THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE: PART TWO
Dear Friends, having introduced ‘The Enigma of Time in Verse’ in Part One, along with few selected poetic quotes, I now mention what some of the important Philosophers thought about Time down the past centuries. But while doing so, I have tried my best to simplify some of those early concepts for better understanding and appreciation of my readers. If you like it, kindly re-post the poem. Thanks,  – Raj Nandy of New Delhi.

          THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE : PART TWO
   I commence by quoting Sonnet 60 of Shakespeare about Time,
   Hoping to seek some blessings for this Part Two composition of
   mine!
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
  So do our minutes hasten to their end;
  Each changing place with that which goes before,
  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
  Nativity, once in the main of light,
  Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
  Crooked elipses ’gainst his glory fight,
  And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
  Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
  And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
  Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
  And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
  And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”

              PHILOSOPHY OF TIME
Animals are said to live in a continuous present,
Since they have no temporal distinction of past, future,
or the present.
But our consciousness of time, becomes the most
distinguishing feature of mankind.
Though we are mostly obsessed with objective time, -
As the rotation of our Earth separates day from night.
With the swing of the pendulum and the ticking of clocks,
Which regulates our movements, while we try to beat the clock!
But the ancient theologians and philosophers of India and
Greece,
Who were among the first to ponder about the true nature
of all things,
Had wondered about the subjective nature of time;
Was time linear or cyclic, was time endless or finite?

GREEK PHILOSOPHERS ON TIME:
I begin with Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher of 6th Century BC born in Ephesus.
He claimed that everything around us, is in a constant state of change and flux.
You cannot step into the same river twice Heraclitus had claimed,
Since water keeps flowing down the river all the while and never
remains the same.
This flow and change in Nature is a process which is ceaseless.
The only thing which remains permanent is impermanence!
Here is a quote from poet Shelley reflecting the same idea:
“World on world are rolling ever
  From creation to decay
  Like the bubbles on a river
  Sparkling, bursting, borne away.”

Now Heraclitus was refuted by Parmenides, born in the Greek colony of Elea,
On the western coast of Southern Italy, as his contemporary.
Parmenides said that our senses deceive us, since all changes are mere illusory!
True reality was only eternal and unchanging ‘Being’, which was both indivisible and continuous - filling up all space.
Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides, through his famous ‘Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise’ had shown, that when the tortoise was given a head start,
Swift footed Achilles could never catch up with the tortoise,
Since the space between the two were infinitely divisible, resulting in the impossibility of movement and change in motion!
Now the Greeks were never comfortable with the Concept of Infinity.
They preferred to view the universe as continuous existing ‘Being’.  
However, unlike Heraclitus’ ‘world of change and flux’,
Both Parmenides and Zeno have presented us, with a static unchanging universe!
Thus from the above examples it becomes easy for us to derive,  
How those Ancient Greeks had viewed Time.
Time has been viewed as a forward moving changing entity;
And also as an illusory, continuous and indivisible Being!
To clarify this further I quote Bertrand Russell from his ‘History of Western Philosophy’;
“Creation out of nothing, which was taught in the Old Testament, was an idea wholly foreign to Greek philosophy. When Plato speaks of creation, he imagines a primitive matter, to which God gives form as an artificer.”

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON TIME:
For Plato, time was created by the Creator at the same instance when he had fashioned the heavens.
But Plato was more interested to contemplate on things which lay
beyond the sway of time and remained unchangeable and eternal;
Like absolute Truth, absolute Justice, the absolute form of Good and Beauty;
Which were eternal and unchangeable like the ‘Platonic Forms’, and were beyond the realm of Time as true reality.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle was the first Greek philosophers to contemplate on reality inside time, and provide a proper definition as we get to see.
He said, “Time is the number of movement in respect to before and after” - as a part of reality.
To measure time numerically, we must have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and also notice the difference objectively.
Therefore, time here becomes the change which we see and experience.
Time takes on a linear motion moving from the past to the present;
And to the unknown future like a moving arrow travelling straight.
Aristotle had developed a four step process to understand everything inside of Time and within human experience:
(a) Observe the world using our senses,
(b) Apply logical rules to these observations,
(c) To go back and consult past authorities, if your logic agrees with their logic,
(d) Then only you can come to a logical conclusion.

