EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Twenty-Two, the number which, according to my Bible, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, “perhaps symbolises the manifestation of being in all its diversity and, during its allotted span, that is, in both space and time.” Moreover, “…the Bambara believe that all mystic knowledge is contained within the symbolism of the first twenty-two numbers, and for them the number twenty-two stands for the whole span of time between the start of the process of creation until the completion of the universal order. It is the fulfilment of the creator’s task, the boundary of speech, the figure of the universe.” So yet again this issue has a lot to live up to.
I do sometimes wonder, though, whether or not all this has anything to do with the Illuminati, who for nearly a millennium have apparently been preparing for the advent of The New World Order under a One World Government. It all began it would seem with the Knights Templars. Of course, I've lived too long to fall for such conspiracy-theories myself, but I daren’t mention this fact in certain circles for fear of being accused of being a co-conspirator myself. (I’m not joking. I have already been told that I am a member of the Illuminati because I questioned its existence on an internet forum!) Not that there aren’t any conspiracies by people in power, but I am a great believer in the God of Chaos Theory, whose prophet was Robert Burns - “The best-laid schemes of mice and men / Gang aft agley.” Thus, even if the Illuminati existed, I’m quite convinced that their plans would be thwarted by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon. Furthermore, these conspiracy-theorists would have us believe that what they say is happening in the world is driven by cabals of individuals and elites, whereas my own take is that that events are driven blindly by what happens at a much deeper systemic level, which the said elites simply respond to, like everyone else. This is not to say that we should feel complacent. The elites - and they do exist - will do anything to preserve their power and wealth; after all, life is a zero-sum game for them just as it is for the rest of humanity. My view of the "class-war", for example, is not that it is about the poor envying the rich as much as two dogs fighting over the same bone. One of them's got to be the loser.
Which brings us back to ‘reality’, and the sad fact that we now have a Tory government again in Britain, this time without the Lib-Dems to hold them in check. So, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, food-banks will mushroom even further, and more and more people will be driven to desperation and suicide. Not only that, but they want to take Britain out of the human rights arrangements of the EU in order, probably, to deal with the fall-out. Sooner or later, something’s got to give, but what that might be I have no way of knowing. I am still hoping – and praying - that chaos will give birth to a dancing star, but I’m not holding my breath.
There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon, I suppose, (e.g., Rojava) but they seem so few and far between that it is sometimes very difficult to hear that other world breathing which Arundhati Roy has spoken about. That’s where faith comes in, I suppose, and I don’t mean religious faith. It helps to keep our spirits up when all else seems to be failing. One thing is certain: we need to start thinking outside these “There is no alternative.” boxes. That’s partly why poetry is needed I suspect - as a means of carving out new ways of seeing things that put the old and familiar in entirely different perspectives. But even in the poetry-world, the gatekeepers are numerous and hold all the strategic positions.
But enough of this; it’s time to go on with the show. Welcome again to Issue Twenty-Two.
_______________________________________________________________________
QUOTE – Arundhati Roy
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
I do sometimes wonder, though, whether or not all this has anything to do with the Illuminati, who for nearly a millennium have apparently been preparing for the advent of The New World Order under a One World Government. It all began it would seem with the Knights Templars. Of course, I've lived too long to fall for such conspiracy-theories myself, but I daren’t mention this fact in certain circles for fear of being accused of being a co-conspirator myself. (I’m not joking. I have already been told that I am a member of the Illuminati because I questioned its existence on an internet forum!) Not that there aren’t any conspiracies by people in power, but I am a great believer in the God of Chaos Theory, whose prophet was Robert Burns - “The best-laid schemes of mice and men / Gang aft agley.” Thus, even if the Illuminati existed, I’m quite convinced that their plans would be thwarted by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon. Furthermore, these conspiracy-theorists would have us believe that what they say is happening in the world is driven by cabals of individuals and elites, whereas my own take is that that events are driven blindly by what happens at a much deeper systemic level, which the said elites simply respond to, like everyone else. This is not to say that we should feel complacent. The elites - and they do exist - will do anything to preserve their power and wealth; after all, life is a zero-sum game for them just as it is for the rest of humanity. My view of the "class-war", for example, is not that it is about the poor envying the rich as much as two dogs fighting over the same bone. One of them's got to be the loser.
Which brings us back to ‘reality’, and the sad fact that we now have a Tory government again in Britain, this time without the Lib-Dems to hold them in check. So, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, food-banks will mushroom even further, and more and more people will be driven to desperation and suicide. Not only that, but they want to take Britain out of the human rights arrangements of the EU in order, probably, to deal with the fall-out. Sooner or later, something’s got to give, but what that might be I have no way of knowing. I am still hoping – and praying - that chaos will give birth to a dancing star, but I’m not holding my breath.
There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon, I suppose, (e.g., Rojava) but they seem so few and far between that it is sometimes very difficult to hear that other world breathing which Arundhati Roy has spoken about. That’s where faith comes in, I suppose, and I don’t mean religious faith. It helps to keep our spirits up when all else seems to be failing. One thing is certain: we need to start thinking outside these “There is no alternative.” boxes. That’s partly why poetry is needed I suspect - as a means of carving out new ways of seeing things that put the old and familiar in entirely different perspectives. But even in the poetry-world, the gatekeepers are numerous and hold all the strategic positions.
But enough of this; it’s time to go on with the show. Welcome again to Issue Twenty-Two.
