The Spoiling of Beauty

Have you wished
for beauty,
that loveliness kissed
with lips of ruby
your brow?

Let us imagine
it happened,
and all with passion
were maddened
by you.

You could go nowhere
to breathe.
You were the flower
to bees
in the field.

When you were present
you gratified
and acquiescent
you catalysed
their need.

Your charm defrayed
those charges
that were raised
through largess
by want.

Now show your face,
its flaws and boons.
Does it pay
to grace a room?
No, it doesn't.

We could be free
not once but doubly
Let's make a plea
to be ugly
as sin.

We'd walk this land
tall as giants
with faces bland
in defiance
of man.

The Good, the Bad and the Inefficient

"All good writers have some bad in them." -- Philip Larkin

I believe he's right because, if you want to make art, you have to really believe 'This thing should exist' and 'It has to be like this', but nobody can be so self-oriented only when they make art; they must be that kind of person all the time.

My next point will broaden the stage of this intrapersonal story quite dramatically, so to speak.

I think there is too great a concern with being good and being perfectly good. I think it's okay to be bad. The universe is fundamentally good (take 'good' to mean something like 'unified' if the word 'good' is losing its meaning at this point). The goodness or unity in the universe is strong enough to carry the weight of badness or disunity, and that may even be what it's for.

Let us take the politician as a case apart from artists. All politicians are at least partly bad because they all want to control the monopoly on violence. They all desire the right to apply force, to compel their fellow citizens to do things they would not otherwise do. (Authority in my view is a form of disunity or 'badness' because the only people who can represent that people is that same people themselves).

But, for one, this 'badness' of political actors may in the end achieve some good, suggesting that their badness may have been part of a goodness so great that it was difficult to perceive.

(As an analogy here, consider the inefficient but surviving business. It is inefficient because some of its activities do not convert investment into profit as efficiently as possible. But some of that inefficiency may yield an insight that increases the business's profitably. In that case, what was thought to be inefficiency was in fact an efficiency that could not be identified using the available methods. So it is with the good and the bad.)

And secondly, the necessary badness of individual politicians is tolerable because there is enough good to carry it.

But what if there is not? Shouldn't we say 'Badness is okay *as long as* there is enough good to carry it'? Let's try it. If a government becomes so subsumed by badness that its goodness collapses under the weight, much more suffering will radiate outwards from it to the rest of the people. But those people, being largely good, will carry the weight until a better time and better decisions. And if they are not, and they destroy themselves, humanity will live on around them to that better time. And if humanity is destroyed, the considerable remainder of the world will live on. And if the world is destroyed? The galaxy? The universe? Ah, the universe cannot be destroyed. There cannot be no universe. As long as the potential for existence exists, there will be.

And so, it is not necessary to say 'as long as' because there will always be enough good to carry the bad. It is just that there may not be enough good to carry the bad within a given identified container.

Having established this, we can now work backwards. If Earth doesn't need to be ripped apart as part of some powerful disunity (or some greater good so large it looks like tragedy to the human eye), it shouldn't be. The nation, the community, the individual should not be consumed by badness if there is an alternative.

I think identity exists so that we will struggle for it, but we have innumerable concentric identities: self, family, profession, sex, class, background, political outlook, society, nation, continent, planet, galaxy. A person who could align all of their identities and struggle towards unity in all of them would be the most powerfully good person. But because we cannot do that - none is sufficiently strong - and so each of us is necessarily somewhat bad, somewhat disunified.

As Plato had Socrates say in the Protagoras, "No one errs willingly". They who know right will do right. But knowing, for example, that it is right to give food to a person who is starving is not enough. We would also have to align our identities sufficiently to understand that we and the suffering person are of the same kind. Then we would automatically help them.

When we know how to preserve, how to be the good and carry the bad, we do so. And when we don't know how to be good, we must necessarily be bad and be carried.

This provides no assurance against personal destruction or that of our kind but, because the greatest reality is indestructible, even if our collective badness leads to the end of any good we recognise, some small part of us will live on until the end.

Toilet Sitting

Don’t toilets glow in the middle of the night?

I know it’s really because they’re white,

but aren’t they such places of solitude?