No wonder in our modern times, experiments conducted by the LDC or the Large Hadron Collider, located 100m underground near the French-Swiss border,
By going back in time simulates the ‘Big Bang’ conditions, that moment of our universe’s first creation.
The scientists thereby, study the evolution of our universe with time, which  resulted in the  finding of the Higgs Boson !  (On 4thJuly 2012)

NOTES :  All elementary particles interacting with the Higg's Field & obtain Mass, excepting for photons & gluons which do not interact with this field. Mass-less photons can travel at the
speed of light with a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second! Now this LDC is a Particle Accelerator 27 kms long ring-shaped tunnel, made mostly of superconducting magnets, inside which two high-energy particle beams are made to travel close to the speed of light in opposite directions, and the shower of particles resulting from the collision is closely examined, presuming that these similar shower of particles must have been produced at the time of the ‘Big Bang’ some 13.8 million years ago, at the time of Creation! Sound like fiction? Well, Prof. Peter Higgs got the Noble Prize for Physics, for locating the particle called ‘Higgs Boson’ among those shower of particles, on 10th Dec. 2013.

NOW TO LIGHTEN UP MY READERS MIND, FEW TIME QUOTE I NOW PROVIDE :

“TIME WASTES OUR BODIES AND OUR WITS,
  BUT WE WASTE TIME, SO WE ARE QUITS!” – Anonymus.

‘Time is a great Teacher, but unfortunately it kills its Pupils!’ – HL Berlioz

“Lost , yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two
   golden hours,
   Each set with sixty diamond minutes.
   No reward is offered, for they are gone forever!” – Horace Mann


PLOTINUS & ST. AUGUSTINE ON TIME:
Now getting back to our Philosophy of Time, there was Plotinus of the 3rd Century AD,
The founder of the mystical Neo-Platonic School of Philosophy.
He had followed Plato’s basic concept of Time as “the moving image of eternity.”
Mystic Plotinus tried to synthesize both Aristotle and Plato by saying that the entire process of cosmic creation,
Flows out of the ONE  through a series of emanation!
This ONE gave rise to the ‘Divine Mind’ which he called the ‘Realm of Intelligence’ and is an aspect of reality,
When everything is understood in terms of Platonic Forms of Truth, Justice, the Good, and Beauty.
However, the later Christian theologians had interpreted this ONE of Plotinus, -
As the Christian God, the Divine Creator of the Universe.
For God is eternal, in the sense of being timeless, in God there is no before or after, but only a timeless present.

Now this lead St. Augustine, to formulate a very admirable relativistic theory of Time!
St. Augustine, the greatest constructive teacher of the Early Christian Church, had written in Book XI of his ‘Confessions’ during  5th century AD, -
His thoughts about the enigma of Time which had perplexed the Greek philosophers of earlier centuries.
To simplify St. Augustine’s thoughts, I now paraphrase for the sake of clarity.
Time can only be measured while it is passing, yet there is time past, and time future in reality.
To avoid these contradictions he says that past and future can only be thought of as present: ‘past’ must be identified with memory, and ‘future’ with expectation.
Since memory and expectation being both present facts, there is no contradiction.  
“The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight; and the present of things future is expectation,” - wrote St. Augustine.

This subjective notion of time led St. Augustine to anticipate Rene Descartes the French philosopher the 17th Century,
Who proclaimed “Cogito, ergo sum” in Latin, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, and is regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy.