_______________________________________________________________________
QUOTE – Arundhati Roy
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
CONTENTS
POEMS - Colin Honnor
SHORT STORY - K.J. Hannah Greenberg
POEMS - Sandra Allen
POEM - S. R. Lee
QUOTE - Fred Astaire
POEM - Abigail Cargo
POEM - Sarah Ferris
QUOTE - Stephane Mallarme
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
POEM - Stellasue Lee
REVIEW - Paul Murphy
SHORT STORY - K.J. Hannah Greenberg
POEMS - Sandra Allen
POEM - S. R. Lee
QUOTE - Fred Astaire
POEM - Abigail Cargo
POEM - Sarah Ferris
QUOTE - Stephane Mallarme
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
POEM - Stellasue Lee
REVIEW - Paul Murphy
POEMS - Colin Honnor
Birkenau
.... the pine forests by Mainz
lit parabolas glare in the Kinema
the touch of lips on house wall screen
faces between hands become flowers, fossils
the falling clouds perimiter, black cherm, under
cones and needles
Look, at the bones that mock you
polyhedral, whitening
Each seed burns in its sprouting
From the black soil become its own inanition
And cultivates itself the twilight
pine twigs, scented pines, hot pine needles breath,
resinous pine cones gathered
taken home to burn or gild,
(the old dispensation in the new world)
who saw the sickle flames through tree trunks
and roe deer dart between their frozen hands
who wandered there in nightshirts, freed
from the human experiment.
Cavafy On Poros
in wall wells its single eye
the man who comes here, stays as he wills
mendicant of ivy walled detail, finial, curlicue
blebbed putti and smooth-worn coped herm.
But is never alone the statue in the garden
forgotten, drowned out insect noise, antennae
rub their incoherent chemical morse
in broken codes. The man who stays
cools in planet cooling carbons gulped
and breathed from this white lung
opal pearl, diamond, grindwheel, hung
The hydrocephalic dwarf plays pipes
laughs Dionysiac laughter
The mythmakers dart among trees
flashed fire lit freighted spiderwebs
with flamed frosts
Mussel shelled sky
that octopus time coiled on
earth’s broken motto, robbed
into invertebrate silence
again and again
the octopus sleep wraps
itself where broken amphorae spill
frozen wine jars sprawl
sea-plantains wave like sirens
pale transparencies of green
lapidary gulp of cisterns
as the god left India, shedding
silks diamonds pearls
became cuttlefish rattle on stones
cicada song, insect bark crawls
its flute stopped back writhes
a carved olivewood dish
spills black eyes and pearly teeth
bowler hatted, high collared, necktied
Third Circle sharpens its fine pencil...
.... the pine forests by Mainz
lit parabolas glare in the Kinema
the touch of lips on house wall screen
faces between hands become flowers, fossils
the falling clouds perimiter, black cherm, under
cones and needles
Look, at the bones that mock you
polyhedral, whitening
Each seed burns in its sprouting
From the black soil become its own inanition
And cultivates itself the twilight
pine twigs, scented pines, hot pine needles breath,
resinous pine cones gathered
taken home to burn or gild,
(the old dispensation in the new world)
who saw the sickle flames through tree trunks
and roe deer dart between their frozen hands
who wandered there in nightshirts, freed
from the human experiment.
Cavafy On Poros
in wall wells its single eye
the man who comes here, stays as he wills
mendicant of ivy walled detail, finial, curlicue
blebbed putti and smooth-worn coped herm.
But is never alone the statue in the garden
forgotten, drowned out insect noise, antennae
rub their incoherent chemical morse
in broken codes. The man who stays
cools in planet cooling carbons gulped
and breathed from this white lung
opal pearl, diamond, grindwheel, hung
The hydrocephalic dwarf plays pipes
laughs Dionysiac laughter
The mythmakers dart among trees
flashed fire lit freighted spiderwebs
with flamed frosts
Mussel shelled sky
that octopus time coiled on
earth’s broken motto, robbed
into invertebrate silence
again and again
the octopus sleep wraps
itself where broken amphorae spill
frozen wine jars sprawl
sea-plantains wave like sirens
pale transparencies of green
lapidary gulp of cisterns
as the god left India, shedding
silks diamonds pearls
became cuttlefish rattle on stones
cicada song, insect bark crawls
its flute stopped back writhes
a carved olivewood dish
spills black eyes and pearly teeth
bowler hatted, high collared, necktied
Third Circle sharpens its fine pencil...
SHORT STORY - K J Hannah Greenberg
Beyond Her Hotel’s Threshold
Finishing the paperwork relevant to the demise of the horse whisperer, by dint of the python, which had been hired to share a pose for Concept I: The Human Being, had been time consuming. In the interim, Matti had appointed a graduate assistant to proctor her lone Art History midterm, and had pronounced, aloud, gratitude that the majority of her teaching load consisted of studios. Thereafter, she took a plane to Honolulu; a coupling there needed to be actualized and Matti meant to see to it that the wedding took place.
On Matti’s return flight, the bad sushi she had eaten on the Big Island repeated every five hundred kilometers. Nonetheless, given that her time frame for linking the pair had been shrinking, she had been right to eat the raw poi.
If only, upon initially inviting the couple to her hotel lobby for Kai Swizzles, she had not acted the small town simpleton, tipping servers as lavishly as she did back East, she might have processed that twosome faster. Not only did her faux pas not go unnoticed, but it had become the centerpiece of their shared conversation.
