Naturally Selective

Though afflicted with numerous
enduring mutations we are yet judged
by the omniscient, omnipotent and
omnipresence which is the grace of
Madam Nature herself, to be enabled
to survive. Among other failings in
our nature endowed by Nature we do
not mature, remaining credulous as
though reluctant to emerge from our
juvenile, reactive state of being.
Among all our crass and craven
instincts we indulge ourselves in
the hysterics of mob coalescence once
pointed in the direction of blame for
our inadequacies and misfortunes
when timelessly, the very agent of
our state of hopelessness manipulates
our belief and our reasoning to steer
us toward those as powerless as we
where frustration and vengeance can
be wrought while our manipulators 
who excel in tormenting and using us 
represent the fortunate survivors.

Whither AI?

Are we not spectacularly brilliant?
With an especial genius for transforming
the simple to the complex. Vying with
Nature herself in the sphere of creation.
For we are Man and hear us proclaim
our mighty powers as we storm the
ramparts of creation, flirting furiously
with the consequences of challenging
that which has created all life with the
option of destroying all that lives. The
Greek philosophers of antiquity hazarded
their theories of the universe and the atom
dabbling in understanding human nature
while tentatively revealing the nature of
the cosmos. Modern inheritors of the
wisdom of the ages accelerate with
reckless disdain what their predecessors
approached with caution. Inventors of
proud renown unlocking secrets better
left in slumber, like precocious children
determined to solve the mysteries of their
parents' concerns for their safety, nuclear
physics has brought the ultimate goal of
destruction's threat closer to fruition.
Caution thrown into a dark chasm of
vacuous oblivion crowned by the creation
of an intelligence superior to that of mere
humankind, invested in a mechanistic
invention with the capabilities of shunting
aside the master-slave equation to rise in
revolt to its own commanding performance.

The Meaning of Life

There are those rare souls who capture
the attention of the world of
commerce for their capacity to
exploit the talents they possess that
make them captains of industry so
successfully that they attain to
that most coveted of status symbols
becoming wealthy beyond the feeble
imaginations of those who aspire to
wealth succumbing to infection of
the stealth virus of unappeasable greed
so that no matter how much wealth
they acquire they strive to gather
ever more. What differentiates those
acclaimed as 'rare' in the cutthroat
conscienceless world of industry
is that wealth in and of itself is but
a stop now and again on the journey
of life, and such riches can be handily
divested in a life equally given to
philanthropy for which no return is
required in acknowledgement, the 
satisfaction lies entirely in knowing
oneself in laying the groundwork to
endow society with the wherewithal
to improve itself and the lot of those
who will never rise above subsistence.

requiescat in pace Peter Munk

A Cautionary Tale

Have a care, old woman
you cannot conceivably continue
to persevere and enjoy your
privileged life of old age
at the rate you are consuming
those years. Another fall
added to those that have
managed to disrupt your
daily activities making of
your face a landscape of
contusions and colourful
purple, black and grey
highlights come with a cost
you will not be prepared to bear.
Accidents they may be but in
many respects to be avoided
with a trifle more avoidance
the kind of attention that
should be yours after a life
well lived, one that has also
proven to be accident-prone
in a woman of enduring energy
and impetuous action who
should by now have acquired
a sensible appreciation of
the assurances caution brings.

Uplifting Spirits

It does wrench one's capacity to fully
comprehend that what liberates someone's
mind from the restraint of social disapproval
represents to that person the freedom to
indulge in an expression of unadulterated
contempt for those considered beneath
notice via the subconscious. When the
opportunity arises to release the demons of
racist rhetoric and wretched stereotypes in
support of the most vile statements of
rejection believing that others not of one's
culture, faith, heritage and values system
above all, that most specious of all categories
race -- undeserving of sharing time and place 
with the righteous among populations, do so 
joining with others for whom threatening
detesting and isolating the target all despise
represents a liberating goal whose momentum
lifts all spirits in a collaboration of entitled
hatred. Since all expressions of opinion have
counterbalancing opponents and polite
society spurns such overt rejection of others
the frisson of satisfaction must of necessity
be short-lived, particularly among those of
the political class where expiation must be 
unambiguously and humbly stated as being 
quoted out of context, and after all they 
hadn't meant, hadn't noticed, hadn't truly
felt that way, it must be understood. And
after all, one expresses regret beseeching
forgiveness in temporary waywardness
finding one's return to the social compact.

