Category Archives: Musings

Introspective Ramblings

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I started this piece in late November of 2025.  It is now mid-January of 2026.  The Ides of January in fact.  I started with a specific focus but all too quickly what I was writing mutated into a ramble.  Ramblings seem incoherent and they frequently are, but not always.  Sometimes, as in the case of poetry, there are verities to be gleaned in their tangled depths.  At the very least, within a rambling’s shadows, within its hues and tints, there may be clues as to the nature of the person rambling.  Clues that may or may not be meaningful to others but may well be introspectively important to the one who’s opened up his or her streams of consciousness which, for some reason, he or she felt compelled to share,

The following certainly shares the odor of a rambling.  Hopefully though, a benign rambling albeit perhaps a bit too long, for which I apologize.

I’m an expatriate, an expatriate squared or perhaps an expatriate unraveled.  I was born in the Republic of Colombia but soon after I turned six I “was emigrated” with my sister to join my mother and new step father in Miami Beach.  I use the phrase “was emigrated” because leaving Colombia was not my idea, I loved Manizales, the city where I was born and today recognized as one of the best places to live in the world, but I admitted that the idea of moving to the United States was exciting.

I’ve lived in diverse parts of the United States during most of my life; however, since the Ides of October in 2007 I’ve again become a resident of north central Colombia.  Now, as it was before I was six, I live closer to the Pacific than to the Caribbean.  I now, once again, live in the summit of the central range of the Colombian Andes, again in Manizales, a city blessed by perpetual spring and surrounded by snow clad peaks whilst overlooking valleys where summer always dwells, all within a ninety minute radius. 

So, … since I was six I was a Colombian expatriate in the United States, a Colombian expatriate for over half a century and, as tends to occur, in the process I acquired important links to the United States but I never lost my spiritual links to Colombia.  Now that I’m back though, and I’ve been back for almost two decades, I’m a sort of United States expatriate in Colombia. 

That’s not all that unusual.  As is the case with the Irish as well, many who leave their homes for perceived opportunities in foreign shores long to return and the lucky ones eventually do, but changed.  We tend to be twice torn, happy to have returned but longing for the many places we’ve lived while abroad.  In my case, pining for Miami Beach and Charlotte and New York and the Carolina mountains and Central Florida, but especially for Manhattan, and for Charleston.

My apartment in Manizales, one I bought within a month of my return in order to make it difficult for me to change my mind (I knew I’d miss my family and friends a great deal), occupies the entire tenth floor in a condominium set where one starts to enter the city center.  It sits across the street from a beautiful little park centered on a fountain gifted to the city by the Fourth French Republic about a century ago.  On the other side of the park is the city’s large cultural complex which features a large theater and auditorium.  There, the departmental (a mix between a state and a county) symphony frequently performs as do theater groups from diverse parts of the world.  It also features a number of event rooms and an art museum.  My apartment is a block away from the principal hub of a recently installed cable car complex that drops down to the regional bus terminal and then to a nearby city.  From the regional bus terminal, one can take bus transport to all parts of the country and, in a different direction, by cable car again, to an uptown commercial, civic and educational hub.  Because the condominium is designed with a single large apartment per floor and because I’m on the tenth floor, I enjoy unobstructed three hundred and sixty degree views of the entire city and of the surrounding mountains and of the valleys far below. 

To the west, just before twilight, I can see sunsets in brilliant scarlet fading to purple, with gold and green highlights reflected off of clouds over the distant Pacific Ocean and sometimes, during the evenings, lightning flashes over the Pacific covering that part of the sky.  Also to the west, the spires of one of the world’s tallest cathedrals, one with a very long name: “La Catedral Basílica de Nuestra Señora Del Rosario”, climb towards heaven.  On top of the tallest spire a gentle crucified Nazarene seems to be casting himself to those below, apparently having finally accepted the challenge mistakenly attributed to Lucifer (the tempter’s real name was Hêlêl).  Rippling beyond the cathedral flow what the Chilean Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda (my favorite poet), once described as “a sea of mountains”.

To the south, very far to the south, many departments distant, lies the planetary equator which crosses the southern regions of Colombia.  Picture windows in my den and bedroom overlook that southern view which also involves a sea of mountains but, in that direction, dormant volcanoes lie resting as well (well, sort of dormant).  Ironically, the tallest four peaks are crested in white reflecting snow covered glaciers (rather than sea foam); a “sea” like the one to the west, both mountainous seas dressed in myriad shades of green morphing to blues and purples in the distance.  Similar sights, but for the volcanoes and the crested white peaks, also dress the north and west.

All the windows in my apartment are wide, tall picture windows which capture entrancing scenery and a great deal of light as well.  One would have thought that having returned from the United States to the north, the north would have been the direction on which I focused and, initially, I did, always with melancholy and nostalgia.  But it was the windows that faced south, those in my bedroom and in my den, which for some reason, enchanted me.  “Enchanted” in the mystical sense as well as the aesthetic.

From the southern windows, when I first returned to Colombia I almost immediately began to engage in a ritual of sorts.  During the evenings, as the sun set just before twilight, I would “call” one of the four cardinal quarters, the one meant to open the spiritual gates to the south.  That was sort of strange as, in my case, while I’ve always been fascinated by the concepts of divinity and deities, I’ve rejected organized religion and find organized mass prayer, prayer where ritual words are repeated without reflection and introspection as to their meaning and their context, troublesome rather than inspiring, and hypocritical as well[1].  I was thus engaging in actions that seemed indistinguishable from those I found objectionable and drawing comfort therefrom, apparently drawn to a primordial need for solace when faced with profound changes for which I was not totally prepared but couldn’t avoid.  I didn’t actually believe that the ritual really had any real validity but it brought me solace nonetheless.

