Conversation Between Sight, Seeing & Seen

Sight: Would you look at that!

Seeing: [sighing] Looking....

Sight: What do you see?

Seeing: One moment.

Seen: What? Where?

Sight: Well?

Seeing: [pauses] Have you spoken to hearing lately?

Sight: Why? He never listens.

Seen: Oh! A tree?

Seeing: Typical. Any word from smell?

Sight: Please. Turns up her nose at everyone.

Seen: a....bird?

Seeing: Tell me about it.

Sight: And how she goes on!

Seen: Is it a lake? A lake!

Seeing: If she could only hear herself!

Sight: Not with the way he listens.

Seeing: Eh. She has no vision anyway.

The Jellyfish Dream

Heir Kafka, give us a beach, won't you? And don't skimp on the existential expansiveness this time.

That's it.

Monsieur Seurat? I was thinking of something pointillistic for the landscape. Could you -

Great, thanks.

Senior Neruda, I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but that sea foam could be a bit more surreal.

Perfecto.

Everything in place? Well then -

A dead jellyfish washed up at my feet, lying there in fine repose as a home-coming traveler does collect himself before the door. I had a look down at this soundless, stillful fellow and rather expected him to make introductions, seeing as how we were alone together on this beach of my dreams, but, no - this was a stubborn and final jellyfish, death notwithstanding.

To the left and right the vista extended farther than the eye could see, and, if one could travel out past that point - this is impossible, impossible - but if one could then one would only discover another infinite stretch of sand and shore. Resignedly, I hung my head and was met again by the imploring presence of the dead jellyfish washed up at my feet.

I rose to the occasion with the most penetratingly quizzical expression in my repertoire.

Reveal your secrets, my gelatinous friend.
Heap upon me all your whys and wherefores.
Enlighten me.

Suddenly I heard a familiar voice declaim simply,

"That is a jellyfish."

I nodded in assent but at the same time a dream a butterfly was dreaming in another place rose quietly-steadily from my toes to my voice and said,

"That is not a jellyfish."

Whereupon the whole world, as jellyfish, stood writhing at my feet in ecstasy, as something that self-evidently both is and is not, in stunning, lovely, equal parts. I smilingly watched the languid fingers of the rising tide swallow the jellyfish and myself, giving me reluctant passage back to the waking world.

Juvenal Delinquency

There was a time, just a few, heartrending generations ago, when the youth of the civilized world would chant, not without a touch of monastic nostalgia,

amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum -

and thereby dedicate themselves to a scholarly fraternity to whose agency we owe the very structure of our western minds.

No longer.

The past is overwhelmed by an implacable present, a march of the now with each step measured in new reward and quickly forgotten in turn.

Antiquity? Antiquated.

The generations of more recent vintage, insulated in their connectedness, have no memory for the past, contentedly occupied with courting their own adolescent sense of irony. Which begs the question:

when the past is utterly forgotten, root and branch, and watchmen of the new generation take up their charge in the world,

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Dolphin Swims with Porpoise

My dear, sweet, devoted readership! After having our offices here at Three Rolls and a Pretzel virtually inundated with different blog requests, we've decided to settle roundly on the quite indisputably intriguing question of purpose:

what is it, and from whence; what of its hows and its nows, to say nothing of its brown cows ostensibly bereft of purpose but whoso are, in fact, perfectly molten with imperative, cheesy or otherwise.

To begin, purpose is born at birth, a myriad different mechanisms, old with memory, lying in wait in quite perfect silence for the moment to sound. Nerves and muscles more, ten thousand gestures scrambling to be heard in the race that time began.

And they're off!

Continuing, then, at a brisk trot, we have purpose squinting uncomfortably in the light of consciousness, hugging the darkness before being duly appropriated by the intruder, debased to such lowly stations as: "I didn't do it on purpose!"

Humiliated, it recedes back into the nerves and muscles, back into its native darkness while consciousness looks for it unrelentingly but without repenting for its first, and, if you really want to hear it, original, sin.

So it is, then, that we look everywhere it is not, allowing a perfectly ridiculous, harmless-ful thing like the world to dictate our purpose in a delirious attempt to recover it outside of ourselves.

Repent, oh ye of the world, repent, and let purpose find you again.

Consumer Captivity

On what should have been a perfectly harmless trip to a perhaps less than harmless electronics purveyor in search of, admittedly, more or less harmful beeping and flashing "lifestyle enhancements" - how else are we to better ourselves? - I nearly came to mortal grief at the checkout line when I found myself, hostage-style, being assaulted by the artistic stylings of that creature fallen from God's own breast, Rihanna, who was lip synching her little heart out in pleather-bound glory.

De gustibus non est disputandum, you know, but to oppress the already somewhat sullen, shuffling masses dutifully fulfilling their consumer destinies with such disaffectionate, ill-conceived excrement-in-sound strikes me rather more than vaguely of adding insult to injury.

As I find myself rather inexplicably arrived in this world in which Rihanna is given to us in HD and in surround sound, I hope to impress upon my checkout line comrades that despite this excess of diversion, this lonely crusade against aloneness, the sweet, gentle, sensual hand of death is coming, thank God -

- and if you have your wits about you, you'll set the table.