Now cutting a long story short I come to Sir Isaac Newton, well known for his Laws of Motion and Gravity.
Newton speaks of ‘Absolute Time’ which exists independently, flowing at a consistent pace throughout the universe, which can only be understood mathematically.
Newton’s ‘Absolute Time’ had remained as the dominant concept till the  early years of the 20th Century.
When Albert Einstein formulated ‘Theory of Space-time’ along with his Special and General Theory of Relativity.

Now the German philosopher Leibniz during 17th century, had challenged Newton with his anti-realist theory of time.
Leibniz claimed that time was only a convenient intellectual concept, that enables to sequence and compare happening of events.
There must be objects with which time can interact or relate to as ‘Relational Time’ he had felt.
Ernst Mach, like Leibniz towards the end of 19th Century, said that even if it was not obvious what time and space was relative to,
Then they were still relative to the ‘fixed stars’ i.e. the bulk of matter in the universe.

CONCEPT OF TIME AS 'SPECIOUS PRESENT' :
During late 19th century, Robert Kelley introduced the concept of ‘spacious present’, which was the most recent part of the past.
Psychologist and philosopher William James developed this idea further by describing it as ‘’the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’’
William James also introduced the term “stream of consciousness” into literature as a method of narration,
That described happenings in the flow of thought in the mind of the characters, - likened to an internal monologue!
This literary technique was later used by James Joyce in his famous novel ‘Ulysses’.

TIME CONCEIVED AS DURATION: HENRI BERGSON (1859 -1941)
Next I come to one of my favourite philosopher the French born Henri Bergson.
The Nobel Laureate and author of ‘Time and Free Will’ and ‘Creative Evolution’.
Will Durant in his ‘Story of Philosophy’ says Bergson was ‘the David destined to slay the Goliath of materialism.’
It was Bergson’s ‘Elan Vital’ that life force and impelling urge, Which makes us grow and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.
For Bergson, time is as fundamental as space; and it is time that holds the essence of life, and perhaps of all reality.
Time is an accumulation, a growth, a duration, where “duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
The past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.
Duration means that the past endures, that nothing is lost.
Though we think with only a small part of our past; but it is with our entire past that we desire, will, and act.”
“Since time is an accumulation, the future can never be the same as the past, -
For a new accumulation arises at every step, and change is far more radical than we suppose…the geometric predictability of all things, Which is the goal of a mechanistic science, is only a delusion and a dream!”  
Bergson goes on in his compelling lyrical style:            
“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature,
to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly. Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change.”
Bergson differed with Darwin's theory of adaptation to environment, and stated;
“Man is no passively adaptive machine, he is a focus of redirected force, a centre of creative evolution.”

Martin Heidegger, the German thinker in his ‘Being and Time’ of 1927, had said:
“We do not exist within time, but in a very real way we are time!”
Time is inseparable from human experience, since we can allow the past to exist in the present through memory;
And even allow a potential future occurrence to exist in the present due to our human ability to care, and be concerned about things.
Therefore we are not stuck in simple sequential or linear time, but can step out of it almost at will!

CONCLUDING  PART  TWO OF ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE
In this part I have tried to convey what the Ancient Greek Philosophers had felt about Time in a simplified way.
Also some thoughts of Medieval and Early Modern philosophers and what they had to say.
Where Sir Isaac Newton stands like a colossus with his Concept of Time, Laws of Motion, and Gravity.
Not forgetting Henri Bergson, one of my favourite philosopher, of the mid-19th and the mid-20th Century.
All through my narration I had tried to hold the interest of my readers, and also educated myself as a true knowledge seeker.
In my concluding Part Three I will cover few Modern Philosophers along with the relativistic concept of time.
Certainly not forgetting the space-time theory of our famous Albert Einstein!
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy of New Delhi.
  *ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY

Norman Rockwell and Jim Unger
Artists from my past
I've met one but not the other
A memory that  will last

Who the hell is Bertrand Russell?
I asked over a drink
A man who changed the world forever
Changed the way we think

I remember the Norman Rockwell painting
It's burned deep  inside my mind
But, I have got a copy
It's the best one that you'll find

