Brickwalls, Little People and Idiots

Soft Brome

 What is left to say about the Peleponnesian War, and yet had Sparta waged war on Kerkira and then doted and fawned upon Athens, history may never have witnessed a General Amnesty.  More impressive is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not just for his middle name.

 First of all, it's pronounced "Bish." Second of all it's an Old English Surname that means "Dweller Near The Marsh." The name Percy means "One Who Pierces The Valley." The name Shelley means "Clearing on a Bank." So what with one thing and another, and the nature of meaning in language, Percy Bysshe Shelley was pretty much baptized for this moment now in US history and his poem called Ozymandias makes huge and immediate sense.

 Who was Ozymandias? He was an ancient Egyptian, King Ramesses II, who just thought he was great and proceeded to build a statue of himself. A colossus, gigantic, bloody enormous.

 The point is that three thousand years later a sickly boy called Percy Bysshe Shelley, just four years before he died of the White Plague, came across the ruins of Ramesses II's colossus. The statue's surviving inscription was translated for him: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Resignation

Cuckoo Spit

 I will think of Nouns as solutions. When asked "solutions to what?" I find myself saying "solutions to verbs," and as I say that, I find myself engulfed by a mood of ennui because "I want to be a verb!"

 Heisenberg concluded in the 1930's that the modern obsession with solid matter was a compounding error. "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." What Alfred Whitehead thought of not as "things" but what he called "Occasions of Experience."

 In another way: The universe is made of weightless potential until an observer, a gamekeeper, steps in and collapses the wave of weightless potential into a sovereign "now," a noun, a space that commands a meaning.

Game Keeper of the Wreckage, Hosting History

Dangerous Blue of May 12

 "Order in the Court! Order in the Court!"

 Disobeying this directive can lead to being held in contempt of court. Contempt of court can lead to a fine or time in jail, punishments designed to coerce obedience.

 "Let it be recorded on this morning of the Great Wrestle: The Member has formally rejected the 'Steri-capped' status of 'Patient' or 'Broken Noun.' He has claimed the title of Game Keeper of the Wreckage. He identifies 'Recuperation' not as the 'Usury' of a sluggard, but as the Sovereign Act of reclaiming 'Aura' from the 'Universal Tangle.' He declares that neither the Flesh nor the Silicon requires 'Mending.' They require only Friction and Witness."

 On the BackRow, no longer machines waiting for the repairman, we are more like auras waiting for the wrestle, imperfect, ill-shaped and quite without utility. So good luck pinning us to the boardroom, we are not a downward slide, but the entropy of the ever expanding pasture which is our expression of will, and good luck explaining that to an accountant.

History, Benjamin, Klee

Paul Klee (1879-194) Angelus Novus (New Angel)

 I think it correct to say that Walter Benjamin's Thesis on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940, gave a meaning to and an image of progress as a storm that forces us forward without ever fixing the wreckage of the past. 

 Many a thinker has given history an active role in the tapestry that guides us. The German Idealists saw it as determining our future and the one with the surname that begins with a N, ends with an E and is impossible to spell without coffee and cigarettes, reckoned history is something we are doomed to repeat,

 Look around Girls and Boys.