You'll break it! / It's not a toy!

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 March

A micrometer - great therapy though it is to find, over and over, the thickness of a piece of paper, and hear it click click when it has reached the point of measurement - is Not a toy.

Nor is a spring-loaded tape-measure, but that doesn't stop it being great fun to have it literally reel itself back in, with that distinctive noise as the stop at the end of the tape (0", 0 cm) hits the metal of the aperture.


So what does that tell us about anything? That - as do other creatures* - we like to play, to repeat, to test things to the limit? Maybe


That, knowing what something is for, we find another use for it? - and, in art, it is Marcel Duchamp who is credited with calling doing this 'a readymade', Fountain probably being the most infamous of such works of his. So our inventiveness, turning our hand to other things, seeing something anew / from another angle?** Perhaps


Or the impulse - coupled with the enabling power - to subvert the order of things?:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

in the words of early Joni Mitchell***. Possibly


And if not ourselves being those who act, then allowing it? - being those who 'having the power to do good', fail to do so? Conceivably


Saul, the man who became Paul and spread the Christian message over vast distances (from Malta to what is now Turkey), stood by, looking after the others' garments when Stephen****, the first follower of Jesus to be martyred, was stoned to death:


Whoever is not with me is against me (Matthew 12:30; Luke 11:23)

but also

For he who is not against us is for us (Mark, 9:40)


End-notes

* Including plants?

** Yet this is not a purely human trait, as those will testify who try to devise ways either of keeping squirrels out of a bird-feeder, or even challenge the creatures to puzzle out a series of steps to secure rewards intended for them.

*** The song 'Big Yellow Taxi' from the album Ladies of the Canyon.

**** So what is usually called Boxing Day, 26 December, is St Stephen's Day.


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