Man's son

My name's Charles.
Some call me Charlie.
Either way, it means king- which pretty much wraps me up.

I'm a king amongst fools, a fool amongst kings!
You can try to catch me, but you'll end up tying yourself in knots.

I'm here one minute, gone the next-
now you see me (lucky you), now you don't.

But what did you even see?!

Can you be sure you saw anything?
Are you doubting your own memory, Charlie (mind if I call you Charlie?!).

We're like two mirrors, you and I.
In the space between exists the reality.

Don't let 'em get you down.
In this life, there are two kinds of people (though I couldn't tell you what they are!).

Some think I'm crazy.
Others know that I am.

Ain't no shame in that,
no shame at all...

I bet you'd recognise my face if you woke up with it.
You might forget it by nightfall (I can be pretty scary, after dark).

Can I ask you one question?
 (Too late, I already have!)




 







'The only difference between a madman and me,
is that I am not mad!'

Salvador Dalí

The lie of the land

I once became World Lying Champion.
This was not an easy feat, I assure you!
The world is full of liars, so I take great pride in being the very best of all...


'This sentence is false', said the girl to me- which I tended to believe, as she was 10 feet tall and I didn't dare do otherwise!
I'm lying, of course- everything I say is a lie.

So, being that I am so practiced and- one could even say- pathological in my lying,
I took on the challenge of the giant, blue ogre woman (whose name was Phyllis),
confident in my ability to baffle brains with bullshit.

'The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true.
The first sentence in this list is false.'

I said to her.


She thought for a moment (ogres can only think for a moment at a time),
really straining her poor little brain, and when she tried to think again,
the pressure was too much- and she exploded with a loud 'pop'!

You can imagine my surprise (if you can't, you don't have much of an imagination),
when- low and behold- what did come a'raining down from the sky, than millions of banknotes worth a pound each (or was it one banknote worth a million- or perhaps a million banknotes weighing a pound each.....etc.,etc. You'll have to excuse my forgetfullness- it's always said that liars have bad memories...)!

Obviously, being an honest man, I couldn't take the money that had been thrown into the air by the exploding ogre woman, so I contented myself by telling a lie (which is something I never do).

'I'm Scottish (though I deny it), and all Scotsmen are liars.
You cannot trust a word a Scotsman says (lucky that I'm not one!).'


I can sense a little doubt here.
You don't believe me, do you?
And you know, I can't blame you- because they say that the one who doesn't trust is untrustworthy,
which would explain why you don't trust me.
And, I guess, why I don't trust you...!

How did I end up winning the World Title?!

Well, I didn't.
Simple as that.
I've never told a single lie in my life (and there's no other man can honestly say that).

One thing that does confuse me though, is this-


The last sentence in this story is a lie.

Puzzled?!

 





 In our life puzzle, we don’t even know how many pieces there are.
But we start with an inkling of an idea of what our life will look like and we start putting the pieces together.
In life, there are no corner pieces and there are no edge pieces.
We have no boundaries like that. We simply keep putting pieces together and the puzzle keeps growing.
Sometimes we finish off a section, take time to appreciate that part, and then move on to another section. … And the puzzle keeps growing, piece by piece, section by section.




---




We commonly say that something is "a puzzle," or we are "puzzled" by something.
A puzzle can actually be a very large and indeterminate situation, which stops us dead in our tracks because we don't know what to do.
Sometimes I think that Nature itself is a large puzzle, which we can put together in various ways, achieving different lifestyles for ourselves depending on how we "solve" the "puzzle."

It is useful to have a metaphor like "puzzle" to describe such an indeterminate situation.
Puzzles are indeed important things.
They played a role in many ancient myths, which involved having the protagonists figure out some riddle or puzzle before being allowed onto the next stage of their journey.

And so when I was putting together a series of jigsaw puzzles, at one point in my life, I took the opportunity to think about puzzles in general.
The jigsaw puzzle itself, the cardboard-and-paper collection of differently shaped and colored pieces, was an embodied metaphor.
It embodied, in physical form, a large metaphorical concept.
Within limitations, it provided fruitful material for thinking about the process of solving puzzles of all kinds.

You start, of course, with a large pile of randomized pieces.
Thousands of them. It looks hopeless.
Disorder reigns supreme.
But you do have a couple of things going for you.
First, there's the picture on the box - you actually know what the answer will look like, in a large sense.
You can get hints about the general groupings of the differently colored pieces - those blues will represent water, these blues are the sky, these buildings are brown and tan, and so on.
The result will be a Mediterranean seashore scene, with boats and buildings under a blue sky.