I mean it—not simply being crude.

There’s a touch of the confessional

despite the lack of religious professional.

One can think

next to the sink

and sort things out

and shift their thoughts about,

without worrying about approvement.

It is a place of spiritual movement.

Some pour it out at the tomb.

My preference is the little room.

English Grammar and the Phantom Reality Explosion

Today, I learned more about the third (or past unreal) conditional, a grammatical structure I used to teach as of more than ten years ago. It goes like this:

If I hadn't come to Ecuador, I would never have tried encebollado.

This is a counterfactual statement which tells us that a) I did come to Ecuador, b) I did try encebollado and c) my trying encebollado was contingent on my coming to Ecuador.

So far so good, here's what I added to this today courtesy of the philosophy of Luis de Molina, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit priest, jurist, economist and theologian:

In producing any counterfactual statement, we admit the possibility of other hypothetical realities.  In the case above, these are the realities in which I did not come to Ecuador. The number of these realities must be infinite due to the limitless number of possible lives I could have lived outside of Ecuador. 

In the statement, what we are saying is that, in no one of these hypothetical realities, did or do I try encebollado. This is patently untrue. There are any number ways to eat encebollado without coming to Ecuador, and if the number of realities where I do not come to Ecuador is infinite, I must have found some way to eat encebollado in at least one of them.

(And due to the natures of permutations and variations, if in one, then in many, most likely an infinite number, albeit a subset of the aforementioned infinite set.)

Therefore, what I must mean in making the above statement is that, of the admitted infinite number of hypothetical realities in which I did not come to Ecuador, of those which are most like the one we are experiencing, except for the stated counterfactual condition, I did or do not try encebollado.

(And, I can't help wondering, is there a line drawn between the realities sufficiently like ours to count and those which are not and, if so, where? Or is it more of a gradient of similitude, and even if so, where is it?!)

In conclusion, we have a sentence which implicitly refers to an infinite number of hypothetical realities with one specific difference from the existent one, implicitly ring-fences a group of these which otherwise resemble the existent reality, and then states something which could not happen in that reality but did in this one, or vice versa.

I think it is quite amazing that a humble 12-word sentence can make phantom realities rill out as far as the internal eye can see, only to pack them all away before we reach the full stop. It is elegant, it is tidy, and I approve of it.

The Unbeast Who Was Not

On Monday morning, he awoke, not realising that the shambling unbeast was not under the bed. He thought there was plain old nothing under the bed. As he got ready for work, the unbeast didn't emerge. It wasn't seven feet tall. It didn't smell of deer carcasses. It didn't carefully tread downstairs. It didn't terrify itself with its ghastly appearance in the landing mirror. 

As he ate breakfast, it didn't climb into the passenger seat of the car. Obviously. It didn't exist! It didn't fiddle with the radio channels. It didn't accidentally play prog rock so loud the people in the next block could hear it. 

At work, it didn't hide under his desk, pointing out the desperate futility of trying to make order in a vast and chaotic universe. When he went to a meeting, it didn't sit next to him and whisper hilarious insults about everyone else there present. It didn't eat the apples from the staff room fruit bowl and spit the pips out all over the floor. 

It didn't pick up his smarmy boss and hang him out the window by his feet. It didn't hum TV show theme tunes annoyingly when he stayed late. It didn't ride home on the roof of his car making nee-naw sounds. 

When he got home, it didn't sit next to him on the sofa, talking over the events of the day, trying to help him make sense of a life which technically belonged to him even though it increasingly didn't seem to. It didn't insist on double helpings of ice cream at dinner time. When he went to bed, it didn't stay up watching TV until 3 in the morning and drink all the beer. 

At 3, it didn't creep upstairs. It didn't stand at the end of his bed, looking down at his fragile sleeping body. It didn't lean in closer, revealing its huge fangs. It didn't breathe the smell of rotten meat all over his face. Its stomach didn't rumble. And there, in the slumbering darkness, it didn't give him the tiniest little kiss, and then it didn't climb back under his bed. And as the light brightened behind the curtains, the unbeast didn't blink and simply disappear.

It didn't do that because it had never been there to start with.