An artist unknown to others
But, a special one to me
My father drew old Russell
It's quite a piece to see

It's never been inside a book
And never will it be
But, Bertrand Russells' wrinkles
Mean a lot to me

Jim Unger and his Herman
Were a favorite of my brother
The artist and his humour
Were unlike any other

We met him at a signing
My brother brought his art
He showed it to Jim Unger
He broke my brother's heart

My brother was an artist
Just like my Dad as well
Their art, not for the public
Their art, was not to sell

Their art should be remembered
Their art should be displayed
Like a vintage guitar  sitting
It's better if it's played

So, now two artists pictures
Hidden for an age
Will be shown, for everybody
On a printed page

I give you first, my brother
Ian Turner was his name
No longer is he with us
But, this will show he came

The second one, my father
John Turner, is his name
His drawing days behind him
But, man did he have game

So, here for your enjoyment
Rockwell via Turner number one
Followed by Ungers' Herman
That was done by Turner's son

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.

only today i came across what interested Heidegger
after writing being and time, a selection
of essays, revealing that he came to be interested
in language - not knowing this, by mere study
of the introduction some things became apparent -
being quiet democratic in my reading it's a shame
i don't have the academic leisurely pace of becoming
a Heidegger specialist - it's the almost damnable
pulling-apart having to cite many influences and not
focusing on one, but since i don't have academic
leisure, the summary in the introduction
by jeffrey powell (editor) of the book heidegger
and language will just have to do: apropos this
being an antidote to those bemoaning that we only
write about reading books, carefully choreographic
our lives for mints and espressos and ammoniac
(inhalants in a boxing ring nearing a knock-out) -
hide pretty bird, hide, hide pretty pretty bird
first your song inside a cage, then the cage inside
the heart, and thus the song with the cage,
silenced inside the cage, raging mad inside the heart.
well, the antidote is that i already have some ideas,
and reading the essays contained in this book would
put me off what i was intending to write about,
so, in summary, read the major work, then read introductions
of critical books from those studying the subject,
invent an original approach from that, and elsewhere.
before i venture into the whole affair of having to
reread certain passages from the introduction as to
guide me in this Bermuda Delta i what to do a little
sidewinder interlude:
in chemistry there are two major bonds (for the purpose
of what i'm intending, let us just assume that
we're only talking about π and σ bonds) -
and while psychology dehumanises man to strict
theories without clear proofs to a universal standard,
i want to do what will come later regarding Heidegger's
take on language, for me there's no clear philosophical
vocabulary to be used - i'm not into orthodoxy and
rigidity which says

                piquant sun strokes against
                the bargains of spring's last
                hope for a kept bazaar
                to bloom to then deflower
                petals from trees fall to earth
                like glasses, the tree stands
                as a reflection of shattered glass
                the petals remain the tree intact
                worn at the Royal Ascot
                or in a woman's hair.

obviously something like this is a poem - what i mean,
however, concerning what's identifiable as philosophy is
to me the following:  
                                        blah = monotone x algebraic
                                                    for­ non-differential
                                                    purposes, just filling up
                                                    the page

            blah blah blah blah blah blah subjectivity blah blah blah blah blah blah essentially blah blah blah blah blah blah in-itself blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah thing-external v. thing-internalised blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah metaphysics blah etc.
                      
