Still Thinking

My latest project is distilled wisdom, which is nearly as tricky as finding the Philosopher’s Stone. The sort of thing that led Elgin to lose his marbles.

I commenced with suitable raw materials in the biggest sudden retort I could make. At the bottom I put a layer of Emmanuelle Kant, and then for safety, I piled on some religious cant before adding the full works of Descarte, a small hay cart and some fake art. Finally, I threw in some Bertrand Russell, the neighbour’s annoying Jack Russell and enough brown paper to make a serious rustle. I think I may have dropped my thought-a-day motivational calendar in by accident.

I added a tin of peas, such an overlooked letter, and a spoonful of eye’s cream along with other pureed pronouns, because when you’re looking for wisdom it’s best to know who’s who and what’s what, what?

Beneath my sudden retort I stacked Aristotle with Plato and let the debate heat up.

Meanwhile, I built a fractious column, fully exaggerated at ten feet tall, packed it with editorial marks, some Karl Marx, TK Maxx and a sprinkle of typographic details, and finally sealed it to the retort with tight-packed conjunctions, and so.

When you’re distilling ideas, the devil is in the detail, which you don’t want leaking out.

After months of warming to some of the ideas, and watching the slow churn of concepts, I saw the first wisps of vapid wisdom floating up the fractious column. At the very top, tiny drops of the lightest fractions, the high falutin, gathered where I could cream them off and make a little money selling them to Christmas Cracker manufacturers.

I may have drunk a few, just to check the taste.

A week after the last empty idea passed my lips, a tide of bees rose up the fractious column. Be the best you can be dripped into a small, glass receptive audience, followed by be confident in yourself. When a sludge of be true to yourself formed beneath the lighter aphorisms, I realised that it was just the remains of my motivational calendar.

First principles gathered in the condenser, working their way out with nothing else to go on. Being quite unstable, they reacted with trivial problems and condensed into pure solutions. I resolutely scraped off these resolutions and put them in my diary for January.

Pure truth bubbled at the bottom of the column, too heavy to rise, too volatile to stay in the mire of boiling opinion and conjecture below. I was prepared for this when I built the fractious column and had put a light-hearted article near the bottom to draw off anything too dangerously weighty. I pulled up a chair and watched the bubbles, hard and heavy, stark and simple, and like most people, such truth was more than I could stand.

As a final precaution, I took the truth, the whole truth, the utterly unforgiving truth, and buried it in the garden. If you want to know the truth, I can introduce you, but honestly, you may not like it.

Straight and true, but safely devoid of truth, my fractious column got on with the business of refining wisdom, of separating fact from fiction. After eight months, I saw little sparks of inspiration, so I wrapped the fractious column in layers of flannel, because those little sparks can get out of hand and turn into explosions of dangerous ideas.

At nine months I thought I heard ideas chiming, but after I leant, and bent my ear, I realised I was simply fooled by verse, and mere doggerel at that. It was nothing more than the neighbour’s Jack Russell dogging my efforts.

I reached the sticking point, probably fetched by the Jack Russell, when the fractious column cleared completely in a final editorial frenzy. As thin as air and impossible to truly grasp, the purest wisdom rose incrementally toward the very top.

After a year of my life, a single drop of the most rarefied concepts teetered on the cusp, unsure whether to rise or fall, so ephemeral that I had to use the edge of my Occam’s razor to raise it to my eyes and gaze upon my success. True wisdom is so clear that most people see right through it, but through my ongoing efforts to refine the finest of intellectual refinement, I made a bit of a rose-tinted spectacle of myself, just enough to clearly see anything that was too clear to see.

The heaviest fraction balanced on a knife-edge, ready for me to think the unthinkable, drink the undrinkable, and curse the inevitable.

I think.

Their four.

Ay! Yam.

That’s the trouble with distilled wisdom, it’s so easy to get contamination with bitter words, or bits of words, and stray vegetable matter from the paper.

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This was inspired by the #BlogBattle prompt of Abstract.

Images from pixabay