High Fidelity

Cato the Elder, aka Marcus Porcius Cato, was a Roman statesman, or perhaps you might say policitian, in the second century BCE, or perhaps you might say BC. He was a man with a well defined mission, single pointedly devoted. Or you might say he was tyrannically obsessive.

But the fact of the matter, as a matter of fact, is that he ended every speech, every

writing, with the same words: Delenda est

Carthago. His mantra can be translated as "Carthage must be destroyed." In Latin the use of the gerundive with a form of esse, to be, indicates necessity of the action.

This tenacious, repetitive, insistent battle cry functioned as verbal punctuation regardless of the content of his speech. Highly predictable, a new parse born of a radical fidelity, this phrase was realized in the Third Punic War. The Phoenician city-state of Carthage in North Africa was totally destroyed. All the survivors were sold into slavery. Even the fields were sown with salt. Hence the sweet vengeance of total victory.

For Cato, there was no problem. No moral dilemma. There was total clarity, punctuated into existence, or you might say, non-existence.

For Poul Anderson, American science fiction writer, things are not so clear. Poul writes: "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you look at it the right way, did not become more complicated."

Poul wrote a short story entitled, of all things, "Delenda Est." In this story, time traveling outlaws create a new 20th century. The hero decides to fight to restore our familiar history by totally destroying the new version. He describes the enterprise as "risking your neck to negate a world of people like yourself."

What is the relationship between fiction and reality? Is it a hi fi relationship? Is there a high quality of reproduction of the original sounds and images? To what degree does the device reproduce its effect?

If fidelity can refer to exactness, it can also refer to faithfulness and loyalty. Can our stories about fidelity be stories of high fidelity? Or, do the stories we create say more about us creators than about our endless parade of heroes and villains? Really, do we all just simply disappear into thin air leaving behind our endlessly kaleidoscopic stories?

Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, disappeared and reappeared. Quite a trick. But the real magic is the endless flurry of stories. Joe Taylor, commerce secretary of South Carolina, says that Mr. Sanford is "a hell of a shot." And Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina, says that her friend Jenny Sandford, Mark's wife, is "always the smartest person in the room." We have seen the You Tube video of Maria, the other woman, filmed for television in New York just after 9-ll. We have read the available

e-mail billets doux.

Is Jenny too smart? Too cold? Just? Right? The absolute balance of open yet tough love?

Is Mark narcissistic? Volatile? Or has he sacrificed all for love? After all, he wrote to Maria: "The rarest of all commodities in the world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become." Or is he having his cake and eating it, too?

Is Maria a narcissistic dilettante, or is she a Muse, a fearless locus of passion?

So, what say you? With what mantra of bias do you punctuate your hypotheses?

Nietzsche wrote that there are no realities, only points of view. Some say that with him came the death of the gods and of a high philosophy search for the grand unified theory of everything. Important pronouncements have been replaced by little meaningless tautologies of which we are childishly proud.

This pirate says: "No problem." I am good with the endless possible imputation that replaces inherent existence. I find kaleidoscopic bliss in the ever changing drum circled square dance of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I see, from the genesis to the nascent revelation, that it is good. High fidelity is device reproducing effect. And it can be no other way in our

web of intimate, endless dance. Danse

macabre, p as de deux , line dancing the shortest distance as sign of the divine. We can only be compass encompassing trust, loyalty thrust into worlds that we create and destroy. Oh, endless joy, there is no problem. There is no problem. There is only the sound of rocks falling onto sand, left behind, leaving only a perfect vehicle for impermanent story words already blown away. No attendance required.

Merely the attending.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who

hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all

those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be

wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but

emanating fr om within this shado w is

hope that readers will feel free to respond.

Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the

muse. Make contact if you dare.