Dear Narrator
Well Polymnia is fervently urging me to contribute something to this blog _ if only to convince your audience that we do frequent the realms depicted in your pictures, which of course goes without saying but nevertheless may not be evident to many visitors to your site especially in your narration “Bringing Home The Bacon.” The latter got all of us guessing and we were just too willing, at first to put it off as some kind of parody.
Maybe some of your visitors may not be aware of the fact, that we emerged late in evolution, after most of the realms in and outside Olympia had been configured and any evolutionary convergence that may have occurred till then inevitably consolidated and subsumed under a synergetic divinity. And as all the realms & biotopes had their synergic guardians with seats and varying veto rights in the Olympian Assembly, so spoke the universally acclaimed wielder of Plasma-Thunderbolts…unto all the assembled Olympian dignitaries thus: "Let there be the Muses…"
The rest is history … that you and Polymnia have also blogged on this site.
Not only in this
multimedia-multicultural-multitasking
melting-pot-muckraking
global-earth-homogenizing
pygmies-cannibalizing
civil folks marginalising, terrorising and collaterally in infinity metamorposizing and then again red-cross-revitalising
models-curvy-form, pop-stars-microphone-meanderings
footballers-fancy-kicks,& film-stars-melodramtic-gestures
multimillion-dollarwise-honorising
sixty-year-old-woman’s construction-bricks-carrying pennies-wage in Calcutta streamlining
gods-morals-capitalizing
fossil-fuel-firing
petro-dollars-pulverising
petro-chemicals-synthesizing
genome-generating
absolute-zero-and-even-below-kalvinating
harvard-professors-outsourcing
rob-cops-patrolling
and
mars-mining
Age
but throughout the centuries we visited these regions and helped in their development.
Forgot about Gandhara?
In fact all of the Alexandrias that were founded during Alexander’s time, were less a celebration of the glory of this new Macedonian-Agamemnon, known in history text books as Alexander The Great than a deliberate effort of our chosen ones amongst his followers to spread our message across the whole world, whose dimensions however Aristotle, on whose know-how Alexander relied albeit reluctantly, had unfortunately meticulously miscalculated. Some people however believe it was a deliberate lie constructed by Aristotle in order to make Alexander return quickly to Greece before he became to old to analyze the data that Alexander was collecting for him. Nevertheless as you may know it was in fact at one of these realms, namely in Alexandria in Egypt where the Director of the Museion Eratosthenes about 250 years later calculated the circumference of this planet and talked about the feasibility of sailing around the world, that later spurned Columbus & Cook to try it out. Museion, in case you don’t know is an Academy, Research Center & a Library all rolled into one and is implicitly and sometimes explicitly dedicated to us. The Institutes with acronyms like MIT that you may find in Osaka, Oxford, Ottawa, Boston, Berlin, Bombay, Seoul, Seattle, Sydney, Shanghai & Singapore today are all its offshoots.
Even before Alexander, we traveled some of these regions with architects, artists & doctors who were sent as a royal tribute to the Achaemenid Kings. The Dareios’ Palace at Susa with its apadana was partly our inspiration. Unfortunately Alexander, who on one hand was hellenizing the world and at the same time increasingly adapting himself to the despotic ways of the conquered, burned this whole palace to the ground as a revenge for the destruction that the present king’s ancestor had wrought upon Acropolis! Alexander behaving like Tamerlane? The same ancestor, Dareios I __ the destroyer of Acropolis, by the way had a Greek royal physician named Demokrates. No less involved were we in the creation of the great palace at Persopolis where we accompanied, the Sculptor Telemachos from Phokis.
We were with Persian Muhammad Effendi ( a student of the Greek born Sinan from Turkey, one the worlds greatest dome-constructors of the time) as he decided to collaborate with Ustad Isa and Shirazi for the creation of one of the great wonders of Mankind in India.
We all spent years out there in Agra together and at the end Polymnia for the first time in all of her existence became sick, as the Mogul King decided to cut of the hands of some his designers & engineers & workers so that they may never construct another Taj Mahal or anything similar. We felt miserably powerless to do anything. Zeus was occupied with trying to keep his realm intact, since Prometheus was, it seemed loose again and this time had something more significant up his sleeve, as was prophesied by Chiron, and would be now conspiring with men like Newton & Maxwell. Zeus has only now reluctantly given up the chase, ever since Prometheus gave Einstein the ultimate secret of Jove’s good old Thunderbolts ( e = mc2 ) but that is subject of a different story that you already know. I think Urania may be more able to tell you about it than I, for she had some significant role to play in this.
