Dancing With The Sparks Of Light

This is about money, believe it or not.

And I should not be sidetracked...

But I must stop briefly and just note the odd usage of the word 'parabellum' by those philosophers of the gun around the place seemingly everywhere. I'm pretty certain 'parabellum' means 'prepare for war' in Latin. And, I also think that what it implied was a type of cheap and small round of which vast numbers thereof could be quickly manufactured, in preparation for war, where one might be expected to have to possess, and also to carry, a lot of bullets, that don't necessarily weigh a ton, and that you might also easily fire off in large numbers.

A lot of people I have heard speak recently, seem to think a 9 mm parabellum is some special kind of advanced, especially killing sort of cartridge to be used in semi-automatic pistols. Whatever. Any kind of projectile launched at a vicious speed into a human body in the wrong place can kill. Lots of things can kill.

Anyway, I actually don't want to focus on guns and bullets at the moment. However I make the point that people use words and many times what they mean, is not uniformally understood as entirely meaning the same thing as what they think they are communicating to their listeners...

Conceptions of value and wealth and luxury private material possessions are also nowhere nearly as clearcut 'uniformally defined' as we sometimes take for granted that they are.

Yes, the power or the ability to select from many choices is seemingly universally accepted as a freedom that money and wealth renders to an individual. It is of course nullified by sheer ignorance or lack of culture and lack of a wide knowledge about what things exist: people can only choose from that of which they possess some knowledge. Out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, out of any reason to be desired.



Great Car Art - even Ferrari thinks so...

I look at some modern cars around now and they seem to me excessively convolluted, even for admittedly advanced intricate machinery. A friend of mine just told me today that he found the new Black Series C63 Mercedes annoying and utterly unfunctional for driving long distances in Australia along the major outback highways.

On the one hand it may appear that electronically-fuel injected and/or turbo charged, drive-by-wire, motion sensing suspension equipped, hi-tech modern cars with alloy and ceramic engines beat the hell out of a handcrafted Aston V-8, or a Jaguar V-12 with its double bank of Weber carburettors that need to be tuned regularly... On the other hand, the obscurity of what is going on inside the hood of the car, and the shelf-life of all these modern offerings coming from over-capitalized robotic manufacturing plants in Germany, means that none of it is on the human scale anymore. It's all very – maybe too far - removed from the human physicality of sticking a hand-crank into the front of an Austin or old Ford and firing the thing 'into life.' Not that I'm saying we need to go back to all that, but the physical link to the human body/mind creature is essentially lost when it comes to modern things like cars and even buildings and city planning and art and design. And especially communication. I can still use a leaf of hand-filled deckled edge french linen paper to write a note to someone using a pen and ink – but then, nowadays would that person be able to read it and 'get the message?'

Possibly not.

And then again, I would like to be able to wear an Italian rapier on my hip more or less like an accoutrement (of clothing) when going around in public but such a thing is not legal to do, more's the pity. And by what I mean by 'more's the pity' I mean that, such a thing being illegal in my location of residence where there is no right to bear arms or to have any kind of actual or legal freedom of self-expression, it gives the general public no clue, sign, or warning as to how dangerous a person can be with words alone. I'm a dilletante when it comes to it, and I'm sure that specialized guns do a lot more damage than less-specialized ones might do, but I'm equally sure that the process of the damage and the killing begins earlier on than the moment of simply sticking the cartridge into the clip or the chamber. It begins with words. It begins with the ways in which social communication is carried on. The ideas are the seeds, and the words are the physical beginnings of actions springing from the ideas. Words – are absolutely the physically, and really, deadliest things there are.

 

Calvin J. Bear