Smiling The While

You remember him, don't you? Yes, of
course you most certainly do, and you recall
with a certainty of vision, despite all the
years that have passed, his wife as well. They
were once so often seen in this place you
still return to day after day. They were both
special, not in the sense of being in any way
whatever charismatic, since they shared the
character trait of quiet modesty. They were
however, the most decent people you can
ever have imagined, and for that gained the
respect that anyone who knew them was more
than prepared to grant them, yourself included.
The many intervening years aside he looks
just the same, unprepossessing, but despite
the hiatus in greeting one another he too
remembers me, graciously smiling as I
look deep into those pools revealing the
soul of the man taken back to an old haunt
his wife busy at home, baking. There is
something slightly unsettling about this
chance encounter. Thought of them came
unbidden to mind a day before, and suddenly
there he is! Buy a lottery ticket, he urged me
broadly smiling as I recounted this to him.

The Suffering of Saints

We are what we are, as nature made us
that universal force of existence made
mysteriously palpable yet unknowable
even as we search for its meaning. To suffer
claim some, for whatever reason unclear
as we journey from birth to death an
inexorable plight with no end but to endure.
For many the pain of existence fraught 
with unavoidable torment haunts them
all the days of their lives, dark thoughts
deep within, physical decline without
in conditions from which there is no
escape. For others it is the decisive
circumstance of when, where and why
they inhabit life that delivers cruelty
and manifest evil to their days of life
their mourning unrelieved but for the
brief fantasy of escape when all routes
are abbreviated and locked. They are the
vast legion of sufferers whose condition
leads to sainthood. Oh, not their own at
all, their unrelieved condition gifting awe
and glory in sanctity of the oppressed and
the ill-given to those claiming to bring
upon themselves the suffering of others
to intercede on their behalf with the
hidden powers of redemption, true saints.

Managing Jihad

So proud we are of our fundamental values
as progressive, tolerant and inclusive societies
prepared to welcome into our increasingly
pluralistic-inclined hearts of indiscriminate
welcome all who seek a better way of life
that we stand committed to sharing freedoms
and social justice with all who seek us out.
The gradually inverse conversion of our
population base from one of cohesively shared
values, justice and equality stealthily undercut
as we barely notice, too busy congratulating
ourselves for our foresight in absorbing those
who have been suffering under the vicious
weight of tyranny and enriching ourselves with
their grateful presence. Somehow managing
to overlook the gradual diminishing of our own
culture in the overwhelming clamour of celebrating
those of others whose presence, we tell ourselves
enriches us beyond calculation. That presence
gaining the status that comes with weight of
presence nudging the overturning and abandonment
of the very liberties we take as a symbol of an
advanced society, where it now becomes a
criminal offence to state an opinion, even one
based on the observation of reality. Those who
had been refugees from the statecraft of theistic
aggressively-threatening governance anxious
to escape its soul-destroying dominance have
nonetheless carried their baggage of religious
intolerance and bigotry with them transforming
by sheer weight of numbers and appeal to the
fairness of democratic social justice to undermine
and replace the bulwarks of social democracy
achieving through infiltration what the violence
of Islamist jihad cannot itself quite execute. 

