Cornucopia, an Imagining

Cornucopia

I recently returned to my hometown. Again. Once again however, I hear the voices whispering:

"You're a coward. You've ran away from Amsterdam. And now you're running to hide in your parents house. You can't hide forever."

I shut them up by reminding myself that I chose to come here for a reason.

I went on a walk today. Not far, in `normal' terms, but far enough to clear my mind. After a while I realised I was walking across fields, following the map in my memory's mind. I started to ask myself that eternal question all adventurers ask in this day and age - "What am I searching for?"

The Holy Grail? The Lost Ark of the Covenant? The Spear of Destiny? Atlantis? The Philosopher's Stone? All of the above! Although after a while each knight must face his own doubt within him, the shadow companion who dances round his psyche while he walks, gibbering and laughing.

To seek these items in a literal sense is futile. They are symbols, representations of knowledge we once had, and has been lost, or more correctly, corrupted over the centuries. These relics are symbols of potential cures to our mental ailments - whatever is currently making us unhappy in the world.

Everyone is asking the same questions in the same way, and losing faith when they do not receive the answers they seek.

"How do we cure cancer?" ,"Is Abortion Right or Wrong?" ,"Did God create the world in seven days?"

Cancer is merely something that eats away at us. Something we have let fester inside too long, and without the correct treatment, we are consumed. Yet we fail to appreciate the beauty in cancer, the natural way of controlling our population. People have argued for millenia what this cancer is within us, as a society. Is the cancer crime, like the good people at OCP thought? Partially, crime is a symptom, once again of a larger illness. A society is judged by the way it treats it's prisoners. We only need to look to our apparently benevolent leaders in areas of the U.S. to see how more "advanced" they truly are.

Under the hypothesis that we share a global consciousness, each man serving 23 hours of solitary confinement is suffering. Each man, woman and child are sharing his suffering. Does the man enduring this hardship learn anything new about the crime he may or may not have committed during that time?

Rarely, even more rare that if he did he would be given the chance to prove to his peers that he has been reformed. Economically, the same system drains funds by providing slave labour (ala The Shawshank Redemption). Honest businessmen cannot compete with greedy corporations. Nothing is learned. History repeats itself.

We can learn a lot from how to act from our elders. People who lived in simpler times. In certain tribes, when a man stole from one of his neighbours, the rest of the village would go around to the offender's house, and instead of lynching him with pitchforks, give him gifts of food, and other luxuries.

They would apologise, "Please, we are so sorry for ignoring your needs so much that you felt you needed to take without being able to ask permission. What can we do to help you?" Perhaps we need to end the failed “tough on crime” stance.

Walking today I saw a church group advertising for Street Angels, to patrol the streets keeping towns safe. The towns are safe. It's the violent vigilantes, inflicting their beliefs with the stick upon whomever they feel is intolerable. The idea of these people being giving taciturn approval by a scared populace feeds my own fears.

Is abortion Right or Wrong? The answer is always both. It can be the right decision for the time, yet the effects of the action will be felt for a long time afterwards, and correctly so – not in an ethical sense, but in a psychological one – I have rarely met a woman who has had more than one. Once bitten, twice shy? The terms pro-life and pro-choice seem once again a false dichotomy. Alarmingly, if I'm wrong, the arguments we have presented are between “Living and choosing, or dying oppressed. Kind of tempers the fire.

God created the world in seven days in an allegorical sense (as in IT created it for us to live and respect different aspects of the world in different days: a day of Sun, of Moon etc.) so Creationists have a point, yet try and read the phrase in a literal sense and confusion is bred.

So if we are all asking the wrong questions, what are the right ones?

I have been trying to study the answer to that question for a long time, with little success. The same problem plagued Douglas Adams (or did it...42?), but when I started to open my channels somewhat, as in to listen to more, shall we say, alternative suggestions from branches of science, I found much more that seemed to crossover successfully with religion.

I think it was the fact that I approached most `new' science with a spiritual bent that I developed my...strange way of seeing the world. One of my mantras of late has been “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

For example, I mentioned earlier I was walking with no sense of direction. Aimless in more than ways than one in the world, I decided to just to go wherever I felt like, wandering across verdant fields and gorse-covered hills, near the Great North Yorkshire Moors, between Scarborough and Whitby.

Dante may have had to pass a leopard, a lion and a she -wolf on his trip through the dark woods, I only had to contend with some cows, a horse, a skittish deer and a worm.

I say only. Every animal is intelligent, whether we can sense it or not.

I felt the cows fear of me as I approached them nervously, practically courting their friendship. Eventually they approached me after I lowered myself before them. After staring at the Sun for a moment, I looked back at the cows, who had all lowered their heads and were staring at me. Their coal black skin and eyes was only offset by a yellow barcode branded in their ear. I gazed about me at their `prison'. Yes, they had no freedom, but as I walked away from them, the mad thought that many women pierce their ears ran through my head and I giggled maniacally for a moment, and then stepped over a toppled iron gate, and looked back at the cows. They were still watching me intently, but had stopped following me a little distance from the exit to the field. They were happy. Everyone in the farm was happy, except you (me?). I shivered and walked away, trying not to glance behind me.

