Lovely Crinkly Edges
When an award is won for Norway,
flattened coastlines seem daft.
Lovely crinkly edges,
Not equatorial enough for Africa.
The Answer and the Question complete each other.
Norway and Fjords complement each other.
Magratheans and Mice create a ten million year program together.
Slartibarfast and his superiors oppose each other.
Earth Mark I and Mark II follow each other.
Therefore the Magrathean
Can know little of these early Sixties sitcoms of which you speak
And still want to jump on a table and scream.
Shocking management relations do not stop him,
hanging the sense of it, he tries to stay busy.
Being happy rather than right any day,
Is where it all falls down, of course.
When the awards have been won, his name is still unimportant.
Lovely crinkly edges.
Deep Thoughts
The Taowel:
“When an award is won for Norway,
flattened coastlines seem daft.
Lovely crinkly edges,
Not equatorial enough for Africa.”
Once we see something as beautiful we create a scale by which everything else is judged. Mediating on the original Tao, the verse doesn’t disdain the concept of beauty so much as it warns us against setting the scale all too harshly. We should try to see the beauty in all things, lest we create ugliness in the things we judge not beautiful enough.
“The Answer and the Question complete each other.
Norway and Fjords complement each other.
Magratheans and Mice create a ten million year program together.
Slartibarfast and his superiors oppose each other.
Earth Mark I and Mark II follow each other. “
If we know the Answer we seek the Question, or visa versa depending on what sort of universe you live in. A fjord really doesn’t seem all too equatorial, but they suit Norway well. There is a bigger unity, and everything has its place within it. Like Mice and Magratheans ,we don’t always perceive the greater whole of things. Who would have expected that the Earth was created for Mice by an ancient race of custom planet builders?
There will always be someone to tell you that fjords are too baroque for Africa. There is always resistance to anything we want to do, but resistance is growth. It’s in crossing the boundaries put in front of us that we find new ways to go about things.
When one planet built by pan-dimensional beings to learn the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything is destroyed by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass another is built. Special cases withstanding, we can only go one direction in the universe, forward. We should trust in the logic that the universe will unfold as it should.
“Therefore the Magrathean
can know little of these early Sixties sitcoms of which you speak
and still want to jump on a table and scream.
Shocking management relations do not stop him,
hanging the sense of it, he tries to stay busy.
Being happy rather than right any day,
is where it all falls down, of course.
When the awards have been won, his name is still unimportant.
Lovely crinkly edges.”
We can not know what we are doing, and still do the right thing. There will be obstacles, and defeats, but we can’t dwell on them. Rather we have to hang the sense of it and keep moving forward. We can’t always be happy, and we aren’t always right. No matter how much effort we make we may not always get due credit, you can put your name on the glacier, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be demolished by the Vogons.
It is the experience of the journey that remains, not who we are, or what we are called; it is what we learned along the way. We aren’t the the lovely crinkly edges, we are the act of making them.
The Second Tao:
“When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.
Therefore the Master
can act without doing anything
and teach without saying a word.
Things come her way and she does not stop them;
things leave and she lets them go.
She has without possessing,
and acts without any expectations.
When her work is done, she take no credit.
That is why it will last forever.”*From Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tzu complete online text. Translation for the public domain by JH McDonald, 1996
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I made a glacier, of sorts, once. It took me some time. I loved it, and others appreciated it.
The Vogons in my life destroyed it. I fought, but they still won.
I am not sad I made it tho. Despite everything.
Thank you x
There’s some hoopy truth there. Very deep. Very good.