The Golden Rabbit and the Golden Horse (and how pre-established ideas lead to the wrong choice in a grave matter relating the two)

Vishnu hallucinated last night. I dont know what about, but he hallucinated last night, and he also had high fever. But my story is not about his hallucinations, for I did not experience them. Today I left the lab, for I had a headache. Came back, went to sleep, and had hallucinations of my own. Well, technically they werent hallucinations, as I was asleep, they were just a nightmare, but thats besides the point. Point is, I have figured It out.

Now allow me to throw yet another irrelevant detail at my dear reader, the fact that I almost never remember my dreams, even when I really really want to. So it is a rare enough occurence that I remember this one. Who knows, maybe all my dreams are this bizarre.

But I doubt that all of them are this relevant. I remember one dream sequence . Let me relate it to you, and then I'll leave you to judge its relevance.

It was quite weird. In that my Dad was a wizard, and my mom a queen. How it is that my dad wasnt a king, I have absolutely no idea. But this is how it was. There came a time when they realized that the sustenance of justice in this world required them to have a magic rabbit, and a magic horse. So they sent a friend with me on a quest. A quest for the magic rabbit and the magic horse. Our quest seemed to take a lifetime. We seemed to cover geographical distances on foot that would take a man years to cross. We went over deserts, over forests, over brook and mountain, we went to castles and rundown huts. You get the idea. Now throughout the quest, I insisted on being the man with the Horse, and I repeatedly stressed the importance of my being the bearer of the Horse, and even before we found either animal, I had almost ensured that the rabbit would be entrusted to the care of my friend, and I, the powerful Son, would take back the prize horse. My friend, being a farmer's son, relented without much ado, and so it was decided who would have which animal when he returned.

So it was to my dismay, when after many a mile, we found the Horse before the rabbit.I expected my quest to be more circuitous than my friend's . It was golden , and it could talk.its mane wasnt even matter. It was a flame. Then, the horse spoke, in a deep drawling voice, oozing with wisdom, and he said, " O son of the queen and the wizard, I am afraid you have decided to have me." For I shall bear back the weak of heart , whereas the stronger of the two of you will go on in the quest. In fact, I wasnt even part of the quest, and if you hadnt hastened to deciding who would bear back which animal, I was to aid your quest. However, that is not a possibility now. Alas for you, O son of queen and wizard, for it has been foretold that this quest will end in glory. That is why your parents sent you on it, for you to win fame and glory.

But now, now you will be borne back as the weak of heart.

That sixties show

People who saw the 60's often reminisce about the golden decade of the twentieth century, and we, born later, but who werent beyond the mystical ripples of that special decade, can only shoot wild arrows at floating images in our minds of how it must have been.

For face it folks, the 60's were a special time. People who roamed fearlessly then are now tipping from middle age to rheumatism and arthritis, and so it is easy to dismiss them when they say what a special time their youth was. But they have a point. for the 60's were a special time. There were no iPods, no laptops, indeed no fixation with material affluence. Which is very weird considering that the world was just recovering from two devastating wars in the first half of the century , and the youth of the 60's , the first lot of the baby boom of the late 40's , might have been expected to hoarde, to be obsessed with material affluence. But they weren't. Instead , they gave it their all to the quest of beauty.

For the 60's wasn't only about Rock and Roll, sideburns and mullets, free love, the hippies, and the flower children . These things were the side effects. What was happenning was a much larger thing, that manifested itself not only in the mass behavorial patterns, but also in the way these people did what they did. For the 60's was the first attempt since the middle ages to break free from the canons of truth and logic that the ancient civilizations, most notably the Greeks left in their wake. The 60's was an abortive attempt to break free from the stranglehold of Truth, and Worship in her stead Beauty, no less an entity than her sister Truth, only forgotten by mankind.

The middle ages were very much the ideal universe that the Golden generation of the 60's wanted to emulate. For true, there were plagues, there were diseases, there was poverty, there was every goddamn imaginable evil in this world, but Man obeyed Beauty, and not Truth. But then came the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution, which rolled back the Wheel of Time some 2000 years back, To ancient Greece, with its Aristotelian ideals of Truth, the Immutable, which left no scope for Beauty, which was now relegated to being a useless accessory. And then, the wheel of time jammed. instead of alleviating man's wretchedness, his mad rush for developement and advancement made every problem he had more acute. But he had organized thought. So instead of enjoying what he had, he began diverting all his energies to acheiving what he did not. Where Greece had failed, its Offspring, coming of age 2000 years later, succeeded. This time they almost did away with beauty , and replaced it with the Immovable Edifice built on Human Flesh to Truth.

That is why the 60's was such a special decade. For out of the blue sprung a generation, and instead of following the Code of Truth, like their Fathers and their Fathers , they almost pulled of the greatest heist in all of recorded History. They almost reversed the tide. Classicists took this as a personal slight. They labelled the Flower Children as part of a Counter Culture, as being anarchists , a perpetually drunk and drugged lot lacking any general direction. For this attempt struck at every thing everyone had ever learnt about how to live life. Indeed, it sought to render all existing Knowledge, and indeed the Concept of Knowledge obsolete.

It might be that they could take such a radically different direction, precisely because of unabated suffering Man had been subjected to a few years earlier. For the first time since Renaissance, there was at least some scope for doubting the wisdom in obeying Logic alone . This was the first time where the way of Logic had failed, and What Man saw was not at all a pretty sight . Maybe that is why the Flower Generation turned into a bunch of Libertines. It was their way of foraying into ways of life long forgotten in the civilized world.

It is indeed worth asking, looking at the material fixation of our generation, that did that generation fail in its endeavour? We live designer Lives in our designer clothes, designer mobiles in our pockets, Stepping out of designer cars into designer restaurants, where we can afford to eat only thanks to our designer pay packets. We have designer girlfreinds for whom we have in our designer hearts nothing more than designer love, which we choose to express through designer valentine cards. We are the corporate generation, Hoarding madly as if the world were to end tomorrow, something that our fathers were expected to do, but didnt.

But this will pass. For I believe that the 60's was only a dress rehearsal. Beauty will return. She is preparing now. She will come back. And when she does, I will be waiting. We all will.

And then, then we will be free.

Hey Joe

Hey joe, where you going with
that bomb in your hand?

Hey Joe, I say, where you going with that
bomb in your hand?

Hey joe, where you off to,
you know its dangerous

I am goin down to blast ol' Liberty
Heard she's been messin around with another man

I am goin to blast out ol' Liberty
You know I caught her messin with another man
And that aint too cool


Hey Joe, I heard you brought
Miss Liberty to the ground

Hey joe, I say, heard you brought the woman down

Yes I did, I brought her crashing down on the ground
A pile of bricks

Yes I did, coz you know I caught her messin round now
And that aint cool


Hey Joe, I say, where you gonna run to now?

Hey Joe, I said, where you gonna run to now?
where you gonna run?

And he said this

Why,I am going way down where
nobody ever went to
man

I am going way down to Where
a man can live and be free

Aint no hangman there
to put a noose round my neck

Aint no Prez there,
who cares that I brought ol'Liberty down

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