I’ve frequently wondered as to what motivated the inept linguist or translator who turned the word “flutterby” into “butterfly”. That usually brings to mind (at least to my mind) the inept Catholic “saint”, Jerome of Stridon, who made a mess of his Latin translation of the Greek version of the Hebrew Tanakh. Poor Lucifer, demoted by the purported saint from the Roman god of truth and light into a rebellious archangel and the patron of evil (a role that belonged to a Hebrew “entity” whose name was Hel-El).
Flutterby is obviously the correct term to describe the fluttering, flying insect, often beautiful, that has nothing to do with butter but is stuck with that appellation. I don’t suppose Jerome was responsible, he knew nothing of English, but who knows. The absence of knowledge never stopped him.
And as to the “Latin” version of the Bible on which the St. James and other mistranslations are based, what can one say other than perhaps, …
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/.
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 ….
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/.
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.
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/
“Aniquinically yours” she shouted triumphally, “that’s how it’s used, it’s a neologism”. It’s the adverbial form of the word “aniquinical” which is an adjective for the noun “aniquin”, although perhaps that’s a verb, but I’m pretty sure it’s a noun.
“Hmmm” Will replied skeptically. “Hhmmm” was not an acceptable word in Scrabble no matter how frequently he thought about using it. He was intrigued by the possibility of adding “h”s to increase the word score but, he abided by both the spirit and letter of the rules, no pun intended, and, getting back to Martina’s “aniquinically yours”, he responded on a more specific rather than reactive basis: “I’m pretty sure brand new neologisms designed to fit the board don’t count. Anyway, they’d have to mean something and what the hell does ‘Aniquin’ mean”?
He’d used the word “neologism” recently and, after he had proved its existence to Alyssa, the arbiter in their game, Martina had become intrigued by the possibilities it represented for her in the game. Now, she looked at him somewhat mysteriously, seductively, knowingly, as though she wasn’t bluffing and said: “everyone knows what that means, at least if they’ve had a modicum of education” (and she immediately thought: “modicum”, I’ll have to remember that). But she simply said, “If you’re challenging, just look it up”.
From across the room Alyssa said, “I think she meant ‘Aniconically’, which is a word.
“Yeah” Martina said, “that’s what I said!”
“But, … you spelled it wrong” Alyssa added, to Martina’s disappointment. “It’s spelled A-n-i-c-o-n-i-c-a-l-l-y”.
Will laughed and said, “So Martina, … what does ‘Aniconically’ mean anyway”? Smirking, he knew Martina had just made up a word. Martina was all too frequently creative in a deviously dishonest fashion. But she was also beautiful and charming and charismatic and was thus usually able to pull off whatever she wanted, especially with men to whom she was not related. But he was immune. Martina was his younger, very competitive sister and Will loved her just the way she was, especially since, over time, he’d finally learned how to read her.
Apparently, the three were not quite as alone as they thought they were. From what some might refer to as another dimension, perhaps one set in a sort of twilight that might have once been familiar to a certain Rod Serling, Aniquin apparently inchoately stillborn, looked on from the ether flowing from the board of the game on which Martina and Will were playing. All boards used in that game were sources of soul-like concepts which, from time to time, entered and possessed, not bodies, but the memeplexes we refer to as words. Aniquin wondered just what it was that it itself might someday mean and wondered what the hell ‘Aniconically’ meant. There were a google of other inchoate concepts sharing the etherous, otherworldly vapor seemingly surrounding Aniquin, all of them inchoate or stillborn, all of them waiting to be defined, all of whom looked on expectantly, wondering whether a new word was being born.
Apparently, on Instagram there existed a certain “Ani Quinn”, so the potential for a new word existed.
In the meantime, in the more tangible world with which most of us are familiar, Martina and Will had dashed for their shared official Second Revised Edition of the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a huge tome which sat pompously, almost smirking, in the middle of a bookcase made of castoff cement blocks and wooden planks on which diverse other books shared space with old wine bottles covered in the multicolored waxy residue of former candles as well as with the lonely, seemingly disappointed (or perhaps just disinterested) jade-colored bust of a well-known ancient Indian sage, one who too many people believed to have been born in a place referred to by its inhabitants as the Middle Kingdom (which was definitely different from Middle Earth).
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
Once upon a time, not a very long time ago nor in a very faraway place, there lived, for a very brief instant in time, a very young title in search of a story. It had heard of Neil Gaiman’s short story “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of Dread Desire” and that had turned out rather well, thus, it found itself inspired, albeit perhaps not quite prepared for success. The following is what, after not looking all that long or, to be honest, without very much exertion, it created:
The story started with an exclamation bereft of an introduction or of any character development or context, although, to an extent, context sort of followed:
“So what! Who cares? What’s the difference anyway?”
In that manner, in a huff, a disputation appeared to end, one between inanimate marble busts of “purported saints” Peter and Paul, sculptures crafted by one of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso’s lesser known relatives who, for reasons of his or her own, chose to remain anonymous.