Is this an accurate metaphor for our situation when faced with puzzles in life?
Sometimes, yes.
We often have a general sense of what is going on, what should be happening we just don't know the details.
We don't know how it can be brought under control.
We don't have all the pieces filled in yet.
In life, our fantasies, theories, ideologies are the pictures on the box.
We try to put together the pieces of our lives so they will match these dreams.

So in an important way, in solving puzzles, we work backwards from solutions.
This goes counter to our expectations of moving logically, step by step, from premises to conclusions. Logically, we are supposed to work forward from premises, not backwards from solutions.
But in real life, as in the embodied metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle, we often do not proceed logically.
We have another thing going for us as we tackle our jigsaw puzzle.
The boundaries of the puzzle are straight lines.
We can separate out the edge pieces because they are usually the only ones with straight edges.

Is this an accurate metaphor for solving puzzles in life?
It can be, if we assume that our conceptual boundaries are like the straight line borders of our puzzle. We understand certain concepts up to a limit.
That limit is the edge of our puzzle.
And so we work in from the edges of our puzzle.
As we do, certain outlines appear, and we search for pieces which will fit them.
 We work in from the context, try to fill in the blanks.
Again, this is different from how we conceive "logical" "problem-solving" to work.
We usually think of going to the "heart of the matter" and "building upon what we already know." This might be analogous to finding a bunch of pieces which are the same color, and which obviously belong together.
We put them together into a tan building, say.
They are then a "sub-assembly" ready to be "plugged in" when the rest of the puzzle is ready.
But the main action is working in, bit by bit, from the edges.
Early in the puzzle-solving process, there are lots of pieces lying around.
The job is to classify them, group them together. …

In our life puzzle, we don’t even know how many pieces there are. But we start with an inkling of an idea of what our life will look like and we start putting the pieces together. In life, there are no corner pieces and there are no edge pieces. We have no boundaries like that. We simply keep putting pieces together and the puzzle keeps growing. Sometimes we finish off a section, take time to appreciate that part, and then move on to another section. … And the puzzle keeps growing, piece by piece, section by section. - See more at: http://kenjaques.com/?p=591#sthash.1CJFjx5K.dpuf

Why not?!

Why not
try not,
now and then?
And reach the deepest depths of Zen

For all is realised through Non-action.
Put 'sati' back into satisfaction.

Going with the flowing river,
paradise your soul deliver.
Or not-
of course some prefer it hot!


Open your heart,
your mind's free.
Why not imagine you are a tree?

Why not be all you can be?

Why not you?

Why not me?

Why don't we;
all women and men,
not try to fly
to the heights of Zen?

(And if we like, fly back again...)

On your Marx, get set.....

As you all know, Karl Marx is regarded by many as probably the best stand-up comedian ever to have lived.





To celebrate the anniversary of his death and- coincidentally- the collapse of the Communist Bloc,
we're going to take a little trip down memory lane, by remembering some of those favourite quips and anecdotes which made him such a household name in his own household.

I'm sure he would have wanted us to share everything- good and bad alike...


---


On being asked to lead the Soviet world takeover-

'I refuse to join any political party that would have me as a member.'


...


In a debate against democracy, head-to-head on the television against that champion of reedom, Nixon-

'The secret of Communism is honesty and fair dealing.
If we can fake that, we've got it made.'

...

In court, accused of giving away nuclear secrets, and threatened with execution-

'Those are my political principles, and if you don't like them......well, I have others!'

...

Accused of writing a workers' theory intelligeable only to an academic elite-

'A child of five would understand my manifesto.

Er.......could someone please fetch a child of five?!'

---



A handful of jokes (which now seem eerily prophetic) were of course largely reponsible for much of the disillusionment which led to the fall of the Great Socialist Experiment.
Printed here for your delight, delectation and other things that begind with 'd' are a few of the more famous-



Under communism, every man has what he needs. That's why the butcher puts a sign up that says "nobody needs meat today."


...



Three workers find themselves locked up, and they ask each other what they’re in for.
The first man says: “I was always ten minutes late to work, so I was accused of sabotage.”
The second man says: “I was always ten minutes early to work, so I was accused of espionage.”
The third man says: “I always got to work on time, so I was accused of having a Western watch.”


...



KGB officer tells the next of kin that their father committed suicide.
Kin: How did he die?
KGB: Skull fracture.
Kin: Skull fracture?
KGB: Well, he wouldn’t take the poison.


...



Q. "Why do the KGB operate in groups of three?" A. "One can read, one can write and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals."


...
A Briton, a Frenchman, and a Russian are standing and staring at a portrait of Adam and Eve.