Anyway, … when I left what had been my life for well over half a century behind, which I did in the fall of 2007, I for, some reason, adapted as my own, aspects of rituals employed by non-traditionalist, non-Abrahamic, purportedly primordial religions; rituals used when seeking to both open and close hallowed spaces, usually in the form of sacred circles, spaces in which to commune with that which, to some, seemed hallowed.  I did so as an individual rather than as part of a group and I limited the ritual, which is normally quadridirectional, north-east-south and west, solely to the south.  The ritual I designed for myself involved opening a gate to the southern quadrant, engaging in nostalgic and melancholic reflection and introspection, and then closing it.

After I would metaphorically “open” the gate I’d reflect on my life and on what I’d left behind, most importantly, on my three sons, Billy, Alex and Edward.  And I’d think about many of the acquaintances and friends with whom I could no longer interact, at least not physically.  I’d reminisce concerning my former students, classmates, mentors and colleagues at the old Eastern Military Academy in New York and about my classmates and the stream of special people that somehow consistently flow from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, my alma mater (my son Billy’s alma mater as well).  And I’d grieve for those graduates from both institutions whose lives had been so cavalierly wasted in useless wars where all the victims on both sides were mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and sons and daughters of others, but rarely the relatives of those politicians and entrepreneurs who had insisted on the conflict and were made wealthy thereby.  My return to Colombia coincided with a large popular movement to end armed conflicts which had plagued the country and its people for centuries and, in part, my return was motivated by a compulsion to participate in a positive manner in efforts to see such efforts succeed.

During the ritual, I would also recall my classmates and teachers at the St. John’s University School of Law and at the graduate division of the New York University School of Law, my alma maters as well.  And I’d recall my classmates and teachers at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies where I’d attended classes in the graduate program in linguistics and translation studies in 2005 and 2006.  I also frequently recalled Debra Allen Vazquez, a wonderful professor I’d had at a creative writing course I’d taken at a community college in Ocala in the late 1990’s, a wonderful woman who was murdered in front of the Ocala police station with her infant granddaughter in her arms by an estranged, xenophobic husband.  Xenophobia, racism and misogyny, the triple pillars that have always haunted the so called “American Dream”.

I initially focused my reflections on academic acquaintances and experiences because I’d returned to Colombia to work as a member of the faculty of the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales, first, briefly in the Language Institute but then in the Department of Juridical and Political Studies which I briefly chaired, and then in the university’s political science government and international relations programs which I chaired for a significant period.  That, of course, does not mean that I didn’t reminisce and reflect on many other people: on acquaintances, friends, colleagues and lovers.  Too many of the latter, unfortunately; I’ve emotionally hurt too many women who’ve loved me, although I never meant to.  I’ve seemingly been engaged in a quest for a perfect soulmate and perfection is not only hard to find but leaves behind too much disenchantment in its wake, on both sides.

I’d also reflect on the many places where I’d lived and worked while in the United States.  I’d reflect on Miami Beach where I’d first lived with my new family, and on Fort Lauderdale where I’d had two of my three sons much later on, and on Charleston in South Carolina and on Charlotte in the north, and of course, on New York.  And with respect to New York City, I’d recall my life in Ozone Park and Hollis and Jamaica and Queens Village and in Manhattan which I loved, and in Whitestone and, in Long Island.  And with respect to Long Island, the part of it which lies outside of New York City, I’d reminisce about Glen Cove but most of all, on the castle where I lived for so long, the castle that topped the highest point of Long Island in Cold Spring Hills in Huntington. Today the castle is called OHEKA but back then it was the Eastern Military Academy.  I loved those places and left pieces of my soul in each.

At any rate, after I was through with my reflections, reflections which too often involved a dash of self-pity (of which I’d quickly repent, or at least attempt to repent), I’d usually find the motivation I needed to restructure my life, hopefully in a better manner than I had in the past.  And then it would be time to close the gate to the southern quadrant.

I’d open and close the gate with the following ritual phrases uttered while facing the south and looking out through the large picture window in my den.  Opening the figurative gate to that quarter, I’d softly declaim (after all, I was alone):  “Spirits of the South, of fire, of heat and passion, of energy and creativity, I invite you to join with me in this space and ask that you grant me your peace, your wisdom and your protection.  Be with me now. Blessed Be.”

And later, when I was done, I’d close the gate to the southern quarter by softly declaiming:  “Spirits of the South, of fire, of heat and passion, of energy and creativity, I thank you for attending my rites and guarding this space, and now, I invite you to stay if you please or depart if you must, in either case, with my peace and blessings.  Blessed Be.”

I didn’t do anything similar with respect to the other cardinal points, the East, the West and the North, I’m not sure why.  Perhaps because the South represented the present and the future and that’s where I most needed help.

Despite my lack of belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, I’m not an atheist.  I am perhaps more of a curious agnostic but I do seem to sometimes need a bit of magic in my life, a bit of something still unexplained albeit not inexplicable, a bit of something supernatural, of forces beyond my ken.  In fact, I believe that questing to understand “whatever gods may be” (a quote I love from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley) is a duty and not just a curiosity.  One I’ve always taken seriously based on a pact I made with “whatever gods may be” when I was seven.  Apparently I was somewhat bold as a child, … and perhaps irreverent.  I was bathing, looking at the ceiling and trying unsuccessfully to reconcile what I was being taught in catechism classes when it occurred to me to strike a deal with the god I was being taught to worship but in whom, even then, I couldn’t quite believe but feared to disbelieve.  I couldn’t accept that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient entity would be so insecure as to insist that he, she or it be worshipped based on fear and faith rather than on real love, real love earned, and on real knowledge, gnosis some had called it but I hadn’t yet heard of Gnostics.  And so I promised to explore and research until I attained sufficient knowledge to worship the deity based on evident realities but to behave morally and ethically as if it existed, even if that existence seemed improbable.

