Poetry Update #3

A Song to Dallas
______________

I know your cracked earth and
Southwest sky. The buildings
in the faraway haze my first
compass. You are like a lover or
a deity: aloof. Unknown but familiar.
The black spaces below your overpasses
and the clockwork of ten thousand
casually furious cars. What you taught
me: how to be sad wherever I am,
how to remember pain and man's
artificial masochism. How to want
Truth.


Severance
__________

The dog lies collapsed on the side
of the road, folded in on itself like an
old blanket set aside for no particular
purpose. Somewhere a woman is
upset because there is a dent in
the right front bumper of her new Lexus.


Thought
________

Awake, trying to find something
that approaches Truth. Turning over
old poems, old conversations, shaking
the dust of a former ignorance.
My mind is a mold I cannot feel.
It is a container that breaks itself,
hunting the sharp horizon
in the vast expanse of the known.

Poetry Update #2

    On Holding the Machinery in My Hand

________________________________

There, the occipital lobe, the

frontal, the temporal. Cerebellum.

The mind in my hand smelled of

rubbing alcohol and plastic. Splitting

apart the soft mass to see the white

branching web of nerves cocooned

underneath. Touching it, I felt the ageless

desire awaken, the machinery of

thought trying desperately to understand

itself. Sensing the need to understand. 

Before it is shrink-wrapped in

a plastic bag

that smells of rubbing alcohol.

     Remembering a Rain Song
_______________________

The damp cold air shudders the
lungs, making breath more real than
thought. Water clinging to the trees.
Remembering a rain song, as
always, that sounds like the
pond at Bushy Park with
drizzle carpeting the waterlilies,
that sounds like the glistening stones
of the Hellfire House in the wind.

The Bitter Nature of the Truth

It's an often-observed irony that the more we know the less convinced we become that we can know anything.  As children, we knew the grass was green and the sun was hot, and we were convinced that was the whole story; then we learned that the grass is green because it has chlorophyll cells in it, and the sun is hot because it's a giant ball of reactive gas.  And then, if we really think about it, we realize that there is no such thing as "green" or "hot" in the first place, because "green" is just a neuron signal triggered by the eye's perception of a certain wavelength of light, and "hot" is likewise just the perception in the mind of nerve cells sensing the intensity of the movement of molecules in the area around the skin.  That is to say, "green" and "hot" only exist in the sense that you perceive them; if you did not have eyes, then nothing would be green, and if your nerve cells could not react to temperature, then nothing would be hot.

Of course, dragging this to its logical end, one comes to the realization that everything we think of as truth is really just our perception of some sort of external Truth. Green is our perception of the external Truth (which we do not understand) that we call wavelengths of light, and hot is our perception of the external Truth that we call temperature.  The same can be said of sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, even logical thought: all are approximations of an external reality.

But this means that we fundamentally do not know Truth.  We can perceive it, yes, assuming exists (refer to Solipsism), but our perception is not Truth. It is an approximation, and as such can only be described as flawed. Logic can be misunderstood or misapplied, language can be twisted, even our own physical senses can be unreliable (witness sight and touch, for example).

The implication is, then, that we cannot say with certainty if any individual something is true - that is, in line with the external Truth - because we do not know Truth, we only perceive it. Something can appear to us to be true - perhaps we even have an unshakable conviction that it is true - but we can never know for certain what, exactly, composes the external Reality.

Perhaps it is the closest to Truth we can come to say, in the words of Socrates however many thousands of years old, that we know that we do not know.


Intelligent discussion, as always, available in the comments section below.

One more, on the house

One last poem.  "Regular" blog post coming very soon, I promise.


Happy
-----------
couldnt sleep last night
i dont know why -
or, i do i just would
have thought contentment
would bring sister
sleep with it, or
at the very least
restfulness.

ha, in my hands
hope does more damage than
even despair.
now even the sleep is
wrung out of me,
taking the familiar lonely,
shaking the soft conviction of
sadness that says
"there is a greater end to life
than to be happy"

Poetry Update

10 days between posts is longer than I expected.  Well, I'm busy, and I'm new to this whole blog thing, I guess.  Regardless, this is going to be a pretty brief post - I'm just going to share a few poems I wrote today during Theo class (Don't judge me until you've sat through one of Fr. Roch's theo classes).

They're both as of this moment untitled.  Live with it.


1
---
coming to see only now
the gap between what i know &
who i think i am - to say
you're not fucking socrates
its ironic, even socrates knew he
did not know - or especially socrates i guess
but me i dont i just want
to stare out a window &
pretend life is like a movie -
that i already know the plot and
am just waiting for the credits to roll.


2
---
In the pub. It's five o'clock,
and it was five o'clock yesterday
around the same time, when he
was in the pub. He wonders if
these thoughts constitute him as drunk,
looks at his warm beer. not yet,
raises the glass to his lips. Five
kilometers down the road is the house.
Silent road silent house. She's not
warming up the last night's lasagna,
not even picking wild gooseberries in the side garden.

Mirror, Mirror

Has this happened before to anyone else?

 A few minutes ago, I was clicking through my facebook photographs due to a mixture of narcissism and the need to find a profile picture for the google-whatever account I had had to set up to create this blog.

While I was doing this the weirdest thing happened. When one photo popped up, I didn't recognize myself.  And it wasn't like the photo was from seven years ago or my hair was dyed blue or something and I was thinking about how different I used to look. No, I looked exactly like me, I just saw myself as a stranger: I absentmindedly wondered what I was like to be around, what my deepest thoughts and desires were, whether I would like me if I knew me.  It was like I had walked in on my self-image undressing or something.

The very same thing has happened with longtime friends as they've grown older; looking at them, suddenly their faces break the mold of the familiar, and I glimpse for a moment not who I think they are, but what they really look like. It makes me wonder how much I really know them, to what extent I've mentally categorized, simplified their being down to a few idiosyncrasies and a certain manner of speaking.

How much of the world that we live in is the expected, the habitual, pasting itself over the real, the actual? Apparently, there's a good chance that we don't even see true colors anymore.  These moments of clairvoyance, in which we are permitted to see ourselves and others without the subconscious filter of our own opinions and expectations, don't come nearly often enough.

No.1

Hello everyone.

So, apparently, having a blog is kind of the shit. Correct me if I'm wrong here. At the very least, it seems one of every two of my friends has a sports blog or a quiet musings blog or a realtime autobiography blog they link to on facebook.

And you know what? For the most part, they aren't all that bad.  There are a few that are even good.

-- Please don't get the wrong impression from the way I said that.  I'm not really an asshole. I'm more of an eternally surprised cynic.  If you don't see what I mean, I'm sure you will as I post more.

But no, I'm starting a blog because I've seen it done well, because some of my friends write blogs that I do more than read out of friendship. You know what I mean. I'm writing this blog in the hopes that what I say will be just as interesting to even a single person.

The cynic in me thinks that what I have to say isn't really that interesting, and that I'll post about four times and quit.

I'm open to surprises.