Best Writing Prompts

I've purposely left out info about the pictures to help avoid preconceptions about time and setting (click on the pictures to view a larger version).

Describe the landscape. Describe the people in it and their actions. Now imagine you're in this picture. How did you get there? What are you going to do? How will the people in it react to your presence?

 

Describe the landscape. Imagine sensations other than visual (smells and sounds). Imagine the sensation of the wind against your skin and the touch of wood and foliage. Now start walking. If you were to cross the wire would someone stop you for trespassing? Describe the confrontation.

Down and Out Riots

By coincidence I'd just finished reading Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London when I heard part of a broadcast on Radio 4 (BBC) on the very same work. Though his novels Animal Farm and 1984 are better known nowadays, his journalism remains largely forgotten, apart from Shooting An Elephant, which is often anthologised. In the first part of Down and Out he describes his life as a plongeur, a dishwasher in a French restaurant. He describes all the fraud that goes on behind the scenes of fancy restaurants. In the second part he describes his experiences as a homeless man in London, being moved from dosshouse to dosshouse. Generally the plongeur, despite the harsh working conditions and the low pay, is better off than the tramp. Right about the time I finished it riots broke out in Tottenham.

In Down and Out Orwell contends capitalist society fears the mob so much they won't leave people idle. The tramps have to work for their stay in de dosshouse. His suggestion was to give people money and let them pass the time as they saw fit. However, later in the book he points out how resentful and humiliated people feel at being
given handouts.

From the Industrial Revolution onward, one problem with capitalist society has been that once food became more available the population would surpass the needs of industry.
Colonies providing cheap raw materials and later the welfare state tended to mitigate this problem. So the idea among (social) democracies was to provide basic services and a small income for these "superfluous" people. They ignored the resentment this caused among the recipients who felt excluded from society, and the taxpayers who felt they were being robbed. The latter won't cause that much trouble because they have more to lose. Resentment among the former, however, is free to boil over at times.

The only option would be to make young, unemployed people work for their handout, but this would have unpleasant echoes of slavery and Russian gulags.

Immortality, and onward

Self-portrait by Jacek Malczewsky

Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, ihn zu überwinden?

Man is something to be conquered. What have you done to conquer it?

Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch - ein Seil über einem Abgrunde.

Man is a rope connecting animals and the superman - a rope across an abyss.

Both quoted from Also sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche (my own translations).


Nietzsche felt the body, the receiver and transmitter of the senses, was a thing to be overcome, conquered. In this he used the same duality of mind and body as many religions do. Dualities have the drawback of suggesting oppositions, where in fact there is a relationship. The image of the rope over an abyss also suggests something has to walk across it. The soul, perhaps?

Granted that we’re the vehicles of our DNA. In the process of nature this is our part in it. Yet we are, and feel ourselves, to be more than this. From reading the works of Daisetz Suzuki, and Nietzsche’s metaphors, the following thought struck me.

We are the results of countless causes, our parents meeting, for a start.
Our actions, and even our existences, have equally countless consequences, most of which we’ll never know.
Doesn’t this mean that even our organic selves are immortal?
Some food for thought, I hope.