At any rate, the foregoing is now relatively long ago. 

We tend to change and I am not the inchoate man I was as a child, or the one I was before … et seriatum, etc.  It’s been a full life so far hopefully with a good deal more yet to live although, with the world in the horrible state in which it finds itself, the future is no certain thing and the longer I live the more I learn that most of what we’ve been taught, most of what I once believed, has been false; most of what I myself taught was false, especially the history I taught when I was in my twenties.  I really believed what I’d been taught and what I in turn taught as so many still do; however, I eventually woke to the reality that most history is only propaganda and that discerning truth involves not only hard work and objectivity but also a great deal of luck.  Since my late twenties, now many decades ago, I’ve done my best to find truth, and to share it.  To share it all too often with people for whom I care but who have no interest in having their illusions shattered.  And the truth is that objective certainty concerning history is never certain.  It’s something that we can perhaps approach but never attain.  There are too many variables and too many contexts and too little time.  We can’t even successfully discern the accuracy of the news concerning current events that we’re fed daily; something many of us have come to realize as we lose faith in the media and even in the entertainment industry, both institutions used successfully to control us. 

Notwithstanding the foregoing, despair concerning the absence of verity does nothing positive.  We need to keep plugging along doing the best we can, especially those of us in academia, whether as instructors or researchers.  But we need to inform those to whom we seek to impart knowledge that we can be as wrong as those who sought to do the same with us.  That means we have a great deal of constant research in which to engage if truth matters.  And it does to me.  And a great deal of listening to do as well as pontificating.[2]

It’s long since I’ve engaged in the rituals I’ve described but such rituals seem to have worked.  I arrived in Colombia knowing virtually no one and today, almost two decades later, I have many local acquaintances, some among them friends and most of them special people.  And I’ve been very active, active in academic circles as well as in cultural, civic and political circles.  The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego, visited me in my apartment on several occasions, albeit prior to his ascension.  In fact, seven years ago he sat granting televised interviews from the desk where I now sit and write these introspections.  Yes; I’ve been very fortunate.  Surprisingly so.  Inexplicably so.  Probably undeservedly so, especially with respect to the wonderful women with whom I’ve been involved, especially with respect to the one who’s become my wife.

For some reason I recently recalled the rituals I’ve described and after a search through my computer archives I found the specific phrases I used to evoke and invoke them, the ones I shared above.  And I decided that they deserved to be honored and that they deserved to be thanked.  The rituals were not entirely unfocused, they were directed at the evolving monist, panentheistic divinity I think may exist, one about which I frequently write and on which I frequently speculate, not always in a manner which it would find pleasing were it both sentient (possible) and anthropomorphic (unlikely).  But what I write reflects my honest opinions, always represented as such, and are never, or perhaps better said, rarely, undertaken in a quest for favor but rather, frequently, perhaps usually, to either give thanks or to attempt to attain introspective understanding.  After all, it’s what I promised a certain purported divinity many decades ago.

Anyway, … having written this ramble in the form of an elegy of sorts to rituals in which I may not really believe, an elegy written in a spirit of thanksgiving, a real spirit of thanksgiving unrelated to the celebration on the last Thursday in November involving a celebration of genocide and ethnic “cleansing”, one undertaken in the country I love but left, I’ll close, by first, acknowledging that the rituals seem to have been at least helpful in assisting me to better know the person who stares back at me from my mirrors and, secondly, as I did when I closed the gate to the southern quarter, by sincerely saying to one and all, friend or foe:

“Blessed be!”

This ramble, or perhaps rant, is too long, I know, but that is often the nature of rambles and rants.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] However, there is no denying that others find such rituals not only meaningful but essential and I strongly believe that that whatever the objective validity of our respective positions, attacking the “faith” that makes another’s life tolerable is unjustifiable.

[2] On the other hand, an ex-wife of mine used to insist that she’d rather be happy than right and that truth was relative anyway.  Most people today, it would seems agree with her.

Solstice Day, 2025

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Today, December 21st, 2025 we experience a solstice, really two: the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the Southern Solstice in the South with the longest day and shortest night.  In Colombia, which straddles the equator, in its southern regions it experiences the Summer Solstice, at the equator, well, perhaps nothing at all, all days being equal, and to the North, the Winter Solstice.  As in so many other things, Colombia has it all.

Like the equinoxes, to me the solstices are days for introspection and reflection and more, so than New Year’s Day, days for refocusing and resolutions.  Our world is in terrible shape, chaos and injustice reign in a replica of what philosopher Thomas Hobbes described many centuries ago as the “State of Nature”, a phrase having nothing to do with sound ecological practices but rather, with chaos, injustice, lawlessness and impunity.  The reality is that our world has seemingly always functioned (dysfunctioned would be more accurate) this way but, we have always been successfully deluded through false and fanciful narratives into believing that there are good guys on one side who believe in truth, justice and equity, and bad guys on the other who believe in nothing at all but power and pleasure for themselves.

Historians should know differently, as should journalists, but they don’t, or they don’t care because they’re an integral part of the problem.  Reflecting on how genocide and ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum have become fashionable in Western and Central Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world, rather than anathema (as we were told following the Second World War), I’ve come to doubt everything I was taught concerning World War Two and World War One, indeed, about the American Revolution and the American Civil War, and which I then, in turn taught others.  There were no “good guys” in any of those “conflicts”, only evil politicians and sacrificial victims on all sides, sacrificial victims who along with their families provided the fuel to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

In what we refer to as the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, being seen as the good guys seems existentially important despite the hundreds of millions of people who have been slaughtered through our elective wars and through our colonialism, purportedly a “burden” imposed on us in order to raise our cultural inferiors to our intellectual and moral heights.  The Romans of two millennia ago, prior to their conquest by Christianity, were just as selfishly aggressive as are we in the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, but they were much more honest.  They had no problem at all in being seen as the bad guys but, truth be told, we have easily surpassed them in savagery and in a lack of respect for legal institutions, all the while insisting that we do what we do in the name of justice, liberty, decency and democracy.  In the name of our Abrahamic god. 

