The Intersection

The Intersection

And how could the Soul lend itself to any admixture?

-Plotinus

I like big butts and I can not lie

-Sir Mix-a-Lot

As a thought experiment

Picture a set of refined ladies

Fashioned of creamy Dresden porcelain

At a tea party

In a lovely garden

Surrounded by bunnies and snow-white doves

And some delightful children dancing in a circle.

That’s the Ideal.

Over here we have some other stuff

A lion and a bull bloody battling,

Also savages fighting

A motorcycle gang,

At night

Struggling and strangling,

The raging rabble grabbing and grappling,

Mixing it up with some garbage men on a muddy street,

Add a couple of weirdos.

One scrolling on his phone

The other eating stale Rice Krispies out of the box

That’s the Real.

________________

Can the Ideal and the Real ever intertwine, intermingle, intersect?

How?

The bunnies may start mating.

The doves may start crapping.

Is this a betrayal?

The elegant ladies start to burp

Fart (with body English) snicker curse like sailors.

Rainwater sloshing around in the garbage cans makes a kind of soup,

The ladies chuck these cans of garbage during the free for all.

Bathos

Profaning the Sacred

Or conversely,

The garbage men and the savages blush as they whisper the tenderest of feelings.

Or,

The ladies go mad

Shriek and mumble

roll around in the leaves and soil

Listen to the earth’s low frequency chthonic heartbeat deep underground and

(Literally) rip his head off,

Arteries squirting like fountains.

Or,

An unshaven garbage man saves a bunny from an onrushing van,

Getting run over himself in the process.

Internal bleeding.

Watching her hop about as he expires.

_________________

Maybe the Real and the Ideal contradict each other, annihilate each other

Like matter and antimatter.

The bestial men assault the ladies,

The porcelain figures flake and chip and crack and then shatter into numerous jagged pieces.

Or,

The muddy street is covered by a thick blanket of snow,

Delicate, downy flakes

Falling and falling,

Smothered by purity

Now only populated by a collection of vacuous insipid mannequins.

Or,

The porcelain is exploded, burned to ashes

Turned to dust, empowdered

Never to be remembered.

_________________

Shall we play pretend.

The motorcycle gang dresses up in bonnets and bows and pinafores and stockings.

The bunnies growl like predators.

So funny.

Look up in the sky is that a Huma bird

Which never alights upon the earth?

Bliss vs. Blast

Tranquility vs. Calamity

The children’s dance goes unregarded

Relegated to the side.

Pythagoras vs. Benny Hill

Sure, a little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day.

Open the celestial faucet

From the sky gushes

Blue blossoms.

The hyenas start eating the zebra while it's still alive.

War of survival

And let’s look in on the weirdos:

The fat blimp, he of the greasy locks and sarcastic air,

Spits on his roomie, the carbuncular guy with the pink hair

And screams, “That’s the only shower you’ve had this week.”

They’ve given up entirely.

Is the universe chaotic and dark and meaningless?

Peace vs. War

Ice vs. Fire

How about the Real and the Ideal keep a certain distance,

We just accept the status quo antebellum?

Oh let us squat down and plant tulips in the mud,

Scraping at the stony earth with a hand shovel.

Robert Frost

TS Eliot

Dionysus Bacchae

Bull in a china shop

Bombing of Dresden

Blue flowers

Real: evolution materialist

Ideal: aloof Victorian

Christian socialist humanist vs libertarian Posthuman tech billionaires

Christian naive humanist vs. Posthumanist vs. cynical right-winger

Victorian married couple

Elevated Oriental artifact

Fairies

Porcelain doll

Sweetness and light

Gentle with children

Irish

Hospital in Africa

A Christmas Carol

“Not feeling well”

Describes tea party with reverend

Oscar Wilde

Bentham

Spencer

Lascivious Oriental artifact

Empire

Darwin’s bulldog

“You look beautiful”

Demanding of children

Describes business

“I am a brute”

Pounds chest

Queensbury

Plutocrats

Tree of knowledge Serpent

Tower of Babel skyscaper

Babylon world city

Atlantis advanced

Colossus

Daedalus Crete horned beast

Talos

Trading Atlantic

Nova Caesarea

N.J. Garden state

Blessed Isles

Eden

Persia garden paradise

Garden of Hesperides

Avalon

Golden Age

Peaceable Kingdom

A new Heaven and a new Earth

Mother Earth

In the far western reaches of the world

The edge of the world far far to the west

Where the sun sets

Where the Blessed Isles lie

And Atlas carries the dome of the sky

The Garden of the Hesperides in the Garden State.

Nova Caesarea

Or is it the Tower of Babel and Babylon

Magnificent Atlantis

The island of Crete

With its horned beast and mighty figure of metal?

Is mankind glorified or dissolved?

At the edge of earth

Way way to the west

Atlas and apples and Avalon

Atlantis in the Atlantic

Ambling on the boardwalk with a bull-headed beast

By the Tower of Babel and urban Babylon lie the Blessed Isles

Feathered flight around the 50th floor

Here comes a clinking clanking clattering colossus from Crete

Sizable supreme Caesar

Megaton men of Manhattan mad men

Pluto and plutonium and plutocrats

Sinister serpents slithering

Inventive incandescent intellects

The Age of Aquarius

As the exhausted sun sets in Nova Caesarea

Gather together in the golden gloaming at the Garden of the Hesperides in the Garden State

A perfect plentiful paradise

It’s cleared

Long shadows at sunset

Emphasize alliteration

At the edge of earth

Way way to the west

Atlas and apples and Avalon

Atlantis in the Atlantic

Ambling on the boardwalk with a bull-headed beast

By the Tower of Babel and urban Babylon lie the Blessed Isles

Feathered flight around the 50th floor

Here comes a clinking clanking clattering colossus from Crete

Pluto and plutonium and plutocrats

Inventive incandescent intellects

The Age of Aquarius

As the exhausted sun sets in Nova Caesarea

Gather together in the golden gloaming at the Garden of the Hesperides in the Garden State

A perfect plentiful prosperous paradise

It’s cleared

Long shadows at sunset

Nova

Julius Caesar quote

Beach blanket

Yeats 2nd Coming

The Tempest

The Great Gatsby

Pluto and plutonium and plutocrats

On the boardwalk with a bull-headed beast

Feathered flight around the 50th floor

Inventive incandescent intellects

Disappearing dissolving disappointing

By the Blessed Isles

A perfect plentiful prosperous paradise

The Garden of the Hesperides in the Garden State

Here comes a clinking clanking clattering colossus

Babbling beside the Tower of Babel

The Lands they told us were as pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees, as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them.

Humans rule our solar system.

Parties of the left turn toward Christ.

Machines rule outside the solar system.

They establish numerous Peaceable Kingdoms.