Matti, who had thus given meager tips during their second encounter, had fared no better at that meeting. The woman seemed enamored of the man, but the man only seemed interested in comparing the virtues of Matti’s Virgin Blue Hawaii` with those of his Virgin Scorpion.
At their third date, Matti tried a new tact. She commented not on the weather, or on current hemlines, but on how women’s hosiery tends to slide down. The young woman, whose folks traded in dry goods, took up Matti’s topic and added thoughts of her own concerning the federal sanctions recently imposed on woollens imported from China. When the gal began speaking about the international embargo on cotton, though, the fire in the young man’s eye dimmed. He made no attempt to discuss the sorts of socks perfect for day wear or to make witty remarks about Hawaii’s earlier reliance on the pineapple trade.
Matti sighed. Many circumstances, beyond her hotel’s threshold, had impinged on that match.
Her second cousin, the young lady in question, needed matrimonial success with someone, such as the young man in question, who could afford to keep her in semiprecious gemstones. Matti needed to sooth the multigenerational feud between family members who remained loyal to the land of Queen Lili‘uokalani and those who had had the audacity to move to New England.
The following day, at a picnic, featuring a basket that the matchmaker had had filled by a traditional caterer, Matti brought up the issue of mainland universities. The young man inched closer to Matti’s cousin. Both had been educated at The University of Hawaii. Both disdained “white” education. They began to talk together, ignoring their chaperone entirely.
Noticing that the couple had at last engaged each other in talk, Matti had slumped. Her work was far from effort-free. Relaxing, just a bit, she had reached into the food hamper, not realizing that the poi and other perishables, contained within, had not been reinforced by ice or other coolants.
Matti was no culinary whiz. She worked as a glass and ceramics professor and had unwittingly joined the ranks of old ladies that help with arranged marriages. On the jet home, she had experienced her first bout of food poisoning.
Had it not been for Tammy, a fiber artist, whose office was cattycorner to Matti’s own, and who had pointed out that welding weddings was a lucrative avocation, Matti might never have spent two days in the hospital. But Tammy, who earned money on the side by selling costumes to Furries, had been on the target list of a New York placement agency, hired at the bequest of moneyed individuals, possessed of children long overdue in making the wedding canopy march and in supplying grandchildren. The agency, which had pocketed most of the blue bloods’ fee and had only bothered to notify, via email, select members of art and architecture departments of the employment opportunity, had known Tammy through a Fur Meet connection. Since Tammy was more interested in costume design than in lineage, she had passed the job tip to Matti.
The first coupling that Matti had produced evolved mostly in Chittenden County Vermont, along the shore of Lake Champaign, in venues like the tea room of the Shelburne Farm Inn and along walking trails in that state’s wilderness. The resulting marriage was celebrated with a reception that cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. Matti, who received a twenty grand finder’s fee for her efforts, was able to pay back a portion of her student loans.
From then on, word of mouth, within ethnic communities reliant on supervised dating, provided the art professor with the opportunity to pay back her loans in full. She reached a point, in less than five years, where she was able to pick and choose her clients. The Hawaii matrimony case had been attractive because it involved the beach, because it would help heal a family riff, and because it meant an escape from Tammy’s excessive verbalizing.
Tammy had taken it upon herself to educate Matti about Furrydom despite the fact that such stories horrified Matti. Furries dressed in neon costumes. They refused to step out of character, even when eating or when chasing potential mates. Second, locals’ attitude toward “underrepresented ethnics,” was often unconscionable as was made clear by repeated conflicts between “coyotes” and “wolverines.” Third, regional medical systems tended to treat Furries poorly. While it was indisputable that plush costumes could be dangerous to the people wearing them, Tammy’s new-fangled designs notwithstanding, it was worse that the health care providers, who were employed in the emergency rooms of the cities most often used for Furry conferences, showed open prejudice against adults that spent their vacations anthropomorphized as sentient critters. Worst, Tammy regaled Matti with tales of Furry romance.
The fiber artist was convinced that her recent relationship with a purple falcon was no better than had been her hook-up of years ago, with a pink gorilla. So upset was she with her realization, that Tammy spewed her anger at Matti. While weaving some of the smallest of the leaves, with which Matti had gifted her from a recent matchmaking trek through the poplar groves of New Hampshire, into a tapestry consisting mostly of variegated alpaca hairs, Tammy snorted. In her esteem, Matti seemed to be doing well financially. It was cosmically unjust that Matti also enjoyed the love of friends and coworkers. If only Matti, herself, ceased to be a free agent, Tammy would consider Matti’s life to be charmed.
Matti ought to liberate herself from her backward anthropology. Matti ought to become a better matchmaker, a richer person, and a woman capable of landing a man. Matti simply needed to change her thinking about love. “Everyone” in the department knew that Matti had asked Sal, the department’s sexy print maker, to buy sandwich cookies and to prepare chamomile tea, instead of reserving a table at a fancy restaurant or ordering tickets to a tourist-filled ski slope.
“Everyone” continued to stay informed about all aspects of Matti’s personal life to which Tammy was privy. Tammy had become privy to less and less.
