Wounded in life, I seek to staunch the wounds of others . . . . --xoj

"Jack Spratt’s two centavo Guide to Redemption”
©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

God's tapestry, all creation, my greatest value an attempt to live/love for: in gratitude, mercy, forgiveness, regardless of Age, Race, Creed, Gender, Gender Proclivities, or Generosity . . . seeking to make redemtion salvation & resurrection potential in all unique, precious, individual lives, human, plant, animal, world. . . .through words & images - Jack Spratt ... KISS

Sunday, April 7, 2013

US'a dreaming

My day begins with laughter, tears, humming and screaming; whenever I awaken from, not rest, but dreams astonishing: always! Regardless the time or place; running around the ceiling.

When last I wrote, yesterday, I began a bit about Ishmael, wandering off to read and then viewed “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Somewhere mid-stream I gave up since it was (the movie) so constipated compared to reading Kazantzakis, anything/everything, I began to understand that we as infants are the center of the Universe and in time, mature? Become vaporous, ephemeral, to me ready to leave the chaos for sanity.

Going Home.

True of me, I hotdog on The Torah, The Bible, etc. And hear God laughing; Her sense of my being a fool for love. Sweet Jesus on a go cart, in downtown Paris, at rush hour, how I love playing with words. The Good Books about God are paving stones while those written by Kazantzakis, Roth, Singer, Malamud; the few, yet many, who describe life as lived and loved. Like the magician littering the stage with motley scarves, hidden behind them, so many, I draw the authors I’ve read from within my heart . . . and now, only now, remembering meeting The Dalai Lama, that the hand I shook had touched Thomas Merton’s; embraced him and later prayed at his grave.

Lord God Almighty! Free at last!

Odd. The confluence, conjunction, collisions of elements: About Ishmael. She was a forty something foot schooner out of Greenwich, Connecticut. Sailed by a young man, a friend of the bride-of-my-youth’s younger brother; one of three.

You see I have always seen myself as white trash from the wrong side of everything. While she, her brother, their friends and neighbors were the white, washed and holy. Merely another way of saying, especially in these times of poverty, the obscenely rich . . . at that, the person with one eye in the land of the blind is wealthy beyond all measure.

In any case, the bride, long fled with children and I alone save for being accompanied by a man and woman who had stepped in to rescue me. We were invited to accompany the captain of Ishmael to a hippie conclave in the tidal marshes of Virginia wherein I was given a joint that rendered me hysterical crawling about the paw feet of a round oak table asking; ‘why I must be crucified endlessly.’

A mystical experience? Yes. I never smoked another joint. Later being informed that it had either rat poison or smack inserted within the weed.

They laughed, of course, as I now laugh at the experience.

Thinking metaphorically, time has become something of an ant farm, or wave form, glass encased, visual. An experiment going back-and-forth, forth-and-back. Endless. Futile. Fascinating.

I’ll have to go back and re-read Melville. Consulting Brewer Phrase & Fable, the thumbnail, yes, it could be that Ishmael is me. Laughing. Gore Vidal once mentioned the children chained in the attics of those button down Victorian Houses for the obscene unspeakable acts and pleasures of their parents. Greenwich, Connecticut?

YES.

OBVIOUSLY!

Not everything is specious, superfluous, fatuous, flatulent in the words of men. Or man as family; one and all. But the process enables me to observe myself comparitively to what I’ve ever said of others. Add. I remain enchanted with the chance? Conjunction of quotes as I wander between what I write and record of others. However when I view television I laugh instead of cry; the supercilious farting of time. With especial gratitude to Fox and the demigod who owns it. To think, once-upon-a-time it was my vocation to make the fools look wise; recalling now the lolling tongues, nose picking, crossed eyes that I excluded or deleted. The problem with irking the ire of the superficial is that they, in their boredom, will make your crucifixion longer for their entertainment. God grant me, please, the grace to not cry at the time of my departure.

For a brilliant woman my mother could be incredibly and rudely scatological. She could swear any Master Sargent or sailor under the table I’ve ever known. As for myself, in anticipation of another monthly, capricious, arbitrary, obviously demonstrative of self anointed administrative importance, inspection/violation of my privacy (as welcome as a napalm enema) I have begun imagining my fellow denizens, of we about to die (HUD housing) in a Drum & Bugle Corp. Who then could goose step with mops and brooms up and down the parking lot in review. Apparently the fecal minded have taken over the world.

