Where do you wind up when you finally come to the conclusion you really know very little about very much. If you’re like me you’re sitting at the kitchen table, feet cooling on a stone floor because you’re too lazy to hunt down your fluffy slippers, musing yourself. But I do know that the sum total of life is just a personal model for ‘reality’.
As a child, I sloppily glued together models of Starfighter jets and battleships; talismen for the Cold War reality of armamentality. As I acquired new and more sophisticated hormones, I began to acquire a sexier panoply of models; those that helped me appreciate what surely must have been the mainstream ideal of womanhood as espoused in Playboy and Penthouse. Car models taught me that, yes indeed, life and vehicles proceed apace; that life is improvingly linear and ever reaching for the heavens like that Starfighter hanging above my bunkbed.
The line “You can’t handle the truth”, resonates much more deeply than most of us would care to admit. It speaks to an inability to handle the realities of life and appoint self aggrandising religious arbiters of reality to explain everything. Peter and Paul were perhaps the greatest examples of such uber life coaches; misogynist Peter working his inability to relate with the distaff side into pedestalising Jesus’ mum to an only slightly lesser podium, and Paul (aka Saul) confessing his nasty and violent youth, yet holding up his convertible model as somewhat paragonian.
So while such models, and many more, serve as looking glasses of varying prescription with which to view the world, they are almost all doomed to failure and end up on the slag heap of recycled eyewear; for most things in life -like the perfection suggested by models- are unattainable and are relevant only as small scale sign-posts. I’ll leave you with the Bard, who knew such things better than we mere mortals. . .
“So all their praises were but prophecies . . . for though they looked but with divining eyes, they had not praise your worth to sing.”
And I still don’t, nor will I ever, know the wallpaper pattern at the end of the Universe . . .
idem sapite, pacem
