Lawrence R. Spencer's Blog, page 175
April 11, 2021
DREAMS OF FOOLS
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THE REALITY OF DEATH REVEALS THE DREAMS OF FOOLS AND OTHER HUMANS
lawrence r. spencer. 2013.
SHERLOCK HOLMES Personal Memoir Chapter One
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CHAPTER 1: CHARLES OF CHRIST CHURCH“When I first arrived in the great city, I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air — or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought.”, I thought to myself.
It was a cold morning of the early spring. We sat after breakfast upon either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-colored houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet.
As neither Dr. Watson, or myself, had any other pressing matters before us, and no prospect of employment to enhance either my interest or livelihood, we spent the afternoon perusing the London Times. I read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always instructive, most particularly in the observation that violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
Our original acquaintance, when I had been lodged on Montague Street, around the corner from the British Museum, was on Saturday, July 16th. I had spent the day working in the chemical laboratory at St. Bart’s Hospital. In the morning, I complained to a young medical man named Stamford about not being able to find someone to go halves on some nice rooms I had found in Baker Street.
That very afternoon Stamford brought Dr. Watson into the lab to inquire about sharing the rooms. The next day Watson and I went around together to inspect our potential domicile at 221B Baker Street. We made our arrangements then and there with Mrs. Hudson, the landlady. Watson began moving in that night, and I the next morning, Monday, July 18th.
Dr. Watson represented himself to me as having served as an Assistant Surgeon of the Army Medical Department, which was attached to the 66th Berkshire Regiment of Foot in Afghanistan. He related to me that he was discharged following an injury received in the line of duty during the infamous British defeat at the Battle of Maiwand, in July of the previous year. Watson related that he was nearly killed in the long and arduous retreat from the battle, but was saved by his orderly, Murray, who threw the doctor on a pack-horse and thus helped to ensure his escape from the field.
Watson is strongly built, of a stature either average or slightly above average, with a thick, strong neck, owing to the fact that he was once an athlete, whom, although a Scot who was educated at the University of Edinburgh, played rugby for Blackheath in south-east London.
I spent nearly half an hour lighting and relighting my pipe while Dr. Watson shuffled through the tabloid pages, grunting occasionally at one trivial report or another.
“I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping about in my rooms”, I complained in a melancholy tone.
Watson grunted impassively from behind the unfolded sheets of the newspaper with little regard for anything other than the distraction provided by a river of typographical trivialities many men frequently employ to dull their empathy. I will admit that I have most certainly included myself amoung their number on numerous occasions.
Apparently the dampness of my environs had affected my personal blend of Latakia and Cavendish tobaccos, which I have relished as a flavor more pleasing than the finest culinary delicacies of Paris for many years. Ordinarily, the heat retained by the fine meerschaum bowl of my pipe was sufficient to dry the mixture enough to keep it well lit. In any case, matches are plentiful and cheap. Suitable pipe tobacco is not.
For some years Watson had taken it upon himself to create adventure stories based upon my criminal investigations, which, upon several occasions, he had accompanied me at my request. Most frequently, I asked for his assistance when the matter at hand presented a feature of menace which may have required fire arms. For this purpose Dr. Watson seemed inevitably prepared, bearing his service revolver in his pocket, should the occasion for the use of it present itself. Indeed, I presumed without justification, that his military service qualified him as a proven marksman, though, in point of fact, as an assistance surgeon, he had never fired a gun in defense of his country or himself.
My review of his written accounts of our adventures did not meet with my satisfaction upon any occasion. After reading a few of them I chose to ignore them more frequently than not, demurring of his insistence upon sensationalizing the science of logic and observation which were the only features of my investigations worthy of note, in my own opinion.
I had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers in search of items of professional interest. Having reflected upon the subject of his scribbling as I researched the morning papers, with fruitless result, I emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture him upon his literary shortcomings.
“To the man who loves art for its own sake”, I remarked, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, “it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of my cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.”
“And yet,” said Watson smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.”
I took up a glowing cinder from the fireplace with tongs and lighted with it my long cherry-wood pipe. I smoked this when I was inclined to a cooler and sweeter smoke than that provided by my briar pipes.