We are masters of hypocrisy.  For example, followers of the Christian branch of the Abrahamic triad abhor the economic theses on which their religion is purportedly based, which ironically coincide with the premises underlying communism, i.e., not only political, social and economic equality and equity, but a dedication to lift up the poorest and most humble among us while preventing the accumulation of massive wealth by the few (remember the camel and the eye of the needle).  Among the followers of the Judaic branch of that triad, people who for millennia were victims of intense social and legal injustice, post-eighth-century Eurasian converts today purportedly acting in the name of all Jews have become oppressors and mass murderers in an apparent quest for political and economic hegemony.  The Islamic branch meanwhile looks on: Palestinians (descendants of real Jews) are sacrificed while wealthy Arab leaders pretend to care but at best, do nothing and at worst, secretly collude with Christian and Zionist Islamophobes.  Ironically, the atheists among us are those most inclined to avoidance of state sponsored murder and most supportive of equity, equality and social justice.

Reflecting on the foregoing on this day of solstices, a movie from the late nineteen thirties, the old movie version of the Wizard of Oz, one of the first to use color, comes to mind, specifically with reference to one of its final scenes.  The scene in which its purported villain, Elphaba, the fictional Wicked Witch of the East, exclaims (after she was accidentally soaked with water by the heroine, and began to melt), “what a world, what a world”!  That metaphor was certainly prescient, not only with respect to today’s world, but to our world since significantly before history was first recorded, perhaps since we first evolved as purported Homo Sapiens.

Anyway, … enough reflection and introspection.  What about resolutions?  Is there anything we can do to change the inequity that surrounds us? 

Well, maybe not.  But we can at least try.  The strange thing about we humans is that in large collectives we tend to be horrible while individually, although some of us are indeed horrible, the majority are decent albeit incredibly gullible and all too ignorant.  Thus, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to help each other shed our blinders by realizing that virtually everything we’re taught is false and then, by following our more humane instincts, for example, the so called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, rather than its perverted analog, “do unto others whatever you can get away with before they do it unto you”.  Perhaps then, hopefully blinder free and well intentioned, we can reject leadership by all those who seek dominion through violence and deception, and who follow the creed of perpetual greed and perpetual war, albeit in disguise.

Anyway (again), … these are my reflections after a good deal of introspection on a shortest day and a longest night high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on a Chilly Morning in Late November

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It’s cold in Manizales, a city in the sky set high in the central range of the Colombian Andes, although it dawned hot and sunny.  Well, relatively hot.  It’s about nine o’clock in the morning on the last day of November in a year that has seen the very worst of humanity triumph all over a sad and abused planet.

In Manizales it never really gets too hot or, truth be told, too cold.  Just different ranges of spring although the humidity varies, frequently by the hour.  Still, it’s chilly right now.  Today I’ve layered up: tee shirt under shirt under sweater.  That’s all I need here to escape the chill.  The morning has turned foggy, visibility outside is nil, but it involves low lying clouds more than fog, as occurs when you’re in a city higher than the seven thousand foot mark, an interesting albeit common phenomenon in this city in the sky set amidst mountains usually dressed in myriad shades of green.  The sight is eerily beautiful.  It’s as though the city repented of having woken early and pulled its ethereally fluffy white blankets back up over its head. 

It’s a good day for a fireplace.  For several fireplaces.  We have a small one set high on a wall in the living room but it’s not wood burning, it’s powered by a relatively small propane gas cylinder, not a fireplace Santa would appreciate but very pretty when it’s lit.  Something we seldom do.  If I were to build the perfect house it would be set amidst waterfalls and deep caverns and lakes but near the ocean, and would have fireplaces all over the place, and large rooms with balconies, and the roof would be a park-like terrace full of plants but with a Jacuzzi and would feature wrought iron outdoor living room furniture of sorts, and a wrought iron desk with a glass top so I could work outside, and an outdoor fire pit nearby. 

But, for now, no such luck. 

Still, I can’t complain, I have a large tenth floor apartment that occupies the entire floor giving us a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city and of the surrounding mountains, many clad in snow, and of the neighboring city set below, far below with a tall cathedral set not very far away, and a small park set outside of the front door.  And with a used-book store set aside our lobby.  The city’s cultural center with its large performing arts center is across the street and a block away we have the city’s initial aerial cable transport station, gondolas taking us to the nearby bus terminal and then to the neighboring municipality.  And, two blocks from our front door, a small modern shopping mall.

What I don’t have is my three sons, now all grown; two with children of their own.  They live a continent away in the Global North and I never see them now; well, except every once in a while in a video call.  We’ve lived apart for a very long time now, decades.  I’ve remarried to a wonderful woman, not just attractive but spiritual and intelligent and eclectic, and she fills a lot of the void I’ve created for myself after leaving most of my past behind, as do the wonderfully kind, talented and artistic people of Manizales, and as do my few expatriate friends, traces of my old life, but nothing can replace my sons.  I think of them daily.  And I think of the many, many people I’ve known, some of whom I’ve loved.  Most of them have long vanished from my life but not from my memory.

It’s been a full life, one full of blessing and of challenges, most of which (the challenges) have been overcome.  It frequently feels as though it’s been too full but today, for some reason, it seems hollow.  Perhaps it’s the weather but, although the low lying clouds still have everything covered so that it seems as though the world outside my windows has been erased, a bright spot in the white, a brighter white, seems to be trying to break through.  Of course, eventually it will.  It always does.

