The Crocodile- Part 4 Copyright Robert Fullarton 2017

The Crocodile- Part 4

Blomquist's Dream

-Copyright Robert Fullarton 2017

In the dead of night certain noises could be heard, but this time they were not coming from the wooden outhouse, but one of Blomquists’ chicken coups. A multitude of amber brown and white feathers were scattered into clouds as the creature carried out the great massacre of the chickens- a long foreseen event to the reader- with the front door shattered by a mere movement of the crocodiles tail. In the middle of the “massacre”, a cautious and cunning fox, merely watched the event from the outside while the chickens moaned and shrieked in the dark.

Blomquist was having the “greatest dream of his life” where all the towns people gave up walking their Italian Greyhounds and instead walked their “prized” Nubian crocodiles down the Hermanstrasse, where civil servant Klaus Von Karbunkle, sworn enemy of Blomquist, upon his “beloved” bicycle had to bow and scrape and honour the eccentric chicken farmer for his scientific breakthrough, as the greatest discovery of the century, the taming of the crocodile. How it became human over time, through the rigours of being made very polite, passive, docile and attractive to the common man on the street!

However with the Italian Greyhounds now manning the coaches for the tourist trade, the new population of crocodiles were in every lawn, wandering the streets, with postmen complaining of the “impossibility of being able to deliver the mail”, with hands mauled and how the “occasional postman had been eaten in the line of duty!” It was not just the postmen who moaned at the gates of the Rathaus, but also the concerned members of the knitting circle, who had no cats to feed, because of the hungry and loutish behaviour of juvenile “delinquent crocodiles” that roamed the streets at night, giving a menacing look and threatening the public safety of every citizen, dog, cat, postman and civil servant in sheer chaotic madness!

The Crocodiles were not behaving themselves they were acting like young teenage boys on a crime spree, raiding every chicken coup upon their path of destruction! Blomquist’s very own “pet” seemed to be the ringleader in the entire kerfuffle! As the crocodiles had escaped and sauntered rather casually through the streets, the local cooper’s cider cellar had leaked, with a colossal spillage of fermented cider flowing through the cellars to the brim and into the gaping mouths of the wandering reptiles. Now in consequence there were 25 crocodiles drunk on cider, “out of mind”, having “lost the run of themselves”, they struggled down the road, until the police arrived and had to reprimand them, to lock them in the town jail for the night.

The crocodiles seemed not to care much, as they drifted off into an intoxicated coma, as the district nurses and doctors worked for a solid hour trying to carry the cumbersome, unconscious beasts away on the hospital stretchers. Blomquist stood out on the edge of his front lawn, listening to the fading commotion that dispersed in the growing darkness of the midsummer night. Why had the authorities not put a speedy end to the event?

Why had the people even listened to Blomquist’s persistence that Crocodile’s were a very “misunderstood animal” comparable with being the “Flemish rabbit” of the reptile world. The dream had transformed into a nightmare, it was the cost of ignoring the honest warnings and obvious signs for which the social experiment spelled disaster!

Blomquist awoke, from his nightmare in a cold sweat, tugged loose from the web like layers of his bed sheets and ran down the stairs in haste, to see several chicken coops completely ransacked, with the shattered wood strewn everywhere and with a trail of chicken feathers leading into the dense bushes of the neighbours lawn.

“Oh that wicked fox must have been at it again, only this time its worse than ever!”

He said aloud half-heartedly, seeking an excuse, so to hold firmly to his naive fantasy.

However the Crocodile had not touched his bowl of water, the door of the outhouse had been smashed through as well, the bolt had been torn asunder and once more the nauseous feelings of failure and regret began to surface in Blomquist's troubled heart.

Caravaggio and Christ -by Robert Fullarton

Caravaggio and Christ

-by Robert Fullarton

Copyright Robert Fullarton

With the current exhibition of Caravaggio’s work on display in Ireland’s National Gallery in Dublin, I decided to write a short piece on the momentous inspiration this artist has given me over time.

Though Caravaggio’s life is one of mystery, of violence, a suspected murder, a hot headed and sensual man, a man on the run from local authorities, who according to some died a violent death, assassinated by the Knights of Malta, a different side of Caravaggio can be imagined and to some extent be seen through pious faces, heroes of faith, that make the Biblical characters very real to the modern day art lover.