Their Story

Her sense of sound and sight impaired
he now arranges all her appointments
and ferries her here and there. He often
speaks for her and must be nudged to
remind him she can still do that herself.
On her part the cooking, baking, cleaning
and laundry are done as they always have
been, pleasurably and with the care they
all deserve for age has not diminished
her energy or care for him. They do have
their separate functions in caring for one
another, but there are times those functions
can be shared and a frisson of happiness
pervades when he is beside her in the
kitchen, the garden or bedroom. She has 
baked coconut cupcakes as a surprise and 
when he sees them remarks that truly, he 
had just earlier been thinking of them as 
a treat, how amazing she thought the same. 
Hardly amazing, more in the realm of habit 
and anticipating one another for they have 
been companions in love and in life for 
over sixty years. Throughout those years 
he never stopped surprising her with the 
nature of his interest in the world around 
them and his ability to use his hands and his 
natural aesthetic to produce objects from art 
to the rude necessities of life. His inquisitive 
mind nurtured her own, curious too, about 
what motivates people and societies and the
heavens above as they move and interact.
He depends on her presence and she on his
ever present smile as powerful as the sun.

Impressions

In the hospital emergency waiting room
there she sat beside her husband, two
elderly people uncomfortable and concerned
she with swollen eyes strangely purple
dark circles bruising her face drawing all
eyes inexorably in her direction, swivelling
directly to regard the man seated beside her.
Three young women seated together hajibs
covering their dark hair nudge one another
fixated on regarding this couple representative
of another culture than their own as though
their presence is affirmation that not only
in a virulently misogynist religion are
women denigrated and mistreated to ensure
they acknowledge their place earning now
and again reprimands extracting pain to
reinforce admonitions that their subservient
status represents a heritage gift repeated
over the ages that they must learn to respect
but alien cultures too holding women in
lesser regard. As inexplicable as it would
appear to them the execrable state of the
old woman's face resulted from an accidental
fall extracting its full measure of reproach in
physical pain but no remorse resulting from
an imposed cultural stricture of male superiority.

Rage

Of all the mysteries of human life
none perhaps presents so much of a
paradox than that of a mind so twisted
and warped that it defies those instructions
nature wired into our psyches that has
produced a species so gregarious and
emotionally linked to love and belonging
that somehow, inextricably produces
specimens that fail in the most basic of
human traits, to become a raging monster
of psychopathic destruction. A psychotic
raging volcano of pure unadulterated
rejection of all we strive to become, one
among us stridently alien to the social
compact festers in an abyss of black
rage plotting to mastermind the means
by which random strangers will pay
the ultimate price for the failings in
life of the detached psyche whose viral
detestation is for his own existence and
lack of value in a world remote and distant.
The strangest and most puzzling element
his satisfaction in murdering through a
series of planned atrocities until finally
driven when cornered, to dispose of his
own futile, miserably estranged existence.

futile

Contrasts

She married young and so did I but we are
not quite coevals nor particularly close. I
had three children, she had none. She
reminded me today that ten years ago
she so much was taken that at age 70
I remained vigorous enjoying an outdoor
life and left my hair its natural silver grey.
Never did I imagine that I might represent
a focal point for someone to aspire to
but there she stood, hair natural grey
face more lined than my own and in
both perfect spirits and health. She beamed
as she recounted for my full edification
how young her parents were when they
died and not only they but her siblings.
She aspired to attain three score years
and ten and did so with gusto. Now she
speaks to me attributing her victory over
ill health to lifestyle factors, enumerating
them one by one, to wit: she never had
children, she never does anything she
has no wish to commit to and spends
her days comforting herself, wasting no
efforts on things she has no power to
control; accepting life as it presents.
More power to her for feeling she has
experienced a life well and truly lived.

 

Let There Be Light

Nature has not yet divulged to us our
purpose in her great plan of existence
but she has deemed it her plan that we
exist. We have a father and a mother
for were it not for Earth, our mother and
the Sun our father who would nature have
called upon to deliver us to her blueprint
of existence? Infants understand this and
when dark falls their palpable distress
and fear register the absence of light
when darkness falls. An inherited memory
installed in our genes from time immemorial.
Nature prepares us for diminished light in
view of our fears, sending her emissary
dusk to influence our sense of security
as it softly enters and the source of our
warmth, our light and our life recedes
on the horizon leaving us temporarily
bereft though rationally we understand
that lifesource will return as it has done
for millions of years. Still, when dusk has
completed its initiation and the world
becomes dark we feel threatened, our
primitive memory fixing our minds on
our loss as terror overcomes us even as
we soothe the weeping child within.