One would be well advised to realize that it is possible to die from laughter.

Imagining myself wetting the trouser leg of my superiors while in my step-and-fetch-it mode; listening with focused, rapt attention on their pontifications. Otherwise, in protest, I might simply burn myself alive on their doorstep.

Possibly, I could convince St. Loony Tunes (Rupert Murdoch) to be the Drum Major while his minions record the events, for the delectation and edification of Ayn Rand’s resurrected/reincarnated selfishness coupled with the legends, in their own minds, baboons of Congress?

Salaciously reverent and divinely irreverent I think it not too odd to have awakened this time with thoughts of being a vapor no longer corporeal. Ecstatic. I no longer need to pretend to be “nice.”

Interesting and found at this close:

130407 02:37 Dreaming
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved


Saturday, April 6, 2013

Love - Art Nouveau


A study in blues, as in Rhapsody in Blue.

The breaching whale of my dream broke into consciousness; acknowledging the conflicts of my grandparents and parents. Their difference in loving and living style within societal constraints; their lives and times.

Will I never learn not to fall asleep with music!

Or write!

At the surface, half in/half out, I recognized the style and thought of them: women married to men. As, chained together running away, in opposite directions, fetching up – failing their flight; collapsing. Awake now I wonder is this not true of almost all marriages eventually? A seamless continuity of remaking the other into an ideal partner absent all conflict.

Two realizations before I go on: I too failed the test to become a friend submitting to my then wife. For much, I think now, the same reasons. And now our “All American Dream” has been gambled away corroding the ideals of marriage, home, children with a future. Future? What future? Through thick and thin, thinner, then vapor. No hope for the children, homes lost. As for old age; forget about it. While the Banisters on Wall Street gloat and smirk. Having bankrupted the world.

130406 0111 mere mortal

. . . notes in reply to a dream just awoken from, wherein a dialog was spoken to an unknown woman whose inspiration this is. Can I say; “Call me Ishmael”?

What and why I write are merely notes on a life unfolding. But then, equally, I could say being enfolded. Such ego as I might once have had is slowly evaporating in awe for the process I annotate daily in my personal journal: for me a proof positive of all that I am, a mere mortal, touched by something vaster than whales, etc. Awesome in and of itself, this process, I have yet to grow jaded in reply to all that has happened in my life. About which, with sincerity I will say this, it is not for me but us equally available: a genius we all possess. Should only we say “yes” to the invitation to be ourselves beyond the boundaries of definition common to all life and language.

In some sense I propose that we all are filled with events, if strung together, form a necklace of value and purpose. Not to control, rule or exploit, own, so much as to serve one-another. In truth and love imperfect, for now, but participating in a purpose and intention beyond what we can now understand or define. Albeit the direction of integration not destruction.

I know the details of my life and process about which it would be boring to detail or imply since each of us perceives it: Life, Love and Truth differently. A Tower of Babble purposeful.

It is said that to talk to oneself and get answers is problematic. In psycho babble, Schizophrenic.

Damned or Blessed either way I will press forward.

(03:10 If I have lived for nothing other than this hour, celebrated, alone; the feeling, intuition, sense and thoughts. I will have lived for something of such value it cannot be told or sold. Convicted that I must share with others the potential of such joy.

And then I crashed. Returning to sleep for a time to recoup the earliness of my awakening and dreamed again. Another young woman in my dream, this time a fellow photojournalist, we were comparing/competing for work. Within the dream I seemed to demure to her, she being younger, desirable and so desperate for work. Yet now, awake, I remember myself before Randy’s diagnosis at four with Leukemia: I was a terror defying all authority to get my images/vision/version of what was the truth before me.

At least so as I thought myself by compare to the wilting fern persona I adopted with my mother from infancy until sixteen. Who’s savage rage, sober or drunk, I was able to begin to deflect at age sixteen when the second false accusation of incest seemed eminent. The point to this aside is that I have had an unusual deference towards woman lending them a power they can no longer possess. Which I now, loving and being loved my M, no longer need; that former sedition against myself; begging for love. For all we, all who could but do not, rampage, attributable to rape, abuse, abandonment; I healed will attempt to save those who insanely go forward murdering.

