An
unobstrusive piece of writing surfaced on the net some years ago. Like many articles posted on the net, it <strike>rose</strike>raised some big questions.
The article I am referring to was written by someone who expressed surprise and consternation at never having seen any pictures of celebrities in ordinary situations. In particular, I recall that this person wanted to locate a picture on the web of
Mother Theresa riding a bicycle. He apparently had little success in finding such a picture.
I ended up thinking about this dilemma, and the dilemma in general, of the
scarcity of pictures in the media or on the web of famous people doing ordinary things, especially things that are good for the earth, and things that really help other people. I wended up writing down extensive notes on the topic, which grew to more notes. My funny feelers kicked in, and I started misappropriating words (slightly wrongful use of words, in a jumble of semantic outsourcing), words which may or may not pique your curiosity. At times, I only want to show how illogically organized English is, and that sometimes if you are learning <b>usage</b>, you can quite possibly and quite probably get mixed up, or turned down or any direction. This literary (or lit
errory)style is akin to the streamed consciousness style of James Joyce, except his Ulysses had no hyperlinks or images, other than the ones suggested by the words themselves. The literary device used is called
malaprops, and was popularized in the early 1990s by the Canadian humorist,
Charlie Farqueson (a.k.a. Don Harron).
Your web page raises the fundamental conundrum of modern civilization: <u>the lack of photos of celebrities, famous politicians, famous humanitarians, etc leading a lifestyle that is eco-friendly</u>. Maybe it's because they're so busy being friendly to people, that they forget to be friendly to the earth. Or they're always in a hurry to meet someone who lives too far away from where they are for them to bike hike there, and they have to go in a car or limo or taxi or their own private jet or touring buscoach.
This [url=http://www.wolpetrust.org.za/lectures/ml2006Tutu.pdf]document[/url] mentions that — a rare exception to the rule — during the Nazi invasion of Norway,
King Haakon used to travel by bicycle or local
train to the suburbs to play cards with his friends, with no bodyguards. We seek more pictorial evidence, as we only have located a painting of
him arriving at a city by sled.
Not that my thoughts matter a lot, anyway, but I just want to set it right for the record, since what I think means a bit to me, but occasionally I doubt my powers of pensive acuity, and don't write it down. Sometimes, the idea comes and vanishes like faster than a car or person passing me by on the street. But, in this case, I thought I'd chase it down, grab and hold it, and spread it out, anyway, just in case the title caught your eye, askance, even offguard, which is usually how memorable evgents happen anyway, just out-of-the-blue. We remember things that jar us, take us for a loop, but not an arc-en-ciel, because that means rainbow, and that's a new symbol for South Africa. Well, actually, something that takes you for a loop the loop would be OK, kind of like a rollercoaster ride. I remember I almost lost my glasses on one of those rides in
Daegu at WooBangLand amusement park in
Korea. I was not bemused. Methinks I was not befittingly flung. There was no advance warning about being careful about my spectacles, wearing a spectacle strap, or about putting them into my backpack for safekeeping. None, whatsoever. During the ride, I oft had to grit my teeth and hold on to the safety rail tenaciously and resolutely, and my glasses simultaneously. I could have very easily lost my balance while upside down and fallen fatally to the ground below in a sudden, unplanned, and unexpected impact. My camera didn't shutter at the memory of it, but my mind still shudders at the memory of it. I pale and my blood pressure weakens and my speech falters at the recollection of that event in 1998. Every breath I expire now makes me remember that I could have expired then and run out of breath forever, but luckily didn't.
But I apologize for this divergent distraction, this rambling off the topic, this straying off the street, this skipping like a stone across the waters of the pooled topics of discussion. Good discussion should always stay focused, like a zoom lens. If you lose sight of the goal, the rock will roll, and gather no moss. Even in a chat room, it's best to stick around and to the topic. Stay on board, and don't let every wind fill your sail. Somebody maybe will disagree about that; others may concur. It's kind of like a roadmap where you can see where you're going, instead of just plunging into the unknown without regard for street signs, speed traps, speed signs, traffic lights, air turbulence, air-to-ground speed ratio, expected time of arrival, or Eisenstein's Relativity Principal.
