Afternoon Rest
Sartre's comment was at the end of one of his plays about two men who found themselves in a room together and slowly realized that the room they were in was hell.
Endings
The Cruel Sea
Monsarrat's book The Cruel Sea published a year before I was born had an ending. It had a place in many graveyards, it had several tombstones. This book sold over 11 million copies. The trouble with endings in a book is the word end. The thing is nothing is ever finished. In total Monsarrat wrote well over thirty books, closer to forty if you have the patience to count them all. The understanding, the totem, that nothing is ever finished is a characteristic of art not commerce.
A Totem to the Spirit Level,
Totem
No one in their right mind should use the expression Spirit Being without a tongue in their cheek and a smile on their face. We give the past too little credit, pour woo-woo on it and reckon they were all not much better than extra old people closer to moron than the current crop of living old people. Totems are not occupied by Spirit Beings, they are symbols of shared understandings. This whole Spirit Being nonsense is for the con artist, the dubious character at the bus stop, chamois and coffee salesmen, any one under sixty, the hick that has the nerve to suggest it's the Real McCoy, may his own Spirit Being rot in hell. This simple pole in the ground pictured above is an as yet an unshared understanding. It's a totem to the inventor of the modern Spirit Level and its French inventor, author, scientist, traveller, cartographer, orientalist, and diplomat with the impossible name of Melchisedech Thévenot, or Melshid Seveno. Benjamin Franklin, who was interested in a lot of things, read Seveno's book on Swimming, so there! Prior to the February of 1661, when the Spirit Level was invented, the best the world had been able to manage for determining level was a bowl of water. The Bowl of Water Level time frame would have included the Great Wall Of China, Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Ancient Athens, Uruk, Machu Picchu and it goes on.
The Puck of the Afterlife
Evening Primrose, not related to Primula Vulagaris or True Primrose
Baxter is finding it very difficult to accept the possibility that Corgi Archibald likes painted garden gnomes and the Heiress, whose name is Delyth Primrose, does not like painted garden gnomes. It's those sort of little details that cause Baxter to doubt the authenticity of my recollection, sends him running to The Spleen for confirmation. Meanwhile The Spleen is not only a geriatric, he's unreliable, he has his own agenda. He has persuaded the aging collective that at the moment of death a committee from on high will descend and each one of our constituent parts will be tried. Those given an A grade for their service to our shared life will go to heaven. Those given a B grade will be given their next opportunity to shine again by being reborn in someone else. Anything below a B grade goes directly to hell, none of this Dante nonsense there's only one level, flames and little people with pointed sticks. Baxter, the aneurysm, has no chance of avoiding the little people, and neither do I, which is why we are both interested in the possibility of an almighty who believes in Grace, it's the effort grade for a jolly good sort of chap whose true virtues are well hidden, they make excellent and cheerful company for a perfection that seeks to lighten the endless millennia of monotony with a little diversity. The Puck of the Afterlife amongst the madrigals and charades. Can you imagine, a damn good reason to hope for the Nietzschean Limbo of a B grade.
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