Watching the White Wheat

As the Welsh say, "Bugeilio'r gwenith gwyn." A watchman watches. The wheat unfolds, silver in the light. The fields are full, and the harvest ripens after a harsh winter, which started early and ended late.

I was reminded of this by an ancient post that a former student quoted. It so happened by coincidence that I was reading from a prophet whose complaints were answered.

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what He will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.

And the LORD answered me, and said, "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry."

The rest of the passage is powerful and disturbing in its historical context, and you can seek it out if you need to be disturbed. But the watchman sees in the gloom, and realises — the night has come, but the sunrise will follow. That is promised, and the future is aflame with eternal promises.

Black & White

Things hardly ever, are they?

Look to the Citadel, and you will see it a house divided. Some will say, the evil that men do lives on after them; some will say the good is oft enurned in the ashes (since there is now not much room for burials). There are many opinions, and in a constituency so varied, surely some will be disappointed.

But we must have faith in the vision of the hero who started the endeavour. If it is indeed consecrated work, no mere human can desecrate it; if it is indeed truth and light, nothing will defeat it. As a wise man said to me today, "It may take time, but the Citadel will be stronger for it."

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, remember that the ocean may be red with blood, and the wine-dark sea may pull us all into its depths — but somewhere, the sky is shining and the sun is blue, and the sea is crystalline in clarity. Although much has been lost and there is yet more to lose, there is also much that has yet to come to pass.

So to my friends who look upon the ending of an era, think about the other words of Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra:

Trust God, see all, nor be afraid!

Aspiration and Inspiration

I have a nice large lateral section of provolone with me, and several pleasant liquids which one might imbibe on such an occasion. There is bread. And it is quiet.

I think of all that is past, all that is to come. And I remember some of Robert Browning's words in his long and rambling Rabbi Ben Ezra:

For thence — a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks —
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink the scale.

That scale is of course a reference to the weighing out of men's souls. A heavy-laden soul would sink the scale; an unburdened one (or less-burdened one) would not. It makes me reflect on what 'success' and 'failure' have meant and have come to mean to me.

And that brings me back to both the first and last verses of that poem. It begins with

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

and it ends with

So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain of stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

We are all works in progress. Sometimes, the text is blotted, censored, savaged, missing, or incompetent. And sometimes, it is sublime or strange or both. I am inspired to greater heights by the realisation that what I aspire to be is not necessarily as great as what may one day come to pass.

The Blue Ocean Fills With Blood

I think I first posted my thoughts about the awful Blue Ocean Strategy concept here. That was back in February 2009, when a fairly prominent Atlantean educator decided to make it his reason for living (or something like that). In that post, I pointed out that the idea was an ancient one, with a cautionary tale attached to it.

A month later, I then made a prediction about the likely success of this strategy as applied in the education sector. That post can be found here. In this second post, I also coined the term 'lazy innovator strategy', which has since found its way into my research findings.

Scandalised further by more repetitions (parrot-like) of this philosophy, I then wrote a third post here. In this post, I pointed out that the whole idea was also a case of stating the obvious, overgeneralising, and then making a lot of money out of it.

Finally (or so I thought), I came to some conclusions about the viability of the Blue Ocean Strategy in a fourth post here. In that post, I pointed out that the evolving situation was more like that of a stagnant pond or a Sargasso Sea, than an ocean of any sort (let alone a blue one).

A year after the first post I mentioned, I felt a great need to indulge in mockery. This I duly carried out, but not without some stirrings of guilt. That guilt led me, the very next day, to post some soothing words for baby wyverns.

Where am I going with this?

Well, on Saturday night and the night just passing, I heard many things about the fate of the blue ocean of this particular iteration of the Blue Ocean Strategy. Apparently, the blue ocean has been filled with blood and fire. It is not the safe haven it used to be; indeed, the sulfurous stink of gunpowder now fills the air, and 'Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke' as Chesterton said.

I have another dangerous flaw in my character besides a habit of mocking people (the Good Book warns about sitting in the seat of mockers, so I try very hard not to): I also have a bad habit of saying, "I told you so."