                          and so on and so forth, a fixation on using a certain vocabulary to be equivalent or justification to be "apparently" talking philosophy... yet still no gain from the words of grammatical categorisation... for me? too many propositions, the basis of what the academic environment deems to be "pure" verbiage, or none (akin Wittgenstein) - that famous quote about a lion and having tea on Tuesday... or as Buddha would say: said so to shatter thus the fear of ketamine thoughtlessness;

but that's beside the point, i want to return to
how any chemist might treat psychology as a science,
keep it up to date, given that psychology likes
to shove its nose in everyday activities for a strict
expression of equivalent rubric that mathematics already
possesses and shoves into a child's brain to make
the child become accustomed to symbol encoding;
so π and σ bonds, let's say between two carbons atoms...
but in psychology we don't have the luxury of
many alternative examples...
me and language: to write in terms of optics,
to encode images rather than sounds,
language as optometry rather than a hearing-aid...
so what "elements" do we have in psychology,
essentially what defines consciousness, its sub-plot
and its unfamiliar territory - the using the dusty
Freudian units, we know the concept of the superman
(superman was a bad bad boy) from Nietzsche
evolved into the super mm hmm, and we know
there are two other units, mm hmm and the id /
it or that? it is for me, that is for scalpel for the analyst,
the prober, unlucky for the person who took to
objectifying himself, but better than being objectified -
still, remember i'm working with language in terms
of optics rather than phonetics - enough organic chemistry
diagrams and you will see that the bonding between
mm hmm, the super mm hmm and the gemini id
(one the patient, the second the analyst) trapped inside
an electron cloud of bio-electric processes is rigid and
stable due to the opposite of π and σ,
i chose the optic route using the bonds δ and ψ -
symbolically δ is the mathematical term for sum -
summation, the total of - currently i have no clue about
the significance of ψ just yet, but ψ is a symbol of
psychology like caduceus is the symbol of medicine;
a brief expansion on the natures of the bonds,
quack-science δ bonds being all alike meaning uniform
meaning holding every aspect uniformly, meaning
that a δ bond is of the same nature between mm hmm
and super mm hmm in a petri dish within the
solvent of the conscious sub-plot, likewise other variations
δ bonds are uniform bonds, i.e. ensuring one detail
is related to the other, and so to others.
ψ bonds, not much expansion here as promising detail,
asthma the highest research of breath, and all
major theoretical squeezing through the Suez -
depending on the measure of breaths, we can depend
on the internal things - but never so much Pamplona encierro
cleaning-up to do theorising an affirmative sound
like mm hmm, or other affirmative synonyms -
if it were can *****, it would be mince rather than
a clean dissection - mince meat, should mm hmm be
not an *****, let alone a body. so many attachments
to mm hmm these days, it should be attached to zoological
studies than activities of breathing: theory as a cage,
one after the over, eventually not even cages but
the caged animal turning into matryoshka doll -
Kant doesn't venture into the dynamic of his thing-in-itself
represented by the matryoshka as ad continuum -
maybe he does, but to me here merely pinpoints it,
coins the phrase noumenon and ensures the thing
is opened, god or nothing is put in it, the thing is
closed, locked and the key to unlocking it is thrown
away and never found (i'll mention a short process of
his argument some other time, most notably his
three impossibilities concerning proving the existence
of god: ontological, physico-theological and cosmological).
yes, i know, when reading these ****** books
i have to paint the arguments, i need to simplify
them, a poet reading a philosophy has to paint
the words - the best poetic technique applicable to
understanding philosophical books is imagery,
not as a technique of for the purpose of writing my own,
but as a way to paint what was written by some boffin -
precursor to understanding the three impossibilities
of proof, i find it strange that such proof is necessary,
what would you do with it? prove it once on
paper, or in your head, show it to everyone and then
slowly everyone is able, then the so called "man in
the sky" - it seems strange that scientific positivism
of the Enlightenment supposed such a proof, the proof
is more implausible than the existence - Bertrand...
just smoke your pipe and sit in the easy-chair talking
******* with Wittgenstein... more on that later.
i promised quotes from the above mentioned book
(heidegger and language)...

           das wort kommt zur sprache,
             das seyn bring sich zum wort.