"A good mind possesses a kingdom: a great fortune is a great slavery."
"The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life."
- Seneca

10:59

At times I wander about, at stopping points, seeking affirmation to what inspired me in the first instance or amplification: unspecific. For me a process I trust, more often rewarding than not. I still flirt with exploding my mind a la C. G. Jung and Montaigne even Einstein did; wanting to go as far as IT – FAR goes farther beyond the beyond.

Returning to The Rhapsody in Blue(s) My maternal grandmother had remarried having been married at thirteen. Little, to no, mention made by my mother regarding her father: dead by accident or design when she was four. Except any mention of firearms.

My point being that my step-grandfather never lived with us in Ripley, Ohio. But visited us randomly upon a Sunday morn late after his Catholic service and we returned from the Methodist for Sunday Supper the chicken he killed by hatchet or wrung neck, even the one I attempted to toilet train; a pet. My sense of marriage was thus discontinuous and well remember chancing upon them making love beneath a patchwork quilt and the eves of the attic above. Still it disturbed them not; not that they continued but didn’t hide either.

Then there was mom’s confession that dad expected her to be both whore and The Virgin Mary, why I don’t know, but she was sober at the time and not especially, wildly, enraged either.

At twelve, when she accused me of incest with my six year younger sister I hadn’t a clue what was going on but fled. Running away to be found by my father, how? I don’t have a clue for I was in the middle of Innes Arden’s Golf Course. Otherwise, and I’ll close here, my sexual relationship with women beginning at four: she losing her panties at every excursion. Then the kissing lessons given by my baby-sitter in her white nylon slip and I in Y fronts. Exiled to band camp, The University of New Hampshire, at around thirteen, passing for eighteen then and dating older women! Well, what more can I say, I’ve had a ball and despite the sorrows healed it’s been fabulous! So with M our being a pair is comfortable since my ideal of love is infinite, if sometimes discontinuous. . . .and no fooling around.

It may be, in retrospect, remembering a letter from mom; “You don’t need my permission to write.”

I was then unconscious of what I might have said in mourning or celebration of her. Or, any and all women since then and now!

Laughing since the spirit and body are willing and able; still at closing seventy-three: too soon for me.


Photo Caption:
Three-year-old "Esperanza" named her pet pigeon after her wheelchair-bound teenage uncle in Watts, Los Angeles. He was shot by a rival gang member in a drive-by shooting, 1994 credit photo: Donna De Cesare – University of Texas Press

130405 1516 Love Art Nouveau
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Friday, April 5, 2013

beyond


So very many have passed beyond my reach before me, embossed with their memory, given in confession of desires: the life they had wished to live but did not.

Dear friends/God forgive me I cannot remember names as much as the emotions like cloud shadows passing over monumental faces, eyes flickering in confident ecstasy or swimming in sorrow or fear. What they were and by prayer will become far beyond my keen.

And for now, in silent reverence, for they and those who with me stand upon the cusp of time, I spin not Dervish but Prayer Wheel with some more profoundly raised upon the glistening of my braille memory. Changed irrevocably both they and me for no prayer is unanswered in the flesh of time and nothing lost in eternity. We all die sometime, somehow, and in death see the source more clearly; humiliated and naked as we came so we go.

1544
Who has not found the Heaven—below—
Will fail of it above—
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove—
- Emily Dickinson

Disclosure/Transparency:
I did not intend to include the poem but discovered it between what resides above and this. Faith is unique and inherent; or so I have experienced in numerous dialogs. Given my reverence and homage for The Author of all Creation. I am catholic. Finding my former belief in shards. That small “c” is significant. It means that I give equal credence to Islam, Buddhism, etc. More importantly to me is the experience of God; not the idea.

In the course of these recent hours, days, weeks, years: I have found threads speaking the same intention, thoughts, longings across all languages and all times, unbidden, (not specifically sought). I might as well be gibbeted as a fool, sage or whatever. In converse with M, last evening, I mentioned planting trees the shade or fruit of which I will never see. When I had money I gave freely to resources that offer education to all, but that was stolen from me, as my life might be via the agency of violence growing daily in America the land of the enslaved.

