Where does the heart lie?

Mount Etna, July 2008

and where does my heart lie at all and it is quite yeatsian being a veritable foul rag and bone shop of all bits and pieces collected over the years this and that experience this and that meeting of this and that person and as i age i perceive that a certain cynicism is growing within that things are simply not as they seem that my heart has collected so much rubbish and yet it is that rubbish which has made me which has cut me out as the person or character that i am and i feel singularly diffuse as i type these words singularly lacking a centre singularly like the hedgehog rather than the fox that great metaphor used by the ancient philosophers and especially by one of my favourites in the history of ideas in the writings of the great isaiah berlin oh yes i feel like the hedgehog rolling in the field and picking up every little thing in my spines collecting this and that and the other and all of these sundry little pieces are collected in my heart even if they do fall away over time as i move on in life and all of the things i have collected and some of these things are bits and pieces of this and that and the other person and i wonder truly what it has been all about and then a good friend's remark about the comment made by his mother nearing her death as to what the whole project called life was all about at all and that too has stuck in my heart along with her weary 

Mount Etna smoulders... July 2008

wise old face woman of great wisdom and woman of great love and then my own mother with her memory wiped clean wiped so clean that almost nothing is left... and then all those existential things that weigh upon my shoulders as i age and what is the mind then just some vague or not so vague metaphor for some kind of consciousness emerging from the matter that is the brain and am i no more than a collocation of atoms as russell once described the human animal and human animal is a term i love for when we use human being we are putting so much weight the weight of whole cultures on our creaturely shoulders that i often think we cannot bear poor animal self poor bodily self and within deep within but never as a ghost within a machine for the body is no mere skeletal house for the indwelling of the soul or self or whatever because the body-soul or soul-body is indivisible a continuum for one arises out of the other out of the other arises the totality or rather in and with the other rises the totality of the self... and still i wonder and still the wonder grows as to what it is all about at all and in these christmas times when people rush around like headless chickens looking for this that and the other present for this that and the other thing where lies the heart where lies this heart this rag and bone shop of my soul of my self where lies it all at all at all once it lay on a womanly shoulder safe and yet that once is just that once for the years have faded as have memories of that encounter and yet there is no loneliness here there is no regret for the heart cannot regret its hedgehog ways its hedgehog ways its collecting of this that or the other person over the years all it can do is press on and those beautiful words of jesus that the son of man had no where to lay his head ah maybe he meant that he had nowhere to lay his heart and where is the heart of jesus these christmas times and where is the heart of buddha and where is the heart of vishnu and of every other hindu god and of every single religion under the sun and where is the atheistic heart and the agnostic heart as they are all made of the same crooked wood of humanity...

Identifying the self

Student in a large room in Versailles Palace, School Trip October 2011

...and so we come in one by one one by one from the cold street where we were anonymous ants on an equally anonymous anthill and identify ourselves by being this or that president this or that secretary this or that treasurer of this or that organization in this or that city in this or that country and so on and so forth and that is it indeed let there be no doubt about the littleness of the human situation the littleness of us ants on this giant anthill and yes yes yes how we strive to give ourselves identity how we strive to get ourselves known by giving ourselves this or that distinction and our little great egos we little ants and here we go to the agm the agm of egos sitting here defining this or that or the other term in this that or the other motion before the gathered number and yes there are always those old original founders or as they say in the gaelic those old seanfhundúirí those old pedantic soldiers from long ago those old conservative members who like to be heard who like to dot every i and cross every t and yet i too like such precision which has care for such exactness for such a legalistic turn of phrase for such efforts that rage against ambiguity such a clarity  yes clarity clarity that elusive clarity of which the great Albert Camus was in search all his great little life and i am alluding here in my mind to his wonderful book The Myth of Sisyphus and there he was Camus Camus the former great Algerian goalkeeper and wonderful writer who dared question all the old assumptions who dared to be different who raged against disorder only to end up as disillusioned as the said Sisyphus interminably rolling his lonely rock up a lonely hill only to have it roll down again and again and all he said was absurd absurd there was no rhyme or reason to the whole enterprise even if one could call it an enterprise in the first place as an enterprise surely by definition should have some meaning or even in a more dreadfully wordy phrasing of the same thought every enterprise should have some meaningfulness attached to it oh what a term meaningfulness and how does that word differ from meaning anyway or even does it exist but still let it stand for this stream of consciousness needs it and so my thoughts and words go round and round and so these words on this page spew forth searching out thoughts these words are chasing thoughts if i may use another metaphor and yes that is another old question another old philosophical chestnut which comes first the words or the thoughts the thoughts or the words the chicken or the egg the egg or the chicken and so i continue to write or so these words continue to stream on in an effort to give birth to something upon a page and all is circular and i return Joyce-like to my start or Joycean even to those beginning words of Finnegan's Wake which rattle around my mind riverrun past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to our beginning where we all come in from the anonymity of the anthill into the room where we all seek to sing our soul to identify our little selves one against the other one with the other over soup and sandwiches and tea after all the talk after all the talk we are only human oh so human we need this sustenance and the triviality we need these small trivial acts this exchange of pleasantries after the importance of our meeting...