Month: March 2020

the five faces of a fool

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The Five Faces of a Fool he pulls off proudly

The prince whines and whimpers loudly;

He defies the humility of heart as ever,

He falls for the false praises to no ends,

He mocks the wise counsels evermore,

He denies the evil’s counterpart as always,

He repeats easy starts and hard ends forever

With his head buried in the sand to problems

Till Sister of Charity helps him to stand up

To his follies and repent his foolish refuses

To face off the Five Faces of a fool once for all

And walk forward to what lies ahead in light.

 P.S.: While I was watching an episode of my favorite old western drama ‘Laramie’, a character of a falsely convicted ex gunslinger uttered, “I am seven kinds of a fool, ain’t I?” As a lover of fanciful words, I was immediately piqued by the expression, and in the subsequent search of the meaning thereof, instead, I happened on the expression of “The Five Faces of a Fool,” because of its sheer witticism from the wise King Solomon. 

It’s derived from Solomon’s fatherly advice to his spoiled crown prince son Rehobam, circa 930 BC. It’s a verse consisting of five-fold warning against the fall and the decline of the kingdom as a result of refusing steadfastly to listen to the wise and surrendering to God’s will out of audacious laziness in the guise of princely hubris. 

Obviously, the prince son was not a model student of his father’s school of proverbs, but the readers beyond the boundaries of time and place have taken the advice to heart and applied it to where it is deemed fit. In writing this poem, I was wondering which face of a fool I might be wearing… How about you my dear reader? But take heart! For there’s always redemption thru hope and faith. 

‘Heroes’, by Paul Johnson – review

Heroes: From Alexander the Great & Julius Caesar to Churchill & de GaulleHeroes: From Alexander the Great & Julius Caesar to Churchill & de Gaulle by Paul Johnson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We live in a paradoxical culture of hero-worshipping and anti-hero admiring. Hence, the idea of heroism seems to belong to an antediluvian ethos of the misty past when heroic mortals became divine immortals enshrined in pantheons of gods and goddesses. In fact, the ancient Greeks regarded a hero as a paragon of Arete, a prized quality in the Homeric hero, a blend of soldiery valor and moral integrity, a perfect union of moral and physical virtues. However, human heroism is constant of every age, universal of every culture and boundless of race and gender, which the public will always find it appealing and compelling because it shows how one can transform the impossible into the possible with a shot of gusto for courageousness in a cloak of confidence. That said, Heroes by Paul Johnson bears the witness to historical heroes and heroines whose dauntless spirits flew over the mountains of obstacles and brings them close to us with their human sides of fallibilities and follies.

From Samson and King David of Israel to Alexander the Great of Macedonia, to Julius Cesar of the Republic of Rome, and to Joan of Arc to Margaret Thatcher of the U.K., what these people have in common is not supernatural feats of magical physical power or omnipotent knowledge, but natural courage winged by the independence of mind arising from the ability to think things by themselves against dominant waves of compromises of their times. In this regard, heroes, as we generally define per se, are anti-establishment, anti-totalitarianism, and anti-supremacy in the sense that they challenge the subjectivity of popular beliefs or received norms to unpick the validity of truths, even if doing so will require their sacrifice and cruelty at the same time. It’s a sacrifice that they should endure the pains of persecution, and cruelty that they should vanquish the signs of human frailties to act upon their resolution without fail. Alas and alack, it sometimes results in pyrrhic victory, not only of the hero but also of those the hero intends to bring the triumph of the collective glory. Being a hero is akin to being  a Hamlet whose mental pendulum vacillates between “To be” or “Not to be.”

This is my fourth reading of Johnson’s books on history elaborately ornamented with his trademark natural wits, deeply saturated with his dazzling erudition of subjects, and deliciously narrated in a common language that always invite all, learned or novices, all of which are the essential key components of being a great writer who can share his knowledge and put people before ideas. In this book of heroes, Johnson is a sage raconteur of the heterodoxic history of mankind whose goal is to educate the public to illuminate the parts of our human history in the context of regarding the universal principles of reason and taste. With his scintillating story-telling skills, Johnson pivots deftly from the unknown interesting truths about his heroes to the cosmic principles of heroes that hold true today. If you are a history buff who always hungers for those unknown truths about famous people in history that are known to a few backstages of history, this book will satiate the appetites of your senses and nourish the mind married with pleasure.

View all my reviews

portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

 

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Self-Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

A man without an ear had no friends

To show him the face of compassion

To lend him an ear to listen always

To the cries of a soul grim and ashen

Lost in the gallery of a dark house

Where nature oppressed ruled the mind

And commended it to suffer with the body. 

The Studio of the South in tatters

assailed a reservoir of dreams;

The Southern Sun of Arles in shreds

speared his soul with a shout of taunts

And made his heart sink in the abyss

Till it burst with an outcry evermore

Of the man with the unseen voices

That grew loud and grew louder

As he was estranged from himself

And left the world with a thunder

Of fire, a fire of freedom from 

The frights of the broken soul. 

Thereby hangs a tale of a painter

Breathed with poetic madness of arts. 

P.S.: I have recently come across an article about the nature of Vincent Van Gogh’s mental illness that eventually resulted in his suicide in May 1889 with a pistol that punctured his heart in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Sant Remy, France.

It is said that Gogh had shown symptoms of disturbed mental states since he was 17 years old when his parents tried to get him committed. He was later seen eating coals while painting and told of hearing voices and seeing hallucinations. As a matter of fact, Gogh was from a family with a history of mental illness: his maternal aunt was epileptic, and two of his siblings died in asylums and two others by suicide. Surely, this doesn’t aver that mental illness is hereditary and therefore brings grist to the mill of eugenists.

In my opinion, it seems more likely that Gogh’s tragic life story comes from a combination of Gogh’s disappointment with the failed reception of his works and frustration with his ability to deal with the existential reality interacting with the unfavorable circumstances surrounding his struggles to mark his existence through a medium of art, which deserves of recognition for its beauty of his highly innate artistic sensibilities that glow in the dark night of the soul. To me, whether Gogh was clinically insane is to miss the gift of the artist to humankind that always thrives in the beauty of arts.