The busts had been stored in a vestibule deep in the heart of the Vatican, a vestibule located within a labyrinth of sorts, not an artfully designed or planned labyrinth but rather, one that had seemingly evolved on its own as discarded tomes and relics and pieces of art accumulated in utterly random order, or rather, in a sort of articulated disorder. Both saints on whom the busts had been purportedly modeled were reputed, within certain clandestine circles, to have been secret agents planted several millennia ago by Sanhedrin agents (precursors to the current Israeli Mossad) as provocateurs among naïve early followers of a troublesome Nazarene rabbi in order to undermine the early Judaic heretic sect all too quickly spreading like some sort of early virus (although viruses preceded humans by many eons).
For some odd reason, the busts of the purported saints, both of whom found themselves somewhat unexpectedly set in carefully hidden niches, were declaiming in a variant of sorts of modern English, although with blended Brooklyn-Yiddish accents, perhaps understandably given that the event to which we are alluding occurred relatively shortly after a visit by a group of the Vatican janitors and Swiss Guards assigned to the Vatican’s deepest dungeons, or perhaps storerooms; an incognito visit to the tourist filled Bioparco di Roma which was just then hosting a large American tourist group of former Yeshiva students. One should, however, keep in mind, that the phrase “relatively shortly” may have a relative temporal meaning where the Vatican is involved.
Although, … perhaps the foregoing was just a dream one of the janitors or Swiss Guards was having after a hearty but poorly prepared meal using ingredients perhaps well past their due dates, certainly none of which met with Kosher dietary exigencies. It’s been known to happen. Well, not exactly in this fashion, but perhaps, metaphorically ….
Or perhaps not.
On the other hand ….
No Neil Gaiman here, … unfortunately, he’s regrettably otherwise occupied. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
Memes and genes and photons, speed and time and space, dark matter and dark energy:
Is the transportation and reassembling of information, as is the case with memes and genes, a principle photonic function?
Does the purported reality that time bears an inverse relationship to speed and thus to space perhaps imply that it may flow in more than one direction?
Are dark matter and dark energy, in a sense, a reflection of the foregoing? _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
He’d thrown caution to the wind, gambling again against the future and the past, willingly offering them up in exchange for the possible enchantment that appeared to be within his grasp, fleeting though it might be, hoping that one single triumph would make everything else, all the past failures, irrelevant.
It was not a unique situation.
In the past, similar circumstances had failed to fulfill his expectations. But they’d always extracted the full price he’d been willing to pay. He’d been left emotionally, physically and materially drained but, he’d just start anew, never learning and hoping that he never would.
His past infatuations had rarely matured into even meaningful relationships and certainly not into “the” special relationship he’d always optimistically intuited. Yet “rarely” had always seemed, at least momentarily, enough. And despite his past failures, not that many but not that few, he remained optimistic. After all, the unique experience he hoped for could only really occur, in its most profound sense, once. And only one person out of all the people who had ever been born or would ever be born could fulfill it. The person who, as to him, would prove to be the single source of complete resonance: amorous, intellectual, spiritual and physical, melding their individual vibrancies into a single perfect wave, one between and among them and no one else.
Or so he understood.
Others wondered what sort of wave might coalesce through the joinder of more than just two, perhaps even many vibrancies, and the more spiritual aspired to join the ultimate wave that might be formed joining us all.
The possibility of artificial intelligence encapsulated in the verisimilitude of human form might soon complicate the premises involved.
But, as to him, at that moment, at that instant, he wondered what she, the latest catalyst for his obsession, was thinking. Or of what, perhaps, she was dreaming. Which raised the issue of which was the real world, the waking or the dreaming. And then, whether the objects in a dream, the beings who seemed to populate it, had their own realities, their own dreams. And finally, the eternal speculation as to whether we might not all just be objects in the perpetual dream of the most primordial of all denizens of the vegetable kingdom, as so many plants and flowers and shrubs and trees, especially giant redwoods, seem to hope. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
Biggus Dickus, a character eventually revealed (albeit tangentially) in Monty Python’s documentary on the Life of Brian (which dealt with purported events during the first century of the Common Era), may or may not have involved a parody of the infamous Roman Casanova-wanna-be, Primus Phalux Maximus Quintus (who may or may not have actually existed), and who if he did exist (improbable but one never knows), but for temporal improbabilities, may or may not have been the secret hidden triplet of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the third member of which was the audaciously beautiful, sensuous and libidinous Clodia Metelli, sometimes known as Quadrantaria, of whom the Roman eroticist poet Gaius Valerius Catullus longingly wrote dramatically ambivalent vignettes comprised in equal parts of love, despair and deprecation. At least that might have been the lead story in the media in the late Roman Republic, circa sixty years before the Common Era, had its journalistic ethics born a resemblance to that of today’s maliciously creative corporate media, which, come to think of it, it may well have, both having prioritized creative writing. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
What if words are in fact components of sentient collective streams that actually control us; that use our organic components as tools for their own internecine purposes?
What if words are, in fact, sentient memes and memeplexes that ride us the way we are led to believe by them that we use animals and tools for what we erroneously perceive to be our own purposes.
Mightn’t that explain why, in the end as in the beginning, our conduct tends towards incoherence, at least from our own reactive rather than volitional perceptions?
Mightn’t the word, “internecine” say it all, or at least, a great deal?
What if rather than “being because we think” we just “think we are”?
What would a mimetically sentient “god of the words” be like, after all, purportedly, “in the beginning was the Word”? _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 