We await further interesting changes at the Citadel. It is a mystery who will emerge with mastery. But some persons are too gross to serve.

Flower No More

While passing through London a decade or so ago, in another life, I passed by a brick wall with a blue door in it. A brass plaque which I only barely noticed at first informed me that this was where Dylan Thomas had lived. The late, great Welsh bard has always been one of my favourite poets. Here's something from him; it's the last stanza of his And Death Shall Have No Dominion:

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Some days, I feel like saying, "Where taught a teacher may a teacher no more / Lift his head to the blows of the rain..." — I feel sometimes as if I had been dead for years, lost, mad, dead as nails, with my toes turned up to the daisies and my typewriter keyboard breaking into the light of heaven.

Some days, I miss my classroom intensely. I think, I dream, I hallucinate. Did I ever teach in a classroom? Did I have students who enjoyed the experience? Or was it all something like the good part of the dream before it descends into nightmare?

But death shall have no dominion, and I shall end this short post with another quotation from the word-hoard of that mighty voice:

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

Only Dylan Thomas (and perhaps, Geoffrey Hill) could take the pieces of the Book and make them tell their story in such a different way, but yet as true.

Hot Soup

I sat with Gnomus and the Hierophant yesterday in the NineSquare. There was coffee, tea and, for me, a dish of hot beef soup. It was a dish I had long enjoyed; of late, I have not had much of it. I have always enjoyed hot soup.

It's confession time, though. I do not like being in hot soup for bad reasons. I do not like people who put other people into hot soup for bad reasons. I will brave the hottest of soups for a friend; I will stand against injustice and tyranny; but I am, to some degree, not very brave.

Bravery, to me, is tempered and strengthened by reason. The lyrics from Man of La Mancha go:

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear the unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go,

To right the unrightable wrong,
to love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable Star...

It's that line in the centre that is the point: these things are the extremes where the brave dare not go. And since I am not very brave, I suspect I will fall short of such Quixotic ideals. I can drink hot soup, but I cannot live in it.

For those of you who may have once thought that I was brave in any way, I have to say that grievous irritation can spur one to bravery, but it doesn't necessarily mean that one has vast reserves of courage. I wish I had, though. I sometimes would like to be a bit of a hero, but I don't think I am very much of one.

I think I am just me. No Don Quixote, nor Prince Hamlet, I. Just a Prufrock, like any anonymous other.

Two-Faced

The problem with the Imperial Eagle of times past is that it has two heads. Traditionally, the two heads represent the avaricious vision of an empire that looks both east and west, claiming the whole world for itself. My observation is that some people prefer to think in terms of time rather than space — so the two heads look backwards and forwards in time, as in a balance between traditions and progress — and some other people prefer to think in terms of other things.

What really irritates me is this: You can choose to be a traditionalist or a progressivist, you can even choose to be both if you cleave to the values of the past and use them as a basis for future development; what you should not do is be neither, reacting against both tradition (oh, it is a hindrance and most of it is an old boys' club) and progress (why should we try new things unless we can manipulate them to make us look good without actually doing anything). Yet, this is the case from where I look out upon the world of education.

I suspect in the whole island, there are only about eight good principals. Of these, about half are power-hungry mad people, half are game-players seeking to win some imaginary zero-sum game, half are educators (and half are not) and half are seeking to entrench themselves by making a kingdom in this world. Yes, those are indeed multiple halves. But with eight, you can see how easily that can work out.

A cube can be divided into eight smaller cubes. It has six faces, and it has a centre that is equidistant from all faces, and also equidistant from all vertices. It contains both the tetrahedron and the octahedron within it. You can do complicated rotations and other symmetry operations with it, and it is good at returning to its original state. Unfortunately, this is what education is like sometimes.

Where I Live (Part II)

I live in that awkward zone for men, the time of life during which you feel young enough for the sports of your youth, while knowing that this is quite likely untrue. I console myself with thoughts of Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, only to realise that I am older than either, and earn a minuscule fraction of their wages (and that's my annual wage against their monthly, it seems).

