Over the last twenty to fifty years, we, or rather I, have been talking about the changes our answer to the Question Why have wrought on the way we people think. And over the years I've had this devotion to an understanding of life as a product of randomness that's more roundly described as a "slope in a random place" than any one of the many other definitions from the great cathedrals of learning.
One of the results of this navel gazing has been a private relationship loosely defined as "me and I" which we've shared with a primary other we can call the written word, which is a place that listens, pauses, tries to make sense of and then attempts to record what's being said.
In our recent campaign of rape and pillage through the meanings of concupiscence, original sin, Saint Augustine of Hippo and other monotheist interpretations of purpose I and my other parts find myself no more or less depressed than when in the 1980's Margaret Thatcher started referring to written words in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology" a book that was written by Spencer in response to Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Spencer argued that Social Evolution mimicked Biological Evolution, and he introduced the expression "Survival of the Fittest" both in Biology and Society. Thatcher and her conservatives were dominated by Spencer's conviction that "there was no alternative" everyone had to accept that government, regulation, handouts to the weak and sick, free milk for growing children interfered with the only true guiding light of humanity which as Spencer claimed in 1864 was survival of the fittest. Spencer was 83 when he died in 1903. Thatcher was 87 when a hundred and ten years later in 2013 she died a baroness of heart problems, cancer of the bladder and dementia in a Posh London Hotel.
I will remind us all of minds like the one represented by Homer and the Welsh Bards. They had a prodigious capacity to use memory. As a matter of course the Pharisees, including the Saul that became Paul the Apostle were obliged to memorize the first five books of the bible. These were not cruel and unusual obligations. Taliesin worked hard to become one with the community of Bards, their job was to remember stuff before getting their chance to contribute their own interpretations. The very fact of poetry had to do with the authority of the apprenticeship which was apparent in the curtain call that was the audible rhyme of spoken words. It's true you and I might have spent hours in detention being forced to memorize one of Blake's existence challenging poems because the English teacher was a frustrated sadist. All the same some lonely souls reveled in the possibility of having something to call their own. And Homer, if he was a bard, had never a need to write anything down, and even if he'd wanted to he probably couldn't write and if he could write he probably couldn't have afforded the papyrus. No, those beauties carried the life of their poems in their minds, you chased them to the shade of a tree and said tell me a story.
Then all of a sudden where has the body gone and the linear path of the elected few, those chosen by grace and enforced by the Holy Spirit becomes a cosmic law of the Father and his adoring son. A survival of the fittest if ever there was one masquerading as the hobgoblins of the Christian Church . And this is a reason to spend a lot of time with Hannah Arendt's idea of "Natality."
