Current Entries: The Approach to Al Mu'tasim: Jorge Luis BorgesFrom the Dawn of the PatriarchsThe Lion of Judah • The Last of the Hebrews: Jeremiah newI shall not be forgotten: Sappho The Cosmopolitan (by Theodor Mommsen)The Characters (by Theophrastus)The Road to EmmausThe Dispensation of the One: PlotinusThe Wizard and his NieceHomoousion, Homoiousion, or Houyhnhnms? Keeping the Faith: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus new • An Age of Magic new The Worm in Eve's Apple Let there be Light: Michel de Montaigne new Was he for real? Descartes My Great-Great Grandmother’s LetterA hot Chestnut in the open Fly: Laurence SterneAll in the Mind: Immanuel Kant new On the Manufacture of Ideas while we speak (by Heinrich von Kleist)From the Memoirs of Mr. Schnabelewopski, Esq. (by Heinrich Heine) new At the PicturesThe TerminusAbout MeBooks I enjoy reading Memory is the Writing on the Water new The Elements of Style (by William Strunk) • If E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us?Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada?A Case of Game TheoryA Directory to the AfterlifeEvoe! new

The New Issue

 

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain





Welcome to Scenarios!

A reader of mine was kind enough to suggest that she would put money on the table if I decided to publish my autobiography. So, blame it on her. As the Chinese use to say: “A man past his forties is the proverbial rogue,” a man full of stories, profanities and bawdy anecdotes. On this site I tie it all together.

The design of the page may not strike you as particularly fancy, but it does read well on different media like iPhones and Blackberries. Every single piece has received an editorial overhaul and quite a few have been completely rewritten, even if I maintained the old title. There are many more new entries than I cared to mark with “new.” It would have looked preposterous.

A Happy New Year to all of us.

Your comments are welcome. Drop us an email at editor@michaelsympson.com

Enjoy!

michael sympson

© – January 2010 – all rights reserved


Peoples, Places and Pedigrees:


"Every author is creating his own pedigree," says Jorge Luis Borges. Like the hero in the illusory Approach to Al-Mu'tasim I could see myself on a mission trying to find my true identity behind the veils of our existence.








The women house together in the communal compounds of the clan and their husbands show up only for the occasional visit. If the man belongs to a different clan his people will be recompensed for the time of his absence. In between the visits the “wife” enjoys full sexual liberty and there is no fear of unwanted pregnancies.









The Bible speaks of Saul as a charismatic leader, a man who was a bit of a shaman himself (I Sam. 19: 24). Saul was the anointed, the Messiah, the last of the judges and the first of the princes. But, not surprisingly, the old establishment had a dim view of the man cutting into their privileges.







I see Jeremiah as a kindred spirit; he's also the best-documented personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and Egypt fall in sync for the same decades of his activity.








Prophets and “saviors” come a dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus, if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.








"Everywhere, at home and abroad, the younger generation, with a moving enthusiasm, gave in to the poet of sentimentality and love, to the smart sound-bite and the tendentious aphorism, to philosophy and humanitarianism." (Theodor Mommsen).








A namesake of mine, in New Mexico, is now convicted for statutory rape. He is the latest example of a cult leader following an all too familiar and often repeated paradigm. Such are the people asking us to suffer our children comming to them.









So this is the question: is there such a thing as an underpinning unity in the larger scheme of things? Are we citizens of a Cosmos, or does the momentary equilibrium between the forces of chaos create the mere illusion of sustained structure and order?









I rather pull crumbs from the hairy chest of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,” she said. She tilted her head, inspecting the hair. She decided to color it. “Red,” she said. “It should be red."








If Christ were of identical substance with God the Father, then the Father suffered at the crucifixion just as badly as his sun. A dilemma that would not go away, not even after throwing parthenogenesis into the brew.








The new system of Christian ayatollahs began rolling out the shroud over culture and education. It took almost a millennium before the dissent of courageous functionaries would bring about changes from within. Without the legacy of Symmachus and his compatriots, a kind of cultural time capsule, the darkness could have lasted even longer.








Everybody seemed to walk through a dreamy world of genies and magic, a kind of Arabian Nights with the new Jerusalem at the center, the treacherous city on the Bosporus, filling the sky with gold. It was the era of the Germanic epic, of the formidable Hagen.