So, why does today still feel so gloomy?

It must be missing my sons and the grandchildren I’ve never really gotten to know which sculpts the day in hollow tones.  And the echoes of old relationships turned acrid which, at least from time to time, still cast long and somber shadows.

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Poetry and on the Nature and Uses of Prayer

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Sam Hamill

It came to me as I read indigenous reflections written in 1976, almost half a century ago, by Arthur Amiotte, then an artist and teacher who lived among the Teton Sioux in South Dakota, that I have never understood the nature or functions of prayer.  Not strange given how few if any priests or pastors or rabbis have ever grasped them.  Prayer had always seemed superficial to me, ritual repetition of sounds directed at one or more beings to whom we seemed little more than insects, inferior objects to be scorned and disdained, albeit in a strange and twisted, masochistic way, loved as well. 

An observation attributed to a gentle Nazarene whom the Hebrews and perhaps the Romans may have tortured and perhaps hung or crucified has always made a great deal of sense to me: his suggestion that direct communion with the divine, without ritual or intervention, without prayer, was really the only legitimate and effective means of touching divinity but, reviewing Arthur Amiotte’s indigenous reflections, something I’ve been doing while concurrently reading the probably fictitious writing of Carlos Castaneda (fictitious not being synonymous with useless),  another alternative occurred to me.  Ironically occurred to me who, if not an atheist am at best a panentheist.  It came to me in the form of an epiphany: Prayer may well have a positive purpose but it is unrelated to the ritual repetition of sounds the meaning of which few really consider as they utter them, and fewer still understand. 

In that instant of epiphany, it came to me that ritual prayer does have a role and a meaning and a use and a purpose but that it is very different from the meaningless collective rote exercise that takes place on designated days at designated hours in designated places under the leadership of designated men and sometimes, although rarely, designated women.  It is, or perhaps, better stated, it should be, an isolated, personal reflective instrument that properly tuned and used can lead to introspection, contemplation, meditation and self-examination, all in a quest for insight, perhaps totally novel insight, and through such insight, to both elucidation and pragmatic solutions. 

That makes sense, or made sense to me; finally.  Prayers, correctly used, can be catalysts for internal communication in which, perhaps, a spark of the divine (if a spark of the divine exists within each of us, as some among the Gnostics tend to believe), may, at times, be present.

“Poetry” Sam Hammill (a great friend, a great poet and a great translator) once told me “is meant to be spoken and heard”.  As much as I admired him and still do (though he is long gone), I did not agree.  For me, reading poetry rather than listening to it permitted me to transcend the music of the words in order to wrestle with the layers of meaning involved, not all of them layers the author intended.  In that sense, it seems that poems are “written on mirrors”, i.e., they have different meanings for everyone who really delves into their depths based on the reader’s personal experiences, context and perceptions.  I’ve shared my observation with another poet I admire but who is as different from Sam, in many but not all ways, as two poets can be.  Sam was a big man, a former United States marine, with a booming voice, an adventurer in every sense, while the second poet, Carlos Mario Uribe Alvarez, is a fairly diminutive and soft spoken Colombian, but one who annually gathers poets from all over the world to declaim and share perspectives in the sky-high Andean city where I’ve now lived for almost two decades.  Despite their differences, as is the case with many poets, they both share a taste for variety in women, each of whom they love in their own way, and for strong intoxicants, whether drunk or inhaled. 

As it was for Sam, poetry for Carlos, at the numerous events he organizes, is an oral exercise.  I dutifully attend the readings performed by earnest and talented artists who have profound truths to share but I get little out of the readings.  Indeed, I’ve urged that each reading be preceded by contextualization and a sharing of the motives and reflections and introspection that gave birth to each poem presented.  Sam would have argued with me.  Carlos agrees, but seemingly superficially.

I now feel the same way about prayer after my epiphany.  But perhaps that’s just me.  Writing and reading call to me much more than does listening to prayers or poetic expositions.  Reading permits me to dive and delve and reflect while writing seems a means of communicating with my inner self, with the me who’s been and the me that may someday be, and perhaps, at times, with echoes and shadows of divinity that have made their way, if not to me, at least towards me.

Interesting.  But perhaps not novel except for those of us who have been long misled by Abrahamic delusions.  Perhaps my epiphany is an echo of something lost by those of us who have misplaced things that our ancestors understood well and perhaps used and perhaps some among us may still understand and practice it, albeit alone and in personal places in a manner such as that of which that gentle Nazarene once spoke.

Thoughts on a pleasant autumn day high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on a Conceivably Inept Creator

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Reflecting on religion this morning, specifically on the Abrahamic variants to which most of my religious friends adhere, friends I profoundly respect and generally find to be genuinely good people, it came to me that they appear to consider their creator inept. 

They obviously, albeit respectfully, consider the creator to have been incapable of creating a decent product.  Indeed, their worship is full of lamentations concerning how terrible they are and acknowledging that their deficiencies are inherent and unavoidable. Indeed, purportedly not a single one of the creator’s creations have been free from defects except, perhaps, for himself, as incarnated, but then again, can one really be one’s own creation?

Perhaps.

Don’t know why but Ford Edsels come to mind.

Anyway, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” is an obligatory refrain by his creations when engaged in formal worship although, of course, logically, the “culpa” should really be ascribed to the entity, divine or otherwise, who designed such creations, especially if it was omniscient and omnipotent at the time.  Perhaps the refrain should more accurately be: “tua culpa, tua culpa, tua maxima culpa”.

Every time we criticize human fallibility, human frailty, the human proclivity to err against the divine will, we are criticizing, not only ourselves (the divine creation) but also the angelic supervision to which we are purportedly subject.  That concept of divinity posits not only an inept creator but one so full of hubris that it blames its errors on its creations, whether on us directly or on his angelic host, some of which also proved, let’s say … “deficient”.  Nephilim come to mind, as do their fathers.

