Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple.
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

By Wislawa Szymborska,
(2 July 1923  - 1 February 2012)

Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Imagination and the Void

 

Jackson Pollock at Work

By Patrick Laude

The ambiguous power of images has never been as pervasive as it is today through the world of media and virtual reality. Images shape ideas and tendencies, determine action, invade daily consciousness, and sometimes rule over opinion. They can hypnotize and control; they can feed all sorts of delusions and foster imbalance. In short, images fill up the vacuum left by the spiritual disarray of our contemporary world. So saturated is modern life with myriads of images of all kinds that we don't take notice of most of them anymore. One must wonder what may remain of the power of creative imagination when such a passive, hardly conscious relationship with images has settled in and become second nature.

Notwithstanding, modern man still values imagination as a rare, mysterious, and awesome faculty. Our schools encourage children to explore, display, enrich their imagination, although what we mean by it is far from clear, so blurry and capricious have become the criteria that validate its worth and function. When we try to specify what imagination entails, the most likely associations involve subjectivity, individuality, and freedom from boundaries. Imagination is a private, idiosyncratic realm that makes one enjoy the oft-complacent delights of being special. As a comforting haven of fantasy, it protects us from the harshness of an objective world of drab realism and cold, inhuman structures. It seemingly frees one’s mind and heart from the strictures of an industrialized world of tedious, mechanical, senseless activity. From all of this we may infer that imagination is akin to a world of unreality to which we turn to find solace from a reality that alienates us and robs us of meaning and happiness. The imaginary is not real. Its very raison d'être is to be a sort of parallel reality to which we may escape...

In a world in which reality is defined by action and outer realizations, imagination is also prized for its prospective, unconventional, creative power of exploration and discovery. To the impediments of memory, akin to the hindering weight of the past, modern man espouses the seemingly unlimited power of projection of an imagination that defies the constraints of reality as it is known. Modern science and technology thrive on this sense of unhampered liberty to question, inquire, and fathom. This is, in a sense, the very pride that modern mankind boasts as its uncontested superiority over ages of allegedly conformist compliance with unexamined beliefs and unscrutinized customs. There is no modernity without unconstrained imagination, imagination to think, to do, and to be.

Article source Parabola Magazine

I Hid the Body... Now What?

For James

 

It was a dark, gloomy February evening. I was bored. The party was canceled, my husband was away for the weekend and there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch. I called everyone I knew, but my friends were either lazy or busy or just as bored as I was.

I ordered pizza. The guy who delivered my order looked like someone who tortured small animals. Maybe he jumped in for someone because I could not imagine that Giovanni's Fine Italian restaurant would hire someone like that. You expected a shady mafia type guy to arrive at your door. This was to add some spice to your pizza experience, not disgust.

I shut the door as quickly as I could. The pizza was too large for two, but I decided to eat it all by myself. Candles, Merlot, and Miles Davis. Nice!

And yet, Friday evening all alone was not my idea of fun...

I remembered a joke that was making rounds on facebook. "If you are bored, send a message to a random number..." This was such a fun idea! I took my iPhone and composed the suggested message: "I hid the body... now what?" The message went to a number I dialed without even looking at the keys.

I took another bite of my pizza and there it was. Faster than I would even think. "What did you do with the knife?"

Interesting, I thought. Whoever was there must have been just as bored as I was. "There was no knife!" I answered.

Seconds later a new message came. "You did not look under the bed!" "Oh, yes! I did!" I was laughing. This was turning to be quite a fun!

An angry message came back seconds later "I told you to check carefully you idiot!"

Was someone overdoing it or something? "I did my job. I want my money now!" I wrote.

"You will get nothing!" was the answer.

I took a large sip of wine and tried to think of something funny to make the person on the other side even more furious. And just as I was ready to type the message I heard a loud bang on my door. "Police! Open the door!"....

By Dominique Allmon

Image "Between past and present" by Nico De Pasquale

I Hid the Body... Now What? by Dominique Allmon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.