Poetic Therapy

A poet is a metaphysician, a therapist who uses words to treat existential angst and paranoia, the fear of all that goes on behind our backs, by talking openly about topics many are reluctant to discuss and by making unusual observations; for example that flames are raindrops in reverse or that God is just the ego personified as it would like to be: all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere at once, infusing everything with its presence; the dream-phallus filling the vagina of empty space. We erect a stairway to nowhere and encourage others to follow through a door that reminds them of someplace they've never been but might like to. We lull our subjects into passivity with the pleasant delusion that words can get us what we want, that we can speak happiness into being.

Moe: If life ain't great, don't shake your fist at fate, create. Making what time delights in laying waste is a death-defying feat.
Joe: But how can I write when reality keeps infringing on my fantasy? I'm too busy trying to orchestrate the complex libretto of my life. There's no time for leisurely unfolding, the cadence of petals on soft grass; no time to wax poetic over the waning moon.

I'm an inventor, building a better book, trying to bind reality between two covers, the world between two slices of bread. I want my neighbor to love me as I love myself. I'm in a race against fate with one flat tire and a tattered road map. Rhythm is my arithmetic. I'm trying to kill death by giving an immortal performance. I want to be a prism, reflecting a ray from God's own lantern, but I'm too drowsy to operate the heavy machinery of the mind. I want to touch the sublimity of Michelangelo without all the scaffolding, remember the future the way an ember remembers the flame, but I can't work the stage machinery of thought, its ropes and pulleys. If reason is the rope that rings the bell of truth, I'm too light to start it swinging and Quasimodo's out to lunch. I want to read the blueprint of the universe, but my eyes are the wrong color and however big my telescope may be, there's still some stars I'll never see.

Analysis leads to paralysis. I don't know whether to go back to Paradise or forward into Heaven. Maybe I should smoke some leaves of grass, free myself from the labyrinth of language, but I lost the key. The carousel won't stop to let me off. The future's a pristine wilderness, the past a wasteland of regrets. I follow the scent of desire the way a wolf trails a wounded elk. We're like barnacles, clinging to this rock by means of incredible suction. We want to siphon the marrow out of life, store up its pungent, musky secretions, then discharge ourselves into the atmosphere in a dazzling display to ecstatic applause, engulfing the crowd in an aphrodisiac cloud.

A recipe for secular salad

While moving to a different house recently, I cleaned behind the stove of the new place, which hadn't been moved for some time. Among other debris, e.g. roach bodies and cocktail napkins, I found a 3 by 5 card with some notes on one side and a recipe on the other. The notes, apparently made for some Sunday school class, read:

"My Life and Works by Our Ford.

A contemporary essay--demands that we should sacrifice the animal man (thinking & spiritual man) not to God, but to machine. No place in industrial world for animals, artists, mystics or individuals. Fordism (applied science & industrialism) is religion."

My Life and Works is the autobiography of Henry Ford, the automobile mogul. On the reverse side of the card is a recipe for Crab Casserole (salad):

6 oz. spaghetti (cooked)
1 lb. crab
3/4 cup mayo
2 green onions
mix all together
Best when made 36 hrs prior to serving.

One wonders if Mr. Ford would have permitted crabs in his world, since they are animals. Or maybe that's the point. Screw Henry Ford. We will continue to eat crabs and other animals, and enjoy art and mystics despite his industrial philosophy. He was a bit of a crab himself, so eating crab casserole will be like a ritual sacrifice of Mr. Ford and his unpalatable views to our animal appetites. We will gather round the communal table, having been brought there in horseless carriages which he made possible, devour crab casserole, and mock his mechanistic weltanschauung, which brought him nothing in the long run but millions of dollars, worldwide fame, and a failed philosophy.