To Matti, the Polynesian paradise was more, than an escape from Tammy’s caustic rhetoric, more than extra fluidity in her bank account, and more than homage to ancestors. During her last jaunt there, Akoni had given Matti pieces of back coral and of olivine crystals and had compared the former to her hair and the latter to her eyes. He had urged her, despite her forthcoming promotion, to give up her academic career in order to move into his apartment.
Tammy, standing at Matti’s office door, prattled on. Matti put invisible fingers into her ears. Inwardly, she gulped in surf spray. Before she could jet west, she had a matchmaking weekend in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to which to attend.
Penn’s Woods eased her. The copses of trees, the hints of rivers and the many rolling hills soothed her from her neck and shoulders all the way down to her calves. Among the region’s many picturesque shires, weedy flowers sprouted. She made a mental note to gather some buds for imprinting into future work.
Matti’s rental turned out to be a bed and breakfast replete with fluffy comforters and a tea and coffee station. After lacing her hot mint with valerian leaves, Matti tucked under the covers. Her empty cup finally at rest on her nightstand, she drifted.
Morning brought the welcomed distraction of rooster call. Breakfast finished, the art professor dialled her newest charge. The preservation of rare ethnicities, too, spurred her to continue to try to help smooth matches.
The couple in question was supposed to meet, with both of the young people’s sets of parents, in a church foyer, in a town nearby, just shortly after supper, but before evening prayers. That understanding left Matti many leisure hours. She settled, under a tree, with a book.
When her focus shifted to Tammy, Matti exhaled noisily, frightening the wren that had lit on a branch above her. A solid drop, which landed on Matti’s shoulder, evidenced the bird’s surprise. Matti checked her cell phone. In an hour, it would be timely to call the Big Island. The family of the groom wedding the sock heiress had had a few questions about the prenuptial. Traditional people protected their fiduciary legacies.
Akoni, who was not only handy with a rock tumbler, but also with many other tools, had no such riches. He was facile, though. The second time they had met, he was sweaty, having repaired the cooling system in a neighbor’s rooftop chicken coop and then having tweaked the air conditioner in a local penitentiary. Without apology, he had offered Matti a lukewarm bottle of carbonated, alcohol-free punch, unscrewing the cap using only the cleaner of his two hands.
While watching Akoni minister to her soft drink, Matti had temporarily forgotten the cost of her time in Hawaii. The volcanic wonderland was to have been her means to a bigger apartment. Dozens of islanders had asked her to look into matching up their children. In choosing to spend time with Akoni, she was choosing to forego a more expensive address.
The peel of Matti’s phone broke that particular glamour. Matti’s second cousin’s intended had been sending his family emails in which he ranted about his fiancé’s need to gain weight, to shed some eye makeup, and to stop mooning over a guy named Steve. Matti had tried to pacify him with a prenuptial contract, but his parents continued to locate more and more loopholes within that stationary store-procured document.
It could have been worse. Matti reflected on a particular North Carolina belle. That gal’s pregnancy had progressed faster than had her arrival at the altar. Although that semi-professional javelin thrower had ordinarily sheathed herself in men’s clothing, her burgeoning belly could no longer be disguised by her track and field wardrobe.
Neither set of future grandparents cared about the circumstances. There were no intact marriages in their generation. It was the intended groom, a short order cook at a local fried chicken shop, who had wanted to rush his baby mother down the aisle so that his progeny could enjoy full legitimacy, and who had hired Matti accordingly.
He had heard about Matti, from a former lover of Tammy’s, whom he had met at an Atlanta Fur Meet, which he had attended surreptitiously. Whereas his gal, yet busy with bench presses and piano lessons, had agreed to a wedding date less than six weeks before the baby was due, she had refused to go along with Matti’s idea that their nuptials be pushed up any further.
A second call further summoned Matti from boundless places. The Dutch groom to-be had pronounced that he would rather go on his people’s version of a walkabout than marry the lass envied by half of the boys in his village. His mother, who was on the other end of the phone, was obliged to abide by his decision.
Matti shrugged and regarded the bird droppings on her shoulder. After returning to her room, she left her blouse soaking in her tub. Using her smart phone, she pulled up all of the data she had on that Pennsylvania couple and on their respective families. The countryside was beautiful, but she could ill-afford to splurge on a vacation-styled bed and breakfast stay. In a few short weeks, after her tenure announcement came through, she would be moving to Hawaii.
On Matti’s return flight, the bad sushi she had eaten on the Big Island repeated every five hundred kilometers. Nonetheless, given that her time frame for linking the pair had been shrinking, she had been right to eat the raw poi.
If only, upon initially inviting the couple to her hotel lobby for Kai Swizzles, she had not acted the small town simpleton, tipping servers as lavishly as she did back East, she might have processed that twosome faster. Not only did her faux pas not go unnoticed, but it had become the centerpiece of their shared conversation.
Matti, who had thus given meager tips during their second encounter, had fared no better at that meeting. The woman seemed enamored of the man, but the man only seemed interested in comparing the virtues of Matti’s Virgin Blue Hawaii` with those of his Virgin Scorpion.
At their third date, Matti tried a new tact. She commented not on the weather, or on current hemlines, but on how women’s hosiery tends to slide down. The young woman, whose folks traded in dry goods, took up Matti’s topic and added thoughts of her own concerning the federal sanctions recently imposed on woollens imported from China. When the gal began speaking about the international embargo on cotton, though, the fire in the young man’s eye dimmed. He made no attempt to discuss the sorts of socks perfect for day wear or to make witty remarks about Hawaii’s earlier reliance on the pineapple trade.