That was the physics teacher who taught him (
Eisenstein) and also was the principal of the school where he went (when he was a student). That guy (or gal) is really famous these days - everybody talks about Eisenstein's
Relativity Principal. Maybe he or she had a family name that was difficult to pronounce. Or maybe the person wanted to remain incognito, and didn't want their family name to be connected with something that was challenging current thinking in a disproportionate and overwhelming way. I think this principal, however, had secret proof that all humans are relatives, especially since we're travelling in a vacuum through the fifth dimension at 86,000 or so miles per hour or second (please correct me if I'm wrong). It's a phenomenal speed, and I really wonder why the atmosphere and clouds are not all blown away because of the speed. My hat would surely be whisked or whirled off my head if I rode something or drove a convertible through space at that rate. It's called the
Relative or Orbital Velocity. It doesn't mean the speed with which we destroy our distant relatives in sudden attacks or tribal skirmishes. It's the speed with which the earth is cruising through space. Only physic cysts and astronomical figures understand the mechanization and spinning of the celestial spheres. Even though Eisenstein didn't study to be one of those, he taught himself and scribbled lots of ideas on scraps of papers. He used his brain as a hand organizer or palm-top, and he made a formula about energy, light, and mass. It means that everything that has mass (can there be something without a mass?) is made of light particles. We're not even plugged in to anything, yet because of Eisenstein's Principal, the photons are taking over the electrons, and change our concept on how everything is made. It doesn't mean that we're lighter than before, and everything - including us - doesn't glow in the dark yet. That could happen one day, but perhaps as we evolve over the length and crusty breadth of time, it may gradually become an in-born property of a few earthians at first, and then all of us later, after we decide that it will help us save on our electricity bills, and we won't have to wear those reflective vests when we ride our bikes or go jogging at night. We have to be careful, though, because even these days we know that there are good kinds of light and bad kinds of light. Some people don't like the light from computer monitors, so they buy a shield to protect their own light particles from interacting with the bad kind. That's really the nature of the universe: good light and light that you need to wear a shield or sunglasses to look at first.
Eisenstein knew a lot about how the Earth travels into space (but around the sun, first), and beyond space. He really meant that the Relative Velocity is the speed at which the myth or rumor or factoid that humans are really relatives can sweep the earth. Not sweep <i>up</i> the earth, but sweep
around or encompass it totally, like a security blanket. So far, the progress is slow. Some people are still arguing about whether we all came from Africa or different places, even though those places didn't have any names like Africa, Siberia, and so on, when we lived there before, and it was all one big continental shelf a long time ago, near when the dinosaurs roamed freely like in a democracy anywhere they wanted. The dinosaurs were wiped out by the scourge of the impact of an oncoming asteroid, which was released from its belt in a casanova expulsion, and was programmed by stealthily hardly-ever-seen evil extra-terrestrials, who are bent, and determined, to undermine and overkill all humans just as we use bug spray and poison to kill vermin. But after that, and the clouds cleared, the land must have been one big really placid and picturesque place to live, where they didn't have countries or border checks or passports or different currency, and you could live and travel anywhere at free will and at ease.
I am told that his (Eisenstein's) watch could even run backwards, stop randomly or at preset daily or weekly times for preset intervals or durations, tell the time for any point on earth no matter what the longitude, latitude, alitutude, or attitude. It could send email to the friendly extra-terrestrials, measure the amount of sunlight impinging on it, detect intensity of personal auras, and it worked using a battery system that you recharged by putting the watch in front of a magnet every night before you go to bed ot sleep on the floor. It also gave Muslim prayer time reminders, had all the holidays earmarked, chimed and chirped on the historical anniversaries of great scientific discoveries. It was waterproof, and if a shark ate it, the enzymes of the shark would trigger an air flotation device that was not digestible and would cause the watch to eventually float to the surface. Patent-pending research would make it do the same for whales. It had a countdown feature, count-up features, told you your pulse, your walking pace and how far you walked (maybe Mother Theresa should have been part of the pilot study for this feature). I don't think it had any geopositioning feature, but it was also a geiger counter, a metal detector, and had solar photovoltaic cells in it (as backup to the magnet charging in case the magnets wore out and in case there was lots of ambient and incidental light). You could also print out or fax cell phone messages, calculate pollution levels in air or water, and it could psychoanalyze your iris, and scientifically predict your enneagram, your station in life, and the hidden purpose of the universe.