What has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the Kamasutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,” women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.








On a rickety table, in front of a second hand bookshop, I found a pocket sized booklet, A Frenchman’s Itinerary, the Travel Diary of Monsieur Montaigne. The great man had traveled all the places I know so well from my own childhood.








Descartes wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.








My great-great Grandmother’s letter is a genuine document. She was in her teens when she lost everything and became a refugee because of the religious turmoil of her time. I think it was an even greater loss for the country she left behind.








Laurence Sterne had his appointment with destiny rather late. At the age of forty-nine, he offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew better than to risk his money on this nonsense. So Sterne paid for the costs of printing and published himself. Publishers know nothing.









A philosopher who never left town in his entire life has revolutionized our ideas about the human mind. Time and space, he maintained, is all in the mind, the world of duration and extension out there is something beyond our mental categories.








Was it a twitch of the upper lip or some indecisive fiddling with the sleeve cuff that became the cause for the French Revolution? Considering the way we manufacture Ideas as we speak, this is very possible.









When the pot-roast was particularly bad, we turned to debating the existence of God. The good Lord always was with the majority. Only three at the table held atheistic views; yet they too listened to reason if we had at least a good cheese for dessert” (Heinrich Heine).








My grandmother was a very down to earth person. I owe my existence to her conceited ways. Yet all this common sense and survival skill didn’t prepare her for this confrontation with the weird and wonderful.








Her husband was shipped in a sealed boxcar to Auschwitz. The guards rushed him to undress and he was told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.”








People have expressed their interest to actually lay money on the table if I would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will expand very much beyond this little sketch.









Limited shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.
 








For most people it was not the letter that was holding together their recollections and ideas. It was the rhythm, figures of speech, a hypnotic rhyme. The scanning of words became a science. For a long time this was thought to guarantee the accuracy of our traditions.







Personally I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? Is there an insurmountable barrier?









Instead of a linear progression, Professor Hawking proposes a permanent one-off, something beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. Hawking doesn’t mean to say that expansion and contraction occur in a cycle of infinite repetitions, but that the whole process is laid out and suspended in a timeless hyper-dimension of simultaneous occurrences.









Given the seemingly irrational character of some of our taboos, does our morality not defy such explanation? It is all good and well to ascribe to a code of high-minded ethics – the morals we believe we should observe – but that’s not the morals we actually do observe. So what is really at the core of our moral makeup?







I had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of prolonged infirmity, “and why should anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up with a surprise.








Time is made up of the stories we pass on to the future – and often these stories are not true. We create golden ages that never were and we pick our heroes from the muck of poorly documented periods.


 

From the Archive: Two Golden Books

TheophrastusCharacters was written 2,300 years ago, ages before the Freudian and Jungian claptrap, as an aid for the aspiring playwright, and it is still as true as it was then.







My wife believes she can recognize an American composer by certain characteristics in his baseline and harmonics. The same could be said about the American way with words. And it is a good way. William Strunk’s Elements of Style is more than a manual of good expression, it is an education in democracy.

 

So what is going to happen next?

The novels have left the planning state and at the present rate I am typing my fingers to little stumps. Good fiction is like the hypnotist's touch on your shoulder; it is a pleasing lie and it doesn't fail because it is telling a falsehood; it fails when it ceases to captivate. The muse is still doing her rounds. The doorbell rings and there she is, painted toe-nails, the sandaled foot rubbing up the suntanned calf of her other leg, her left hand with lipstick and makeup mirror still poking backward for the tiniest of purses dangling from the thinnest of shoulder straps. She looks at you, the face seems serious, but a little flutter of her mascara-smudged eyelashes gives away the mirth in her narrowing eyes.

    Of the finished novels I shall put up a taster. If you like what you read you make the payment and download the password protected PDF from the page that appears after confirmation. I send you the password, and you can read to your heart's content.

Live well and be happy.

michael sympson

Proprietary Notice: © – 04/10/2003 – by michael sympson. Text may be downloaded for personal use, provided all copies retain the copyright and proprietary notices. No material may be modified, edited or taken out of context. Any commercial use in advertising or publicity requires permission in writing by the author's estate.
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