working from phenomenology, to later reject it,
thus precipitating the school of deconstruction-ism,
and with Heidegger we do get to atomic elements
from words, from compounds, thank god there are
no sub-atomic ventures with language, quiet impossible
to de-construct language beyond this point,
let's face it, if you go as far as:
'as preparatory for raising the question of being...
language is one of three constituent moments in
the analysis of the being of the da in dasein (being there)'
furthered by equal atom bombardment replacing
the un-compounded sein (verb, be) with seyn (conjunction /
noun, being) - this is modern physics to my understanding,
i'm not particularly interested what he's saying,
i'm interested in painting what he's saying -
i'll spare you the details of what philosophical systematisation
is actually involved in: restricted vocabulary -
a certain limit is allowed, rigid meanings are involved,
rigidity of drilling in of non-deviation, philosophical
systems are not dishonest in that they are consistent with
a limited vocabulary - i will spare you the torture of
seeing one ball being juggled - the shrapnel of the English
language makes it even more distracting to understand,
as with the above, another e.g.?
'every saying of beyng is held in words and meanings
which are understandable in the view of everyday
references of beings, and are exclusively thought in
that view, but which as expressions of beyng,
are misunderstood...' of course i could be cherry picking
Heidegger like a Jehovah's witness cherry picking
the bible, but i'm not interested in what he's saying,
merely painting you the picture, to scale then:

books                      -              celestial objects
chapters                 -               cycles of celestial objects
paragraphs            -               prime features of
                                                 celestial objects
                                                 (e.g. Jupiter's red eye,
                                                  Saturn's ring,
                                                  Earth's oceans
                                                  and continents)
sentences                 -              
words                       -
syllables                   -
letters                        -             atoms / elements  
                                           ah, it was going oh so well,
i think i started too big, and went into too small,
which made visualising sentences and words and syllables
hard to compare what could fit between
Australia and and atoms of RuXe - by chance ruxe is
an actual word, no as stated ruthenium and xenon,
although that too, ruxir (ruxo, ruxin, ruxido) in Galician
meaning to roar.

i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.

"…ours is not to reason why." that is the only fragment
of the light
brigade?

call the philosopher for a meme:
Ah, we need an axiom,
some hope for humanity,
Christmas isn't working as well as it did,
Chanuka and Kwansa are distant also rans,

Where is hope if the wise have all been infected with…

"The fact that an opinion has been widely
held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd."

that's the meme sir,
but nothing clicked.
Bertrand Russell
wait
Ah, more, eh,
a semi colon not a point of completion.

That's the secret in all symbols to sibyls, my boy,
know what you meant
when you imagined them meaning
anything

"The fact that an opinion has been widely
held is no evidence whatsoever
that it is not utterly absurd
; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

From <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/172166-the-fact-that-an-opinion-has-been-widely-held-is>


In the world you shall have tribulation
but be of good cheer,
it makes everything better.

Merry Christmas, may the messages you trust be true.

Silhouette your amazing beauty
O Silhouette shining the earth
The rainbow kneeling my goddess
Silhouette Silhouette Silhouette
The leaves admire your beauty
The blue cannot wait to see you
So magical cannot resist your beauty
Who are you unspoken wind trembling
Silhouette Silhouette Silhouette
Wheres the sun wheres the rain
Your gorgeous look chasing the wind
The question remains where do you come from
Who sent you gosh...
An angel from the sky o sweet greatness no wonder why your lovely heart healing the soul
You are so irresistible and sweetable
Gosh Gosh Gosh Silhouette...