Yes you may quite rightly say Ustad Isa & Effendi & Phidias have created the two greatest monuments to our Essence (which is harmony and Symmetry ) that the people on this planet have ever been capable of, with the only difference that Pericles was a friend of Phidias, whereas Shah Jehan was a despotic ruler with a great taste but who possessed full copyrights even on his most gifted subjects and had no qualms in misusing his rights . Asian Despotism and Greek Enlightenment! No doubt the Greeks had slaves, but they did not send them to Stadiums to kill each other and feast their eyes upon such gory deeds. The Greek Amphitheatres did not taste of blood. Nor did they closely resemble the frenzied orgies of the modern masses in huge Stadiums but were manifestations of rhyme , theatre, song and dance, of Calliope & Polymnia & Terpsichore as felt by the great pioneers like Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. They were the realms of the Muses...where people participated and did not just consume.
True the Olympics were different, the Greeks knocked down bulls and today the WWF may object to that, but at those times the empathy for animals in a more humanly way was not an evolutionary given as yet although doubtlessly implicitly emerging in India and which later found its expression & culmination in the teachings of Mahavira & Buddha. Certainly not a universal paradigm, but something that even some people living in this Mars-Mining Age may know first-hand about,__ your utter disbelief in the act of benign creation when the living crowing colorful & seemingly proud Romeo Cock in the garden metamorphosed itself into a dead matter swimming in your curry sauce in your dish on the dining table and you were only 9 years old, and you refused to eat because this cock had been your friend.
But then to enter the realm of the Muses, you have to be a child, just as you need to be a child in order to enter the realm of Jesus. Well in 19th Century some so-called Darwinists thought that this was some kind of regressive animism or neurosis and not as an evolutionary progress. What a joke, as if modern benign field-Biologists were primitive compared to corpses-dissecting scientist of the earlier centuries. Martin Luther King, Jr. in similar vein saw Gandhi as person who performed the evolutionary leap of raising the question of individual salvation offered by Jesus to a new sociological level. And Gandhi was behaving like a child. These are evolutionary paradigms not regressions and to be a child also means to be able to discard filters that others have fixed upon your eyes, to be a child again and see old things in new light. If this is a regressive act? We are the favorite children of Zeus(Power) & Apollo(Light) and will always remain children!
We have not necessarily approved everything Hellenistic, but we chose to make our appearance officially in Hellas and have made this realm our own for a long time.
However after our ‘banishment’ from the Olympian Heights and our migrating to other regions we are having an awful lot of fun traveling around in the new territories, spreading the good word and have had hardly any time to visit the banquet halls of the old gods. We have had also increasingly less time to accompany the bards on their Celtic harps at the Arthur-Round-Tables, join the vagabond bands of comedia-del-arta or travel around with Oswald von Wolkenstein, or for making music with Henry the VIII or Akbar The Great or visit the Churches rendering Cavalli & Bach, or to cheer up poor Mozart, as Saliere’s works are being played for the King and telling him he was the apple of Euterpe’s divine eye, or politely nodding to Wagner but listening to Pink Floyd or blinding Beethoven so that he could only see Euterpe, which was Jove’s decision not ours, or letting Frank Sinatra sing out loud in the oval office. We regret it but I must admit we have discovered new things and are enjoying every bit of it and are becoming increasingly aware of our new responsibilities here.
Except for Urania, who still prefers the stale airs of noble Chambers, Nobel-academies & sterile smell of modern Research Centers where they fuse-attune atoms, play with plasma-fire, peep through nano-divisibility’s and generate digital- or amino acid-codes, we are all out in the fresh air, which however does not mean that Urania is confined to any one geographic location, although her whereabouts are always a matter of high-profile politics for the humans__ politics that the humans, especially males can still play with an enviable Gilgamesh ethos and shamanic convictions. Don’t be surprised if you don’t find her in these domains or at your site. Her domains are still to a some extent SS & SSL!
Yes we are on the road, visiting even the tin pan alleys and of course the Mississippi deltas of this planet. You will find me and Terpsichore with Marlui Miranda in Amazons, with Qawaals on the subcontinent and the gypsies in Europe, amongst the didgeridoo playing aboriginals or suntanned-pale-faced immigrants, gamelan players in Jakarta, Chod-experts in Tibet, flamenco-virtuosi in Spain, yodelers in Bavaria, talking-drummers in Africa, Koto- & Shakuhaci-Masters in Japan and the Tabla-Ustaads in India. Yeh, kinda folksy !
And it is fun!Muses are meant to amuse, aren’t they?
Yours,
Terpsichore