“You have erred in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing”, I said, puffing ringlets of smoke into the air which merged and gently dissipated upon the ceiling.
“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” Watson remarked with some coldness.
“It is not a matter of selfishness or conceit” said I, answering, as was my wont, to his thoughts rather than his words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing — a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of adventure tales.”
“At the same time,” I remarked after a pause, during which I had sat puffing at my pipe and gazing down into the fire, “you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavored to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”
“The end may have been so,” he answered, “but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.”
“Pshaw. My dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction?! But, indeed, if you are trivial I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past”, I said with an earnestly disheartened conviction.
“Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last.”, I said in a black, disgruntled mood.
For some considerable time we sat wrapped in silence. I contemplated the flickering embers of the fire, intrigued by the inexplicable, spontaneous conversion of matter into energy for which no reasonable explanation had ever been offered by any of the great minds of science or philosophy.
Watson continued rattling and shuffling through a pile of papers which I had already discarded with overwhelming disinterest. There was seldom much of any interest to me in the press, unless it reported upon some incident or situation which offered a game of investigation to me.
After some little while, Watson reported to me that he had chanced upon a curious article concerning the mysterious disappearance of a young girl.
“Have you already read it?”, he inquired.
“No, I cannot say that I recall it. If there is a feature about it that strikes you as being of singular interest, perhaps you will be kind enough to share it with me”, I said.
According to the report, he summarized, a female child of about ten years was reported missing for several hours by her two siblings and a professor of mathematics, currently at Oxford, while enjoying a Sunday outing along the river Thames. The girls, when interviewed, stated that their sister, Alice Liddell, had been chasing a white rabbit, and had apparently followed it down a rabbit hole and disappeared beneath an enormous elm tree! The child remained missing for several hours.
Watson read the section of the report which specified certain details of the case he thought I might find relevant, as follows:
“April 19th. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat up the River Thames with three young girls: Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13), Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10)and Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8). The three girls are the daughters of Henry George Liddell, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church as well as headmaster of Westminster School. The journey had started at Godstow, a hamlet on the River Thames northwest of the centre of Oxford.”
“Naturally”, Watson said, paraphrasing the report, “the family of the child, upon news of the incident, were highly distressed. The professor in question, a Mr. Dodgson, has not been detained by authorities, but several unnamed persons have asserted suspicion of pedophilia against this man!” Watson paused as he completed reading the remaining portion of the article.
“How very curious”, he remarked, placing the paper next to his chair, and pulling out his own smoking pipe, tobacco and tools. “The siblings of the child insist that all parties involved are entirely innocent. They assert that their sister is at fault for chasing a strange rabbit. Indeed, they claimed that the rabbit was wearing a waistcoat, and examining a pocket watch when they last saw it!
Furthermore, the child in question, Alice, when questioned by the press, stated emphatically that much ado was being made of nothing, and that the entire incident was merely a story conjured by Mr. Dodgson as an innocent amusement! Certainly, the entire matter is nothing more than a sensational hoax, perpetrated by the Times editor as an attraction to gullible persons to read the paper. Typical behavior of the press! Reprehensible, I should say” , he concluded.
I pondered and smoked over the matter for several moments, mesmerized by droplets of rain streaming down the panes of glass which faced westward from my upstairs rooms at 221 B Baker Street.
“Certainly”, I observed to Watson, “this report demonstrates that the magistrates investigating the case are mentally incompetent. The family, powerless to press charges in the matter, as there is no evidence of foul play, and no harm having been done, are powerless to prosecute.”
Nevertheless, I seized upon this peculiar report as an opportunity to busy myself with a new investigation. My curiosity pressed me to make an inquiry with the constabulary under whose jurisdiction the matter had been attended.
However, before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, I reminded myself, the inquirer must begin by mastering more elementary problems. After all, it is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment. To that end I posted a telegram that very afternoon to the constabulary at Oxford to whom I was known personally through our cooperation upon several cases in that area.
The following morning I received a reply from which I discovered that Mr. Dodgson was a bachelor Anglican clergyman. Moreover, and most importantly, a comfortable livelihood was provided him through his talent as a mathematician, which had won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship.
