Run Rabbit

 

Wild Bunny

"The Role of Myth in Community Reinvention in a Post Industrial Age: An Essay in Postmodernist Interpretation." A simple enough title for Delyth Primrose's Doctoral Thesis, but as a title was it humble enough? The point being that back then when we were all so much younger it was the rage for the brighter sparks in the Western World to pontificate mightily on the end of the Industrial Age to no great effect and even fewer conclusions. The increasing powerlessness of the worker was a prime source of tremendous unhappiness, we were ripening for the fascists, and of course in the scrap for funding, society was increasingly becoming a problem of Business Management. As a result our world as an engine of productivity lost its dreams to another death spiral. Let's face it, as we stare back into the past, Miss Primrose's preoccupation with sadomasochism was probably more fruitful. Baxter certainly thinks so. Yet, like a cry into the dark, all of fifty years later, we still hear the lyrics of Chambawumba's song Tubthumping.

Hell is Other People

 

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.