04

Ordinarily in the world there is so much objective pressure brought to bear on subjectivity that it is nothing short of miraculous that subjectivity can survive at all, never mind flourish in the guise of the artist.

Life appears determined to thwart 'transvaluations', 'rebirths', 're-evaluations', and other endeavours to 'turn the tables' on the objective status quo from a subjective standpoint. Rather, does it seem that 'transvaluations', 'rebirths', and such like alternatives are pretty much the metaphysical exception to the general non-metaphysical rule, and that subjectivity is powerless to directly threaten the objectivity of 'the world' and, more especially, that which metachemically rules over it from an unequivocally objective point-of-view. In that respect, idealism can no more defeat materialism than transcendentalism defeat fundamentalism – at least not directly, in a clash of antitheses subject to axial differentiation.

For artists like us, it is enough to have lived a largely metaphysical life or lifestyle, given to philosophy and the pursuit and understanding of Truth, without having been unduly co-opted by 'the world' to a repudiation of 'inner values' and opposition to thought. Our estimation of success is non-monetary in character, attaching, rather, to the fait accompli of what we have creatively achieved.

Generally speaking, women have no time for religion as understood by an adherence to metaphysical transcendentalism (coupled to a subordinate metaphysical idealism) because too objective, in their vacuous natures, to believe in the subjectivity of 'inner values'. The only form of religion they usually believe in, which in point of fact is less religious than occult, is astrology, and thus the 'influence' of the stars and planets on human behaviour, destiny, fate, fortune, circumstances, etc. At any rate, that is based in the concrete on both noumenal and phenomenal terms, linking the supernatural to the natural, like ethereal objectivity (stars) with corporeal objectivity (planets, including, not least, the Earth itself), whereby will and spirit, elemental particles and molecular particles, are free to play a dominating hand.

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Handguns with revolving barrels are called revolvers. Hence handguns without revolving barrels are not revolvers but something relatively different, like semi-automatics.

Knowledge is – at any rate to a male – more liberating than confusing. In fact, it is ignorance which leads to confusion, not knowledge.

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Women have a way of sensing when you think and often do something to censure it.

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In Britain, Parliament is divisible between the upper chamber of the 'House of Lords' and the lower chamber of the 'House of Commons', the former being where peers sit and the latter where commoners sit, as in a kind of noble/plebeian distinction. To the best of my knowledge, few peers have ever sat in the Commons, but more than a few persons of common origins have sat in the Lords!

There has been much talk in both Britain and Ireland, in recent days, of abolishing the upper chamber in favour of a unicameral alternative. But such fanciful notions as enter the heads of certain deluded politicians determined to exploit a populist agenda signally fail to take account of the fact that neither monarch nor president can directly liaise with the lower chamber, so that if, as 'head of state', such persons are to have any connection with parliament and, hence, government at all, they require an upper chamber, as befitting their higher rank and sovereign status, which cannot be brought into direct parliamentary contact with the 'representatives of the people', as of the common herd, and more especially of this or that particular political faction thereof.

Now whilst this may not apply as much to the lower/upper distinction between the Dáil and the Seanad in the Republic of Ireland, which is after all a republic, as it does to that between the Commons and the Lords in the United Kingdom, ruled as it is by a constitutional monarchy, it still applies to some extent and should be respected in view of the distinction between a titular president and the parliamentary executive, and the need to maintain such a distinction, free of political compromise, on the world stage, where more than political considerations have to be addressed.

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