Unbridled cleverness is the prevailing detriment of all ages. As a gnat attracted to the sweetness of honey is autogenically shackled in a hyper-gelatinous prison– so will the knowledge of humankind be autogenically shackled if left untempered by the saccharine release of wisdom.
I painted Minerva and Her Prey as an analysis of this imprisonment– where I have demonstrated that ambition’s flame, when left untamed, leads to annihilation. The owl eerily looms over the ready-demise of a clever rodent engulfed in a fiery tomb of self-betrayal. The rat is a trembling synecdoche of all ambitious folly, which dangle like pendulums amidst vectorless flux. This flux is illustrated by using fire as an ode to Heraclitus– and the flux can become vector-bound by the suffocating liberation from pure reason. I would contend that it is within the interplay of fire’s freedom and the tempered hand of wisdom that ambition finds its trajectory; only then can it align its path, not with reckless fervor, but with intention.
Phaethon disregarded the warnings of Helios when he took the reins of the chariot of fire. His decision was guided by the searing force of pride, consequently leaving the earth in immense destruction. Like the rat engulfed in the fiery flux, Phaethon’s trajectory was doomed the moment it combined ignorance with action.
The inevitability of ambition, particularly accompanied by intellect or pride, being curtailed by strategic understanding is forever perpetual. The skeletal scaffold of ambition is hollow without the marrow of prudence. All ambitions and pursuits of knowledge are mercurial fire. The steadfast and humble tempering of belligerency will transmogrify untempered intellect into a reshaped bloom of strengthened province, better reclaiming the intended direction of the fiery ambition as it burns in perpetuity.