No formal charges had been filed against Mr. Dodgson or Reverend Robinson Duckworth by the girl’s father, the Vice-Chancellor. However, the telegram implied that the inferred scandal of sexual indiscretion fomented by the newspaper report remained a topic of discussion upon the campuses of the university as well as in the community at large, and had alerted the constabulary to maintain an informal interest in the matter.
Contrasted with this supplemental information, the scandalous implications regarding his behavior, as described in the Times report, were becoming more intriguing to me by the moment! The most singular feature of the case, for me, was not the possibility of indiscretion but rather that no further mention whatever had been made of the rabbit!
Having no further information available to me, and disdaining contact with the press, as was my usual practice, I determined that my most effective method of investigation was to go around to visit professor Dodgson at his offices at Christ Church.
As for the matter of Mr. Dodgson’s integrity, rather than assuming that an impropriety might have occurred, it seemed more likely to me that his ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. As a mathematician he is undoubtedly astute, given his position as a professor. However, an unmarried man of his position should most certainly understand that his culpability for the temporary disappearance of this child placed him at the greatest risk socially! The penchant for society to persecute such a person, even a clergyman, in the absence of evidence of his innocence, is certainly a matter of gravity, if not sensibility.
I might easily have dismissed the matter entirely if it were not for an abiding curiosity on my part to reconcile the singular incongruities in the report. How could a young girl, and not her siblings, disappear down a rabbit hole for several hours, having been observed, reportedly, in pursuit of a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and possessing a pocket watch? Further, why would the children assert that the incident was merely a story conjured by Mr. Dodgson for their amusement, when the adults in attendance at the scene treated the matter with so much earnestness that the police and press were summoned?
— END OF CHAPTER ONE —
—
Read Chapter Two here: http://lawrencerspencer.com/2011/01/22/sherlock-holmes-my-life-chapter-two/
April 10, 2021
ILLUSION
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“ILLUSION IS THE FIRST OF ALL PLEASURES.”— Oscar Wilde —
( Painting “Innerworld”, by Michael Parkes )
PRETENDING NOT TO KNOW
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“The closest concept that human beings have to describe an IS-BE (Immortal Spiritual Being) is as a god: all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite. So, how does a god stop being a god? They pretend NOT to know. How can you play a game of “hide and seek” if you always know where the other person is hiding?
You pretend NOT to know where the other players are hiding, so you can go off to “seek” them. This is how games are created. You have forgotten that you are just “pretending”. In so doing, IS-BEs become entrapped and enslaved inside a maze of their own devising.
How does one create a cage, lock one’s own self inside the cage, throw away the key, and forget there is a key or a cage, and forget there is an “inside” or “outside”, and even forget there is a self? Create the illusion that there is no illusion: the entire universe is real, and that no other universe exists or can be created.” — excerpt from the book ALIEN INTERVIEW, edited by Lawrence R. Spencer
EMPATHY
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April 9, 2021
Erase Your Past Tea
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Gee, here’s a good idea. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Maybe they just forgot to remember….
Available at http://www.neatoshop.com/product/Erase-Your-Past-Tea
April 8, 2021
THE CREATOR IS A BEETLE (OR A STAR)
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The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane Is famous for having repeatedly said that “the Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles, for the simple reason that there are just so many varieties of beetles on Earth.” (He also noted that the Creator also was “endowed with a passion for stars” – again, because there are just so darn many of them.)
Stephen Jay Gould added to this by noting:
“God is most likely to take trouble over reproducing his own image, and his 400,000 attempts at the perfect beetle contrast with his slipshod creation of man. When we meet the Almighty face to face he will resemble a beetle (or a star).”
The Coleoptera /koʊliːˈɒptərə/ order of insects is commonly called beetles. The word “coleoptera” is from the Greek κολεός,koleos, meaning “sheath”; and πτερόν, pteron, meaning “wing”, thus “sheathed wing. The Coleoptera include more species than any other order, constituting almost 25% of all known types of animal life-forms. About 40% of all described insect species are beetles (about 400,000 species), and new species are discovered frequently. Some estimates put the total number of species, described and undescribed, at as high as 100 million, but a figure of one million is more widely accepted. ————–
According to astronomers, there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, stretching out
into a region of space 13.8 billion light-years away from us in all directions. And so, if you multiply the number of stars in our galaxy by the number of galaxies in the Universe, you get approximately 1024 stars. That’s a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros. That’s a septillion stars. But there could be more than that.
