This image [below] points up the difficulties people such as myself have in trying to extricate themselves from situations which some will consider of very minor proportions.This note has been added several weeks after the initial attempts to assemble in my mind just how to approach the writing of a look on the incident which happened to me in December 1972.
In essence this is an exercise to answer the question: Does all human existence and knowledge come down to a random hotchpotch of coincidence and luck? Or is there a plan to be discovered, manipulated and exploited? As I understand it the major religions of the world subscribe to the idea that all of us are subject to a preconceived plan, though, as the Christian believes in free choice then any plan by a Creator must be in distinctly broad strokes. Which reminds me that one of my initial, 'straws in the wind,' the term I used to suggest to myself that perhaps there was the odd person who saw in my writings, confused as they were, more merit than material for ridicule. On that occasion it was during a speech given during my elder son's prize giving by one of the academic staff. This of course was early days but time enough for the Word to have filtered through to the school. After all several years had passed since the incident.
To me one of the major difficulties with sitting on an unofficial, unacknowledged breakthrough in new knowledge is to discern whether a comment, chance remark, or ribald piece of humour is a signal of support, a put down, or a challenge.
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I felt from the beginning this incident was a good deal more than a freakish aberration and something that had been troubling my sub-conscious for many years. Possibly going back as far as October 1953, while serving aboard the warship, HMS Diamond, at the time part of the Home Fleet on a NATO exercise.
1953 was an important and pivotal year for the nation, with the coronation of our present Queen Elizabeth,
the conquest of Everest, a triumph alone, but with hindsight can perhaps be seen as the apogee of British Empire's achievement and the beginning of the United Kingdom? In the same year what to many underlined this change of face for the British was the work of Watson and Crick in successfully illustrating the, DNA spiral of life and thereby opening a new frontier of knowledge. In amongst all these changes in thrust which sought to change the ambitions and expectancy of the new generation's aspirations The sinister overlay of a nuclear holocaust placed a constant reminder of the thin and fragile international relationships between the potential clashes of ideas, ideals and politics which could tip the world into a final conflict of Armageddon.
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A classic pose of an individual, myself, who with tolerable comfortable in life, love and friendship, awaits the day when his strivings will be officially acknowledge so that, his place within the scheme of things is finally totally insecure. Why does he gamble his newly developed more relaxed view of the World, Universe and Everything , for a brief fifteen minutes of spurious fame? In his seventy-six years of life it would appear he has learnt nothing? Despite these doubts as to the worth of his efforts and the humiliation of the jokers' ridicule, his natural human desire to have his worth acknowledged, if only by his peers remains paramount.
My use of the photo, of myself, in a rather crude attempt to illustrate the disorienation of myself after nearly four decades of effort in attempting to put the the events of December 1972, into context then and of the present day.
ReplyDeleteThis blog and a parallel blog: Not Mentioned in Despatches, are my latest attempt to rationalise my own thoughts and approach to a philosophical system of which I was given a glimpse of at the time. With a fair wind I hope to carry through this re-energised effort to make a more constructive picture of the vision and its potential.