I live in the region just after spring, somewhere into summer, with a view of autumn and a dread of winter. Winter's faintest whispers are in my hair, my eyes, my sinews. I still feel young, but that is more a sign of how resilient my mental landscaping is, than a sign of how physically fit I am.

I live in that odd time when the old have passed away, but so have some of the young. Some of those I grew up with are dead, from heart failure, from misadventure, from a malaise of the soul. Just yesterday I received the news that a young man two-thirds of my age had died after a wasting disease. I knew him; he was a good man, a man of integrity — and he has gone away.

I have returned to the poetry of my youth. My mother, always one for the metaphysical poets, brought me up on John Donne. I found myself at Meditation XVII. And there, these words leapt out at me in violent ambush:

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

And those great words are not even the most well-remembered of that meditation. Sometimes it seems that the talent of the world has died as well, that the world is like me; that old Dylan's 'green fuse' that drives my green age also drives the world, and both are less and less green by the day.

Where I Live (Part I)

Every day, I look around me, in the place in which I live, and realise what a peculiar and artificial state this is. It is the most heavily 'churched' area in this entire region; it is the most heavily Chinese; it is the most obviously Machiavellian; it is a synthesis of odd parts made unique by time and space, by commerce and grace.

Every part of the machine has been crafted by deliberate consideration. Even if at times that consideration has not been the smartest or wisest, it has been deliberate and the justifications clear. Whether the justifications were sufficient or even morally correct, is of course a different thing. But this little place is certainly the most artificial (in the original sense of 'made by art') place in this realm entire; it is the gateway between two very large and interesting oceans — large in culture, history and variety.

There is no other island in the world that bridges all the major civilisations of the past, as well as all the major ones of the present. Living here is sometimes like living in a panopticon, a central hub from which one sees everybody else more clearly than they see each other. It is interesting to see through Anglo-Chinese eyes, and Anglo-Indian eyes, and the relentless lenses of the American (and post-American) world.

Just the other day I was reflecting on how I made the transition from birth in the West to studies in the East; scholars from this island tend to make the reverse transition. It is all an enigma, but one I've begun to disentangle.

Love in a Time of Choler

The current age of man is neither reflective nor intellectual; since it is not sanguine either, it must be an age of choler — an age, as the ancients might say if exposed to modern jargon, dominated by the yellow bile of intemperate drive and antipathetic task orientation. In such an environment, our concerns become curiously short-sighted. Our priorities become curiously ill-defined and long-term. In short, there is a gap between what concerns us and what has prior claim on our vision.

It is this, I suspect, which makes love so difficult for some people. I've come to that suspicion not only by looking at others, but also at myself. It is easy to say in a vague sort of way that you love someone, that you will miss them when they're gone, and so on. It is harder to be concrete in the medium term.

For example, it's easy to say something like, "Today I'll give X a treat," or, "Today (or tomorrow), we'll go to Destination Y and do Z." It's easy to think of birthday presents and even the writing of a poem or two. It is also easy to say, "I'll be waiting for you after you finish university; it's only four years more," or, "Someday, we'll look back and think about all the times we've spent together."

But what are our concrete plans for developing the thick layer of affection between the seed of passion and the skin of compatibility? What are the things we work towards together? If we can have 5-year plans for schools that are never carried out, yet call this progress, is there hope for 5-year plans for human relationships that are carried out and are the true workings of a conscious and deliberate love?

Yes, I realise that some people do shy away from linking 'conscious' and 'deliberate' to 'love'. But 'love' is not just a noun, a thing, an emotion; 'love' is also a verb, an act, a process.

In my experience, to treat love purely as an emotion is to dilute its power and its impact, to make it vague and somehow thematic but not concrete. It makes the question of whether you love someone one of whether you feel that you love someone. And that makes it easier to confuse or deceive yourself.

It's not that we don't love the people we say we love; rather, it makes it harder because our emotions change with time, temperature, distance and the concentration of caffeine in our bodies. But things done are done; things to be done are things that you can objectively see will be (or won't be) done.

That's not to say, either, that you must measure love only in terms of things done and objectives attained, plans carried out and 'areas for improvement' improved. That would make it something like one of those schools-run-like-a-business.

