Forgetting the Kings and Queens of England

In a paraded normalcy, the children are hidden back there, kept behind their swipe card system and their guards. These low buildings have no movement; the windows are sheeted like mirrors to hide their games from anyone outside and this is at it should be. But are we helping these children? The boundary between innocence and this world is like the edges of poetry and prose; there is no boundary. We have the secret world of playground duty and no grown-up must know this. We all forget the depth of our games as we get older. We forget all the Kings and Queens of England which we once knew by heart and we forget all those things we must not tell the teacher because we get older and simpler. Our professed complexity is just that, an over-complicated world with no real meaning. Think what you need to live and think what you have to live. There is a gap between them, a valley so wide and we have to fill it with emptiness, trashy TV, bad food, house makeovers. My continuous dream is to sit and read at night, some calming music in the background and what do I do? Nothing so meaningful and yet the time goes by without me noticing it. I would become a child again, able to sit down with a book at any time I want to; able to do what I want without being told I have to fill in a form. Over 90% of what we do is meaningless.

In this dark room, I could curl up and forget everything. A book and food and warmth. Did the poor souls in Plato's cave get books and food and warmth? They had warmth because they were lit from behind to form the shadows. The engines of complexity lie destroyed, half submerged in the sea, giant metal skeletons, the tall remains of the great machinery which humans like to think turns the world. Food does not grow because we have machinery; it grows because it has all it needs to know how to grow within it. Its food and moisture may be delivered by machine but it equally well comes from the ground and the sky without any intervention by us. Perversely, our machinery dries out the sky and leaches all the food from the earth. We kill the world and then make more machines to resurrect it. Evolution is like balancing a ruler on an outstretched finger of each hand. Bring your hands together and the processes of friction and gravity will ensure that your fingers meet at the balance point - it always works and is so simple as to be ludicrously pointless to describe in any mathematical way. There is no point in defining another way to do this. And yet we take the DNA apart, not just to understand it but to modify it, make it do what we want it to do.

Step back and see these children; what we have done to them? Sweetness and light are taken from us so young now.