Instead, I give of myself, no longer relatively ‘wealthy’ in material ways. It may be that what I write are notes to those who have passed, our children, in the universal sense of family. The friends and brief acquaintances discovered everywhere.

Permutations have been made in me and in consequence I have changed. Yet I can change nothing outside myself and leave the world essentially as found. In a sense, at seventy-two years of age I am still looking for a Job Description while mentally young as I was at eighteen. I remember that I’ll never Grow Up but am compelled to do so.

The highest creation we can seek is ourselves in truth and love doing no harm. I can no longer remain silent in the company of “Nones.” Or those in whose company any mention of my resources would render me, in their truth/judgment/perception: insane. What a sweet madness!

I take myself not too seriously, humor being my best quality; always a student of life. I will close here with another set of quotes important to me:

"A good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its two parts seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed."
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." +f
"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
"Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die."
The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.”
"There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon." - Matsuo Basho


130405 03:48 beyond
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Thursday, April 4, 2013

sentiments


I neither water nor thirst, but am a pump between both. At times what was, is, and will become of me naked of sentiment or romance: sorrow and ecstasy passes through me.

Daily I prime, or am primed by words, ribald or wise. The grit within growing an ever larger carapace around it; from some perspectives, dark and misshapen – near invisible; and others viewed as precious. Not those who judge me, but seen, my blind inward sight. Not a gem so much as a well worn river pebble becoming rounded.

Witness to my daughters birth, emerging from her mother’s womb, wound apparent at birth: death certain. As it was when my son was diagnosed with Leukemia, but silent then again and again, since my thoughts seem to poison the innocence of others especially the bride-of-my-youth. Who, now unknowing herself cut off from me at the soles of her naked feet, will become what is intended, or she intends for herself, absent my body but never my love and prayers. For as I have said, finally free, the she remains a stranger to me, from first sight in third grade until now and forever more.

It seems I’m finally wed to myself and welded to the creation: author and all of it. Not whole or complete but getting there.

Love, to me, is the greater power. And I struggle to embrace it despite my anger, wounds and sorrows. Fully conscious: the same in others as well, as those who act with indifference, their violence towards me or they for whom I care the most: all of life, and in death, no end.

Words are the voice of the heart.” Attributed to Confucius but I have yet to find explicit attribution. It works for me as do the others I carry reminding me of the Tibetan Buddhist Nuns who self-immolate in protest the violation of their home by specious materialist. My prayer wheel grows. Conscious, equally, of those who I do not, cannot know. Nameless lay people whose choices reflect grace not graft in the face of mindless greed.

My daughter’s birth was the last recall I have of going into shutdown; a howl of silence. What saved me while being beaten and abandoned serially throughout all my life until that moment. When. It could be said, as I say to myself now, I ceased to be silent.

To myself I am coldly analytical, a Nazi, while hotly euphoric as Goethe. Why Teutonic when my heart is Sufi? Zen? Or by root, nature/nurture, belonging to Jesus. Who by growth, at least to/in me, seems indicative of other wisdom figures as well; eclectic.

Who am I? Living to what end? For what and why?
. . . these things I cannot know for now . . . perhaps when face-to-face with the origin of all consciousness and creation.

Methodically I labor to educate myself knowing my intuition is not the only function . . . to see, perceive and experience everything in its inherent state not as I wish to know it.

I fail my aspirations in conflict with people and institutions/constructs, I sometimes think-feel-sense-intuit, addicted to power as a shield against their fear. Failing. I grow restive, vicious, with sharpened vocabulary, think to eviscerate them for their invasion of my old age, seeking to die in peace quietly without their capricious rape of my attention. Which for me is as taxing as another human companion in my dwelling; albeit infrequent but regular and serial, contrary to what is legislated.

A personal peeve illustrative of what happens to be, world wide, governing us.

130404 04:33

. . . it seems, whistling into a Tsunami, this, what I do (quietly chuckling at myself.) A dog chasing its tail; finally catching it reaching escape velocity, spiraling out of sight: ecstatic.

