No motion in painting
Save the brush stroke
Permanently locked in
Line structure
& 2
Dimensions
Trapped on the canvas
Never offering the subject
The opportunity
To exercise
Free will.
Painting is a prison.
Category: Ars Philosophica
I am interested in place as place, a single objectified reality that is changed only by subjective interactions with it. This as a separate pursuit of the human experience that is influenced by place which is history and human presence objectified.
The park
Neon and forest green
Rolling blend of Kentucky blue
Clover and dandy lions
Shaded by old line of elms
The park
Neon yellow and navy
Zipping children chasing and surging
Tearing out clumps of Kentucky blue
In pursuit of glory
You can have a place
And use it too.
To capture being
As we are not things
As “things” go
Us Being
That Is or shall I say
I Am
No thing
So this is where it gets confusing, you see
So often we write of things, describing things, filling empty pages with empty rooms, filling them with words about things to fill whole rooms. But, then enters the main character and that’s when it goes to hell because lead role players are always such emotional beings so it’s tough to say where it will all go and what will set them off so the room fills with emotional predicate.
We enter
Asking for your attention
The town crier
Speaking of the here
And the now
Present for this expression
Of the hearing
Spoken in clear and present tense
The words of the people
So that they may be heard:
What they say—
How they say—
That we may say about them
And this place; The good
And bad and in-between places
That people go to become their
Very own demonstration of their Human
Being. We are here to write it down.
Plato bans the bard
As Plato would have it (though I can’t help but point out that science alone turns dirt under the foundations of his world view), the poet is to be exiled from the perfect society.
As a young man, I would sit in the canyon and read The Republic in the cool breeze of the summer by Oak Creek, escaping the desert heat burning down below in the red and green valley. At the time a student of philosophy more than literature, though the two not so inseparable now, I should have finished the book. Never read Book X. If in my youthful studies, I had come to this defense of poesy against banishment, I might have had a more focused effort in this endeavor.
Ironically, philosophy itself, could fall prey to this very argument, that it itself is contrived, created, an imitation of our actual thoughts and logic. Modern psychology bears this out. Even our memories are made over and over again. Each a mimic of reality.
Proof of God?
Sometimes you just have to write and the poem becomes…calling for itself from the void dark matter.
Questions – why should I inject the poet here? Is there any real sacrifice that the poet makes to care for culture? Does the dead art of poetry deserve a place at the table with these other archetypes?
Wouldn’t the poem be better without the last line?
My father used to preach a sermon every year about Love. From an early age, I understood that love (like myriad words for ICE in Inuit) has many words and many subtle meanings. The sermon covered and explored the Greek words, plural, for love. Eros – Erotic, sexual love. Philos – Friendship, brotherly love. Agape – Self-sacrificial love. His conclusion was that Christ became the ultimate expression of Human Love by sacrificing his Human Being. The love of a parent to a child, believer and God.
I have added Psychí. Psyche, wife to Eros and goddess of the Soul. My granny used to say that her and my papaw believed they had a psychic connection and that they would try to see if they could connect their thoughts while he was away at work. Building on this idea, I am exploring a transcendental love of the married. Beyond finishing each other’s sentences, life-long couples can explore and develop a quantum entanglement that is connected beyond the other forms of love. This life energy that the two share leads to wordless exchanges and un-spoken understandings.
Hubris
I don’t care what you think the meaning of your own work may be. The listener will be moved by their own experience or you aren’t doing a very good job as a poet. This is not to say that you should not know what your own work means (to you). Don’t expect the same from the user.
If a poem sits on the shelf and no one reads it, is it poetry?