Matti sighed. Many circumstances, beyond her hotel’s threshold, had impinged on that match.
Her second cousin, the young lady in question, needed matrimonial success with someone, such as the young man in question, who could afford to keep her in semiprecious gemstones. Matti needed to sooth the multigenerational feud between family members who remained loyal to the land of Queen Lili‘uokalani and those who had had the audacity to move to New England.
The following day, at a picnic, featuring a basket that the matchmaker had had filled by a traditional caterer, Matti brought up the issue of mainland universities. The young man inched closer to Matti’s cousin. Both had been educated at The University of Hawaii. Both disdained “white” education. They began to talk together, ignoring their chaperone entirely.
Noticing that the couple had at last engaged each other in talk, Matti had slumped. Her work was far from effort-free. Relaxing, just a bit, she had reached into the food hamper, not realizing that the poi and other perishables, contained within, had not been reinforced by ice or other coolants.
Matti was no culinary whiz. She worked as a glass and ceramics professor and had unwittingly joined the ranks of old ladies that help with arranged marriages. On the jet home, she had experienced her first bout of food poisoning.
Had it not been for Tammy, a fiber artist, whose office was cattycorner to Matti’s own, and who had pointed out that welding weddings was a lucrative avocation, Matti might never have spent two days in the hospital. But Tammy, who earned money on the side by selling costumes to Furries, had been on the target list of a New York placement agency, hired at the bequest of moneyed individuals, possessed of children long overdue in making the wedding canopy march and in supplying grandchildren. The agency, which had pocketed most of the blue bloods’ fee and had only bothered to notify, via email, select members of art and architecture departments of the employment opportunity, had known Tammy through a Fur Meet connection. Since Tammy was more interested in costume design than in lineage, she had passed the job tip to Matti.
The first coupling that Matti had produced evolved mostly in Chittenden County Vermont, along the shore of Lake Champaign, in venues like the tea room of the Shelburne Farm Inn and along walking trails in that state’s wilderness. The resulting marriage was celebrated with a reception that cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. Matti, who received a twenty grand finder’s fee for her efforts, was able to pay back a portion of her student loans.
From then on, word of mouth, within ethnic communities reliant on supervised dating, provided the art professor with the opportunity to pay back her loans in full. She reached a point, in less than five years, where she was able to pick and choose her clients. The Hawaii matrimony case had been attractive because it involved the beach, because it would help heal a family riff, and because it meant an escape from Tammy’s excessive verbalizing.
Tammy had taken it upon herself to educate Matti about Furrydom despite the fact that such stories horrified Matti. Furries dressed in neon costumes. They refused to step out of character, even when eating or when chasing potential mates. Second, locals’ attitude toward “underrepresented ethnics,” was often unconscionable as was made clear by repeated conflicts between “coyotes” and “wolverines.” Third, regional medical systems tended to treat Furries poorly. While it was indisputable that plush costumes could be dangerous to the people wearing them, Tammy’s new-fangled designs notwithstanding, it was worse that the health care providers, who were employed in the emergency rooms of the cities most often used for Furry conferences, showed open prejudice against adults that spent their vacations anthropomorphized as sentient critters. Worst, Tammy regaled Matti with tales of Furry romance.
The fiber artist was convinced that her recent relationship with a purple falcon was no better than had been her hook-up of years ago, with a pink gorilla. So upset was she with her realization, that Tammy spewed her anger at Matti. While weaving some of the smallest of the leaves, with which Matti had gifted her from a recent matchmaking trek through the poplar groves of New Hampshire, into a tapestry consisting mostly of variegated alpaca hairs, Tammy snorted. In her esteem, Matti seemed to be doing well financially. It was cosmically unjust that Matti also enjoyed the love of friends and coworkers. If only Matti, herself, ceased to be a free agent, Tammy would consider Matti’s life to be charmed.
Matti ought to liberate herself from her backward anthropology. Matti ought to become a better matchmaker, a richer person, and a woman capable of landing a man. Matti simply needed to change her thinking about love. “Everyone” in the department knew that Matti had asked Sal, the department’s sexy print maker, to buy sandwich cookies and to prepare chamomile tea, instead of reserving a table at a fancy restaurant or ordering tickets to a tourist-filled ski slope.
“Everyone” continued to stay informed about all aspects of Matti’s personal life to which Tammy was privy. Tammy had become privy to less and less.
To Matti, the Polynesian paradise was more, than an escape from Tammy’s caustic rhetoric, more than extra fluidity in her bank account, and more than homage to ancestors. During her last jaunt there, Akoni had given Matti pieces of back coral and of olivine crystals and had compared the former to her hair and the latter to her eyes. He had urged her, despite her forthcoming promotion, to give up her academic career in order to move into his apartment.
Tammy, standing at Matti’s office door, prattled on. Matti put invisible fingers into her ears. Inwardly, she gulped in surf spray. Before she could jet west, she had a matchmaking weekend in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to which to attend.
Penn’s Woods eased her. The copses of trees, the hints of rivers and the many rolling hills soothed her from her neck and shoulders all the way down to her calves. Among the region’s many picturesque shires, weedy flowers sprouted. She made a mental note to gather some buds for imprinting into future work.