"Look at their calm, their reserve" says the Briton. "Surely they must be British!"

"Nonsense!" replies the Frenchman. "They are beautiful. Surely they must be French!"

The Russian finally speaks, "they have no clothes, no shelter, only an apple to eat, and are being told this is paradise. They are Russian."


 ...


 A man is walks down the street one night and passes a Soviet guard.
The guard asks his, "Hey! Where are you going?!"
"Home" replies the man.
The guard says, "You realize there is a curfew here."
The man looks scared and starts to run away so the guard levels his rifle and shoots him dead.
Another man witnesses this and says to the guard, "Curfew doesn't begin for another 15 minutes. Why did you shoot him?"
The guard replies, "That man was a friend of mine and I know where he lives. He never would have made it."

Instant Karma

The boy- as small, feeble and unnoticed as any other boy, found the pill as he was exploring shortcuts through the rubbish dump behind his shack.

He would never (even if he had been questioned) have been able to explain just exactly why he swallowed the pill (or even why he picked it up (or even, even why he even noticed it in the first place!)).
But stories don't necessarily need to follow the logic we ourselves seem to think holds the world together; in fact, one could argue that stories really shouldn't be bound by things as silly as cause-and-effect, motive and belief.

But then those are things that are outside my humble remit to discuss in print...

So, back to the boy.
Who now has grown to a gigantic size (by human terms); at least 8 feet tall and with shoulders just as wide!
Wow!
Rippling with muscles and full of energy (and with a no doubt monstrous appearance),
he goes about initially- as most boys would in his situation- by pulling trees out of the ground and turning over cars.
He soon bores of that, however (as most boys would), and looks for something more interesting and absorbing to do, making use of his enormous physical strength.

Running faster than the motorcars on the street, fetching the most incredulous and shocked looks from the people he passes, he comes to realise that perhaps this is his chance to make his mark in the world, and be noticed.

If this isn't his chance to do that, he doesn't know what else would be!


So, he enters the Olympics, winning every event, and becoming the most famous person in the world overnight!

It's then that the pill wears off, and he returns to being just about as normal a boy as......any other normal boy.

The whole world is up in a clamour to find out the whereabouts of the mysterious super-athlete,
who has suddenly disappeared (and enquiries show, appears to have had no history before his storming of the Games).

The little boy- no matter how much he shouts and insists ,tries to demonstrate (with a futility that would tweak the heart-strings) his now-gone exceptional abilities, and explain what actually happened (facts being of little interest to the excitable masses)- remains unnoticed.
Unseen and unheard.

He starts to wish he could find another pill, or maybe that he had never even found the first...

Then as young boys are wont to do, he quickly forgets the whole episode, and grows up into whatever he grows up into.
Just like most other little boys.

Daringly Truthful

It's all come down around my ears; as I suppose I should have known it would-
but what exhilaration we had there for a while, how amazed and astonished we were, with every moment's discoveries of the possibilities of truth.

Or the flexibility of truth.
Truth can never be perceived.
Truth is only that which we perceive.
Choose an option (or don't).
The truth changes; it remains the same.


I really did set out with honest intentions (paving the way to my own private hell),
but fate intervened, and took things in a direction I never would have chosen.

The man who served as the focus of my film, himself a famous and loved documentary maker,
was as committed as I was to the project; actually, it was likely that the stress he felt over the responsibility of conveying just the right image of himself, that led to his sudden death.

What were we supposed to do?!
The film was practically finished.
We just needed those few key scenes, to provide the touch of........I suppose that to call it authenticity would push the limits of irony, but that's what I think it was.

His adoring audience had their image of the man, as he had a self-image that had driven and shaped his important work.
His films had shaped public perception at pivotal moments in human history;
had helped changed the world- most would say for the better.


As it stood, with the main protagonist dying before our story was rounded off, tied up,
we were left without the happy ending our sorry planet so desperately needed.

So we lied........in the service of truth, of course.
I would say that here is no other noble reason to do so.


Some selective editing (which is only what we do in our brains and with our memories, anyway),
some old footage of our hero, interspersed tastefully with long, blurred or fleeting shots of a lookalike double.
Intelligently written script and an emotive narrator- these things are essential.


We sounded out the paying punters, asked them what they wanted.
We then threw their suggestions out, and made them what they needed.


All in all, the piece has been a success.
The group mind has a saint, an idol.............one that can help push it towards greater growth andan opening of possibilities.
One shouldn't let something as ephemeral as death get in the way of that!


The principal lesson I've learnt in all this, is that the truth is a great responsibility,
and that it really shouldn't be entrusted to just anybody....