Urkat's Maxims & Axioms

1. When we hope, we confess our helplessness.

2. Good art talks about itself.

3. If you're handicapped it may take you fifty years to learn the truth;
if not, a hundred.

4. The only way to see the truth is to be the truth.

5. Language forms the precedent whereby thought may be realised.

6. In writing, death is the only deadline.

7. People generally abuse those who disabuse them.

8. The world is a reflection of my self-image.

9. Form in art is the most economical expression of the greatest value.

10. If we could measure the speed of thought, we'd see that consciousness
precedes thought.

11. Sometimes hard words are easiest to speak.

12. Knowledge is a sensational idea.

13. Death is a grave undertaking.

14. For every soul admitted to heaven, millions are evicted.

15. Every artist is a martyr at heart.

16. Let all your thoughts be afterthoughts.

17. Poetry is my life, but my life is prose.

18. Old authors never die, they are merely translated.

19. Without death, life would be meaningless.

20. Doubt can never be taken for the end of an inquiry.

21. No one knows what he believes.

22. Life, like a good epic, begins in medias res.

23. Being condemned for one's beliefs is a kind of commendation.

24. What is impossible for thought is impossible in fact.

25. Virtue consists not so much in performing good works as abstaining
from bad ones.

26. If all would fight the foeman close at hand, there'd be no need to fight
in foreign land.

27. To a fool a wise man seems a fool.

28. We're taught by our own thought.

29. Those who don't seek wisdom when young won't find it when old.

30. That creed alone is true, not which a man lives by, but which he practises
not knowing why.

31. Man is God in posse; God is man in esse.

32. Though you should think me immortal, you are mortal yourself and so
my fame must be short-lived.

33. Words are the weights and measures of the brain.

34. Theology is the philosophy of those who are sceptical of philosophy.

35. Love begins and ends in being friends.

36. Facts are not dangerous unless you ignore them.

37. The world is the worst place to live in the universe, but it's so hard to
commute.

38. Wisdom isn't found in books; we find it in ourselves, often while reading books.

39. We can will whatever we desire, but we cannot desire whatever we will.

40. Who loves the rites of love, writes of love.

41. By knowing ourselves, we know God; and by knowing God, God knows Himself.

42. Heaven is a euphemism for death, hell a dysphemism for life.

43. Nature is hedonistic.

44. For most people truth is relative; a very distant relative.

45. It's a function of the mind to construe things meaningfully.

46. We are the only thing that stands between us and the truth.

47. The more human, the more divine.

48. Scientists created the universe for their own amusement.

49. Aesop was a fabulous writer who probably never lived in the sixth century B.C.

50. Honesty is a luxury only the poor can afford.

51. From practise comes experience, from experience, knowledge.

52. Don't seek the truth and the truth will seek you.

53. Money never made a man, but it has unmade many.

54. All thought is relative to the thinker; true thoughts are relative to all
thinkers.

55. Freedom is expensive.

56. Where nothing ends, infinity begins.

57. Most ships wreck on the rock of God, most plows break in religious sod.

58. The most unique individual is the most universal.

59. Music is an idealized form of speech.

60. Everybody loves to laugh, but all have misery enough.

61. Fate is what happens.

62. Nothing is so invincible as ignorance.

63. Determinism accounts for all the phenomena of experience.

64. Reason is what we think about what we feel.

65. Don't let truth go begging for a spokesman.

66. To say something can never be proved is to effectually disprove it.

67. Conscience is not an infallible judge of truth.

68. Opinions are the green fruit on the tree of knowledge.

69. Reasoning means generalizing the particular.

70. Most people put a construction on the world not given in experience.

71. Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

72. Morals are an impediment to virtue.

73. Intelligence is not the efficient cause of evolution but its most significant
by-product.

74. Our minds are nothing but the means to procure pleasure.

75. The greatest feat of imagination is to imagine life as it really is.

76. An oyster needs a grain of sand, a poet a grain of truth.

77. Meaning is a way of organizing experience.

78. An altar is a place of sacrifice.

79. The world isn't perfectly just; it's we who must adjust to an imperfect world.