Perhaps that explains the world in which we live, one where one branch of the Abrahamic faiths, the one involving the creator’s purportedly chosen people, engage, in the creator’s name, in genocide, massive and constant theft, justified rape, etc., (and not only recently, it’s a historical trend), and his more recent adherents in another branch, the Christians (originally Nazarenes and then Cristers) look the other way like the three famous simians who see no evil, hear no evil and certainly don’t expose any evil except with respect to whatever minor transgressions they themselves have engaged in, which they bemoan and chastise, … mainly on Sundays.

My reflections are, of course, blasphemous and heretical and somehow or other, probably evil.  Or, perhaps, the creator would agree that its followers are, perhaps inadvertently, being too critical of their creator.  Being very sensitive to any criticism (consider how it purportedly dealt with its archangel Hel-el, subsequently mistranslated by the abysmally ignorant St. Jerome as “Lucifer”; or how it dealt with almost all of its creations when, in a fit of temper, it drowned them all), … it may be worth reconsidering those aspects of its worship.  Just saying, …..

Still, as Elphaba Thropp, the purported wicked witch of the west, perhaps reflecting on YHWH or perhaps just on water, exclaimed with her dying breath in the 1930s version of the Wizard of Oz (the foregoing name is, however, as envisioned many decades later by author Gregory Maguire): …

“What a world, what a world!!!!”

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

On the Confusing Nature of Contextualized Instants and Other Anomalies

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According to one system used to measure the passage of “time” (whatever that is) and to identify events that occurred during that particular stream, one among many events once stood out.  Well in truth almost an infinity of events stood out at least with respect to the entities with which this reflection deals but, for the nonce (another sort of vaguely defined unit of “time”) we intend to deal with some specific events that they somehow deemed crystalized.  The author uses the plural first person pronoun, not in the royal sense, but rather, as a means of including both the author and the readers in the assertion.  Anyway, we will attempt to reflect on an undefined, perhaps undefinable specific series of related events, albeit only after we engage in an effort to place them in a somewhat coherent temporal context (again, a concept related to “time”) albeit using the limited form of communication available to our protagonists.

Diverse series of somewhat related events have seemed interesting to the strange carbon based biological composites which, at the “time” about which we are reflecting, inhabited a satellite revolving around another satellite and with a satellite of its own (as will be explained below) who considered themselves the pinnacle of natural evolution as well as the beneficiaries of particular attention from beings ironically superior to themselves, or at least of one such being which some among them believe to be a deity.  They believe themselves to be sentient and, not just sentient, but special, although, to be honest, they subdivide themselves into a myriad of subgroups and each subgroup considers that only it is special and that all the other virtually identical subgroups, at least with respect to their biological composition, are inferior.  Incoherent, we agree, but we are just doing our best to describe related contextualizing phenomena.  

One of the units of “time” (a concept they cannot quite define but which they use all of the, well, time), is a period they refer to as a year; i.e., the “time” it takes the satellite of a “star” (a “star” being a very large spherical continuous nuclear explosion) inhabited by them (the satellite), the “star being known to them as “Sol”, among other names, and the satellite they inhabit being referred to by many of them as “Terra”, among other names, “among other names” because they have apparently (despite ancient legends concerning a time prior to the destruction of a great tower) never been quite been able to agree on appropriate nomenclature …. 

Oh my, we’ve digressed so much in an effort at contextualization that we’ve assuredly confused the reader’s train of thought, so, we’ll sort of “reboot”: … “a year” is the term they use to refer to the approximate amount of “time” it takes their Terra to complete one circumnavigation of their Sol.

These peculiar and extremely conceited beings further subdivide the “year” into days, the time it took Terra, the satellite they inhabit, to complete one revolution around its axis, and then further subdivide their perception of times into units smaller than days known to them as hours and seconds and milliseconds and nanoseconds, etc., as well as into units larger than days which they refer to as weeks and months and seasons.  Months and seasons are related to the orbits of a satellite of Terra, which these entities, who believe themselves to be sentient, sometimes refer to as Luna (among other names).  Weeks?  Well, they really have no logical basis (but they could if the “year” were divided into thirteen, rather than twelve months, and each month further divided into four, seven day weeks instead of into a variable number of days ranging from twenty-eight to thirty-one). In that case, a day or two would be left over and would be deemed outside of the normal calendar designations of months and weeks, perhaps being designated holidays, for example, New Year’s Day and, every four years, Leap Day. Why months are arranged as they currently are is difficult to say which is not the same as saying that such somewhat irrational albeit purportedly sentient beings do not have myriads of rationalizations to explain their incoherence.  Oh my, a double negative, … confusing.

At this point, it probably makes sense to identify the author of this reflection.  Not exactly an easy thing to do but essential if we’re ever to get to the point.

The author is a confused member of the protagonists in this reflection but knows that “he” is confused.  What, the reader may now wonder is a “he”?  Well, these entities subdivide themselves into two major biological categories, male and female, although lately (another concept related to time involving proximity, “proximity” being a concept related to something referred to as “space” but which could, by analogy, also refer to “time”), a number of these entities have been refusing to acknowledge such categories and refer to themselves as, among other things, non-binary, or else, just somewhat arbitrarily switch their biological characterization to a variant of the other category to which they refer as “their culturally perceived gender”.

Perhaps the foregoing will lead the reader to understand why the author perceives of himself as confused.  So confused in fact that he has completely lost track of the nature of this reflection and as to why he has been writing it and as to just what series of events he had hoped to memorialize when he started writing this reflection.

