Tag: existence

writing

The Gospel of Jack

after which he smiled. 7. Then God located the binary swing of the atom and gave it prominence. Thus there emerged from their subsequent dance, the sky and the land.  8. He breathed air and called it Heaven, peopled the land and, called it Hell. 9. People dreamed of flying, watched birds and, like them, wished to fly. It was a grand dream that took grip of their imagination. 10.  But, even those who managed to fly, found that sooner or later, they had to return to the ground. 11. What goes up, must come down. It’s not rocket science. 12. Where the planes came down, at an aerodrome on the outskirts of town, a bird-chaser lived in a shack. 13. His job was to chase flocks of ducks and seagulls that gathered there and presented a hazard to planes. (They did not consider that, perhaps, the planes were a hazard to the birds). But, the duck chaser did as he was told.

14. His name was Jack and he thought a lot about flight, birds, growing olives and the meaning of life. 15. He was looking for a unified theory of everything. 16. Or rather, he was looking for the words to describe the thing that connected everything.  16. If the world is all that matters and matter is comprised of atoms, why is conscious thought still on the outside of everything? In fact, where is it located? 17. It’s a very hard problem he thought. But it can’t be rocket science. 18. Jack inhaled great draughts of air and as he did, he had a thought that opened like a flower of light stretching its petals. If heaven is in the sky and, the sky is air and, we breathe air, do we not have heaven within us? Surely we do not need to fly to get to heaven he thought?

a flower of light

19. Jack told his friend Felix, the owner of a local Tavern, about his idea. 20. Many pilots frequented Felix’s Tavern and opened up to him about their problems, like in the movies (except this was for real). 21. One night Felix told some of them about his friend, Jack, and his theory that men did not need to fly to reach heaven. 22. You could have heard a pin drop. 23. What does a duck chaser know about the science of  flight? they said, and left . 24. The dedicated fliers among them did not like this talk. It made a mockery of their endeavours. 25. Then they became angry. 26. Through friends of friends in high places, they had Jack fired from his job. 27. This did not bother Jack who moved to a shack in the country to grow olives and think.

Country scene by Hannah Scallan

28. The disgruntled airmen flew as often as possible to forget what Jack had said. 29. They grew angry and bitter, he had tainted their flights with doubt. 30. They resolved to call him evil, for he had made impure what had always been pure. 31. Only fliers and those with aeroplanes, or friends with aeroplanes they said, were loyal to the idea of heaven. 32. It is blasphemy for a person to claim that just by breathing, on his own, anyone can find heaven they exclaimed. 33. To know Heaven, a person must fly with an authorised carrier. This, they proclaimed, is the way.

The way

34. And that became law because big money was involved. 35. Jack and his kind would now face legal proceedings if they dared speak against the authorised carriers, big or small. 36. How cruel you are to take from people their dreams. Begone from our midst, leave us at least our dreams the lawyers representing the authorised carriers told Jack. 36. Jack was happy to begone from them. By begone he understood them to mean be quiet. That he could do. 37. And, the lowly breather of air departed from the lawyer’s office whistling a happy tune. 38. The lawyers cracked open a box of Cohiba Siglio #3 and celebrated. They laughed and laughed. 39. They had outwitted Jack and his kind. Furthermore, they were friends with people of influence.  40. Soon, it came to pass that there were two kinds of people. Fliers who dreamed of flying and those who grew olives, had regular day jobs and just breathed.

41. The fliers became like gods. They sought to safeguard their knowledge of flight.42. After months of collaboration they produced a very special book: The Authorised Manual Of Flight. It was a Big book.

There were pages of complex illustrations

43. They filled the manual with complicated mathematics and laws of physics and equations to describe force, gravity, velocity and motion. They concluded with a chapter entitled How to fold your parachute and avoid death. 44. Initially there was a great demand for the book but since no-one could understand it, sales dropped and soon it was forgotten. 45. This pleased the fliers. There plan had worked. Their jobs were secure, as was the adoration they enjoyed from the masses. 46. The masses accepted that they were illiterate in the field of flight. They were relieved they did not need to read complicated books or learn to fly. They were happy to pay authorized carriers to carry them. 47 They continued to work hard and save like heck to pay for the privilege of being flown. 48. Everyone was happy.  49. Except the men of influence, the friends of friends of fliers. 50. Everyone was benefiting from flight but them. 51. They introduced a tax for all authorized carriers, big and small. 52. The carriers were busy, the tax was annoying but they had expected it. They increased their fares and paid their taxes. 53. Now, everyone was happy. Those who were not, did not count.