80. Always go in the direction you're headed.

81. Love leavens our lives; like yeast in dough it makes us rise.

82. Confidence comes with competence.

83. Nature uses the personal to accomplish impersonal ends.

84. Courage is the only antidote for fear.

85. I wish people would make truth their God instead of making God their truth.

86. Intellectual freedom takes precedence over religious dogma.

87. Pain and pleasure can’t be severed.

88. We must constantly outgrow ourselves.

89. Innocence means surrender to yourself, to your own inner sense of who you are.

90. Few can look truth in the face; thus myth-making proceeds apace.

91. Persevere and you'll overcome.

92. As stewards of life's vital flame, we struggle against the inertia of matter.

93. All I know is what I think.

94. There's no quick spiritual fix for the world's problems.

95. There's no such thing as a permanent state of bliss.

96. Life can’t be reduced to a few well-chosen verbal formulas.

97. You can't take away the world's pain by being enlightened.

98. No one has a surplus of intelligence.

99. Death is how we atone for our every egocentric act.

100. There's an element of volition in evolution.

101. It was his prolificacy of mind that made Napoleon invincible for a time.

102. To those who yearn for moral absolutes, I offer this advice: respect the truth.

103. The universe possesses dimension but not extension.

104. People are never so happy as when they're in conflict.

105. How we behave has more to do with temperament than whether we believe
the New Testament.

106. It's harder to save one living soul than all mankind.

107. The world is well formulated to frustrate every noble purpose.

108. Philosophers enjoy the unique privilege of explaining how unimportant death
is.

109. It's easy to love in the abstract, hard to love in the flesh.

110. It's easy to be cynical about the intelligence of others, hard to be sceptical
of our own.

111. When ideas are lacking, idealism rushes in to fill the void.

112. Using ultra-sophisticated research methods, physicists can now stretch the
truth to incredible limits.

113. Religion would meet with universal acceptance were it not for theology.

114. The value of an heroic epic is that it inspires an heroic ethic.

115. Don't expect mental monuments from malicious midgets.

116. Gravity helps us get to the bottom of things, levity lifts us out again.

117. If life is going badly, don't despair. It'll eventually get worse and these times
will seem good by comparison.

118. Thought leads more people awry than it leads aright.

119. Life is inimical to art.

120. Human nature foils every plan for the advancement of man.

121. There's an eternal now at the heart of every passing hour.

122. The best way to avoid a void is to contain content.

123. Truth, not death, is the great leveler because it can be neither engrossed
nor entailed.

124. Inference is as good as evidence when it's based on established facts.

125. Nothing is so false as a too strict fidelity to the truth.

126. The pen is the mind's fang and wisdom its venom.

127. Pay attention to what's worth paying attention to.

128. Sometimes truth slips out despite our best intentions.

129. The way we see things has more to do with the way we see than
with things themselves.

130. To test the truth, taste it; if it contains no salt, toss it.

131. The cranium is the cradle of civilization.

132. Compassion needs no rationale.

133. Art and science are the Olympics of the mind.

134. Love is a hungry guest with impeccable manners.

135. Theory enables practice, thought supports action.

136. Morals are just manners writ large, etiquette for apes.

137. To improve, we'd have to eliminate much that is good in us.

138. The inside of nothing is the outside of everything.

139. Facts require no faith, faith requires no facts.

140. Virtue is vanity's favorite disguise.

141. There are no prizes for courage, that's why it's called courage.

142. To get into Heaven, you must enter through a door.

143. We’ll never exhaust the varieties of thought.

144. Love is a charitable form of aggression.

145. If we understood the assumptions underlying our questions, they would
themselves become the conclusions we set out in search of.

146. By being perpetually dissatisfied, you cheat yourself of much you might have
had.

147. The worst experiences make the best literature. Being a great writer and
living a quiet life are incompatible aims.

148. Reality is structured by the personality of the perceiver.

149. Everything's the same under the surface.

150. Good conduct is the truth for which reason provides the proof. What
contradicts good conduct isn't reason but a ruse.

