Last few days, been thinking about what makes a person’s, well … person. The five pylons or pillars (I like both these words so can’t decide and besides); here’s how I think a person is built. The awareness, the perception, the filters of consciousness – the person as a living, thinking, feeling individual, with an excellent tendency to make bad decisions and exist interestingly. I’m using popular words, though from culture to culture they may have fancier, more exotic synonyms. Whereas some are entirely expendable and over-rated, some of the others are utterly irreplaceable and can be, once broken or corrupt never again illuminated. 

THE CUNT. The cunt (or its male counterpart) is a very simple part, it basically has no negative perspective, it just wants to party and when it isn’t it’s getting ready for the next happy hour, keeping it cool. It loves the attention, but it has no illusions. It has, pretty much, seen it all. 

THE HEART. The heart is extremely complicated, because it wants to feel all the time and it isn’t really important if the emotion is positive or negative, as long as it is vehement. For all it cares, it can be absurdly depressed or giddy, it really matters none. It is where creativity originates from and as long as it beats, it’s the centrefold of all decisions. It is also a palimpsest. It is the fastest aging organ. 

THE WIT. Wit likes to think it’s the boss, but it really isn’t. Wit isn’t as passionate as the heart, as fun loving as the cunt or nearly as important as the spirit, but it is all over the place and lives to compensate for the biology of the matter. You can live very easily – in fact often a lot more easily – without the wit. Sometimes it’s the best part to own.  It makes for the best orchestrator of foreplay. Seldom credited. 

THE SOUL. This is a tricky one. The soul is where the morals, the ethics, the fundaments stand and it is also what can get very dark very quickly, if there’s dangerous discrepancies in the before mentioned bits. A soul is what encloses the whole of a person, the fundament. Like a fine leather coat over it all, the protector, the warmer, the shield. It’s very prone to denting, extremely sensitive and once damaged, it can almost never be repaired. When they say that sometimes, when you look into an abyss, the abyss looks back, it is the soul they are talking about. 

THE SPIRIT. The spirit is the opposite of soul. It is, what I believe, life and the shine of living of all things, like a magnificent, bright and very clean outer and inner sheen of any creature. It is what makes you want to live, live, live. It does not want to make you think too hard or follow the biology, plan long term or apologize for anything. It just wants you to take what you are given in this excellent planet and have the best time with it. Warrior poets or explorers or adventurers have an over-abundance of that. The spirit, however, if removed, leaves the person for ever empty. Once broken, it spills out the enclosure of all of the other components. Without the spirit, while perhaps without one of the others, there simply is no resolve.