Could it be the mind behind every deed, or legislated action, is greed? Whether Republican or Democrat for most, if not all, are rich; becoming more so daily. The Congress, that unlovely assembly of Baboons incarnates the best of folly: selfishness. . . . At best a pimple upon the posterior of corporations: Exxon, Bank of America, the manufacturers of death by puncture, wholesale, united in cupidity.

"Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you." - Nietzsche

Be kind to unkind people. They need it the most.” - Ashleigh Brilliant

Most men would rather be charged with malice than with making a blunder.” - Josh Billings

My process, perfect for myself, unable to change ought else, continues.

130403 13:44 sentiments
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Rhythms

Rhythms awakened me, the snick and thump of a manual sewing machine adapted to electricity. Childhood lullaby’s. “Now I lay me down to sleep. . . .“ Yet I awake decades latter and wonder where their labor went. Mother having had from the beginning a Singer of the new kind, no treadle. Then too she would sew by hand; fine garments for me to wear. Both Mother and Daughter were the women of my life adored. The Great Mother, my maternal grand mother, her child, my mother, both were seamstress’s leaving me with a sense of being fabric woven into garments or tapestries.

Odd I should so adore my threadbare poverty hearing the snickers of those who stole my inheritance. And from my sleep arise disquieted, but not distempered, wondering when the revolution will begin. As stated: “Love is preemptive while law is remedial.” Add, far be it from me to foment riot since I soon will depart to whatever awaits: rot, Heaven or Hell, or somewhere in between. Not sad to leave the stage of this life as it is and swiftly becoming more so; dominated by those who worship power, usury and greed. The true religion of America. Wherein the powers that be retroactively abort every life, except theirs. Those who BMW (bitch, wine and moan) about the right to life.

What life?

Factory Farmed breeding stock and canon fodder!

Fritz Eichenberg, artist and book illustrator, creator of Christ in the Bread Line, asked me shortly before his death; “Have I done anything to change the world?” To which I replied; “I don’t know about the world, but you saved my life.” Our friendship though not deep (I was then ashamed of my mixed mode between being middle-class and nominally from the seat of thieves: Greenwich, Connecticut and an “artist” who never, by his observation decorated my “home” with my work. I detailed the Christmas Eve, standing alone upon the banister of a bridge over the Inter Coastal Water Way ready to step forward to my death. Thinking of he, the Jesus and J. S. Bach. Celestial? No. I simply realized it would take more courage to step backward and live then forward and drown.

Here I am remembering his description of another Jew, not Jesus, who in concert was marched to a mass grave to be shot. The humble Jew, facing his assassins turned around and lowering his trousers baring his posterior mooned them.

So in reply to the anal retentive conservatives, of their greed, who stand upon my neck, while I yet live, I will at the very least bite their ankles . . . possibly to gnaw them into attention. As they stand upon my neck face down in the excrement they’ve made of Earth. The way of love is not riot but at worst boycott. And/Or the curmudgeonly maundering of one about to die, hopefully sooner rather than later. Filled with sadness that my bequest was stolen.

I reside upon a bridge between two Depressions; the future stolen by those whose normal is to rape, pillage and burn everything to their convenience/pleasure/amusements.

I wonder at my empathy, compassion, love for my executioners, since they were my childhood companions for a time when I resided in what I now consider the pimple upon the posterior of creation. Should I not think of them as they were then and now? With concern for them as well as those who follow.

Forgive me for begging your attention. I mean not to foment or intrude. Inflict or impose my awakening in a world of hurt annoyed by the dragon within. It is they who are insane not I. They continue the same activity expecting different results. The consequence of which is a world paved with mass graves.

The wrath to come is already upon us. No need to raise a hand against it. Since what has been sown will be reaped. I imagine, in retribution/recompense, those who gloat and smirk will be given endless loops of themselves to entertain them. Such little as I know of God’s good pleasure is enough for me.

Yet for now I remain bemused by the stripes and scars I see walking amongst us. Those who like me bought the dream of America betrayed by avarice having aborted The Bill of Rights and by smoke and mirrors perverted the Constitution.

Mendicant, I seem employed by a new perspective on what was a life, ideal, as apposed to real.