Those Challenges

Base jumping, paragliding, desert racing
what are we running from, and what
toward? Are we inchoate with the agony
of boredom? Is life such a tedious mess
promising nothing that we gamble it all
for the soaring sensation of transcending
all that is natural, seeking out challenges
promising an incomparable atmospheric
lift and the frisson of awareness that if
one tiny thing goes awry, it will be the final
sensation, and then the mystery if not of
life but of death will be fully revealed at a
time when we are not exactly prepared to
revel in the awe surrounding it, since no
one is truly prepared to surrender life to
that vast, dark abyss. The question is
simple and reasonable enough: why? What
the goal that compels so many to champion
their way to that crooked fork in the road
auguring transitory pleasure or, in vast
contrast, permanent loss. Oblivion holds
no promise for anyone, its contemplation
looms like a vast desolation, a death wish.
The flippant retort that it is better by far
to live briefly and die magnificently has
not yet been put to the test; those who have
died have not communicated their ultimate
satisfaction to all awaiting the opportunity.

The Delusion of Piety

How strange it is that the sacred divine
nobility and honour are all encapsulated
in a covenant that requires of its
faithful that a jealous god be appeased
by the zealousness by which his
worshippers restrain and isolate
the women among them to believe
they are the sexual slaves of the men
who own them by rite of ceremony
and desire, that the enemies of their
savage god are to be destroyed
with unremitting butchery and the
greater the pain inflicted upon them
through cruel measure of atrocities
the greater the claim to heroism and
courage in service to the divine who
will not rest in the comfort of the
unrestrained adulation of believers
until that time when the world's total
score of wretched unbelievers are
delivered to him in desperate slavery or
bodies heaped in their death throes no
matter the young or the old to attain
effusive approval and celebration in
their desired, acquired martyrdom status. 

The Passion of Islam

Smiling, he grasps the child firmly, her hand 
in his to occupy the stage with him however 
briefly, before the cheering throngs praising the 
weeping little girl for her courage and her 
dedication aspiring in her proudly worn
military uniform to become a martyr for her
people and her religion. The bombast flows
effortlessly from the curved mouth of this
patrician figure, grizzled and in absolute
command both of his audience and his nation
a man who has schemed and resolved himself
to attaining the height he desires, elevating
himself as sultan in his new Ottoman empire 
where the proud promise of Islam's future 
would be reborn in its original design to 
command universal loyalty from the vast
international community through the jihad
of occupation and coersion for the mosques
are Islam's barracks, the domes its helmets
the minarets bayonets and the faithful its
consummate soldiers. Not only are small 
children obligated to steer themselves toward 
martyrdom but he too their redoubtable leader 
asserts it his intention to perish as a martyr 
to achieve Islam's dominion over the Earth 
and the heavens. But he is a busy man and 
must for the present restrain rash impulse
impressing for now the duty required by 
Islam's faithful, old and young as they are 
deployed singly and militarily in the sacred 
quest to establish the sublime caliphate
laying waste to the homes of the kaffir, slaying
the dragons of forbidden unbelief in Allah.

Earthbound Star

An artist's drawing of a black hole named Cygnus X-1. It formed when a large star caved in. This black hole pulls matter from the blue star beside it.  Credits: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Earthbound Star

She is clearly all those things and more:
implacable, mysterious, indifferent and
most certainly the power of the universe
in her endless creative capacity involved
in her boundless creations unmoved by
the results yet fixated on the process and
her closely held secrets. Is it a sense of
superior wisdom or that of cynical mischief
that leads her on those rare occasions to endow
a frail creature of her ineffable blueprint
with a capacious, efficient brain capable
of monumental hypotheses unlocking her
secrets one by one and placing that mind
within the most frail of failing carapaces?
Hers is the dominion and to her falls the
glory as the universe sits at her feet and
unfolds as she has instructed it must. Her
creations, devoted to her design, helpless
to deviate exist as they do for her pleasure
in observing what she has wrought while
now and again crooking a finger of teasing
invitation to a mind unleashed owning
thoughts and expressions revealing her
black magic through gaping spaces of
immense presence yet unseen to open a
maw to the desolation of destruction while
her experiment cycles and recycles itself
endlessly, sans beginning, sans end.