Matti’s rental turned out to be a bed and breakfast replete with fluffy comforters and a tea and coffee station. After lacing her hot mint with valerian leaves, Matti tucked under the covers. Her empty cup finally at rest on her nightstand, she drifted.
Morning brought the welcomed distraction of rooster call. Breakfast finished, the art professor dialled her newest charge. The preservation of rare ethnicities, too, spurred her to continue to try to help smooth matches.
The couple in question was supposed to meet, with both of the young people’s sets of parents, in a church foyer, in a town nearby, just shortly after supper, but before evening prayers. That understanding left Matti many leisure hours. She settled, under a tree, with a book.
When her focus shifted to Tammy, Matti exhaled noisily, frightening the wren that had lit on a branch above her. A solid drop, which landed on Matti’s shoulder, evidenced the bird’s surprise. Matti checked her cell phone. In an hour, it would be timely to call the Big Island. The family of the groom wedding the sock heiress had had a few questions about the prenuptial. Traditional people protected their fiduciary legacies.
Akoni, who was not only handy with a rock tumbler, but also with many other tools, had no such riches. He was facile, though. The second time they had met, he was sweaty, having repaired the cooling system in a neighbor’s rooftop chicken coop and then having tweaked the air conditioner in a local penitentiary. Without apology, he had offered Matti a lukewarm bottle of carbonated, alcohol-free punch, unscrewing the cap using only the cleaner of his two hands.
While watching Akoni minister to her soft drink, Matti had temporarily forgotten the cost of her time in Hawaii. The volcanic wonderland was to have been her means to a bigger apartment. Dozens of islanders had asked her to look into matching up their children. In choosing to spend time with Akoni, she was choosing to forego a more expensive address.
The peel of Matti’s phone broke that particular glamour. Matti’s second cousin’s intended had been sending his family emails in which he ranted about his fiancé’s need to gain weight, to shed some eye makeup, and to stop mooning over a guy named Steve. Matti had tried to pacify him with a prenuptial contract, but his parents continued to locate more and more loopholes within that stationary store-procured document.
It could have been worse. Matti reflected on a particular North Carolina belle. That gal’s pregnancy had progressed faster than had her arrival at the altar. Although that semi-professional javelin thrower had ordinarily sheathed herself in men’s clothing, her burgeoning belly could no longer be disguised by her track and field wardrobe.
Neither set of future grandparents cared about the circumstances. There were no intact marriages in their generation. It was the intended groom, a short order cook at a local fried chicken shop, who had wanted to rush his baby mother down the aisle so that his progeny could enjoy full legitimacy, and who had hired Matti accordingly.
He had heard about Matti, from a former lover of Tammy’s, whom he had met at an Atlanta Fur Meet, which he had attended surreptitiously. Whereas his gal, yet busy with bench presses and piano lessons, had agreed to a wedding date less than six weeks before the baby was due, she had refused to go along with Matti’s idea that their nuptials be pushed up any further.
A second call further summoned Matti from boundless places. The Dutch groom to-be had pronounced that he would rather go on his people’s version of a walkabout than marry the lass envied by half of the boys in his village. His mother, who was on the other end of the phone, was obliged to abide by his decision.
Matti shrugged and regarded the bird droppings on her shoulder. After returning to her room, she left her blouse soaking in her tub. Using her smart phone, she pulled up all of the data she had on that Pennsylvania couple and on their respective families. The countryside was beautiful, but she could ill-afford to splurge on a vacation-styled bed and breakfast stay. In a few short weeks, after her tenure announcement came through, she would be moving to Hawaii.
POEMS - Sandra Allen
A Walk In The Night
Pavement slapped by rain.
I see glass shards left behind.
They glisten underneath the street lamp.
My feet would bleed poppies if I were to go barefoot.
I look for telltale red splotches of a predecessor but find none.
I want the dark to push me down, suffocate and cover me.
But the earth isn’t open this night.
Tomorrow may bring a tiresome sun.
Though my skin is thirsty for it,
my clouded mind is not.
The absurdity is almost too much to bear.
Alfred Hitchcock Knew It Wasn't Just A Movie
I sit on the grass in front of my house
and watch cars pass by this crystal blue spring day.
My companion, Bella, a small yorkie,
is ready for her daily walk around the condo complex,
to the mail box, and back into the house.
Her short legs clock miles
while my human ones baby step a stroll.
A black bird lands a few feet away.
Bella barks her indignation but stays beside me.
I watch my glistening feathered visitor sum up the situation
with its one eye pointed in our direction
and the other towards the street.
Its little jerky movements,
twitches that keep his muscles ready for flight
at a moment’s premonition
are a bit endearing;
A stark contrast to the news story this morning
of a 52 year old woman who fell 1000 feet
Off a beautiful cliff in the Pyrenees, France.
She was dead by the time she completed a last somersault to earth.
Vultures left only bones, clothes and hiking boots for rescuers to find.
French farmers in the area aren’t allowed to shoot vultures--
they are a protected species valued for this very ability.
The Parsi practice sky burials
where human dead are put on top of a Tower of Silence
to wait for vultures to complete their ritual.
Pavement slapped by rain.
I see glass shards left behind.
They glisten underneath the street lamp.
My feet would bleed poppies if I were to go barefoot.
I look for telltale red splotches of a predecessor but find none.
I want the dark to push me down, suffocate and cover me.
But the earth isn’t open this night.
Tomorrow may bring a tiresome sun.
