'That's not a knife.'
Australian proverb.
What's that thing we call Love? Does it rain from above? Can we say we know how these things should go? If we claim we do, are our words really true, or simply inventions we made to make do?
In ancient times in boggy grimes on beachy shores with peachy sores on their feet a fleet of smart men began to ask themselves of tasks that dwelled in their knobby heads, as with hands that bled they toiled to make their cauldrons boil and groaned till their fingers were bone to erect buildings of great respect.
In marble-paved grave-staved bowl-shaped holes they sat and would chat and shout about the stars and Mars and human scars and why we say what we think's the way to run a world that often hurls itself off the shelf of safety, maybe trying and vying for a better place to grace with a human presence; pretence, perhaps, but these chaps were grieved and believed their concepts would reflect in their society, while quietly the poor were ignored and the downtrodden soon forgotten.
The issue was not their smarts, as their hearts were in the right mode, but loads of problems went under their noses, no? yes? You'd suppose their best guess to human troubles bubbled down to a skewed view of their fellow souls, whose goals were often at odds with the gods and with the teachers preaching of sin leeching at the mind of mankind and mistaking the breaking of social structures as ruptures in the human spirit.
'Kill it!' they'd say with a confident bray as they'd pray for Zeus to use his bolt to halt the silliness of the villainous people, creeples on the Earth, whose girth was under pain from the strain of Ingenuity with its importunity.
While people spread like bees and trees were being felled, one yelled: 'Be kind to one another!'
This brother was named Platon, son of Ariston, and was also called Aristocles. Trained by Socrates, the big cheese of intelligent men, he'd spend his life at strife with what he claimed were maimed nations, imitations of true humanity, whose sanity was clouded with vanity, thus their current state and fate.
To remedy this poison tree the descendant of Codrus would guess at a 'World of Forms' that swarmed the human brain. He explained that Ideas trickled down to the physical ground, and all things had an origin from a pre-sin 'Form of Good' which he understood as the Root of All Being, seeing this Grand Idea as the solution for the pollution that plagued the human institution.
After Platon came Aristoteles, then many bees would form a hive and jive to new philosophies, from Aischines and Agrippas to wise Plotinus. They all offered a word or two on who or what could shut the jaws of Chaos' clasping maws, and make people better, unfettered from the chains of ignorance and indignance.
The Platonists and Pyrrhonists and Stoics and Cynics and Epicureans and Pythagoreans and everyone between, a gleam of truth in each devised scheme, so a fuller picture could be cinctured together. Never one greater than the other, but all of one Mother, Wisdom, who would shoo away and fray the sway of evil and cruel ways.
In Bhaarata wise Aadi Shankara sung of rungs to climb to find enlightenment, behind the façade of this world we rent. He said that Maayaa, Illusion, caused confusion and made us think this world was real, when the field of dreams was all it seemed to those who saw past its well-knit seams. If all was but a thought in a sleeping god's brain, then pain and banes can be explained as nightmares uncontained. We could wake up and leave the Dream to be 'redeemed.'
Yedidyah Shlomoh would go into meditations for explanations on this world and its machinations. He said 'All is vanity', as life's Circle stirs and curdles new shoals of souls to frolic like foals on hot coals, before they grow old and cold and are bowled over by the ball of Death, flung from Thanatus' net, that circumspect Spectre taking notes and reaping debts.
Kong Fuzi could see that 'What you don't wish to be done to you, to others do not do' was a good way to thrive, more than simply survive, as he searched for the reasons to be alive. Pure religion? To help the widows and the orphans.
In Egypt great Tahuti Hermes, some legendary wizard, pulled from his gizzard an interesting verse:
In al-A'laa min al-Asfal, wal-Asfal min al-A'laa. Or that 'What is Above is from what is Below, what is Below is from what is Above.' Love, hate, chance, fate, cold, hot, lost, got. That all things were two sides of one mirror, one side dusty and the other side clearer.
If all things are connected through some means untold, then sand and gold are equal to behold, and the eye through which your friends you'd see, is the eye through which they'd see thee. Purpose is found in those that surround you, as like planets we spin through this crazy and beautiful sieving we call Living, taking and giving, hearts blossoming and breaking, growing old and turning to stone, walking with lovers or walking alone.
The butterfly flaps its wings, and from this springs great winds that spin to form vast storms that tear mountains, choke rivers and fountains, flip houses like old blouses. Small things can grow, like snow blowing into massive cowing boulders that roll down hills to flatten lorries like pancakes, mistakes by no one but the whims of Nature, sator of insatiable seasons that, without reason, pat down the world like a mud-stained mat unfurled.
What these smart minds all came to conclude, was that in this brief interlude on this watery sphere, we here have a choice: to use our voice to build with skill, or divide, or coincide with others, our sisters, siblings, brothers, in the odd family of Humanity, so often rattled with calamity, but with the power to someday rise up to the hour of a new order, toward a time when crime is dead, and read in papers and news stories are the glories of human achievement, bereavement long removed like gum from a shoe.
Explore the shores of knowledge till you score doubt nevermore!
The greatest truth we will ever know is how to love when Love won't show, and how to unite when division is more pertinent. That, I think, is a life well spent.
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