Gospel & Universe 🎲 Almost Existential

Between the Flippers 

Thirteen-Year-Old at the Wheel - The Shadow & the Butterfly

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Thirteen-Year-Old at the Wheel

We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys;

they kill us for their sport. (King Lear) 

Get off kilter, get used to it

Life's a carnival, old chum

Oom-pah-pah, Oom-pah-pah, that's how it goes

or a pinball game and you're the ball

and some thirteen-year-old is at the helm

and your spirit's "little bark" is being driven

for the third time, toward the cliffs 

Three strikes and you're out

no time left to find the perfect quote from The Divine Comedy

or the tragedy of King Lear

all the capital works have no ball bearing

simply because a girl walked in and someone’s hormones quickened a beat 

and he pushed too hard and TILT! your little boat capsized

and you fell back into the sea: O voi in picchioletta barca...

Forget about REPLAY, that dream of a different game

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Someone put in a quarter and sent you flying out the chute

and then a whole bunch of things happened

bright lettered cubes, jacks, roulette tables, queens

your steely ball bumped up against rubber, bounced off the rim

money signs flashed 50 THOUSAND ONE MILLION DOLLARS

but you couldn't use the numbers to buy anything that counted

no clothes of your own, no car, no home

because you were just a poor naked steel ball

rolling, not even stoned or coked to the gills (though you were once a fish)

you only had three lives (though you were once a cat)

and you ended up being (or not being) just another element

ashes to ashes, metal to metal

hurled in some strange sport by a wanton boy

so all you can conclude is that the numbers drove some other intent 

this way and that

until a pretty girl walked in and he got distracted

and his heart-beat doubled and you slipped between the flippers

GAME OVER

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The Shadow & the Butterfly

Alice, are there, or are there not, strawberry fields on the other side of the mirror?

You may have tripped when you were young, yet this is different. This death may be (or may not be, Ramakrishna) the first and only time this happens to you, but it's certainly nothing new. Nothing to get hung about.

In the time of the Ancient Greeks, Chuang Tze said the same thing in an extended metaphor: the Penumbra (the edge of a shadow) asked the Shadow why he did what he did. The Shadow didn't know. He could only refer the Penumbra to a body about which he knew nothing. That body moved because of other bodies and other things. He had no clue what those were doing.

This is Chuang Tze's preamble, or penumbra if you will, to his famous parable about the man who dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, the man wondered if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

This isn't Neil Diamond's story of a man who dreamed of being a king / and then became one. It isn't about rags or riches, rainbows or pots of gold. It's about the difference between being a fish or a human, a butterfly or a fly, a cat or a dog. It's about being. About two big words — phenomenology and ontology — which boil down to a short infinitive: to be.

I can't help thinking back to the Chinese bodies and their shadows. And the edges of their shadows. And about what happens when one penumbra makes contact with another.

And about what else belongs to the worlds of dogfish and lark.

🧞‍♂️ 🧜‍♂️ 🧚‍♀️

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