54. Meanwhile, back at his shack, Jack was happily harvesting olives and sharing his ideas with back-packers who came from all over the world to experience honest work. 55. And, they paid Jack for the work they did. This made no sense to Jack, but it was what they wanted. He was happy to comply with their wishes. It’s not rocket science. 56. Besides, their company was good. 57. Jack’s ideas got traction overseas. He did not spread them but the back-packers who were mostly young were liberated by his notions and upon returning home, many took up flying. They built their own flying machines. 58. The authorized carriers were not happy when they discovered that people were flying independently of them. 59. We must stop these anarchists before they destroy our way of life, they declared. 60. And the headlines in newspapers (owned by friends of friends of people of influence) read: Anarchists threaten our way of life! 61. The young flyers were stunned. They searched for the meaning of anarchist: 62. a person who believes in or tries to bring about anarchy.  They then had to search the term Anarchy: a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems. 63. They quickly sought legal representation. 64. No lawyers were willing to represent them. 65. The anarchists were arrested.

66. Everyone felt better. 67. Troublemakers are selfish, the tabloids reported, never happy. 68. The authorised carriers breathed a collective sigh, smoked their cigars and went back to the skies. 69. I went back to my olives and shack, smoked my pipe and wrote this down. 70. Now I pickle olives and between thoughts, I breathe, deeply and contentedly. 71. I wish you peace. 72. The end.

I wish you peace
existentialism, philosophy, poetry, writing

The Banquet’s end

It is a universal truth that there exists between man and inanimate objects a mysterious. Astute observers of humanity, such as Woody Allen speaks of the “innate hostility of inanimate objects to man.” I concur. My contribution to this dialectic is a response to one of humankind’s worst inventions-the public toilet roll dispenser. Where they fail in utility, they succeed as effective metaphors of modern existence. They hold within them the promise of ease-of-use but despite their failure to deliver, they continue to keep us hoping that next time it will be easier and better. It seldom is.

Ode to a banquet’s end

When in haste to this enamel throne I come,
the world behind me, I am, as made, alone here, undone;
my kingdom’s laid bare – its mystery revealed:
all human endeavour’s are a folly unrivalled, 
while the high and the lowly are at table divided,
men’s stations at banquet, are at toilet suspended.

But after thine bowels for thee here have toiled,
Alas, now be warned, the encore is spoiled,
this paper dispenser would have you stay soiled.

Were Dante alive now his inferno would tell,
this plastic contraption’s the first ring of hell.

MJ Scallan

being, philosophy

The elementary heaviness of being

I watched a plastic bag dance in a breeze. The way its creased grey skin responded to the air felt remarkably familiar. Gravity is the heaviness that living on earth imposes on the body. If the soul expands and comes close to the surface of the skin, the weight of air upon it is enormous, and often escapes as a sigh. Let us call this force by its real name, life. There are two forces working simultaneously on our existence. There is the downward thrust of gravity, the earth force that keeps us on the ground, ‘grounded’ as some call it. Pushing out against this from deep within us is the force of our own being, some call this force ‘soul’. A silk balloon in the centre of a stone. We measure living, not coincidentally, by the gravitational ellipses of our planet around the sun and all the while the soul expands proportionately outward. We begin our lives battling the physical force of gravity. We are easily toppled, must struggle to crawl, learn to walk and in our youth must endure scrapes and knocks as we collide with the earth in our endeavour to move with speed and grace on top of it. During these early stages of being human we are mostly muscle and identify strongly with the body we inhabit. Then we begin to hear the whisperings of our soul, realising we are more than the flesh and sinews we have thus far fed and adored. The soul begins to inflate from within. Physical routines lose their novelty and we notice the slow decay of the body in wounds that take longer to heal, aches that linger and teeth that crumble. Falling scares us, our mortality takes hold, caution makes sense. In the following decades the people we love begin to die. The once eternal vigour of youth is gone in a flash. Exercise is not what we do for fun but for staying alive and sometimes we wonder why  we persist. Easier to yield to the downward thrust. We push back. Gravity crushes us in the end, grinds our particles to dust. It always wins. Thankfully, as the body grows weaker, the soul grows stronger, if you pay attention to it. You realise it has always been there and has been fighting the battle since day one. It defies gravity, it brings nobility to living when the muscles do not. Living is not an act of ascension. Fairytales invite us to reach for the stars, to fly, to soar, to reach great heights but in truth we are just dropping by slow degrees of entropy from the womb to a hole in the ground. We begin by descending and the soul provides the downward journey with narrative, with a history of presence.

Some of us love airports because they remind us that the soul is made of lighter stuff. We find ourselves looking up from whence we came and the homesickness feels like a dream we can’t yet pronounce. Some of us have embraced our fate and will mine the earth to teach the soul that like coal or gold or iron it is trapped. Some of us walk on the ground and watch birds with a longing beyond our present comprehension. None escape the velocity of life. Whether we dig, walk or fly we move in the direction of ourselves. The laws of physics depend on location and direction. We are always going somewhere, toward something, from some place, but in truth these are irrelevant signposts for the space within. Scientists cannot locate consciousness because it is like looking for the act of looking. Some people dispute the existence of the soul. It doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to prove it exists, or anything really. I’m just working on my narrative, like a plastic bag caught in the wind.

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