.

Hillsong

I'm over the hill but fear not the valley
I'm all round the street but not up the alley

And that is the way I think of my life. I've reached another prime. My many-coloured life prisms around me, shards of gold and blue and red. I am happy because I have a little hill. I can see enough to be a watchman, but not so much that I would see only little things. Everything looks both small and large from where I am.

This year has been a good year. I have to thank the old young people who have kept in touch. The people who live nearby, the people who live a bit further away, the people who have meals with me and who have made so many of my days.

I've met with even older people, who are still in my memory yet young. They've aged well, which is to say that if they weren't to expose my agedness, they'd not expose their own. I have not many regrets, although to have none would be great.

I am a happy man. This too is the blessing of God.