What I think love is, to borrow the analogy of the four temperaments again, is that it has to have the short-term enthusiasm of the sanguine, the short-term focus of the choleric, the long-term persistence of the phlegmatic, and the long-term introspection of the melancholic. But it can't be four separate things, because the medium-term gap appears. It has to be an integrated programme.

This means that the enthusiasm and focus must be stretched, while the persistence and introspection must be anchored to the near future. Think about the next year, the next two years. Look back at the last year or so. And learn to enjoy every bit of it, without anxiety for the next day or the next ten years.

If you're in love, love will abide. But it also needs some deliberate positive cultivation, not just the deliberate negative avoidance of bad things. And somehow, your relationship will stretch to bridge the gap; before you know it, you will have loved someone for a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years and more. But that's as far as I've got.

Monde

It's like sitting in the tail-gunner's turret. You look behind you and see the world spread out, all its kingdoms and powers. And then you launch a hail of fire, and part of that is obscured, but not for long. Meanwhile, you remember the sermons good and bad, the self-aggrandizement and the self-humiliation, the true humility and the true grace, the many flavours and varieties of service and of style.

Like many wyverns who have left the nest, the Monday service is what we miss. It isn't for the substance always, but for the fact of its existence, the fact that there is an anchor that begins the week with the opportunity for reflection, for meditation, and for those who believe, God.

It's a lot like sitting in the tail-gunner's turret. Your parachute is just outside and you have a bunch of .50 cal heavy machine guns in front of you. If anything serious happens, you just might not get out in time. But you will go down with guns blazing, active till the last, just before your ascension into the heat of the day.

Taking Stock

This year has been too good a year. Financially stable, some work has been done (well, about 20,000 words or so), a lot of reading has been covered, my friends are still my friends (and old friendships have been renewed). All in all, more than anyone needs to feel that this has been a good year.

I am glad for the many thousands of small moments that made this year memorable. I started this post with the intent of listing them, despite the fact that the list would probably be in the dozens, nearer the hundreds. Then I realised that it would have to wait for 31 December, for obvious reasons.

The list of people to thank is very long. Being thankful for the divine providence is one thing; it is something you don't stop doing, and hopefully, you don't forget to keep doing. But sometimes one forgets to thank friends. I will always begin with family, without who I literally would not be around to thank anyone else; thus do I also honour the Fifth Commandment (these days far less respected, it seems, than the Fifth Amendment).

Among my friends, I must remember my three ex-wingmen, who can still be counted on in a fight. They have always been great support. I've never had female wingmen (haha) but I must say that you can find superior ladyship in this blog elsewhere.

I'll continue later.

Halflife

I had dinner last night with some ladies — I have always called them ladies, even when not everyone thought they were — from a long time ago, from almost the very beginning of my official teaching career. Not all of them were there; the weather was full of faraway voices dimmed by the roar of time. They will always remain my very first batch.

I listened to their stories, and their stories of their friends. I see how much was lost, and how much more was gained. I laughed when I realised that my recent students would look at some of them and think the age-difference negligible; by now, the gap is a dozen years, a bridge probably (or improbably) too far.

The bright are still bright, the fire is still hot, the life in them undimmed. I felt a lot younger with them; I was ten years older than they when I taught them and they were only as old as my 'baby' sister. Now they have entered their thirties, and I am wearing the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I am thankful for them, for all they taught me about the craft of life, the craft of building in the wasteland. They always have reminded me of that master of the English word who wrote in his 1934 opus, The Rock:

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.

It is all half a life away for them; for me it is more like a third of my life, now gone to dust. But the dust remembers, and the dust was once alive, and life was made from dust. I thank God for all the great things He has given me, and among these great things, the memories of being a teacher, of having that privilege of teaching and knowing those I taught.

If...

Sometimes you realise that people who lived and died a long time ago have still got something to say about the times in which we live. This is of course an obvious sort of observation. But when I say 'realise', I use it here in the sense of 'make real (to yourself)'. This is the sort of epiphany you get when you idly leaf through the poems of long-dead people like Chesterton, Blake, Donne or Kipling, stuff you used to read as part of an English Lit course or just for background atmosphere.