Eisenstein never really told people that time was like a delta river that sometimes flowed out to the ocean, and other times flowed back up the river - rather like salmon leaping into the B.C. air in the spring as they swim upstream to spawn or pollinate or whatever they do, or like the Essequibo or Pomeroon Rivers in
Guyana. It seems that they like to resort to resort areas on the river as their last resort up it. If the whole world knew that time wasn't linear, but that it could conform to whatever pattern or design or tessellations that mathematicians or physicists perceive or dream up, then the psychological impact of people learning that they live no longer in a Newtonian static world of predictability, but instead in an ever-changing world that includes flux, solder, soldiers, change (symbolized by the Greek letter
delta ?), pocket money, and myriads of other important max factors would really stir people's imagination, unleash their creative potency, or improve the tone of their skin but not their voice - or, perhaps, all three. It would wreak havoc where angels fear to tread, where writers fain would falter, where fillies frolic and barnacles barn, and farmer till 'til the dusky dusk descends. It would wreck pre-conceived notions, pre-fabricated nations, and ill-defined objectives, for which nobody had any advance warning system about. It could alter the substratum, and never allow geophysical faults to be corrected. Our tremors would be richtified. It is subliminal, subcutanaceous, and subterranean all at the same time. Most common people just want to take a break from the humdrum of the rat race. In one way or another, we are all pining for pines, especially whispering pines, and we pin our hopes on just that. Just like the sock-eyed salmon.
It's something we slowly have to wake up to. And then walk and climb up the Jacob's ladder of reality, the staff of life, and the criterion on which all life is based: the
DNA helix, which as vibrant, life-giving, and steadily energizing mortal coils we should not try to sluff off or shuffle off our feet. You have to wait until you die to do that - get rid of all your coils of DNA once and for all - in the permanent waste dump of the soil and earth, where you get recycled as plant food.
Shakespeare knew that this process would have its fair and equitable share of run-ins, hold-ups, cast-offs, no-shows, has-beens, burn-outs, shoe-ins, and wannabees, who by dint and dent of misfortune don't fit into the crowd, the pidgeon-hole, or the urban influx migrating from the outlying arrears and underlying themes. Shakespeare was only too aware that this profound existential experience - the feeling of
Angst,
ennui and
déjà vu (the combination of which is the nearly fatal
triple entendre, which all people, especially femmes fatales, should cautiously and adroitly avoid at any or all staggering costs) - that can make people in industrialized nations (especially young people who are at the mercy of a stagnant economy that is just spinning its wheels and going nowhere fast) feel discouraged, unwanted, or want to sing the blues or join the greens or the reds. Shakespeare was only too well aware that this kind of malaise would happen in industrial states and other altered states of consciousness where machines and humans compete to get jobs, gripping and pre-occupying the minds of the young and the vernal-minded. He used the word
coils, which are part of magnetos, car engines, and form in a hand over fist way part and parcel of the other pre-industrial machinery that are foreshadowed in his plays. This is more than an inkling or an off-the-cuff remark. I think maybe he had private correspondence with Nostradamus, and they were thinking of a merger, but I read somewhere that the tea leaves - specially imported from China - said otherwise, and they foreclosed on the idea. They both vetoed the idea, since nobody voted for it. Venetian merchants were also against the gathering of clandestine business clans into a gridlock empires, since it would rob the gondola drivers of their freedom to ply the waters of Venice and create their own economy aboard a boat. Even geography wasn't ready for it then, since only daVinci had thought about helicopters, and no one except Shakespeare had envisioned the train.