Though my skin is thirsty for it,
my clouded mind is not.
The absurdity is almost too much to bear.
Alfred Hitchcock Knew It Wasn't Just A Movie
I sit on the grass in front of my house
and watch cars pass by this crystal blue spring day.
My companion, Bella, a small yorkie,
is ready for her daily walk around the condo complex,
to the mail box, and back into the house.
Her short legs clock miles
while my human ones baby step a stroll.
A black bird lands a few feet away.
Bella barks her indignation but stays beside me.
I watch my glistening feathered visitor sum up the situation
with its one eye pointed in our direction
and the other towards the street.
Its little jerky movements,
twitches that keep his muscles ready for flight
at a moment’s premonition
are a bit endearing;
A stark contrast to the news story this morning
of a 52 year old woman who fell 1000 feet
Off a beautiful cliff in the Pyrenees, France.
She was dead by the time she completed a last somersault to earth.
Vultures left only bones, clothes and hiking boots for rescuers to find.
French farmers in the area aren’t allowed to shoot vultures--
they are a protected species valued for this very ability.
The Parsi practice sky burials
where human dead are put on top of a Tower of Silence
to wait for vultures to complete their ritual.
POEM - S. R. Lee
Red Shirt
Bright, once saved for Christmas,
as seemed right at the time,
but now cheerful, soft, and smooth,
it warms somewhat, no need to wait.
Wear it now, now,
to protect from the doldrums of chemo,
to warm the shoulders,
make bright arms
complement blue pants, striped shirts,
white shirts, grey pants.
Perhaps I am done with wearing raggedy things
now that I may not live long.
I like these clothes:
red shirt, yellow top,
orange shells too loose
go well over winter turtlenecks,
add a layer of warmth
to the chemo-chilled body.
Wear them, wear them,
play with the colors, textures.
Wear them!
I dig into the box of scarves,
whose rich patterns
distract from the loss of hair.
They’ve lain there for years
(some even my mother’s).
I ignored their rich flowing colors,
but not now.
Unless I’m cooking, I’ll wear scarves
wrapped round the neck,
thrown loose like a Muslim woman’s,
depends on the shape—most of these are long.
Play, lady, play with colors,
cover the thinned out flesh
with scattered swishes and patterns.
I have protection with the red shirt,
flashing scarves, orange and yellow tops.
I write of sorrow, but I am not sorrowful,
though it may intrude into the gaiety
from time to time.
My disappearing body shivers, but
bright clothes proclaim defiant rejoicing.
QUOTE - Fred Astaire
"Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young."
POEM - Abigail Cargo
Untitled
“U” announces the beginning
of this horrid word which
devours my poems like
a paper shredder.
“N” is such a simple
letter, that greets your
mind with a sweet,
mother-like gesture,
nestling you in a
warm, sweet nest.
Be warned, for
even mothers
nursing their baby
birds have acute,
polished talons.
“T” is stiff, sturdy,
Its arms ready
to karate-chop
anything that
gets in the way
of his tapered,
bald point.
“I” is plain and tall,
simple, uninteresting
(there’s that dratted
U again), but ready
for any and all
challenges that await.
“L” is the female
version of I, lean and
angular, prepared
for slicing and dicing.
“E” was kidnapped
from some other
word, her sweet,
rosy visage does not
belong in this killing machine.
“D” brings up the
rear of this dreaded
word, strong and
deadly, his round
end a shield that
cannot be pierced.
“U” announces the beginning
of this horrid word which
devours my poems like
a paper shredder.
“N” is such a simple
letter, that greets your
mind with a sweet,
mother-like gesture,
nestling you in a
warm, sweet nest.
Be warned, for
even mothers
nursing their baby
birds have acute,
polished talons.
“T” is stiff, sturdy,
Its arms ready
to karate-chop
anything that
gets in the way
of his tapered,
bald point.
“I” is plain and tall,
simple, uninteresting
(there’s that dratted
U again), but ready
for any and all
challenges that await.
“L” is the female
version of I, lean and
angular, prepared
for slicing and dicing.
“E” was kidnapped
from some other
word, her sweet,
rosy visage does not
belong in this killing machine.
“D” brings up the
rear of this dreaded
word, strong and
deadly, his round
end a shield that
cannot be pierced.
POEM - Sarah Ferris
Grandpa's Daughter Clouds My Mind
I am helpless against the sorrow of losing her
it jumps like an assassin around a corner
and slams me against the wall
while my children play in their rooms
I stumble down the hall holding my shredded ribcage
hoping my children won’t see
hoping I can make it to a bathroom
close the door and slip down a wall to the cool tile floor.
QUOTE - Stephane Mallarme
“The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking…” “…the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering words which, otherwise, at a single stroke, would materialise as truth.”
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
Poetry ‘Versus’ Philosophy
According to Plato, poets were to be banned from the ideal republic because he considered it subversive of the rational norms he believed it should be ruled by. It was not just that Homer had misrepresented and disrespected the gods and made them appear disreputable, but also that poetry deflected the citizens’ attention away from the truth – which, of course, was the province of his ‘philosopher-rulers’. Plato, it should go without saying, was a forerunner of all those who have wanted to impose an ideological straightjacket on art.