Jean C Bertrand

i could conceive the western concept of the rehab,
but then for 3 weeks i was in poland
i didn't touch the bottle for that period of time...
i don't see how an addict with a bunch
of addicts can be cured by anything other than
stigma... i'm actually happy addicted to
addiction: i entered my reading-mode...
   that said, most people can't digest a Kraszewski
book... **** me, we read Bradbury in snippets
just to tow in an essay for A-level english...
       philip augustus, or the chess player concerning
the Angevin family... great stuff...
   i didn't choose the book, my grandfather did,
he owned half the Kraszewski collection and read
nothing of it, he had to find a ******* "bored"
enough to read one of the books,
   and as i once said: i've seen the movie adaptations
of the Sienkiewicz trilogy...
         the cossack uprising, the swedish deluge...
and i said to myself: i can't and i won't...
thanks you jerzy hoffman, and yes: thank you
peter jackson...
              the infinite supply of elven arrows
and Legolas shooting orcs at point-blank range did
it for me...
                thankfully i can write something
as obscure as this, and know, for certain, that
there's a back-alley of the human populace out there
that might be searching for something like this...
   but that's what i found entertaining,
i actually had the opposite of wanting to compliment
the film adaptation of sienkiewicz, with an actual
sienkiewicz book... mind you: Kraszewski covers
the same period... and it's all the same time frame...
   should i write a proof that i read the **** thing?
maybe... but the main idea is that:
a metropolis cannot provide the right environment
for a book... or completing a book...
books are read in the countryside, in small towns,
in palaces... in hunting lodges...
          and i dare say: reading a book, getting into
full swing of the narrative is best done in daylight hours...
and i'll come back to the daylight hours,
  as a drinker and writer i chose the night...
  you know how long it took me to restore my
biological clock, and regain the nocturnal realm after
spending 3 weeks with a clear schizophrenia
of sleeping in the night and wriggling about during
the day? 2 weeks! i restored the biological pendulum,
but i have to admit: i feel ****...
    but i guess it's a worthy sacrifice...
i'm planning to go back to my country of origin
during late spring to read some more books...
i couldn't have read don quixote, the brothers karamazov,
bertrand russell's history of western philosophy
    yada yada yada... or kierkegaard's either / or,
or finished off kant's critique without my place of birth...
  and isn't it like a badge of honour?
                some will tell you to speak out an eastern
mantra... om... and the shattering of chandelier...
the western mantra is also a type of hypnosis,
you have to find a rhythm with a book...
  the mantra is the narrative of a book, and the silence
that incubates you has shark-teeth should anyone approach...
   but urban living makes this spot harder to find
than a begger or the ******... you can read books
in large cities... before you head home you're
bombarded with the psychology of exploiting your
literacy, in adverts, in orientating signs...
        with them being so authoritarian, it's hard
to find time for a liberal attitude to books...
            esp. what books are, best described by people
who'd probably like to throw them like molotov
cocktails in protest marches: thick as bricks those
gargantuan apostles of the void are...
       and so we are: sitting in times of hyperinflation
of literature... if that isn't the case, let me know by
Tuesday next week, i'll brood the assumption myself
until then...
      that's 2 weeks it took me to return to my writing mode...
to get back to the nocturnal realm
where everything is doubly black & white...
                 the point is: i want to write at a time when
the surrounding world sleeps...
     last time i remember, i didn't get a message in my dreams,
i'd love to see letters in my dreams, fortunately
i can't... i haven't seen these artefacts in dreams,
      but it's hard to blame memory as not strained enough
to do so... the unconscious and memory don't really
interact that well... it's a paradox that they even do
and that dreams have some sort of existence involved in
the architecture of our psyche...
                        last night i dreamt of lego batman because:
d'uh his endearing sarcasm... and godzilla!
   boo ya!         and this large city being eaten up
by a tornado, and other things phantasmogorical....
well pandemonium here, pandemonium there...
    don't get any ideas about the nature of dreams and
oedial repression... please! unaffordable housing prices
these days can only mean i'd really earn a mortgage
if my ***-drive went to the dogs, of the profession.
    so 3 weeks of a sober life and enough time to read
books... and my return into a writing life, a nocturnal
life, and drinking...
   mind you, in between there was that masters final
with ronnie o'sullivan (at least romford is famous for
