#1: The Dog Is Barking At The Bees
Whilst En Voyage, Little Prince, Brave The Dogs and Pollinate.
Your mounting years require dealing with, Little Prince, but the hope of sustaining your childhood of today, is not a hope you ought maintain. That is not to say that your childhood is lost, far from it, it is to say that in the years to come, a schism will begin to arise. As your body ages there will bound fourth, a temptation to assume that your mind will not and that it will require only small labours, to remain precisely where you are, in the timeless childhood coil. With sadness, I feel it incumbent to tell you, Little Prince, as I am now in my twenty-second year, that for a time, you will forget how to be a child. As the years compile it will become more difficult to remember and the kind of childhood to which you might wish to return, will not be as it is now. What’s more, as distant a proposition it may sound to you at the moment, Little Prince, a time will come when you will yearn to be as far from childhood as you possible can.
You will find it, Little Prince, harder and harder, as the earth laps, to maintain your emotional eloquence. You will lose your composure for a time and it will feel as though you are trapped inside of your own skull. There will be no place at all, in which you can be alone, even when it is only you who is present and yet loneliness will scream at you from within your own head and covering your ears will only make it louder. It will appear somewhat faint however, as unintuitive as that may sound, which is what makes it so insidious. It will lie on the border between, acknowledged and denied and a sulking delusion will begin to tie you in knots.
Please, Little Prince, I know that you understand why I am telling you these things, but as they compile within you, they will become harder and harder to cast off. For your multitudes to be swept aside by the incapacitated vision; for you to be pulled under by mad crowds and serpentine nothings; for you to forget even the abandon of your childhood and of your free and magical adventuring, would be to set ablaze in your heart, the whole corpus of childlike wonder and the ash of it, will only crumble when you try to pick it up. I would weep, Little Prince, if it were all to be lost and I fear that if it is lost for you, it will also be lost for me.
So, as I endeavour to make it clear in these posts, (and I do hope you have been tending your letterbox) whilst also balancing the rest, I mean, with the greatest solemnity of which I am capable, to the tell you of what regained childhood might look like and to aid you in that remembering.
I would like to induce again in you, Little Prince, a place of your own, far from the Lilliputian Leviathan. A place, within which anger and resentment fade away and timeless wonder abounds, inside of the quiet universe which you contain. This place, will be the place of your composure.
I noticed something today. It brought a new world to me and I thought, at once, to share that world with you, as it serves as a turnstile to that place of composure. What I wrote for you, is written below.
The Dog is barking at the Bees and now ‘The Grumbling Hive’ appears incomplete. Beneath the whole spacious canopy of clouds, reside us, but more, in what lays beyond the hive. The Dog jumps at the passing Bee, clack jaw snapping shut, again and again, in brief flights, following and barking; a great gargantuan peril. The horrors, skulking the Earth flats, lurk and patrol and are innumerable, yet the Bees flourish. Yet the flowers bloom and the birds do eat and from all their petty squabbles and private vices, is born a great protecting vessel. Time has known no limits in our love for them, yet the Bees are quick to anger; Yet they, on their pollinating voyage, leave no trace; Yet, they tinker away like elfs at their work, with idle focus and sweet-innocent consistency; Yet they travel the world, being perhaps more traveled than we; Yet seem to have not Art, only Architecture. How divine a game they are, for such curious souls as Homer, being played in writing (550-568) with Apollo,
‘There are certain holy ones, sisters born – three virgins gifted with wings: their heads are besprinkled with white meal, and they dwell under a ridge of Parnassus. These are teachers of divination apart from me, the art which I practised while yet a boy following herds, though my father paid no heed to it. From their home they fly now here, now there, feeding on honey-comb and bringing all things to pass. And when they are inspired through eating yellow honey, they are willing to speak truth; but if they be deprived of the gods' sweet food, then they speak falsely, as they swarm in and out together.’ (550-568)
Oh what a wonderful eulogy for collective anger. “A eulogy?!” I can here you rightly ask, Little Prince, “It is as alive as ever and always will be!” Little Prince, here we arrive, at one of the many quiet little turnstiles, from which, a mosey path extends, far from the Lilliputian Leviathan.
It is a eulogy TO collective anger, Little Prince, but it is a eulogy FOR you. It is for you, to humbly make known to you the death of collective anger, in spite of its apparent life. For it is but a pantomime, Little Prince. It is Bees following the Bees and Herds following Herds, for which reasons you are surely, given that you have read from the beginning, already familiar. Herds follow herds because they have nowhere to go. You have everywhere to go, Little Prince. At any time and at any pace, in which ever order, to whatever place, may you go and be and feel and find what cannot be found in the rubicon of time.
There, is a place of breath. Having escaped your skull, you may now, there, consider, at whichever pace you so choose, where you might let yourself be. Ought we believe, Little Prince, that collective anger is no place for you? That you might choose to turn the stile, and walk down the mosey path where, whilst strolling, be not pressed by any urgency? That you can expand the breath of your mind, and let it involve as much air as you so very well desire, free from rush and hurry? It is urgency, Little Prince, that seals off the way to the rest of your pollinating exploration.
Oh dear, Little Prince, I have cut to the chase already in my mentioning of pollination. Very well. It has been done and I know that you need no apology from me, so here it is.
I was watching the Bees after they fled that gargantuan peril and studied their venture to what I have just now realised were Dog-Roses. What an odd coincidence but oh what a graceful allegory that could be. Another time perhaps. I am becoming distracted. As I watched the Bees tussling the stamens, I realised why Homer described them as, ‘bringing all things to pass.’ Pollination! The answer is pollination! This is also the answer to a different question, which was hindering me in my writing to you. With all of this talking I have done about the curse of prescription, I thought to myself, how might I now fill the space containing the question of HOW one ought explore? Pollination! Oh how this revelation filled me with joy. It at once described the manner of my own exploration, for which I previously had, no description.
The Bees leave no trace, I said. How monumentally foolish that was. They leave every trace. Were it not for the joyous series of events, which they set in motion with every floral landing, there would be no You, nor I to watch them do so. They pollinate on their voyages! They make happen! They do nothing but travel and make happen, multitudes! Upon which, they hold no interest of intruding. They visit and they and they invoke and they inquisit and they provoke, multitudes! Then, whilst bravery and humility abound, they simply fly away on another adventure.