Yes, Shakespeare
does hint at trains -- first in King Lear, when he says:
Saddle my horses; call my train together.
This reference to transportation by means of horses (the established means of transportation at that time, and even for a long time before and after that) coupled with the hint of phoning (an eerie futuristic reference, as in phone call, which is what people used to have to do in order to make a train reservation, maybe about twenty or thirty years or so ago - in Canada, anyway, but I'm not certain if you can or can't still do that in other countries that sport trains as part of their tourist packages) indicates the astute perspicacity and clairvoyance of Shakespeare, and it indicates a deliberate longing on the part of King Lear for a faster means of conveyance. The only other kind of train that Shakespeare writes about, is the
The very train of her worst wearing gown / Was better worth than all my father's lands (King Henry VI), and
A royal train, believe me. These I know.. (King Henry VIII) which talks about when train meant a royal procession, not a steam locomotive, although the image of an aristocratic lady wearing a gown, looking out a train window at the vast landscape is unmistakably clear. It is not an
oxymoron, or a
moronic doublet. In linguistics, a doublet means that skirt and shirt can be traced back to the same root, but by different routes. Regal and royal are farther exemplification and amplification of this unique phenomenon. A moronic doublet could be thought of as a fool's vest, but in its linguistic context, it refers to an oxymoron doublet - two strange words put together, but right now we don't see the link. In the future, someone will find the link, and reason and sanity will prevail, unabatedly and nonchalantly. There is a website dedicated to this research,
interconnected.org. Leave the
ox(y) out to pasture, and we are left with the term
moron doublet, which becomes less socially threatening and sounds better than
moronic doublet.
Since a doublet is a kind of jacket worn by men during Shakespeare's time, this term is suitable - since it reminds the writer or critic about Shakespeare, who really knew about the power of the spoken and written word.
They are the opposite of anachronisms, which is what happens when your watch doesn't work, or when you talk about watches before they're invented. Anarchy (related in origin) is what happens when French farmers dump their tomatoes in front of MacDonald's arches to protest globalization of the hamburger. Some people think that the flatulence and omnipresence of beef cattle methane constitutes an occupational or existential hazard for each and every human, since it means that combustible and highly-flammable methane could burst into flames any time, anywhere, any place, and without adequate precautionary measures and fire hazard or other WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Material Information System) or fire-fighting equipment. This potential catastrophe constitutes a formidable future danger for earthians, even those who have no life insurance, formal burial ritual protocol, last will or testament, or even a proper roof over their heads during this lifetime.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier not so long ago (the backwards opposite of soon) (I could have said "just mentioned"), but it was earlier than that since it was a few paragraphs ago (actually on page 1). I was talking about topical unity in one's writing, keeping an even keel, reeling with the eel, and feeling the nuance and nudge of every word, syllable, collocation cluster or beatpack. The
beatpack - far different from the popular six-pack that you see cloistered not in cloisters, but in bars, late night TV ads, suburban homes if they're having a party, discos, night clubs, and other pertinent party precincts where pert paraphenalia is paraded - refers to groups of words that have a beat to them. This hidden uncanny cadence of words - both spoken or read aloud or silently unsustainably - is in the words themselves. You just say something, and it has a kind of up- or down-tempo beat, depending on the mood or time at which you or another person said , sang, or wrote it. No electronic device has as yet or thus far to date ever before even until now yet been invented that will keep track of or measure the rhythm of
beatpack word clusters. I venture to predict (from my lowly citadel of an unheated computer workstation that overlooks a library and background red,-brown,-yellow-dappled hill with an eight-sided Buddhist-style all-wooden but clay-roofing-tiled gazebo at its summit) that one day, a computer program will be written to read prose and poetry with full and proper and adequate enunciation, diction, and tone. It will know automatically how to anticipate and how to maximally vocalize these important groups of words, and how to get all the syntax right, and know exactly what the writer meant. Some people will say