And then it hits you how some of these poems line up; how sometimes it becomes clear that the issue being written about was something that may actually have consumed the author in his search for meaning.

Take for example the third stanza of Kipling's 1897 Recessional:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

And the first lines of Kipling's 1895 Ballad of East and West:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

It's quite clear that Kipling, for all his jingoistic reputation and tendencies, was conflicted between his appreciation of non-white humanity and his inborn (inbred?) urge to see his own nation as the crown of all humanity. The caution he sounds for his own people and the readiness to praise the qualities he found elsewhere don't quite jibe with the idea that he was an out-an-out racist.

The conditional 'if' also gets a full measure of elaboration in this famous poem of his. To my mind, this piece perhaps shows that perhaps Kipling's idea of real dichotomy was not that between different kinds of race, in that Victorian sense; rather, it was that between the real person working and getting his hands dirty and living life, and the person who was not so exposed. It was, to him, a real issue that a man should know how to use power and not be corrupted by it; it was a real issue about how people should strive to be more than their natural inclinations would have seemed to allow.

The World

It's a fragile thing, this thing the Greeks called 'Cosmos'. It is all we have, it is all we think we make of it and all we see. But it is tissue thin, and dissolves for us at the moment of our passing.

The World is not the only real; it is the thin shell of reality, much as we tend to view the Sea as only its surface and perhaps the next five metres down. But the Sea is a thin skin over a progressively hot and molten ball of iron, a furnace made for powers like Hephaestus and the myth of the phoenix. So too is this Cosmos, this World that we see.

Timetabling

You spread it all out on the table of days, your buffet of 3600 seconds per hour, 86400 seconds per day.

You type 'GMT', and it tells you that even Greenwich isn't doing GMT till Sunday 26 October 2008 01:00 GMT (02:00 BST). The Wolfberry came by at 4:37:51 local time. Time is a river, an illusion brought into play by existence.

It's as Omar Khayyam said: life's but a checkerboard of nights and days/where Destiny with men for pieces plays.

You shuffle the pieces around. One is you. Anand draws with Kramnik in round 7 of the World Chess Championships. Neither is either. Are you a pawn? You never sought to be a king. You might be a knight. Knights and daze.

Time is perhaps that patient etherised upon a table, vide Prufrock. That poem always insists there will be time. But who is this who comes around to tidy up the table and clear the dishes away?

I sip my coffee. My life is measured out in coffee spoons.

A Night In The Lonesome October

That's the title of a little-known 1994 gem of a book by Roger Zelazny. I was reminded of it when She-Who-Knows said that this time of year was sad. In a sense, it is. It's the bleak mid-Autumn, at the very least; if the leaves haven't fallen, they will — and if the people haven't left, they're leaving.

It has occurred to me that perhaps this batch of students may be the last batch of teenagers to whom I will ever be saying farewell at the end of a school year. That reinforces two things to me: 1) that the young phase of my life was over, as with many people, at forty; 2) that the new phase has genuinely begun.

Once again, I have to thank all those who made it possible; from those who were great but thought little of themselves, to those who were small but thought great things of themselves; from those who finagled their way into the counsels of the mighty, to those who contrived to make light of the burdensome; from those who were Family and hence stood by me, to those who were not and still did.

It's not a lonesome October for me. But it must be a lonesome October for the friendless people who have to balance the books while seeing the deficits mount; it must be terribly lonely for the big people "in the high houses that are shuttered from the day" as Chesterton said. Where did summer go for them?

Postcolonial

It struck me many years ago that the word 'postcolonial' might mean very different things to a gastroenterologist and a historian. And yet, the same coprolithic conclusion might be reached: after all is said and done (or eaten and digested), you have to live with the consequences after the main events.

Right now, I'm looking at a tiny red dot in South-East Asia. It amazes me that the budding and blooming of its education system actually took place in the 19th century. Apart from the early 20th century influx of Chinese philanthropy targeted at securing a cultural outpost of Sinicism on this valuable frontier, most of the institutions underpinning the dramatic modern-day development of this red dot were set up a long, long time ago, in far-flung corners of an Empire that has melted away.