- Charles Peguy
"Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love."

130403 0536 Rhythm
© 2013 by Jack SprattAll Rights Reserved



Tuesday, April 2, 2013

envisioning i ain't there yet!


From this moment. For the moment. Forever? I note change. Wondering how it came about, or to be within me, who is nothing special; just another Joe. Or sometimes John, Jack or Jacob or even “HEY YOU!”

I am not THERE YET!

Holy, whole, complete or finished. This/The process of unfolding continues. For now it is enough to simply say; ‘Be careful of what you pray for . . . ‘ Shy to say so for my many beloved friends: atheist, agnostic and believers who say so of themselves. There are no boundaries between we and god; only delusions, illusions, wishful thinking or indifference . . . possibly avoidance?

Could it be, it seems so, unfolding is better said: enfolding? By any measure or means, I previously thought, by kind or degree: when we die we rot: from nothing to nothing begot. Turn and turnabout  inside out, and upside down, I remain touched by something/someone greater than me. Integration is a process of becoming unending; beginning here-&-now.

10:52

My vision/version/ideation is formulated from many resources, correct for me. Affirmed and convicted: to live and die for. It seems best describednot prescribeda we: the entire family, living and dead, are woven into a tapestry complete, ineluctable, yet so vast as to defy description. Our language of any tongue: by race, creed, gender penchants, proclivities, practices or associations seems in those who have spoken words of any worth remembering seems to grow more exhausted by utterance of those who would sell of what they presume we need; not want.

For me the difference, is lights years apart, between: assertion/aggression, love/hate versus indifference, Life/Death. Analogies, Similes, epitaph, Epigraph, Metaphor or Parables seems inconsequential compared to experience. No “I” in I, me or what writes; but a near consumed cigarette butt flicked into a mud puddle or as remembered; at sea when the universe is surrounding, becalmed, a mirror if you must. Or, better, sailing upon cats paws alone in a dingy uncaring whither I go; the tiller gently nodding myself near asleep in the bilge at night beloved. . . .

The Way, trackless: I want only for you to remember yourself, as precious beyond all measure of value to God. Learning for now as if living forever while ready to die this moment. Until meeting Creation/The Creator/whatever image need be to guide you to a full consciousness. First and foremost you need a self beloved to know where and why we live trusting that.

. . . . alone we come and alone we go

home

- Julian Baggini
The topic of personal identity is strictly speaking nonexistent. It’s important to recognize that we are not the kind of things that simply popped into existence at birth, continue to exist, the same thing, then die off the cliff edge or go into another realm. We are these very remarkably ordered collections of things. It is because we’re so ordered that we are able to think of ourselves as being singular persons. But there is no singular person there, that means we’re forever changing.” - in The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self

PS Consider, amusing or bemusing, Google knows your taste in erotica, your sperm or white cell count, when you ovulate or don’t, where you live, what and who or whom you love, etc. Who watches the watchers? Would you believe, you should you know! They track which side your hair is parted or not and the toothpaste brand and how often you brush or don’t ever.

Willy Shakes aka William Shakespeare @ Brianpickings.org
. . . . credos that underpin the analytical tool. Dubbed Prospero’s Precepts, these eleven rules culled from some of history’s greatest minds can serve as a general-purpose guideline for critical thinking in all matters of doubt:
  1. All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level. (Stephen Schneider)
  2. Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. (Dandemis)
  3. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. (Francis Bacon)
  4. Never fall in love with your hypothesis. (Peter Medawar)
  5. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. (Arthur Conan Doyle)
  6. A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong. (Francis Crick)
  7. The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting. (Richard Feynman)
  8. To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. (Charles Darwin)
  9. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. (Mark Twain)
  10. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. (Thomas Jefferson)
  11. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
    130402 09:37 envisioning
    © 2013 by Jack SprattAll Rights Reserved

perceptions

@ parabola.org.
Were I a rich man I'd subscribe. However, not being one, makes me richer than those who stole my inheritance(s). In the process bankrupting the entire world economy. The cynics, who as Oscar Wilde said; “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” 
"Heaven is within!" - J.C. 
' . . . and not within a bottomless rictus of greed.' - J.S.
is not hell the waste of the entire human race?