"Ludicrous! Impossible! You are an imposter, and you violate the traditions of this land, and pieces of land everywhere! Get out of here! You're nothing but an inviolable piece of derelict spook, and a lack-luster daydreamer trying to conjure up a dehumanized future and an impalpable implacable phantom robotic spectre for our beloved children!", but I fain would retort in a kind and gentle way that: what is science fiction today (which is not really my writing genre) becomes tomorrow's fact. It's happening beneath our feet and as we speak. It's in the winds of change that are blustering through the corridors and canyons of our high-rise office and apartment towers, and by the subway vents that people at ground level hardly ever walk over. It's an unavoidable turn of events. It's an unmistakable trend, even though somebody made a lot of mistakes when he or she was doing the computer programming to make it work. Expert systems theory predicts that base grammars will be encoded into all hardware, software, peripherals, residuals, appetizers, and residents of RAM who have volatile memory, and semi-conductor circuitry - to such an extent that we will take them all for granted, and not bat any eyes or false eye-lashes at them, and we will just get on with our business of day-in-and-day-out living as peacefully as possible. It and we will be subsumed into the reality of the new world order. Maybe alarm clocks connected to the internet will serenade us before we go to sleep, drill us on our vocabulary in any language or dialect, and wake us up with a variety of national anthems and the Mandarin version of "Breathe Again", originally by Toni Braxton,or
Sugar Jones singing an accapella "A Little Bit of Heaven". That's the tough nature of reality, the grit, and the nuts and the bolts and flanges and socket wrenches of it. It's part of our automatic weaponry for survival, that we make tools to help us do things and to save us time so that we can think about what time and life really means. Cogito, ergo sum. The converse is truer: if we don't think, then we aren't. We need a renaissance of philosophy and metaphysics to the highest order. Everyone's true vocation in life is to recognize that our words should be used for extolling each other's virtues, not for lambasting one another in petty putdowns, vehement outbursts, or torrential and terrible tirades. It saps us of all of life's
qi, which together with the
yin and
yang form the triadic cornerstones of all Chinese architectural artifacts and figures and philosophical incentives.
Even though I strove for inter-sentence coherence for the last ten paragraphs or so, it kind of fell through the floor boards and the floor tiles, in terms of paragraph topic unity. But at least I put an interesting topic at the first part of the essay/letter/speech, as something to get your interest, and that's a good thing. There were also some twists of fate, flicks of the wrist, winks of the eye, nods of the head, and flourishes of the broad bush in vibrant colors upon the canvas of the new broadband access, which leads me back to the main theme of this response. Remember the part about bicycles, Mother Theresa, and the rollercoaster experience in Korea?
Well, back to the issue of the dearth (not death) of celebrities seen on two wheels. Why didn't Mother Theresa ever ride a bike? Or did she a long time ago when she was young, growing up in Albania? Did you check her biography or autobiography, if she wrote one? Have you ever seen a nun riding a bike anywhere? There was once a movie called The
Flying Nun about a nun who flew an airplane to visit people. Would that kind of image do just as well for you? Didn't Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music wear a nun's habit and ride a bike? Did Mother Theresa ever see that musical? What was her opinion of it? Has that been documented, and put into the public domain and range? Was The Flying Nun a true story, or make-believe? What about in Sister Act I, II, or III? How did nuns get around in those movies? What about the
Singing Nun? She became famous as a singer, and then later was against fame, and tried to help autistic kids, but then later committed suicide because of unpaid taxes, and the prospect of being more penniless and charitable than she already was.
Did she ever get around in a pedicab, or pedi-rickshaw? What about motor rickshaw? Is there a photo of either of those situations? That would have shown her support for local venture capital projects, her support for the local business community at large but still present - long-established business men and women who have years of service at their job and strive for a high level of achievement in getting people to their destination quickly, despite the congested and coagulated streets of Kolkata, its bad air, and thinking about the kids back home who maybe are with a relative or grandparent, or not in school at all because of the financial burden of exorbitant tuition and admission fees, or maybe both.
(to be continued!)
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india
September 2008 
stedawa
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