Complementing an academic’s freedom to dissent is the maximal removal of impediments to her pursuit of hypotheses and matters of fact about the stuff that furnishes the universe and of the universe itself. This stuff undergirds the core investigations of philosophy: what exists (ontology); what, and how, can we know (epistemology); and how shall we live together (ethics)? And, in turn, these investigations bud out into the dendrites that forest the synaptic network of human enquiry.
Here, the old growth canopy both obscures and nourishes the new. Just as each compete-for or wither-in the light. It’s here where prose and poetry, arts and letters, science and technology, co-exist in various states: fossilised, inert, evolving. It’s here where the rings of the hominin phylogenetic tree terminate in Sapiens, the one who succumbed to temptation: Eat of the tree in the midst of the [forest], and your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. That’s the day Adam and Eve got Woke. And now we contend with their sins.
It’s in this forest that Robin Hood and the Big Bad Wolf cohabitate; discuss the nature of good and evil, what picnic baskets and bank robbers have to do with distributive justice, and what analogies might hold between pigs and princes. It’s here that Robin agrees to spare the Wolf his arrow so long as the Wolf spares Robin his fangs. And it’s here where such disparate minds engage on the stuff of the universe, where attempts to tear these intellectual unions asunder give rise to the proverb, As useless as casting stones at brick houses. Pity that the pithy proverb is a one-line fairy tale. Mere grains of sand erode brick walls. Just as, sometimes, people who live in glass houses should throw stones. In which case, if one must in case of emergency — break glass, a stone is a better tool than a fleshy hand.
Every forest has its conks and burls. And whatever it is that tethers friends loosens its bonds for friends of friends. Robin’s Merry Men and the Wolf’s pack shelter under an ad hoc pact, and they’re never quite clear on the difference between traitors and peacemakers. Nor whether collaboration or competition is the surest way of survival. Whether one hunts a deer to nourish the other or deprive him of it, or back-burns to save the other or starve him out. So they hash these things out around a campfire, splitting wood and splitting hairs. One pack circles the flames, the other circles the pack circling the flames. And they all look up at the vortex of white smoke pile driving the black sky, embers flashing like falling stars and ash falling like a soft grey rain. And they all lay down on the earth again. To sleep. With one eye open, and the other looking in.
And wouldn’t you know, as coincidences go, Robin Hood and his Merry Men and the Big Bad Wolf and his pack dream the same dream. Or close enough, all being made of the same kind of stuff. As the dawn bruises the morning, each dreamer sees clearly small mounds of flesh push up from the duff, phallic caps skewed this way and that, some fish-gilled, some veiny, some spotty. Some edible. Poison. Hallucinogenic. When all at once, as happens in dreams, these motley soft-bodied pilgrims wither into hooded sages bent over the forest floor. And then give up their ghosts to become metaphor. The mushroom of a brass shell embedded in flesh. The radioactive cloud that burns flesh. At that, a crow breaks a branch and jolts them all awake.
Still surprised, Robin Hood and the Big Bad Wolf focus their eyes as one shades a glint from the other and hisses, Split the tongue of a crow so he can talk, split the tongue of a man so he can’t. And the forest falls silent.
— Pamela Lindsay, Aug. 31/24
Categories: Guest Posts
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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