Wtf, Maggie?
2009. 20 years after the biggest political event of my life.
Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? Remember how pushing the Soviets for German reunification was one of the top planks of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher Cold War policy axis?
Remember how happy everyone was when the impossible happened and the Wall fell?
Yeah now it turns out - not so much actually, at least if you were that bastion of freedom and democracy, Margaret Thatcher.
"The Prime Minister's view is... we do not want to wake up one morning and find that events have moved entirely beyond our control and that German reunification is to all intents and purposes on us"
Wtf, Maggie. Just wtf.
With the Velocity of Thought
Oh! could I take you with me, and with the velocity of thought wend our way through space, looking down on worlds moving in their orbits, filled with spirits whose only thought is onward and upward! To point out to your ken the source of those things, the manifestations of which only, you are permitted to behold. Together to learn from the observation of his works, the nature and attributes of the Creator. Together to develop the germs of our own characters, and together to strive onward toward that sphere where the full conception of our yearnings shall be gratified.
When we should have at last arrived at the place of eternal rest, can you conceive the sensation which would pervade our spirits, freed from materiality, when in daily and hourly communion with the millions of millions of souls liberated from every thing which partakes of earth, we enter forever into the real joys of our eternal existence ?
No human heart can realize, no human mind grasp the thought which now fills my nature, and lifts my spirit even beyond the barriers of this world.
Oh! 'tis then I feel that there is in all the works and laws of God this one eternal principle of love. For what can exceed the love of that being who has prepared a heaven where mind can grasp the every thought of life and death! Yes, even you, toiling and laboring to obtain that which will satisfy your minds on earth, can you realize what that joy must be when there is no obstacle to the fulfillment of that desire?
'Francis Bacon', Spiritualism Volume 1, Edmonds/Dexter/Tallmage, 1853.
Dreamlog: Fractal Island
I'm with friends visiting Lyttelton Harbour, or dream-Lyttelton, which is not quite the same thing, but similar geography: hills, a bay, sea, islands. I recognise the prominent island in the middle of the harbour with its amazingly artificial computer-generated looking peaks: line segments going up and down at regular intervals. That island was the inspiration for a whole genre of computer games, I recall. Including Myst.
We go alongside the island in a rubber dinghy. Up close I realise it's not an island at all but an artificial structure, sitting on wooden pilings. It's been there all these years and I never knew.
