Hedges and futures past and how to stare over them |
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oil on canvas the year is 1535 this marks the begginnings of the modern english nation and in its dark beginnings ... enlightenment within 5 years the wealth of the egregious church will be conveyed to the stout licencious king and its covenant with catholicism will be drawn like troops arraigned against a hilltop skyline and those arrayed below to battle with same a contest of religions and 150 years of consequent unrest uncertainty upheaval, but there is more in politics i john clerk am peering enviously over the hedge at Glastonbury abbey envying its riches and its wealth of relics a veritable mortuary of dead saints parts the finger of saint columba .. a man never destined to play the sackbut again soon its abbot, by my subterfuge will be hung and drawn and quartered atop the the jagged volcanic tooth of the tor and the ancient sacrificial brutality of the dawn of superstition be reviled upon its site for such are mirrors both in time and culture drawn and turned and where are we now mister clerk ? with the state pretending to be the enlightenment of church and god and with a parliament pretending to represent a nation to whom they are only infrequently answerable to this is where we are headed ... upon the firm realisation of technology the time has come for us to refresh our acquaintance with the interests and efforts of politics which from a majority has become remote for it has previously been accomplished by those to few and far removed from our own interest to be the sure representation of a peoples passion and their truth it may be asserted that we now have at our fingertips the ability to both dictate the course of our choosing and to vote upon it in the most significant way and though our first stumbling through this a true democracy and not the sham of those small representatives we now abuse in its name in small hegemony or trivial parliaments that barely disguise the vested interests of its sponsors often subversive to a peoples collective will so will science and computing mediate in voting on each issue in certainty we will make mistakes as a child makes errors in its learning and we will assuredly be waylaid by others interests in the way that cunning ploys or outrage mislead even the least credulous and though the devious might deceive you with pretences and outlandish statements that the common man is a fool easily led i do not believe that this is so beyond his tender learning and even more do we owe ourselves this debt of folly to make the world in our own collective image and for its purpose to both engender the opinions we hold ourselves and for them to be modified and compromised by the greater whole not be bled through the skin of a few with covetous designs that bear remote or compromised relationship to our collective desire for we only need governance to show debate and thence to act as a servant to our wishes
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