The Devil's Pleasure Garden

THE HEART IS A KITE, a lyric from SEXOPHOBIA

The heart is a kite.

It’s heavy, it’s light.

At maximum height

It quickly takes fright,

Descends to the trite

Then turns itself right,

Out-races its plight,

A speck in the sight

And, feeling its might,

It shudders in flight,

The string stretching tight,

A moment of night,

Then falls away, slight.

You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born

By Dr Robert MacLean, PhD

INTRODUCTION

You are doing something wrong. By now that should be obvious.
You have failed at love (see LOVE).
You have failed at your work (see WORK).
You have failed to acquire enough power (see POWER) even over your own life to be able to control your future. You are still, after all this time, "on your way."
Or, conversely, you have succeeded. You have made it to the top. But there is something you have neglected to do that would permit you to enjoy your life there. Something you don't have. Some lack in you. You are at the top of the wrong profession. You are admired by the wrong people. You have married the wrong person. You have the wrong children.
And you are getting older (see AGE). It is a time, for you and for the culture, of sexual withdrawal. You are divided as by a glass wall from everything you want. You have made the wrong choices. The moments of decision, botched, or fled unnoticed. There is nothing now but celibacy, darkness, age and death (see DEATH).
Am I close?
You may not even exist. The greater part of the East and a substantial number of western intellectuals--Buddhists, Hindus, linguists, logical positivists, behavioral psychologists and webmail employees--are prepared to argue that your existence is an inconvenient mirage. A non-thing.
You would not survive as you at all if you did not irrationally and shrilly insist on so doing more times a day than you care to recall. Your sense of yourself in the world, over and against the world--as opposed to the world, let us say--is maintained by a series of fictions not of your own authorship frantically shuffled by your imagination at a rate of several per second and so hysterically contradictory that the sorting process never quite stops. You are impressionable almost beyond reclaim. Some slow-witted c and w lyric can have you lurching around moodily for days. Your opinions, your feelings, your memories, quite possibly even your "self" are not things of your own (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).
Only your suffering verifies you. You suffer, therefore you are. Of this you are almost certain. It may be fleeting. You may be no more than the tip of a brief flare of suffering but you do have your pain. You may even need it.
With what thoughts shall we comfort ourselves?
You have put aside the old commandments, the old theories. The various therapies are no longer persuasive. You are not even sure any more what it is you want.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, in Whose eyes we are but scuttling insects busy beyond our own deciphering, grant we beseech Thee enough light to sin by and know what we're doing.
But prayer no longer works. It has been castrated by the contradictions (see GOD), is nothing now but an arbitrary attitude, a pose before the mirror, an act of futile self-encounter.
You are, when you think about it, desperate. You are not what you want to be. You are not where you want to be. Or how. And you have not the courage to face your own death.
Little can be done for you at this stage. You need time. You need language that will put some distance between you and What Is. You need someone to sort things out for you, a dispassionate figure in a lab coat to interpret the X-rays and guide you in your struggle to become more truly yourself, sort of thing. You may not be able to stand it.
Are you sure you want to do this?
It won't be easy.
And of course, you can't breathe this air indefinitely. Sooner or later you will dive back into life and forget everything again. Which is more or less how it all happened in the first place.
But for the moment at least, the Doctor is here.
Get on the table.

The Child in Its Swiss Classroom: A Toby Moment

“Pay attention, girls,” says the teacher. “This is Professor Teargarten, an astrophysicist who has published several research articles. He's going to speak to us today.”

Teargarten smiles. Andrea and her friend Daniella pay him no mind and whisper together.

“Young ladies,” he says, “do you know how to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer?” He holds one up.

“What a jerk!” says Andrea.

“Not entirely,” says Daniella.

“I don't know why you defend him.”

“It's my sense of things to come.”

Teargarten watches them whisper and scowls. “I wonder if that young lady can solve the problem for me.”

The teacher folds her arms and looks away in despair; she knows what's coming.

Daniella jerks her head at the guy to let Andrea know she's on.

Andrea looks at him. “Sure.”

“Stand up, Andrea,” says the teacher.

Andrea stands. “What's the problem?”

“We would like to determine the height of a tall building using no more than this.” He waves the barometer.

“You hang it by a string from the top of the building and lower it till it touches the ground. Then you measure the string.”

The other kids smile. They know Andrea. The teacher frowns.

Teargarten smiles patronizingly. “Well, I was hoping for an answer that would make use of the barometer as a barometer.”

“OK, you can walk up the stairs with it, hold it vertically to the wall and make a mark at the top every time, then as you come down count all the marks and you have the height of the building in barometer lengths.”

He tries to smile. “Yes, but what does that have to do with the barometer qua barometer?”

“OK, you could take it outside and measure the height of the barometer and the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building and by the use of proportion, you get the height of the building.”

The teacher nods to herself tragically.

Teargrten sours. “Doesn't really exploit the properties of the barometer, does it.”

“OK, tie it to the end of a string so it's a pendulum, go up to the top and swing it, calculate the value of ‘g’ at ground level, and also at the top of the building, using Newton's law of universal gravitation. From the difference of the two values you can get the height of the building.”

Teargarten is now afraid. He looks at the teacher, who shrugs. The kids are enjoying themselves.

The teacher says, “Yes, but the barometer, you see! Use the barometer!”

“OK. Take it up to the top, drop it off and time it with a stopwatch till it hits. Then using this formula”—she goes to the board and writes d=½at²—“calculate the height of the building.”

Teargarten is aghast. “Where did you learn this?”

“Everybody knows it. It’s a legend about Niels Bohr.”

“How old are you?”

“Nine point five seven eight three eight.”

The kids laugh. Teargarten and the teacher do not.

Andrea sighs with boredom. “I guess you want me say take barometric readings at the bottom and the top and calculate the height with them, but there's an easier way.”

Teargarten hardly dares ask. “What's that?”

“You knock on the super’s door and say ‘Here's this really neat barometer. I'll give it to you if you tell me how high the building is’.”

The kids laugh. Teargarten and the teacher do not.

The child, don't you see? The child.

Excerpted from the Toby series, coming soon to a screen near you.

Your comments, should there be any, may be deposited here.

And why not treat yourself to the books, and even the videos?

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.