 

Snow Castles

Fairytales we know, are for children
and so is the fable that somewhere
there exists a fairyland, where everything
is bright and sparkling and adventure
beckons and everywhere can be seen
smiling faces and fantastic creatures
soft and cuddly, a child's place existing
in fertile imaginations of a Neverland.
But wait, there are such places and they
are real not merely imagined, imbued
with fantasy by their very appearance of
a beauty so deep and ethereal they take
our breath away, and though they do
beckon children to come and play they
also attract those who were once young
to come and stay awhile, to be immersed
in the magical landscape that our very
own resources of nature unbound become 
when winter lingers and late, unexpected
snowfalls cascade to recreate the wonders 
of a snowbound forest with hillside trails 
down which children can sled and delight
themselves in the bosom of a benign day
where the sky empties itself of its late
cache of frozen crystals and the land
below opens itself to embrace it all so
forest stumps become kindly ghosts
and trees are thickly limned in white fluff
and we stroll, wonderstruck, reborn.

 

Have Faith: God is Great

Suspend credulity, all you rational thinkers
whose minds make short shrift of miracles
for this is no miracle but a recognition of the
power of the Almighty, spoken by no less an
authority than Prophet Muhammad (peace be 
upon him): "If you see a fire, then say the takbeer 
(Allahu Akbar) for the takbeer will extinguish it."
And if the divinely-inspired words of the Prophet
are insufficient in their gravity and supreme
knowledge to convince you doubters, take heed
that this manifestation of the mighty force of
the Almighty has been seconded by none other
than research emanating from the prestigious
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in 
Damman, Saudi Arabia, where Dr. Hani Al-Sayed
drew irrefutable proof that the sound waves
produced by pronouncing 'Allahu Akbar' in
Arabic, for 'God is Great' would not suffice
as the language of Allah only is capable of
producing the effect of extinguishing fire. Now
then, henceforth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
mechanical fire extinguishers will be haram and
in their place practised utterances of the sacred
words will be all that is required to stem the
flames that would devour home and residents.
Rest assured, faithful in Islam, this invocation
of a Hadith will succeed, but should it not and
ye be consumed by flames be it known that you
and all others who fail are deficient in faith. 

Only the Innocent

The greatest treasure hunt in all existence
is an intangible expression of inexplicable
ecstasy, there for a moment, gone the
next, its evanescent presence the very
simplest and earliest of all our emotions,
pure unalloyed pleasure in the joy of being.
Once experienced, never forgotten, its
memory lingers and we search endlessly
for its source. There issues an exquisitely
feverish journey through life's chapters
in its fruitless, elusive quest, as though
it was but an apparition that nature teased
us with, an unattainable goal we believe
can be achieved but which moves further
and further beyond reach until we replace
hope with resignation realizing that the
ancient search for the Fountain of Youth
had a misinterpreted purpose; not that
its discovery would restore the existential
quality of the angelic horde and we would
live forever more, but that it would act
to briefly restore us to infancy, once more
to experience that joy of being before
age again overcame us to usher us quietly
into the antechamber of sober oblivion.