It’s been calculated that the observable Universe is a bubble of space 47 billion years in all directions. This is a minimum value, the Universe could be much bigger – it’s just that we can’t ever detect those stars because they’re outside the observable Universe. It’s even possible that the Universe is infinite, stretching on forever, with an infinite amount of stars. So add a couple more zeros. Maybe an infinite number of zeroes. That’s a lot of stars in the Universe.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/102630/how-many-stars-are-there-in-the-universe/#ixzz2uK83T2IZ
1666: RECOMMENDED READING
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A “conspiracy theory” is not a theory if there is an actual conspiracy. – LRS
The beauty of this book is that is precisely and briefly educates the blind and intentionally ignorant “sheep” that we have all been lied to, tricked, coerced and suppressed into accepting phony money, incessant and senseless wars, social chaos, and the ultimate “culling” of the human population by members of a very small number of Kabbalist secret societies. Here is a description of the book from the website of the publisher:
“Most people have heard of Jesus Christ, considered the Messiah by Christians, and who lived 2000 years ago. But very few have ever heard of Sabbatai Zevi, who declared himself the Messiah in 1666. By proclaiming redemption was available through acts of sin, he amassed a following of over one million passionate believers, about half the world’s Jewish population during the 17th century.
Although many Rabbis at the time considered him a heretic, his fame extended far and wide. Sabbatai’s adherents planned to abolish many ritualistic observances, because, according to the Talmud, holy obligations would no longer apply in the Messianic time. Fasting days became days of feasting and rejoicing. Sabbateans encouraged and practiced sexual promiscuity, adultery, incest and religious orgies.
After Sabbati Zevi’s death in 1676, his Kabbalist successor, Jacob Frank, expanded upon and continued his occult philosophy. Frankism, a religious movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, centered on his leadership, and his claim to be the reincarnation of the Messiah Sabbatai Zevi. He, like Zevi, would perform “strange acts” that violated traditional religious taboos, such as eating fats forbidden by Jewish dietary laws, ritual sacrifice, and promoting orgies and sexual immorality. He often slept with his followers, as well as his own daughter, while preaching a doctrine that the best way to imitate God was to cross every boundary, transgress every taboo, and mix the sacred with the profane. Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Gershom Scholem called Jacob Frank, “one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole of Jewish history”.
Jacob Frank would eventually enter into an alliance formed by Adam Weishaupt and Meyer Amshel Rothschild called the Order of the Illuminati. The objectives of this organization was to undermine the world’s religions and power structures, in an effort to usher in a utopian era of global communism, which they would covertly rule by their hidden hand: the New World Order.
Using secret societies, such as the Freemasons, their agenda has played itself out over the centuries, staying true to the script. The Illuminati handle opposition by a near total control of the world’s media, academic opinion leaders, politicians and financiers. Still considered nothing more than theory to many, more and more people wake up each day to the possibility that this is not just a theory….”
SCIENCE FICTION CULT-URE
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“Science fiction” is NOT “science”, but it is DEFINITELY fiction. The problem has become that people BELIEVE what they see on film, and internet in the form of “electronic media”. Visual effects technology has become so advanced that “virtual reality” has become “reality”.
“Belief” is the foundation of mind-control. It has always been basis of power for religions. There have literally been THOUSANDS of “gods” and religions in written history of Earth. Modern “Science Fiction Cult-ure” has become a new “religion”. It is often referred to as the “new age” culture or consciousness. Please remember that every “religion” is created by people, just like you and me.
A enormous library of books, films, videos, TV shows, etc. about extraterrestrials, time travel, black holes, and a vast array of “theoretical history” have become “mainstream media” mania since the 1960s with the introduction of Star Trek on national TV. Since then, a vast “UFO CULT-ure” has been created by film, television and and Youtube. The phenomena is literally “mind-boggling”.
I suggest that we not lose touch with “real reality” and allow ourselves to become overwhelmed with “virtual reality”. Take a walk outside, go to a forest, or to the beach… make direct physical and visual contract with solid objects in nature. Let’s get REAL about reality. Don’t get sucked in to the “religion” of Science Fiction.
