In all mundane kingdoms 
the seat of power is obvious, 
and be it led by prince, prime minister or chieftain,
the person and location from which 
decisions are made, and decrees issued 
is prominent and clearly known by all.

But in that place to which I refer 
things are not so simply arranged.
Based on actions performed,
you would assume that the decisions underlining them are being made somewhere,
and there is no shortage of public pronouncements,
but a close examination fails to reveal the specific source of the controlling decision making,
and a study of the proclamations shows them, 
often as not to be pragmatically disconnected to the very matters they verbally address.

More interesting still:
if you query whoever identifies themselves as qualified to speak for the  government 
about what I have just described, 
they will at first feign surprise at your observation and deny its correctness,
but if you persist, and they try to identify for you 
the actual seat of power and source of decrees
they will begin to hem-&-haw, and speak in such vacant generalities as to clearly reveal their  ignorance in the matter.

If pushed too hard, the spokesperson will usually terminate the discussion by abruptly pointing to the
highest building you can see, 
and declaring  that  --  there is where everything gets decided and done!

I happen to know that this is not true  --
…….as does everyone who lives there  --
         ……but they are unwittingly sworn to ignore it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A man selling goods from a skiff came along side us this morning and amidst his sales palaver made this comment:
“I have adopted the position that says:
’An enlightened man is not controlled by conditions.’
So!  --
if conditions make me want to act one way --
--  I struggle against doing so!

Thus I am not controlled by conditions!

…assuming we overlook the fact that
it was conditions that caused me to struggle against
what they initially wanted to make me do.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A lad renting lounges on the beach says that he has been recently wrestling with a particular question:
“Since thought plays such a central and vital role in the life of modern man,
why do people still talk about,
’how-they-feel’
100 to 1 over 
’how-they-think’?”
 

In some lands,
the people are forbidden to even look at the ruler,
while in others, he will walk among them in the street.
Both of these scenes are comforting illusions
provided by life so that you do not have to try to answer questions concerning the actual seat of power
in your personal kingdom.
Either: “Don’t look, don’t ask”  --   or  --
“Imagine that you are looking, 
and are seeing the answer.”
 
 
 

Ordinary people only want things to be calm, comfortable, and familiar in their penthouse.
and the furnaces of passion, appetite, and health
below deck to function adequately.

What more can a sane person 
want or expect from life?!

Any actual response to this question is lunacy;
such a question is its own reply --
…except as regards a few people here-&-there
whose instinctively wired sense of sanity is notably
in a different key to the collective song that 
the rest of the mortal symphony is 
mentally hacking at.

Six billion players only ask that the sounds from upstairs stay relatively predictable and familiar,
while the few, (who carry in their back pocket,
an eternally, avant garde score),
have millions of little brain cells whose musical taste
is for anything but the common and comfortable.
 

On one planet 
the gophers lived on nothing but one particular root.
This one root was all they needed to survive,
and the eating of this single root gave them complete satisfaction.
Any food other than the one root was of no use to them.
   The giraffes of that world ate leaves – 
all sorts of leaves;
the variety was awesome,
and even though they lived,
they were never satisfied with their meals.
The giraffes did not know that they lived in a different time zone from the gophers.

A son said to his father:
“Tell me what I am going to say next,”
and the elder replied:
“Ahh ! --   you shan't so easily catch me,
for before I could answer your question
conditions could so suddenly change as to 
make you say something other than what you were
about to say.”

One man says he wants to move to a place where they issue internal weather forecasts.
…well obviously he is just being silly --  but,
there are towns where the people attempt to cross breed crabs with rams,
and villages where goats roll the colons for,
“delphi-cum-eleven”,
and cities where men talk to their own hand puppets 
while pretending it is their boss.
 

The deck steward just brought the day’s papers
which reveal new terrorists troubles 
via the headline:
“Elephant hijacked by flea.”
 

The girl in the thong on my right just leaned over and asked me if anyone who reads my daily news reports actually has any idea what I am really talking about,
or do they simply find it sometimes amusing.
What the hell does she think is the difference?!
…all right – 
what the hell do you think is the difference?!

And a son asked his father:
“Okay, old man --  what is the difference?”
see,
that is why the lesser faction must always ask the
greater faction,
and why the spokesperson for the crown can 
never actually tell you where the throne room is,
and why conditions can cause you to do whatever
they want you to do –
including,
denying their power.

Doing the robotic tango in a penthouse,
and the horizontal bop, below,
have more in common than everyday dancers realize.
No one knows anything
once “anything” reaches rooftop level.
A man who has completed that unscheduled, internal,
“trip-around-the-world”
at least is no longer such a 
dazed armadillo in the road 
that he worries about it.

And a son asked his father:
“Okay,  what is  --   ‘it’?”
Well finally,
A query with merit;
your stomach knows, but Plato’s in the dark.
 

When men first step onto that brambly inner path 
what they  want above all is to:
know "The Secret” –
but if a man, 
even one who feels that he never actually,  “found-the-knife,” 
will finally --  let go,
and drop the watermelon on the sidewalk
he will then see for himself 
the seeds of the whole affair.
 

And in an exasperated voice, a son said to a father:
“Damn!  that’s a lotta allegories to have to wade through.”
Well, finally, my boy  --   we’re getting somewhere.
 

                                   Sail away,
                                    sail away.

                                          Jan