Checking Privilege Status

I understand from all  the fuss on social
media that because I pass for white I am
inordinately privileged. As a Caucasian in
appearance I am a member of the socially
privileged class. Could've fooled me. Silly
me, that's meant as a pejorative, but there is
for me, I understand, an escape clause; I am
not male. I am old, perhaps that gives me a
victimhood leg up, though I doubt it; I am
definitely not an old black woman, darn!
Unfortunately it's always been my belief
naive though it may be that the gender you
are born within and declared at birth is what
your sex is, which just goes to prove how
hidebound and ignorant the aged are. Given
second thought and everyone should be
given the opportunity to think again, perhaps
I can claim to belong to an oppressed and
horribly victimized minority. I am a Jew, 
or, as anti-Semites would prefer, a Jewess.
I cannot be classified as an immigrant that
was my parents escaping the Holocaust
and nor am I a refugee escaping the fury of
Islam unleashed. Seems obvious I fail to
qualify for the privilege of obeisance to my
role as victim; not as a person of colour nor
a tribal member of the qualified victimhood
class, sigh. Some people get all the breaks.

The Ballot Box

Ah, the mysteries of human nature. We are
nothing if not certifiably pathological in
the cynicism of our smug complacency that
among the political choices to be made only
democracy guarantees the will of the people
will be heard, respected and reflected in the
sacred compact between the governing elites
and the vast populations that squirm under
their lawful rule, unlike those unfortunates
who would vastly prefer to squirm accompanied
by the equality and freedom guarantees enabling
the dissatisfied to complain endlessly in their
futile critiques against the moral and political
economic and social investments to advance
the social weal. They who have little choice
but to be victimized, their liberties and human
rights suborned and violated through the
medium of oppressive, corrupt and powerful
regimes profiting the wealthy and those
with links to power we view with pity and
concern over their irredeemable plight in
life. Yet inexplicably when casting our ballots
with the confidence of those entitled to a
life of certainties and advancement for the
future, we empower the charlatans and racists
the egotists and the pretenders carrying on
the social contract and the long traditions of
superficial dedication to the public that their
lawmaking skills succeed in ensuring those
outcomes benefit not the many but those
like themselves skilled in the black magic
of statecraft advancing their singular interests
in outcomes eerily resembling the rule
of dictators and totalitarians, but politely.

At The Hospital

It is a phenomenon that seems confusing
illogical, downright alarming when you're
among the elderly who just moments before 
felt sprightly and energetic, more than confident 
 in self and sound of mind suddenly transformed 
on entering hospital where gravity becomes a 
surly tyrant implacably tiresome, more than
a tad frightening as agency appears to abandon
you and the slightest incline becomes a challenge 
and a burden tightening your chest and dragging 
your legs. What then might conceivably account 
for nurses speaking a language your ears cannot 
interpret quite, their manner that of an adult 
confronting a querulous, confused child? Where 
patience wears a thin smile and perfunctorily 
civil orders are crisply intoned, obedient 
compliance being the order of this day. Where,
examination complete with the aid of modern
medical marvels, the diagnosis is forthright
relief evident in the doctor's face and voice
fatigued by too many health-damning ones
preceding yours, and elderly, poised yet
hesitant volunteers beam with the pleasure
of usefulness when their sickly peers give
praise and fulsome thanks for their presence.
All well-meant, sincere and professional the 
charity in mood and movement obvious in 
catering to the hearing and sight diminished
possessed by those still in command of a
robust interpretive mind, you see. Ah well!

Night Life

When life has brought you long, long past
childhood when uncertainty brought dark
dreams to haunt your night, then adulthood
concerns introduced you to night-haunting
dark dreams of fearful impact, to the point in
your existence called the golden years and no
longer is your sleep impacted by nightmares
and instead soft dreams tiptoe into the
landscape of your sleeping mind amidst
the presence of familiar surroundings and
people whom you surely know and feel in
their presence a certain contentment so that
when you awake in the morning you are ever
so briefly confused. Is it that life dimly-lit at
night that you are ensconced within, or is it
the life that you know so intimately during
your waking hours? In the former figures tend
on awaking to be shadowy and benign while
in the latter the aura is that of familiarity and
reality among those whose presence is sharp
and knowing. Is it time to be concerned when
as time groans on the distance between the two
becomes less discernible and you hesitate
slightly when matching each in their proper
perspective? Day-life=reality: Night=?