His oeuvre displays his mastery of shadow and light, giving the faces of his subjects a great appeal which makes them look photogenic, realistic in the proportions of the human form and showing Christ in human form, with all the tempests of human emotion and expression. His work is truly one of the finest expressions of Baroque art, along with the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer. He follows the tradition of Michelangelo, to a certain extent, but his portraits are more human and dramatic often for me than those of Michelangelo, or say Titian, Mantegna and Da Vinci, as Jesus Christ, appears to be less covered under a holy halo, but he is shown through his human form, in depictions of suffering, of eating amongst friends, of common everyday happenings and in such he has a personal appeal, to the believer, to the sinner to human dimensions of empathy. I must state that the Taking of Christ, is truly one of my favourite paintings and is one of the greatest paintings undertaken on the life of Jesus Christ, its brooding, dark subject, fills the viewer with a pathos, previously undiscovered and re-tells the narrative of Christ’s betrayal and eventual crucifixion with human agony, it captures the suffering God-man and Sacrificial lamb on the path to Calvary. We are visual creatures, art allows us to visualise the proportions of the past, of the Bible, making such content come alive and when executed well it is a testament to the entire Christian artistic culture and legacy, which is deeply personal to the believer!

Societies Lack of general Faith -the examination of doubt and cynicism -Robert Fullarton

Societies Lack of general Faith

-the examination of doubt and cynicism

-Robert Fullarton copyright 2017

I was meandering through the confines of a local park, all alone, but reminded of a fact. I knew of a certain political figure once held in high esteem, and one which I too respected and admired. He was in the days of my childhood a man adored by most (in circles of liberal democracy) in the public at large and of course by my own parents as well. Over two decades scandals, have since emerged of this man’s private life, which tarnished and destroyed his integrity, as the image of the “great leader” had been tarnished and the “peacemaker” was subdued into the depths of the public’s despair and hostility. With such cases and many other on a comparable level, there is this sense of betrayal when ordinary people lose hope and faith with their own leadership. The sense of identity and purpose becomes twisted in the confusion after the scandal. I too have seen such scandals, whether they been with politicians or with the Catholic church. Men feel they cannot trust the leadership of their nation anymore, what is worse is the truth that men on a broader and more philosophical spectrum, feel the union between the peoples to have been diluted with a level of cynicism, of doubt and vigilance. Society operates on doubt, it does so by the rigours and ends of the press, it does so through its superficial love for all things entertaining, all things pleasurable and wholly utilitarian. Yet the deeper questions and hard lessons of are often ignored, by the cheap offerings of pleasure, the comfort of the moment, does not compensate for the deep answers and assurances of eternal questions.

Such superficiality and doubt do not let the societal mind permeate or exceed the mundane, to ask the big questions, to take such leaps of faith, and sacrifice, where the noble virtues of chivalry, chastity, courage, loyalty and honour are bought and sold by the weight of one’s purse, or more rightly the lure of a new smart phone. Western society, consumes; is the consumer, for the consummation of great excesses, of great luxuries, previously unknown, of great abodes, of great automobiles and great health care coverage, of great access to knowledge and yet with emptiness of heart, emptiness of community spirit, poverty of meaning and yet all such as the empire of men is built upon the works of Aristotle and the splitting of the atom, the pantheons of knowledge seem frivolous and cannot conquer the deep and seemingly eternal divisions that consequentially have seen men play out the fantasies of grandeur and shown barbarism under a fancy new name. Of course the utopia sought by the reactionaries to the regime did not bring the so desired utopia of perfection, because the minds and hearts of men went on hating.

The terrible and tragic loss of faith in the Christian churches has of course been multi-faceted over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. It partly happened through the attrition of ww1, the horrors of ww2, through a broad psychological rebellion against perceived conservative structures of authority and through the general desire of another generation to cling to all things pleasurable and temporal, after times of sparse material supplies, the time of plenty came, and in peace this slide unto unbelief became a torrent in time. The youth of “free love” rebelled against the government, church, family and law, and also against the moral understanding of old. The Byronic dream to have everything- to have no needs, to answer to no person- was ironically in reality a case for delayed misanthropy and disaster.

The modern media driven society of today was birthed in the self-centred, gluttonous, desire to make money, for the psychological tour de force that all people of every class could become famous, could make money and never suffer the exposures and hardships of the previous generations. The drive to make money, clouded the heads of many ordinary people, as sheer entertainment was promulgated and flooded into the senses of the masses.

Good living, recreational pleasure, entertainment and self-preservation have become the religious desires of the public, with all time allotted to these rituals, the superficial facade of the modern rigmarole, sees neighbour trying to better neighbour in the competitive spirit of consumer/capitalist society, sees the sheer pettiness and travesty of the law courts operating upon the petty system of legalism, with vitriolic acrimony and sheer apathy between neighbours on many tiers of the social order. Men still yearn for the perfect government like bears roughing up the bees nest for the honey. Such get stung in time. Likewise as the consumer consumes the corporate inflate in revenue, net worth, in sheer assets, in the expansionism of conquering the market on a global level- this plutocracy defines the age in which live, in our compartmentalised media empire, behind the entertainment and the celebrity there lies a businessman and a corporation. These changes have created walls of disparity between people, making the elite rich even richer and the poor far more considerably poorer.