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QUIRKY WIT AND HIGH WHIMSY
From the timeless quag to the birth of
one-godedness, Or the English tongue
cleansed of un-Teutonlike words, Being
a first bit of a whole outlook on life
writhen and twisted to bewilder and guile,
or for shew
Long in schooling, short in wit, he seeks to wriggle out of the bottomless slimy pit into which timelessness has hurtled him, and, at whiles, lashes out at the many shortcomings swaithing and choking him.Alack! burthensome tethers of worthlessness sink him, ever deeper, into miry nothingness, whence he sprang. An Englishman once said that a little learning is a harmful thing, another that "'tis enough for blue blood", but meseems all lore is fraught with likely ill. This is not the beginning and lot of him alone, but all in this share, for the high and mighty and the weak and lowly are spewed and gorged by the same Earth, and, what is more, one and all are but earth.
Ungodliness most see as his bane, though belief he lacks not, but endless other things he does. Of many things he may be wited, but of bloated self-love, never. Followers of the given, whom I bolden to say you cannot reckon lightly, utterly amaze, forwhy the two, to wit godliness and belief, they make one and, unfit to tell the one from the other, sight a gainsay. "Blind" say I not unto them, for it gives "I eye", and believe you me, I see nought and, methinks, naught is there to see. All and sundry behold the world in sunder ways and each shapes a look-out on the world, a weltanschauung, a weighty and welcome income from a sisterly speech, unlike any other. If one and the same happening unfolds before two, each hues it not in like wise. This is how things should be, if one is left to his own six wits, a few, some say, have seven, as one is the sixth, or in lower English, understand slang, hunch, and the other the mind. But the latter lacks, and one mostly sees only what one is taught to see and blots out never-ending inputs because of them one can neither reck nor them hold. What one cannot unravel or untangle one throws out; it is lighter thus.
It is in the Book of Matthew, "If the blinde lead the blinde, both shall fall into the ditch". Man has been forever wallowing in the broth of seeming truths and half-baked, though often fair-looking, thoughts retched and hawked by scathes, madmen, warped and twisted brains, though all are wreathed and writhed, half-wits, seekers of loftiness, moonrakers and wool-gatherers and bleeding-hearts, all blurting out blight burning out blithe.
The Fall took spring not out of "our foremost fader's" wrong-doing, for he begat no sin nor evil but was guiltless as a suckling in swaddling-clothes, for the threesome, namely sinfulness, evilness and guilt, are sagas woven a very long time after by canny mani-kins, some say uncanny, ever bent on rotting all and dirtying (the name of) Man, Adam, nor from "the mother of mankind" who was no vixen, but too shrewd to be outwitted by the snaky shrew, but from man's yearning to fill the emptiness in his guts, a feeling that seeded whenas he set himself without and far above the kingdom of being. Hearken to Hamlet gloat: "What a piece* of work is a man!.. the Parragon* of Animals*".
This overweenness is one of the early weanlings of his awry awareness of the twoness of his being, that is bodiliness, which he shares with other beings, live and otherwise, and ghostliness, the having of a soul or mind, but which better both be called crazy weirds who bewitch him into believing, amongst other uncunning things, that he is matchless. Witness: "Who can tell yf that the sowle of man ascende*, Or with the body of it dye?". Now man is not only two but is wondering if he is above death itself. Milton crows: "To conquer* Sin and Death the two grand* foes".
It behoveth, that the son of man must die
Woken by the glare of enlightedness, man shuddred at the awful scowl of death, the foeman who snatched life and snuffed out bliss even of the mightful and blessed. In the timeless wording of the Skald of Avon:"Death - Grim-grinning ghost". Life seemed to him as fleet and hapless as a mad flitting bog fire, a will-o'-the-wisp. In the hope of striking dumb, if not all, some of those very few who have borne with this gruesomeness thus far, meanness for forbearness, in the dark fern days it was never thought that there was an upper cut-off time at which living ended, as deadly sickness and wild death left but very few to die tamely, and akin to beings he deems below him, man lived only for the the there and then always fighting for his life and livelihood. Seek as he might, the span of it he made not to outstretch, although it is said he did of late, but only for a little. He became to behold himself as a sheer deathling; man and fly are one. This will not do. But how can a deathful being overcome Death, the all-mighty Lord of Darkness, the unsparing dempster from whose deathly doom not a thing flees?
Man fully grasps that his body is but flesh and blood and is readily unfleshed by the Mighty Evener at will. But might not his wonderful new-born inwit come up with weapons which he could bewield in this most uneven war?