Contextualization can be so confusing!  It seems that the author has lost himself amidst shifting eddies of time and space flowing somewhere hidden deep within what passes for his mind.

Ahhh, fortunately, perhaps, or perhaps not, clarity, or something akin to clarity seems to engulf him and he recalls that when he started writing this reflection he had been speculating on the nature of what some among his contemporaries referred to as divinity, and on how different perspectives were with respect to that strange but seemingly transcendental concept, and then, that he had been wondering about the nature of “surety”, not in the sense of one who stands for the obligations of another, but in the sense of certainty, acknowledging that his interpretation of that term was based on linguistic analysis rather than custom and that language was utterly inefficient in that respect, as opposed, perhaps, to numbers.  And that as he started writing, he had started to reflect on the nature of “knowledge” which, in terms of absolute accuracy, seemed as unattainable as infinity, and he considered the probability that all we had, really, were opinions, some of which we held very strongly, and then he had recalled a philosopher, David Hume, who had wrestled with related speculations and had concluded that absolute truths might or might not exist, and that as humans we could at best approximate the practical semblance of truths by developing what he called “conventions”, useful vehicles which we could, for a time, treat as “truths” but knowing that at some point, their seeming verity might well prove an illusion but how, over time, “conventions” became calcified so that, to most people, they became unassailable truths for which they were prepared to fight and to kill and to die, although “to kill for” was certainly favored over “to die over”.  And then, he had become distracted with the concept of prepositions, wondering how a “convention” had evolved in the English language, really a hodgepodge combination of diverse linguistic traditions, to the effect that it was improper to end a sentence with a preposition.  Certainly a much safer “convention” than the diverse religious “conventions” among the fratricidal Abrahamic religions which declared any failure to firmly consider related “conventions” absolute truths were what they referred to as “heresies”, and that heretics had to be eliminated, justifying genocide regardless of commandments that abjured homicide.  And then he recalled how, as a very young teacher, he had taught a course on comparative religions which he had expanded to include comparative mythologies as neither he nor his students could establish clear boundaries between the two concepts and how, after decades of research, he had come to perceive all organized religions, especially the Abrahamic variants, as more mythic than those belief systems that he and his students had once considered ancient superstitions.  Not a comforting thought, so he had returned to speculating on the nature of time and space which had doubled back to the concept of “conventions” and thence, to this strange reflection.

And the author wonders, first, whether anyone will ever read this reflection and, if so, what the reader or readers will make of it.  And what they will make of him.  And whether or not he will be embarrassed if anyone who knows him will attribute it to him.

Then he decides that perhaps it’s “time” to end this strange reflection.

“Time” he wonders, just what is it?  Not just how it’s measured.  And then he speculates on whether time can exist without motion and then, finally (another concept related to time), while wondering whether syllogisms had anything to do with silliness, he seemingly stops writing ….

At least for the nonce.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Panentheistic Reflections on Evolutionary Structure

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Within the diverse variants of hypotheses concerning the concept of transmigration of souls (including but not limited to the concept of reincarnation) karma occupies an important role.  However, an alternative related karma-free concept appeals to me, that of panentheistic monism.  In the variant of panentheistic monism to which I am most drawn, a hierarchy of self-aware intelligences exist which include us, evolving constantly based on experience, but based on a concentric form of collectivism.  Thus, in our case, we are comprised of diverse collectives; one includes our cells, then, on a higher plane, we are a collective comprised of our organs which are collectives of our cells, then, we are bodies comprised of a collective of our organs and our cells.  Further up the concentric ladder, we perceive of ourselves as individuals but also as members of collectives in which we are parts, e.g., our bond pairings, our families, our clans (extended families), our social groupings (religions, social communities, racial and ethnic identifications, etc.) culminating in our belief that we are part of a collective that we identify as humanity.

The interesting thing is that the collectives of which we are members, albeit subject to numerous variable tensions, seem to have identities of their own, a concept central to sociological hypotheses where groups act in a manner significantly different than would their individual members, willingly sacrificing the interests of individual members for what the collective perceives as a “greater good” (but which much more often seems to involve the interests of elites capable of manipulating the group for their benefit through coercion, very much in the manner that cancers function in our individual bodies).  That is a phenomenon that seems omnipresent in human collectives, at least as far as we know.  An open and critical question involves whether or not the collectives of which we are a part culminate at the level of our species, or whether our species is itself a part of an aware and volitional series of more complex entities such as the complex varieties of life found on our planet and, perhaps, the complex of biological and non-biological components of our environment, including air, water, weather, etc.  If so and, if we are just incapable of perceiving the levels of sentience of which we are a part (for example, the concept of Gaia), perhaps our planetary system is itself only a component of a series of greater sentient wholes, wholes such as our solar system, the group of solar systems of which our own is a part, the galaxy, the universe, etc.

Panentheism is generally viewed as a religious or spiritual concept but that may be misleading.  It may also involve an organizational reality where the omniverse (the total of all multiverses which, in turn, involve the organizational structure of individual universes, each with its own laws of physics and evolution) is sentient and self-aware, sentience being the extra-physical factor that separates the concept of panentheism from the related concept of pantheism.  In their religious variants, pantheism is the belief that divinity is the sum total of everything to which panentheism adds sentient self-awareness.

Monism adds an evolutionary element thus, each component of the pantheistic omniverse is deemed to be evolving and, in evolving, is assisting its superior structures to evolve so that, in a sense, inferior structures (inferior in terms of their level rather than their abilities) are the engines that drive the evolution of the structures of which they are components.  In a sense, there is a striving towards never-attainable perfection at all levels, a striving that is not always constant or successful so that evolution does not involve constant progress, although progress, in the long term, tends to be consistent.

