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 children dancing in a circle.
That’s the Ideal.
Over here we have some other stuff
A lion and a bull in bloody battle,
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 dirty street,
Add a couple of weirdos.
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,
A garbage man saves a bunny from an onrushing vehicle,
Getting run over himself in the process
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 dirty street is covered by a thick blanket of snow,
Delicate 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
They 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
Real: evolution materialist
Ideal: aloof Victorian
Christian socialist humanist vs libertarian Posthuman tech billionaires
Christian naive humanist vs. Posthumanist vs. cynical right-winger
Decadent virtual reality & ferocious corporate
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