He witched and crafted, ranted and drivelled, but, true to the saying "great uproar and little wool", all the warlockry and witchery only yielded tongue wieldings, at most loud, cast strengthless before the binding spell of Death, the wizened, howbeit ever tireless, wise weird wizard, and sooth, the only one; after word weird cometh but seldomly and haply. To say the sooth, and sooth to say, or to speak sooth, inasmuch as anything can be called sooth, instead of waning, the Fiend's lot and might waxed, for as the fetters and shackles which bonded man to earthliness slackened and as the heavy and cumbersome yoke of hard sweat lightened, more tide fell to his lot to idle away, so he began to work, drill and whet his still wet wit which sharpened and shaped into, to borrow for good, for man is best known for his dimness and greed, hackney, read worn out, or like old hire horses, speeches and saws, a two-edged unwieldy tool in the hands of the clever and a self-cutting, not to say self-killing, one in those of a seedless pate. But since witty and witless are one and the same, as man has shewn oftsithes, his downfall must needs be knelled. Death cast his ensnaring shadow over mankind which became to be held in thraldom. Death is no more the last breath only, He is the Lord of Life, an Hibernicism*, that is to say a(n) (Irish) bull, or to english outcast Latin and Greek words, a(n) (a)gainsaying, a godhead to be dreaded and worshipped. He was handed the rune staff, his brand betokening might and doom, with two rune-staves, one the skull and twin bones like a slant wry rood, ever his mark, and the sight of Him, seemless, bearing the reaping-hook. Be that as it may, man, in the depth of his soul, in the blackest spot of his heart, which could be very murky indeed, craved not only to ungod Death, but also for his belittlement and fordoing. Death killed?! If but the works of Him at his dark-shrouded craft be wist, they might be twisted about and swung against Him; Jack Ketch hanged by his own rope, so to speak.
How doth Death slay? At a time reckoned by, and beknown only to, Himself, Death, in an eerie ferly fain fiendish fit of schadenfreude (evil-fun), another intake from High Dutch, knocks at the door and deals His deadly stroke to an unwitting being, which, more often than not, anon crumbles to dust and ash and is then scattered by the four winds to forgetfulness. Thwart Him and keep the body.
Helped by the hot and dry, the Egyptians* were the first to happen upon a way to hold the bodies of their kingly folk from rot and to bury them beneath big stone buildings, in, to make English an against-the-hair greek word, flesh-eaters. About 4,700 years ago, Zoser, the first overlord of the Old Kingdom, built the earliest truly great and awsome lich-house (whence, perhaps, the name Pharaoh*) hallowed to the worship of the dead and to the new belief in deathlessness. As time went by, body-keeping kept being bettered until it reached a very high peak in the New Kingdom. Once this belief took hold, it began to be fleshed over by a druid-like, queer brew of witan, holy men, soothsayers, though the sooth they said not, spell-casters and quacksalvers entrusted with upholding and lofting it. As luck would have it, its dawn and that of writing timed with one another, so that, besides the many drawings showing its utter works, the inner ones were set down in runes to be kept, as an insight, for very long. Even a weightful work wholly on death was wrought, the Book of the Dead.
Life after life and life were likened together, so to spare king and kin the need to work in the hereafter, small carvings of thanes, churls, yeomen, bedels, swains, knaves, drudges, scullions, esnes, the(o)ws and thralls, in the stead of which the home-made ushabti* may stand, were inearthed to be called into being by witchcraft in the thereafter to wait upon the kingly folk with hand and foot. Towards the end of the Old Kingdom, a berserk upheaval led to utter evenness, or Ma'at*, even in the right to everlastingness, which became a lodestone behither, a putting before which the Oxenford English Word-Book is for breathing life into again, death and on the thither side thereof, or, to the behoof of shortness, bethither, a nonce-word for this once, thus behither and bethither death. Each and every one, upon death, undergoes a hearing in which his good and bad deeds are scaled. The belief that the world could be cleft a-twain into good and evil is a cripple child of a shallow brain that would rather that the world be weightless light than seeing being for what it soothly is. This is not to say that things should not be lighted, for knowledge, as it is today, scanty though it may seem to some, grounds upon cleaving the jumble of life into shearings that could be grasped by our clawless heads. Only the worthy are gifted with untold bliss, whereas to the wicked frightful wyte is meted out, or dying, only this time for ever and ay. However, man's inbeing being what it is, a few did not hold this belief to be soothfast and many of these sunk themselves in the "Blisse of the* bodi", heedless of the bequeath warning of the whirlwind as the seed of sown wind, whilst others held other ones.
Before leaving the land of the Pharaohs*, it may be worth somebody's while to wot, first, that outside beliefs from the east mingled freely with home-grown ones and at times played upsetting jolts and jerks, as when in the twilight of the 18th House, about 3356 years ago, King Amenophis* ("Amen* is happy and fulfilled") the Fourth, whose fere was Nefertiti*, or Akhnaton* ("It gladdens Aton*"), for which he was better known, and as he would rather have been called, swept away all gods but one, putting forth one -godedness, albeit that it was soon forsaken after him, the worship of one god, namely Aton*. For this shews that this belief in one almighty god is very old in sooth, and may be the brood of the earliest and furthest-reaching one-goded one, that of the Hebrews*, the offspring of Jacob* son of Isaac* begotten by Abraham* the Wita (whose other son, this time by Hagar*, Ishmael*, the Lord will hear, fathered the Arabs*) of whom the forefather was Shem* born of Noah*, who also seeded swarthy Ham* of Africa* and ashen Japheth* who at first dwelled in the Caucasus*, on the grounds that Jehovah*, He That Is, held sway among the Childer of Israel* and roved along the ea Nile*, which ought to be Nilotic* for life-giver, for hundreds of floods before Aton* was set, alone, on the seat of godhood. Next, that dead men tell no tales, but if they had the hap, they would tell tales out of school and put to rights the tales of the tub spun by the quacks of Egypt* and their sometime bondsmen.