The foregoing applies to the function we refer to as the transmigration of souls as it is apparently through experiences during myriad lifetimes that the systems of which we are components learn and evolve.  We are the tools for their perception of experiences, experiences that test their own evolutionary hypotheses, testing them and converting them into theories, and perhaps, eventually, into natural laws, laws being concepts impossible to violate.

Good and evil are hypotheses which we, in our diverse human groupings, develop, develop as guideposts, but they probably do not, except perhaps in very rare cases, rise to the level of theories and certainly even more rarely to the level of laws, although we tend to treat them as such.  Concepts involving good and evil tend to involve evolutionary processes that start as a practices, evolve into traditions, then customs and then, perhaps, into social norms which may eventually become codified into obligations whose violation is subject to penal sanctions.  But, since violations are possible at all levels and exceptions prevail, they do not really, regardless of how denominated, evolve into real laws.

The foregoing, at least for me, explains the incoherent societies in which we live and in which humans have always lived, where deceit, treachery and hypocrisy seem to be the norm, especially when we describe them in patriotic and religious terms.  But, on the brighter side, we are parts of an infant omniverse taking baby steps which perhaps in time may produce an evolutionary structure worth admiring.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Of Synchronicity

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Synchronicity:

Apparently a Jungian term that seems related to coincidence, i.e., in the sense of co-incidence, but nexus free although meaningfully connected.

Perhaps a toy in divinity’s tool chest meant to confound and confuse even as it enlightens.

Interesting.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Of Māui, Prometheus and Lucifer; or, should it be of Māui, Anansi, Kokopelli, Sun Wukong, Joha and Loki

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Māui is, or was, not an Island in Hawaii, at least not originally; he is (or was) a Polynesian divinity related in certain aspects to the Greek Prometheus and the Roman Lucifer.  Like them, he purportedly stole fire from the gods and gifted it to humans.  That, apparently, was Lucifer’s only sin, he was, after all, to the Romans, a divinity charged with encouraging veracity and light but of course, the media, both ancient and current, have calumnied him incessantly, confusing him with YHWH’s former pet, the Hebrew archangel Hêl él.  But Māui was an even more interesting character than Prometheus and Lucifer.  Like African Anansi or Pueblo Kokopelli or Chinese Sun Wukong or Semitic Joha or Nordic Loki, … he was a trickster divinity.  The most entertaining, dangerous, unpredictable and interesting kind of divinities.

Unfortunately for him, his philanthropy towards humans led to his demise. 

Not satisfied with just gifting us fire, or pulling Islands galore from the ocean floor (one of which bears his name), Māui sought to imbue us, you and me and everyone we know and everyone anyone has ever known, … with immortality.  He sought to accomplish that task, the undoing of YHWE’s curse, by creatively eliminating the death goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, something he attempted to do by penetrating her vagina in the form of a worm, something that in some aspects, at least to some with a sense of humor if not a sense of propriety, seemed inordinately appropriate.  After all, there are worms and there are worms and there are worms, some very large and powerful while others are rather small and seemingly meek, although, in the long term, the latter’s patience tends to be rewarded.  

So Māui penetrated Hine-nui-te-pō, albeit not in an overtly sexual manner, as a tiny worm after which it was his plan to traverse her genital canal seeking to break through to her alimentary canal and then, to exit through her mouth.

For some reason, Māui believed that such journey would be unnoticed, albeit terminal.  Why he believed that perhaps only he knew but, alas, he is no longer available to provide an explanation.

Unfortunately for both us and for him, he was inadvertently betrayed by his avian sidekick, pīwakawaka, who, as sidekicks are all too often wont to do, burst into laughter at the sight of Māui entering Hine-nui-te-pō’s vagina and she, alerted by the ruckus (surprising though that she hadn’t noticed her penetration), became furious and both inadvertently and deliberately, concurrently, crushed Māui to death with her vagina’s obsidian teeth.

Ouch!  Obsidian teeth would seem to have made both sexual congress and successful gestation, at best, improbable.  There are rumors to the effect that it is not only Hine-nui-te-pō who sports that attribute but that’s another story.

Anyway ….

Poor Māui, poor, shredded Māui.  Poor, poor us.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

This vignette is dedicated to Captain Woodruff C. Goble, USMC (retired), lately a florist on Māui but once a hero to many of us.  He still is.  Especially to the members of the Citadel, class of 1968’s, Hotel Company.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/

An Interlocking Spherical Introspection

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It seems interesting and perhaps even meaningful in some way that I am so much more drawn to interlocking identical serial spheres which share a common center at their edges than I am to concentric circles which seem less interesting to me, perhaps even boring; the former sacred and magical while the latter merely organizationally utilitarian, a means of describing concentrating priorities.  I’m not sure why I feel as I do, indeed, the reality is that I haven’t a clue.  But I do.

Perhaps there is an egalitarian element in interlocking serial spheres which share a common center at their edges, something wholly lacking in concentric circles, and perhaps in the shared centers of the former there exists a focused form of synergy.  Not a dominant focus but rather, a sort of distillation which, for some reason puts me in mind of the brandy that one can make from the liquid residue of frozen mead.  A strange sort of simile but perhaps one that, with reflection and introspection, might yield a primordial sort of sacred meaning.  Perhaps a sort of key to something we should know but which has, for some reason, perhaps a very good reason, been withheld.

For some reason, I sense that my preference discloses something important about me, something that I should know and perhaps even more, something those who, for some reason or other, rely on me or care for me or fear me, with or without cause, should know.  Perhaps it’s a clue to a secret pathway towards my soul or even, an echo hidden in shadows cast by a source of distant wisdom that enjoys teasing me with hints of who I am or who I should be, or perhaps of who I once was.

Or perhaps, at their shared core, there’s a hint of what divinity might be.  Or of what divinity is not.

Or perhaps it’s just a silly, meaningless predilection.

But I rather think not.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.