The Hamlet and Cheese Omelet
The key to the great British navy of yesteryear was the Danes. They were
all British from the Stone of Scone, upon which the Kings were crowned. The
stone brought from ancient Israel, to escape the Babylonians.
British is a word actually sometimes construed as meaning: "they live together in peace and peacefully".
And said Brith is a key to prosperity from the coming together of the disparate
cultures. The Danes having become Viking or seafaring, brought the contribution
of the Ship Wright to the Brith of the Britons. But only after they stopped
belligerence and settled down usually in Thorpes.
It's as the famous Dane in Shakespeare's play said. "To be or not to be". Well, I
suppose two bes are better than one. But as you can tell from history,
apparently the Danes and the Vikings of all Scandinavia were anything but
indecisive. And while they could be thought of as huggers of the coastlines like
the early Mediterranean sailors were, history also proves they were anything
but, setting out not only into the deep open sees, but also into Arctic waters
and in open longboats and what they were able to do eventually with Brits of
England they were not able to do with the Native Americans of North America, and
perhaps that was unfortunate.
It's interesting to note that my ancestors were among the English colonists that
first populated North America's shores so many hundreds of years ago. And they
were most probably descendents from the stock of England's early Scandinavian
invaders that had eventually settled in. All the European colonists had great
problems settling in North America, but standing out from them all in ultimate
success were the hearty English, who seemed to have been just the right stuff
for the job.
An interesting point to
make. It's like the contrast between a work horse and a thoroughbred. When it
comes down to the real nitty-gritty, the thoroughbred is almost useless for
anything but a beautiful horse race.
And here we see the robustness of the combination the scrambling of the
ingredients of our Hamlet and cheese omelet. It reminds me of the joke about the
country that needed a stronger Air Force: The Presidentee just had the air
controller scramble the jets.
Here comes to play a word
known as "disparity", meaning the "difference between", such as the disparity in
binocular vision: When you look at something with both your eyes, each eye sees
a slightly different picture. Your mind combines the two pictures and what you
really see is actual perspective, known as "depth perception". It's a matter of
life and depth. So what you are really seeing is what is known in visual
physiology as "binocular disparity", or the difference between two pictures. Two
pictures or not two pictures, that is the question.
The key to success is not always, in fact hardly ever, and maybe even never, the
flawed human idea of "purity". With a good look at the hindsight of history,
noting the parts where all the successes took place, we can plainly see that it
is the mixture, different peoples working together in a blend of peace and
prosperity, that really make a functional and prosperous society. Yet it is not
always as simple as it seems.
In many societies, disparate cultures where different sorts of peoples are
living together in the same nation still do not blend. I've seen examples of
this in almost every place I have visited. I mean, people can do as they want.
Far be it from me to criticize. What I'm doing here, though, is observing a
phenomenon and pointing it out in this article.
When I lived in New York
City, I resided in the West Village back in the sixties. The neighborhood I was
in on Bedford Street was also a part of a section of New York City known as
"Little Italy". It was a neat little place with lots of great cultural value,
fantastic food, really interesting. But it was an enclave and in most places,
you will also find such sorts of enclaves where newly arrived citizens from
other parts of the world settle into tight-knit and exclusive micro communities
that serve to, it seems, retard, as it were, the blending of disparate societies
into the prosperous combination they could be.
Whatever the motive, security, purity, maybe even in some cases common sense,
the outcome is usually the same: the area assumes a sense of rigidity, in which
the denizens acquire an air of polarity and fragility, where the situation
becomes territorial and stilted, all the while camouflaged by the color and
liveliness of the culture brought in from the old country and clung to
tenaciously.
If that's you I'm
describing, what can I say. Real life has its insecurities were a person has to
step out, front up, take a few chances, learn the new language. True strength
comes from the blending of different factions, not from the misconceptions of
purity where fallible human nature tries desperately to filter out anything it
imagines to be impure.
In fact , we find out with some of these races, and peoples or even families
that are given to inbreeding and shutting out the external world, what they
imagine to be pure is really nothing more than stagnation. It's curious to note
that a malfunction of the human mind is to cause, or to tend to cause it's local
society around it to develop no further, but rather, in false visions of purity,
cause it to implode upon itself.
What we have actually in the world today, almost 6000 years after we emerged
from a stone age, is a mere shell, a fragment, of what humanity could be and
should've been. We see a weakened and debilitated species that is intent on its
own extinction; it's extreme intelligence being its own undoing. In other words
becoming the opposite of what it had intended itself to be. But then, I suppose,
two bes are better than one.
--Fine art,
digital art,
music,
several voice
introductions by me about my work, articles about
my artwork
and other topics such as sociology,
the cosmos,
economics,
education,
medicine,
poetry,
humor,
something I call premonitions,
and a series about covered bridges,
all by
yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are
feedback and exhaustive
contents pages. Plus
my weblogs are
on site, an
art
school and
classes.
The key to the great
British navy of yesteryear was the Danes.
-- Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved. --
They brought the contribution of the Ship Wright to the Britons.
|