Since that era, less forgotten than rudely thrust out of the local consciousness with variable affect, the single-party government has said many things which are generally true but somewhat dissimulating about the local past. The myth of the present time is that until the present governing party took over, this place was a sleepy fishing village and perhaps a somewhat lackadaisical, occasionally piratical, port. It was not of any consequence and, on handover from the British to the locals, actually was a great burden to bear in terms of finance and lack of opportunities. Without the present government and its forerunners, this place would not have succeeded.

Actually, the problem with alternative histories is that there is no real test. The history we have and what we are today is all that we can look at. But it should be said that the past history of the little red dot has always been one of being a powerful trading centre and strategic location for the projection of naval and economic power. 'Fishing village' doesn't quite cut it. In fact, the mark of its capable governance is really that it has fulfilled its potential in some very obvious and significant ways; whether it has done better than expected is really debateable, considering the assets it has always had.

But the heroic myth always requires the transition from darkness into light; and if the other psychopomps of the journey are cast by the wayside and forgotten, what is that to the promulgation of the myth? I note that the steersmen, the helmsmen, the captains and the kings have mostly departed, and the past they used to straddle like colossi is now populated with many caricatures and monuments.

999

This is my 999th post on this blog. It would have been my 1000th, except that a long time ago I actually deleted one post.

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It is not the first time I have had reason to think about the fortunate family circumstances I was brought up in. Life is too short, and the arts are too many, for a man to learn his way around the fantastic palace of imagination and knowledge that inspired humans have lunatically spliced together over the centuries. But my family, and the Family to which I was apprenticed, have taught me much.

They, and They, have taught me that no man is an island; that the sea is an apt metaphor for life; that a circus is not life, but artifice. They, and They, have taught me that a man may be peninsular, but not insular; a navigator or a captain; a ringmaster or a clown, or even a human cannonball. But in all these things, remember that God is your Master, whether you like it or not.

For all things come to the person who serves in faith, who continues on in hope, and trusts in love. It does not matter if you endure mortal pain and hurt; it does not matter if history or persons conspire against you, or blame you for things not of your making, or fault you for omissions that were never meant to be committed. In the end, all that matters is that you believed things would turn out for the best, even if you did not think of it as best, in your limited human mind.

We are all frail, weak organisms with curiously imaginative, adaptive and powerful minds. What we need is a healthy disregard for the contrary ideas that we are either the Lords of Creation or the random output of chance. In the former case, it is easily disproved by the things we have no control over; in the latter case, it is clear that either the randomness if supremely self-organising, or that we have no real thought or ideation, and hence it does not matter. If we can disregard these two impositions or impostors, we can start developing an honest opinion of ourselves.

I've learnt that by playing Facebook games, one can eventually draw conclusions about how good one's natural talent is at a variety of mind-boggling exercises. Many years ago, my maternal grandfather conducted a range of intelligence tests on me. His conclusion was that I was pretty smart; probably one of that 1% or so in the topmost percentile of the human population. Well, if that population is 10 billion people, then there could be 100m who are smarter than I. And given the vagaries of test construction, test distribution, and geographical range, it probably means that all those smart people are sitting ahead of me in the highly academic and political society in which I live.

So I don't take myself very seriously. I am serious about being alive, and being human, and having a sense of humour; that is about where the seriousness ends. Life is too short; the arts are too many; and God, above all, is too great.

Journey to the West (Part 1)

Today was hilarious. It is hard to set out on a journey to a mythical land, sans maps, sans cartographer, sans everything except ships, men and weapons. However, if Columbus did it, so can other landlubbers.

I was amused by the fact that whatever one presents may be just a bare package, a present that is never present, so to speak. The ribbons and wrapping paper serve to make a box into the gift itself. Enlightenment, one presumes, is attained when one has reached a state of total emptiness. Zen is one key approach to opening the lock.

I have a professional review to write for homework. Each day I will write something and I shall combine the whole into a little piece for some small peer-reviewed journal. The West awaits with bated breath. Speaking to Kishore Mahbubani is a bonus.