Sunday, February 11, 2007

The Organ Grinder


Well, the poet, John Keats once said something about how the world we live in is basically a school for souls. And well, since we really live in a world of hard knocks, you end up with a lot of lumps and bumps and bruises along the way. So this school, really, is a school of hard knocks. Maybe that's what makes us supremely soulful?

Then again, back in the day, there was a "pseudo-science," called Phrenology, which tried to predict personality traits by the lumps and bumps on a person's skull. So, a Phrenologist, might measure your skull and conclude that your "organ of wonder" was very big, and your "organ of veneration," was noticeably small.

So, I'm sitting here this morning, sipping some coffee, running my hands over my skull, trying to decipher just what's going on in that big mushy brain of mine. I've been in the process of re-thinking my little world. I've taken a few lumps to the noggin lately, and well, what does that say about the dumps/sunny dichotomy?

Is there something to be gleaned from a discredited, pseudo-science? I'm not really a scientist myself, so in some ways, everything is pseudo to me. I've always been baffled by this brain thinking about a brain conundrum. I mean, we've got this organ, and it's kind of a grinder, and there's a monkey somewhere in the picture, and well, like Chico Marx once asked, "how can I find out, what I got to find out, if I can't find out, what I got to find out?"