To Pen

Maybe to write is to pretend that one knows something. But to write is to really go fishing, if one is honest. Sometimes, one will enjoy a catch, sometimes, the line will come in empty.
Oh, I have read so much in recent days, again, and I just feel that reading so much does not enlighten me, nor does it make me a better person. It ostensibly makes me a little more of an expert in the tiny, tiny field I attempt to master in my studies - but I am inclined to mimic Ruskin: "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one... I observe that all our young figure-painters were rendered ... blind by their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones ... but could not, on account of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary knowledge, see the real movement, colour, rounding, or any other subtle quality of the human form."
Knowledge can blind us from seeing. I have written about this before.
Oh the terrible traps that await one if one is trying to enter into the dialogue of modern knowledge.
I have seen these traps from the perspective of the tiny country in which I now live.
The other day, a non-native predator fish was found in its rivers: the kind of predator fish that would consume all native fish and then proceed to eat the swimming children. "It is a good thing," the news reporters said, "that this fish has appeared after the swimming season - and we have the chance to exterminate it before it endangers our local life forms."
And yet how many predators face our little country, that have been put here. The kinds of predators that made religion mute in the West over a hundred years ago. The kind of predators that present themselves in the name of "equality" - of Darwinistic "right to existence" - and then, in that name, kill everything else that does not take their image. As if one were to feed a vulture, and give it extra strength to kill not only the dying, but also the living... What we need now are eyes to see what needs saving.
If we think we are being smart by being "multicultural" or etc by default, we need only think of Tyndall's Buddha. The authority of refinement is not necessarily seen by the man so sated his appetite is whet only by delicacies.That is the man titillated by piranhas, yawning in his study, not worrying about the children.
And when I read all these academic disputes, I feel so sad about humanity - and even my own limited potential to write something worthwhile after such disputes. So, I take a step back, and return to sources of art I know to be fruitful, like the polyphonous song of Sheila Chandra, and hope that all the reading I have done does not cloud my mind, and vision.

Lace brush; bird brush.