151. Einstein overthrew Newton and liberated mankind from the curse of
too much certainty.

152. What we all want is freedom from want.

153. It's easy to believe that what we perceive is all there is and dismiss
what we're unaware of.

154. Reality is more severe than imagination, can go places imagination doesn't
dare.

155. The future is just waiting to occur, unfolding in predictable sequence.

156. Faith is to death as love is to life.

157. Happiness depends more on a steady set of nerves than the correct set of
beliefs.

158. Forget you don't know how to do something and you might remember you can.

159. It takes a willingness to be wrong to be right.

160. Fear is more powerful than desire. We run away faster than we run
toward something.

161. We give birth to our own antithesis.

162. A being is the desire to become itself and in the process to learn
what it was meant to be.

163. Those who can’t climb the stairway of knowledge must take the elevator.

164. Doing the right thing, though difficult, is the best kind of luck there is.

165. People are usually the least attractive aspect of any landscape.

166. We are sane in proportion to the number of thoughts we can afford to forgo.

167. The essence of love is sacrifice.

168. Sound principles consistently applied yield the best results.

169. God’s inscrutable purpose is that He has none.

170. The Jews murdered Jesus and the Christians spent two thousand years
performing the autopsy.

171. A show of skill is better than a show of force.

172. A sceptical person needs a sceptical religion, a dogmatic person a dogmatic one.

173. Life is a journey we're constantly working to turn into a destination.

174. Philosophy is a way to kill time while waiting for time to kill us.

175. Just as bad things are inevitable, so are good.

176. Figurative language is the only kind that’s literally true.

177. Freedom of thought is always under assault.

178. Make the most of the opportunities you’re given, and even more
of the ones you’re not.

179. Life would be a run on sentence were it not for the punctuation of death.

180. The course of our thoughts often belies the course our lives are taking.

181. We should steadfastly reject recourse to God as a way of resolving
philosophical dilemmas.

182. There are limits to what we can be and achieve, but we seldom know what they
are.

183. When we use language to interpret events we’re trying to get the text of what
we say and think to accurately reflect the texture of experience.

184. God is a verb, not a noun.

185. All small, particular truths are eventually swallowed up and subsumed by
the larger, more general ones, and ultimately by the concept of law itself.

186. Individuals should never abdicate their responsibility for influencing the
group through dissent.

187. Thought and reality are like egg and sperm: neither survives collision with the
other but, in the process, they give birth to a new creation.

188. The next Copernican revolution will be to displace man from the center of the
universe.

189. Man has been trying to co-opt creation for a long time now with God’s help.

190. Art without emotion is a windmill without wind.

193. Freedom equals self-determination.

194. Our minds like to rationalize and impose order on experience. Thus
we’re often led to believe there’s order where none exists.

195. Between something and nothing lies everything.

196. Clarity doesn’t lend itself to charity.

197. Whatever our beliefs, the opposite of those beliefs is generally more true.

198. People waste a lot of words in the service of worthless concepts.

199. We take from the world and give back to the world in altered form, until we
no longer know what belongs to the world and what is our own.

200. Poetry is patterned speech, organic as a bunch of grapes.

201. Everything's provisional, pending better intelligence.

202. The mind's too dull and its meshes too coarse to trap truth. When its jaws snap
shut, the bird of truth slips through, leaving a few stray feathers in its teeth.

203. The hand that reaches for the apple gets bitten, the hand that doesn't reach is
palsy-stricken.


204. Reality is even more distorted than the pictures we form of it.

205. Better to befriend a leaf than to be lonely in a well-swept world.

206. Don't take life personal.

207. The meaning of life is about what the meaning of life is.

208. Problems solve the problem of having no problems to solve.

209. People are only as beautiful as they act.

210. When man looks out upon the face of nature, he sees a face. When he looks into
the heart of nature, he sees a mind.

211. Strangers always recognize each other.

212. There's a lot to be said for reticence.

213. When all is said and done, all you've got is your wits to live by. Wit puts the
greatest rogue on a par with the greatest genius.

214. The best kind of knowledge is to understand how to make the best use of time.

Tales from the crypt

Books are crypts containing the embalmed remains of mummified minds.

A fact to hang on to

All we really need to lead fulfilling lives is one fact to hang on to, one indisputable truth, like what my mother, memory fading with age, said today: "One thing's for sure, we'll have to take whatever comes," making more sense in her way than any philosopher, like she's always done.

Baudelaire Batman

In these days when evolution seems to have sped up, with everything morphing rapidly into something else, I have created a new superhero to rival Captain America, Spiderman and the Amazing Hulk--Baudelaire Batman. Baudelaire Batman's superpower is his cynicism. Draped in a black cape lined with red silk, Baudelaire Batman sneers his enemies into submission.

His backstory is the unhappy relationship with his step-father General Aupick. When Aupick slapped him upside the head one day because he gave a sassy answer, Baudelaire Batman went outside to the nearby forest and tried to kill himself by eating poisonous mushrooms. The mushrooms didn't kill him though, they only magnified his cynicism 1000 times until his bitter wit could wither whole villages.

Now Baudelaire Batman fights evil with--evil, pointing out his enemies' hypocrisy with one cold and staring eye until they are forced to retire and work on their ideology some more until it's self-consistent. Buwhahahaha. Beware the icy stare of Baudelaire Batman. Of course his comic strip dialogue will bristle with literary bon mots from Poe and other Gothic authors to prove his innate superiority over rivals.

Spring and Winter

Spring is a greeting,
winter a farewell.
Innocence is fleeting,
impossible to recall.