Happy Anniversarararararies Darlings!
You and me, we have been together for more than a year now!
I hope you have been happy here since the very first post on 24th June 2005.
Now it is 2006! Just a number, of course...but it tells us that something is going somewhere! If you ever have that common feeling that things are going nowhere, I can reassure you that many things are going everywhere! The planet, the stars, all the people in the world, all ideas and plans are zooming around everywhere all the time. It was the Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There, who said something useful about that:
`Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'
`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) wrote that down in 1871. He was a mathematician and logician, among other jobs, and so may have known a thing or two. I find his writing in the Alice books rather exciting. It is particularly creative, and in speaking of things that have no sensible relationship to the ordered outside world that so many people agree on, seem to be rather useful, to me. I like it, and I believe that so-called nonsense can be extremely useful to us all! Now RICK, who is a regular reader, will be saying, "Oh, of course he says that, but he's just being Philip"...well, yes, I do say it, and, who knows, I may actually mean what I say. I think RICK may have guessed that, too. Perhaps he suppresses this instinct?
These days people are saying all sorts of things about Lewis Carroll, some of them rather salacious. He is not alive now, so I suppose it is not wrong to speak of him. But they say "don't speak ill of the dead", don't they, and I wonder why. Is there some reason for this that lies through the looking-glass? And what is a looking-glass anyway? Well, today it's called a mirror, isn't it. Yes, through the mirror, and what Alice found there. Yet Looking-Glass tells us Dodgson was from a different time. Where is that time now? It is gone away, zooming off into the mirror, with the unnapproachable speed of the unimaginable. You can't catch up to time, because it is not there. Your watch works mostly reliably but it is the only thing ticking along like that. Haven't you noticed we don't feel time in the same way? To make a small example, sometimes we are interested and it goes fast, sometimes we are bored and it goes slow. Perhaps it is not really there, for the part of us that feels the difference between interesting and boring. Can it be, can it be, that there is no time at all?
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
Yes, the private lives of past men are public information now. But the friends of the friendly, the nice people who are reading this, respect those people, even though they have moved on now. Because we still have everything they ever did. It is all here, in you and me.
Think kindly of people, alive or dead. Let's think kindly of Alan Turing (1912-1954), another mathematician whose non-mathematical life has been flagged up as "interesting" in a similar way to Charles Dodgson. Alan worked on cryptography during the second war, helping to break the codes of the famous Enigma Machine. He was also a world-class marathon runner. His best time was 2 hours, 46 minutes, and 3 seconds - 11 minutes short of the winning time in the 1948 Olympic Games!
There are lots of people whom I think of kindly. They all made an important contribution. They all used their genius. They were not always happy. I think we can learn from them for all those reasons.
I am saluting them! I am saluting you too, my friends on here. There is no music without ears to hear it, and there are no ideas if no people take the ideas into their minds. It might qualify as a hobby to write a blog to oneself, but it would not be quite as useful as it might.
Creativity is what you get when your soul shines through its clouds. Sometimes it shines even though there seem many clouds. People who had that feeling, those are the geniuses that we wonder about. But with genius there are never many clouds - I mean, there is always some sunshine. Spike Milligan had clouds but he laughed a lot. Uncontrollably. Isn't that why it was funny? What would you be controlling it for, exactly?
Please laugh too! And if people can't laugh, you keep away from them until you know how to make them laugh.I have changed the blog page - as you should have noticed - to try and make it a bit brighter (I will keep improving it). As I said, it is the summer now, and that means more sunshine. But there is always sunshine - I know, I can always see it! Even when the clouds are there, there is sunshine. Even when the clouds are there in the night sky, there are always stars. There is always some good news if you are listening.
I don't really want to stop now, but you can't read this all day. You have got things to do!
I will try to pass on what good news I hear in my mad imaginings beyond the clouds...
And I will write here again soon - for you!
Thanks for reading this year. Shall I mention names?
No, but extensive cryptanalysis will reveal who you are:
Those who could "find no work in the hip replacement industry" - thank you!
Those who don't like dry dinners - thank you!
Those who live in the land of nori and katsuobushi - thank you!
Those who like watermelon, green, and elephant - thank you!
Those who upset the pegs - thank you!
Those families who are fans of the work of the writer Hargreaves - thank you!
Those who keep all their best frogs in a bucket, and do drawings on underpants - thank you!
Those who...well, there are lots of you!
Thank you! (did I mention that before?)
(hee hee)
Labels: holidays and anniversaries, living, meaning