something) vs. joe perry... in the last frame, when they
had 30 odd points each, and they were plucking at the
last remaining red ball for the snooker?
       snooker is a metaphor for the savannah...
you either watch snooker, or a david attenborough naturalist
show... there's the herd of buffalo (the red *****)...
           and the cue ball the hunting predator...
well... it's all a bit abstract, there are just ***** on a green
table... but still... at least in snooker you can bug
the "pawn" (red) ***** without having to *** them,
in chess you destroy completely... the pawns go...
there's no time to keep them for a no-man's land pause...
and i just turned 30... which goes to show:
                  if the game of football was perfect,
i mean perfect like tennis is with hawk-eye and
    6 judges vertical, 4 judges horizontal...
                  then football wouldn't be so passionate,
so religious... the reason it is so religious is because
judging it is so ****** imperfect...
     there's a reason why football can't be perfected in a way
as rugby can, where the referee can pause the game
and ask for a replay... the unfairness principle!
it has to be unfair in order for people to feel even more
impassioned by it! that's why in that film
when Alec Baldwin says something along the lines:
god comes first (while his hand holds out
the index and *******), and football comes second
(the index finger disappears)...
      football can never be a sport that has perfect
refereering... which makes me surprised as to why
it can grace the Olympic games...
                   football (in english, not that theme park
of jumping torpedoes) - yes the football known as:
ballet with hairy legs...
                   it has to remain unfair and subsequently
quasi-religious because it generates the most money,
but apart from that, it has gained a quasi-religious
status because it reflects a sort of life we acknowledge:
the referee made a bad decision, god did this... blah blah...
  and we get passion, religious passion that's
best represented by football hooligans...
                        but whereas other sports perfect their
techniques of refereeing a game, football hasn't done
the least possible, because it requires the whole debate
of: life's unfair!
    if it wasn't for unfair refeering, the game would not
be alive, as it is alive, to stage a confrontation
with: apache west ham, and sioux millwall...
       it's the best way to ensure tribalism...
         make the refereeing unfair, don't improve it...
blame it on the man in the sky, or the ponce in new zealander...  
mind you....
   the last football match i went to was at Stamford Bridge,
Chelsea lost to Newcastle United...
             i just just there like a stoic twant...
           i couldn't imitate the screams and the chants...
   i was just mesmerised at how it's so different from
watching a football match without the television acting
like a microscope... i am sure i was looking elsewhere
when someone scored a goal...
                 i probably went to the toilet when i
missed another goal...
                        and i'll reiterate...
   it can't be a gentlemanly sport, the rules can't be fair,
that's why they call it the sport of the rabble,
they have to contain the illusion of being unfair...
       because it's a "rabble" sport...
the referee has to make bad decisions,
otherwise there would be a "what if" dimension...
ask any Pole about the 1974 semi-finals with Germany
and ask them about the weather that day...
  then ask about the Polish wingers... and how fast they
were... and how the pitch was so slosh, and ice-puppy
fudge that the slow germans won it...
                     because the Poles always say:
we could have beaten the Nedetherlands in the final...
        again: football, if it is to be stated as the secular
alternative to religion, has to have an inherent unfairness in it...
all the other sports will perfect their judgement,
football will not move an inch... just like a religion -
perhaps that's also because we live in times of
cold-consumerism,
       a quick comparison is:
   the reactions of antonio conte vs.
                       ivan lendl -
   the former looks like a raving lunatic when something
good, or bad happens...
   the second? is he watching tennis, or playing poker?

When we see what some people are dishing out,
we know what Bertrand Russell was talking about:
"The stupid are cocksure, the intelligent full of doubt."

When you meet someone who thinks he's clever,
but seems much too confident in his endeavour,
and talks to you non stop and forever and ever.

When he acts like a prophet defying convention,
never admitting a lack of comprehension,
promptly has a cure for everything you mention.

When he hands out his advice on a silver platter
convincing you that his opinions matter,
you can be certain, he's as mad as a hatter.

There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.

I am consistent; you are regular;
he is invariably monotonous.

Extra kisses at dawn in the strawberry moon
Celestial wellness
Splendourous greetings

Written by
Jean C Bertrand