These are big pictures to aid your reflections on little poems.

    FREE AT LAST

Once we’re friendless, grammarless, and blind,
we’re free to do whatever’s on our mind. 

The painting below—“Mellow Pad” by Stuart Davis (the Brooklyn Museum)—illustrates the interacting influences that shape our decisions. . 

NOT NECESSARILY WHAT SHOULD

What I have done and what’s been done to me
will shape what I believe is bad or good.
So while I’m free to do what pleases me,
it isn’t necessarily what should.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) formats. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.

DOGS ARE FREE TO BARK

Dogs are free to bark and grass, to grow.
And you and I, my friend, are free to choose.
It is an offer that we can refuse.

Try. You see, you can’t. But what you choose
will be determined by the sum
of who you are and where you’re from.

We can’t escape the life we’ve lived so far.
Without it, like the smoke from a cigar,
there’s nothing to us to improve or mar.

You ask for help and what your friends suggest
may change your mind but cannot change
your need to do what you believe is best.

Or, say, you do what you would rather not.
It still will be what you believe is best.
if the alternative is being shot,

which doesn’t mean that once the thing is done
you won’t look back at it and be depressed. 

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.

A FREE MAN IS CONFINED   

A self-reliant person lives alone.
He has no phone, no credit history,
and since he has no knowledge of
hunger, duty, debt, desire, or love,
his motives cannot even be
a mystery.

Self-contained,
he’s like a bottle bobbing in the sea,
corked and stuffed with messages
from nobody to nobody,

He isn’t free. 
A free man is confined
inside a maze of rules that guide him
out of his mind.

Above is Caspar David Friedrich’s painting: “The Wanderer, Above the Sea of Fog.” I think of it as “The Unconfined.” It shows what happens to a man who “lives alone, locked in his own mind, with “no knowledge of  hunger, duty, debt, desire, or love.” He isn’t “free.” He’s lost in a limitless nowhere.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats, and those that ar are in black and white.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul the Apostle asks, “And what hadst thou that thou didst not receive?” I asked myself that question and my answer was nada. My genes, language, my expectations, my ideals, the whole schmear come to me from somewhere else (parents, books, teachers, friends, enemies, movies, etc.). However, those influences are constantly changing in the light of new experiences. What they all add up to is me—my unique self. But everything about my unique “original” self originated somewhere else.

SO MUCH FOR BEING CAPTAINS OF OUR FATES

A person does not get to choose
his memories, the weather, or the news,
nor can he refuse the rhymes
linking what’s to come to former times.

And by the way, Marcel Duchamp, an atheist, who is famous for his promotion of ready-made art (commercially manufactured urinals, bicycle wheels, snow shovels, etc.) said, “ . . . man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.” He has been extravagantly praised for this observation and his influence on Modern Art is, alas, hard to overestimate. But, as noted above, Paul the Apostle said the same thing centuries earlier. Below is Marcel’s most famous work of Modern Art. It is, as you can see, signed R. Mutt.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats, and those that are are in black and white.