Freedom’s not not bothering to look before you leap. If you do that your free fall’s going to end in a predestined splat.
However, if you bother, you won’t see alternatives lit neutrally. Out of many, one will make most sense in the light of your experience.
Experience—it’s dealt like cards. You hold them close, inside your chest. Experience is who you are, so there’s no way that you can ever bet against the cards you get. You have to do what you believe is best.
Paul Cezanne, “The Card Players,” Metropolitan Museum
(I’m sure everybody recognizes Wile E. Coyote of the Roadrunner cartoons. See above.)
Aids to Reflection is sold on Amazon in both Kindle ($2.99) and Paperback ($3.99) formats. Note: Illustrations shown here are not included in the book.
Shortly before the new year, I received a copy of Aids to Reflection, a book of my poems that is published by Girandole Books and is sold on Amazon in both Kindle ($2.99) and Paperback ($3.99) formats.
Obviously I don’t intend to finance my retirement on th proceeds. But, yes, I’d like for you to like the poems and buy the book. However, how can you tell if you like the poems until you buy the book? A conundrum! The solution is for me to publish the poems on my blog—One poem a day.—so you can read them and decide if you want to own a copy of the book. (Maybe every two days. I’m still learning WordPress.)
This is the cover.
“The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton, by Thomas Eakins, Metropolitan Museum
A FEW PRELIMINARIES:
My poems are not about my feelings or fancies, nor about my surprisingly exact observations of the natural world, nor about my oracular, symbolic intimations about the ah, sweet mysteries of life. They are poems about things we need to think about—poems of argument and exposition. As such their primary purpose is to make sense. The first set of poems is about self-reliance and free will, about which, as W. H. Auden has pointed out, “our disagreements center still.”
ONE OTHER THING. Because the poems in this book are part of an ongoing conversation that crosses the seas and centuries, they are often followed by comments—quotations—from people who have reflected on the same issues.
AND JUST SO YOU’LL KNOW: This blog version of my book has MANY more illustrations than are in the printed version that is on sale at Amazon. And except for the cover, the paintings in the book are black and white.
The title of my book is borrowed from a book of the same title by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I admire the man, but his Aids To Reflection is unreadable, at least by me. He’s right though when he says that “there is one art, of which every man should be the master, the art of reflection.” It is, alas, an art that is becoming obsolete—like poetry. We live in a world where we are “Distracted from distraction by distractions.” Who can deny it? The first poem is a reflection on our need for reflection.
WORK IS NOT ENOUGH
You’ve read we’re living on a dying star, the Bible’s an anthology of lies; and we, ourselves, have no more consequence, than fetuses or flies.
The world is full of things it doesn’t pay to think about. So get in gear. Forget that guff about there being some purpose to our being here.
Work’s the sovereign cure for grief. Work is happiness and healing. Work provides relief from thinking and from feeling.
We work at working so we get things done and work at playing so we have more fun. We work at learning how to meditate, at staying married, and at losing weight
But when I wake before it’s time for me to go to work, I see . . . It’s clear. that work is not enough. I must confront the strangeness of my being here.
“Eleven A.M. ” by Edward Hopper,
I think “Eleven A.M.” illustrates this poem best, But almost any picture Hopper painted would do. He was haunted by the need for reflection. I almost chose the picture below: “Office at Night, 1940” (Walker Art Center | Contermporary Art Museum, Minneapolis.) Does it not make “clear / that work is not enough, we must confront / the strangeness of our being here”?
Santa ho-ho-ho’s upon his throne He calls the little children unto him. A child steps up. Her watching father wishes that there was more to this than gifts and debt, gluttony, hypocrisy, and fret.
His smiling wife beside him winces, sighs, fumbles for a Kleenex, sniffs, and blots her eyes.
Like gamblers then, who know the game is fixed but have to bet, they buy her still more toys. pretending what is missing isn’t missed.
But when the child is bathed, in bed, and kissed, they sit together looking at the tree and find the gift they almost missed.
This in the last of this year’s Christmas poems. Merry Christmas to all and a HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Winter Scene in Moonlight, Henry Farrrer, Metropolitan Museum
Christmas is a complicated time—a time of gratitude and gladness but also sadness. Who does not at Christmas time remember other Christmasses? Is not updating a Christmas card list a depressing exercise? More than any other annual celebration, Christmas brings to mind both now and then.
CHRISTMAS
Biting bits of skin from my chapped lips, I park beside the shop across the street from Mount Moriah where we buried you. A dark day, I remember. Much like this.
This is another Christmas you won’t miss. A bell rings as I enter. Clerks appear. One of them asks me what I’d like. I’d like to hear you call my name and walk in here.
What if I told him that? Don’t be absurd. I point and say “A bottle of that perfume.” And as I’m waiting for my change, I think how strange for me to be here doing this.
I blow my nose. consult my list, and then it’s off to the lot behind the superette where country boys are selling Christmas trees. And now there’s nothing left for me to get.
I set the tree up in our living room then wrap your present. “Damn!” The paper’s short. “Men can’t wrap,” you say. We grin. I paste a scrap across the gap. To my surprise,
you speak of her, the friend we used to know who knew the people that we used to be. No present waits for them beneath our tree. They too have changed almost beyond belief.
There’s nothing left of her for us to see. But think how little others see of us, who see each other every day— both now and then.
I plug the lights in then I climb a chair. Behind me, you direct me from afar, telling me what I’m too close to see as I adjust the star.
Paintings and Poems 