Send in the clowns

You are a ludicrous soul, b.

Splendour in the blood carries weight.

The more I think about it-and that itself is a mistake- the more I think how superficial and light we are (Tell it, but tell it slant). Well, there you are. There's no point beating oneself over it or trying to find solace in a martyr syndrome or blaming "the times/time we live in"-there have never been so many opportunities to do things not worth doing.

But when we look back we have to ask, candidly, whether our choices were not, in the end of the day, a reflection of our innermost self. Harsh though it is. It's not easy, after all, to take in too much reality.

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

Not the majority, upon whom necessity presses down like a heavy stone, but those who had some degree of freedom. The accountants, the bankers, statisticians...who thought it better to let the dust accumulate and find a kind of security, respectability in that. A timid, bovine acceptance of things that lets circumstances drown out grace. Lawrence was right: all that is important is that one find one's true instincts and hold on to them. To thine own self be true.

It is the light within that fails. Call it what you will: a lack of courage, or ability (and these may, ultimately, be the same thing). The inability to put into some from one's poetic instincts, to give shape to one's creativity with one's own hands or find joy in one's work. Our record is this: what we gave and what we lovingly received.

Ich habe stets nur alles halb gemacht!

We, we negative ones, enamoured by laughter and nonsense, "raucous negation" , radical dissent/descent. No, not even that, for that demands that one possess or love an elsewhere, an otherwise, a there, there. One must know what to take seriously, what one loves and what one hates.