In the times before the current ontology being right was easy; a gift from a dextrous God. On the other hand, the world was beautifully sinister. The ‘metaphysics of the sinister condition’ propelled Immanuel Kant to conclude, that: ‘Looking at your right hand in the mirror you see a left hand, identical to right, but unable to replace the other, which, like God is right.’ Wittgenstein, a patient soul, was rightly amused and replied 200 years later, (that’s the kind of guy he was: prepared to wait a couple of centuries in order to deliver a dexterously sinister reply), ‘A right hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned around in four dimensional space’. (Neil Armstrong, Captain Kirk and Doctor Who have ordered two paisley patterned pairs each).
Machiavelli absconded from this digital count, citing an ‘a priori’ engagement with the Inquisition as a not unreasonable excuse for his point of departure. Aristotle replied: ‘Might is Right’ was true Philosophy
and fitted the world like an un-left handed glove, but he didn’t want to hang around to debate it, because his brilliantly sinister protégé, Alexander, played a very destructive ragtime with his band and was quite decidedly a great southpaw, who got dextrously cross being labelled ‘sinister’ and imagined himself to be rather charming, in that mirrored image kind of way.
Julius Caesar like Jimi Hendrix before the fall
Playing a right handed empire upside down
Until only decadent ruination was left
Second handed down to instant history
Carved in stone upon an ancient broken glory
The experience never left his soul alone
Unlike it left the beautiful Saint Joan
True righteous in all her blossoming
Left to solitary incineration at the end
Leonardo always painted in the mirror
Reflecting images from right to left
And made the distant appear quite near
A smile gazing in the closer distance
But there’s miles of mystery in the eyes
Everything else is just as he rightly left it
Beautifully left vertical on the right horizontal
Restoring your faith in renaissance artistry
Bounarroti worked the Sistine ceiling
With God outstretched in dextrous touch
Toward Adam’s innocently sinister reach
In that other Eden; Adam was left handed
Not dissimilar to the artist and the vision
Set high above the holy sepulchred floor
With its tabernacle likened door
Left so far and distant down below
The hell of all those dazzling heavens right above
Inspired Napoleon to abandon his rags
For a brightly coloured bespoke coat
And a gorgeously tailored left-ways hat
The woven garb to free a continent
And safeguard the very precious joys
Of Liberté, Justice and Egalité
The food, wine and song of democracy
In a very left handed kind of way
That was so right-on you loved him for it forever
And Moscow never looked the same without him
It’s much more Left Bank now in its Russian ways
Catherine thinks it’s Great, and in that style she left it
Then left was right an’ wrongs were righted leftly
Until everything left was rightly wronged in cruelty
And left a scar that rightly shamed a century
Nothing lasts as all things pass to dust and history
Yet the phoenix flies in the face of burning misery
While the ever salient Homer left us his republic
And his equally luminous sinister revelation
That Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler
But worst of all, Ned Flanders were all lefties
As it is in the end, so it was in the beginning
The ever brilliant Elvis has left the building