I came across a red circle in a hay field. Curiously there was some hay in the centre that looked a perfect place for a lay down and a smoke. My mind was filled with pride. Of how I should write of a new Utopia, a Utopia achievable in my lifetime. It is to be called Cornucopia. There is enough resources for everyone. I just need to collect enough data to prove how it can be done to others. Writing gets easier...

The horse was enclosed near the entrance to the Hayburn Wyke public house. I climbed through the barbed wire fence, and approached the horse with even more trepidation. I had been wishing for a horse of my own, as a companion with me on my travels. Maddeningly, I reasoned I was here for a reason, and with a gesture of peace approached the Shire Mare.

She stood her ground as I approached, sniffing me curiously. Not surprised with some of the stuff I had been smoking. I gently tried to stroke her mane, and she pulled back as if stung.

Wounded, I returned my hands to their sides and let her paw the ground slightly before she advanced to me one more time. I closed my eyes, and lowered my head. I listened to her breath, and was surprised by her rubbing the side of her muzzle to my hair. In return I stroked hers for a second, before she suddenly came to and moved away again. I watched her, partly in anger (why can't I touch her?), and partly in sorrow (I'm not worthy to touch her, to ride her).

She ground her teeth, I started to think how she has learned to distrust humans, even though she does not fear them. The wave of distrust swept over me, and I start to cry. I whirl around and walk away from the animal again, my pride sufficiently lowered.

I head to the pub down the long winding wooded slope, all the while amazed at the coincidence – I had been to the same pub with my father, mother, and sister's dog the previous weekend, yet I had arrived here from a completely different direction, with no intention of visiting here until I saw the sign (beer!) and the horse.

I enter the bar and order a pint of Black Sheep. Always was my favourite ale. I start to drink and can hear nothing but incessant titters and giggles from a group of 50 year old men sitting to my right. A man, his wife and dog sit at the table in front of me. I try to drink to take my mind away from them. The beer was perfectly poured, and well settled. Yet I cannot drink more than a few gulps, before I angrily snatch my bag and walk away, leaving the pint practically untouched.

I do this like I'm acting out a script that I read the day before. Yet at the same time it is all completely ad libbed.

Walking in weariness once more, feverishly trying to rewrite my own script, I see a earthworm on the ground. It is on the path of the Cinder Tracks, a disused railway line that links the two towns. I watch it for a minute, seeing the way it flexes and contracts to move, it's proboscis snuffling the dry, rocky gravel path. I am seized by a dilemma once more. Should I move the Earthworm from it's difficult path onto the damp soil of the adjacent field? Is the Earthworm suffering unnecessarily? I try to shut out the cacophany of questions and pick up the worm, and place it gently in the grass by the field. Was I right to attempt to save the worm? I decide that as long as I thought I was helping. How hypocritical of me. It is only now thinking back that I consider both the hermaphroditic aspects of the worm, and that a worm under certain circumstances can be cut in two, and two worms will survive.

Rather than mention the skittish deer, whose representation of temptation I trust is obvious, I encounter as I type the final animal encounter of the night. I'm distracted by my typing by a movement in the shadows to the right. I flick my gaze right and see a large house spider crawling quickly towards the mattress on the floor that I sleep on. I look on, nearly paralysed as it moves on it's razor spindles towards me. The rational part of my brain that normally tells me “This is a house spider. It is harmless.” has vanished. Instead I can only think of Ariadne, spinning gloom and cocooning her victims. The spider dances on, moving along edge of the mattress behind me. I glance down and see the spider walk under the overhanging edge of my pillow. The paralysis breaks, I breathe, and lift up my pillow.

The spider, feeling my fear, my mind dying, absorbs this dreadful energy and moves towards my naked leg. “Jesus.” I close my eyes and look again. The spider trundles away towards my father's laptop, and disappears in the shadows.

An exercise in futility, I try to put it out of my mind. Already I feel tingling goose-bumps on my flesh. “There's a spider crawling on you...it only has a small bite. Barely a pin prick. You won't feel it.” I banish the voice by reminding myself that scaring myself has stood the hairs of my legs on end, and it is only them rubbing on the hastily-wrapped-round duvet that I feel. I hear a snicker.

It's healthy to remember the power animals have over us, they were here a lot longer before we were, and we are the usurpers. Respect nature in all it's aspects and in turn you shall gain the respect of Gaea.

Or so I hope. Dear God in Heaven, I hope. Gone 3am. Forget the day. You've wrote something down. You're getting better. You're still free to leave anytime you want. The sticky coating of concern that draws tighter and tighter around your throat is for your own good. The phosphorescent netting that bites into your ribs is a healing balm. Don't struggle. It makes it so much more difficult. It's the circle of life you know...we all need to feed...