Some people may look at an Albrecht Dürer print and say that its only lines on paper,
and furthermore that neither angels nor dragons actually exist --- but it is more than that.
:
:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome raths outgrabe
Some people may read Lewis Carroll and say that its a bunch of poppycock nonsense --- but it is more than that.
:
:
And some people may smoke a pipe and say its only a piece of wood with holes in it --- but it is more than that.
Regis McCafferty left this poem in the comment box of
The Five Laws of Pipe Companioning first blog post:
COMPANION
Against my cheek, the subtle touch
of your smooth and burnished skin -
The warmth of it reminding me
of the many places we have been.
From London near the Tower Gate,
in a shop where we first met,
to Rome, and Delhi, and Lahore -
Then to picnics on the Trent.
When evening brings the coffee hour,
and aromas to the sense delight,
against my cheek, I feel the touch
of you my friend.... companion.... pipe.
Regis McCafferty
1994
I did not get the book, as I've never ordered anything from NEATPIPES, but it's really cool that they actually made a bound paper volume as a gift for their patrons, a very fine touch which is mostly lacking these days.
The final strophe sums it up well, and a little "poetic veneer" is always a good thing in my book...
You can undoubtedly find tropes correlative to your own interests, aspirations and biography to give a little poetic veneer to your rotation. The important thing for your enjoyment is simply the time you take with your pipes-story, however you decide to “write” it. For the pipe companioner, “the pipe collection is a growing organism.”
In the opening of Case N° 130812, Irwin states:
Anyway, in between stouts 2 and 3, I began to feel nostalgic for my grad-school days as a student librarian (about the only thing I enjoyed as a graduate student), and with a wink and nod to the father of library science S. R. Ranganathan, I proceeded to sketch out “The Five Laws of Pipe Companioning.”
And thusly nods to Ranganathan's 5 laws...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science
...as a loose inspirational framework from which to construct a parallel text concerned with pipes --- I certainly don't think the exercise is a crackpot rant, but a very readable, entertaining and thoughtful essay regarding pipe-smoking and some of the cultural stuff that goes along with it.
I applaud his efforts and thank him for taking the time.
The classic definition of romanticism may be
the triumph of emotion over intellect, but somehow the act of pipe-smoking unites both emotion and intellect in a grand narrative of mysterious properties where both entities exist in strange equivalence.