Poetry, it seems, was a form of mimesis, but it was a form of mimesis twice removed from reality, which consisted of the Ideal Forms of which the external sensible world – which is what the poets apparently only copied – was itself just a copy. That point of view might be valid if poets were just empiricists who simply registered surface phenomena, but I think there is more going on in poetry than that. I don’t want to argue with the rightness or wrongness of Plato’s actual metaphysics and epistemology here; what’s important to me is the way that Plato devalued poetry and placed it alongside sophistry because it apparently relied on the same sleight-of-hand tricks of deception. Philosophers, on the other hand, were concerned with something called the truth and therefore with the forms of argument you should employ to arrive at the truth. Poetry only pretended to be about the truth, but the fact that it ran roughshod over philosophical methods and procedures for arriving at the truth was enough for Plato to place it alongside sophistry as an enemy of reason and therefore an enemy of the Republic, which could only be governed properly if reason was respected and adhered to. And the truth, according to Plato, could only be arrived at through rational procedures – which poets had little respect for
Furthermore, for Plato, good Pythagorian that he was, the ultimate ideal of philosophical truth was the matheme, which was different to the poem because of its reliance on transparently rational and deductive procedures, while poetry depended on procedures which were much more opaque. Alain Badiou, in his book, The Age Of The Poets, and more specifically, the chapter called Philosophy And Poetry From The Vantage Point Of The Unnameable, disputes the distinction Plato made between poetry and philosophy. And he does so in order to redeem poetry from its Platonic obloquy in the name of a more heterogeneous and less univocal conception of reality than Plato proposed. Badiou, invoking mathematicians like Gödel, Cantor and Cohen, recognises that the unnameable haunts mathematics – and, by extension, philosophy - no less than it does poetry. Poetry may not employ philosophical methods or forms of argument, but does that mean it is so completely different to philosophy? For Badiou, the difference lies mainly in the fact that one employs discursive methods, while the other employs metaphor.
So far so good and I agree with Badiou. However, I do have other problems with Badiou and they lie in the fact that both he and Plato seem to privilege mathematics as a species of knowledge in the field of philosophy (Of course, its influence in science is another matter entirely.) Badiou appears to give mathematics and Set-Theory an ontological status which I don’t think it deserves – despite the fact that he draws attention to its post-Gödel aporias and paradoxes, which introduce undecidable and unnameable elements into Maths. Maths is essential, of course, to science and its account of the physical universe, but once you go beyond empirical phenomena, what do you have to anchor it in? Something indeterminate, a sort of epistemological “X” or Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself beyond the structures of perception and consciousness which would prevent us really knowing ‘things as they are’ – supposing, of course, that there were any ‘things as they are’ in the first place. From this point of view, it seems to me simply dogmatic to conflate mathematics and ontology.
I am perfectly willing to admit that I may have a naïve idea of mathematics (I was dreadful at it at school and have viewed it with horror ever since.) but it does seem to me to involve the idea that every integer is commensurable with every other integer, because, for all maths’ complexity, one 1 is still exactly equal or identical to another 1. On the other hand one orange is not exactly equal or identical to another orange – though each is still one orange. In other words, maths operates at a formal level of abstraction which excludes difference, while what Louis MacNeice refers to as World appears to embed difference as fundamental. Maths operates on the level of the rational (Of course irrational numbers exist as well, but that’s another question.) and the rational divides and subdivides World into artificial homogeneous units which have some kind of exchangeable equivalence to each other in the way no two dogs ever will. So there is a problem in treating the matheme as a fundamental aspect of our view of reality in the way both Plato and Badiou do.
Philosophy, no less than poetry, is imbued with – and also defeated by – this heterogeneity at the heart of World which is always escaping its grasp. It can no more place its hopes in the homogeneity of being than poetry can. Language cannot round up and arrest reality, whether that language is philosophical or poetic. Poetry has long since come to terms with this deficiency. Philosophers like Kant – and, more recently, Deleuze and others - realised it too. Hegel seemed to send philosophy on another wild goose chase with his notion about the real being rational and the rational being real and therefore susceptible to being known - dialectically. The fact is, reality can no more be known through dialectics than it can be known through mathematics – and for the same reason. Dialects are formal and abstract. They may be a great help in correcting a too one-sided perspective on issues and thereby giving more nuance and complexity to arguments, but can they capture reality as such, or what Louis MacNeice meant by World when he wrote, “World is crazier and more of it than you think.”? I suspect that, in the end, the likelihood that it can’t gives philosophy no more of a nameable object outside itself than it does poetry and, at the same time, it brings philosophy and poetry closer together – once you remove philosophy’s hubristic blinkers. Poetry is different from philosophy, but the relationship between them is not the hierarchal one that Plato assumed. Philosophy enjoys no more of a privileged relationship with truth than poetry does because neither of them have an object outside of themselves to capture and render in their own terms. The truth of them both is what they are in themselves. In the end, all philosophy does is keep asking the same questions in different ways without ever arriving at an answer. But they are questions which probably need to be asked because it is in our nature to ask such questions. But whether there are any answers to these questions is another matter entirely.
One should, of course, acknowledge the chief difference between philosophy and poetry, that is to say, between rational discourse and metaphor, because the difference is fundamental. However, both in the end are concerned with some kind of ‘truth’ or other. The only point to make here is that this ‘truth’ is not something outside of a poem or philosophical treatise which it intentionally aims at, but hidden inside the poem or treatise and dispersed across the whole of it. I believe that you have to get rid of the notion that poetry or philosophy might be concerned with a truth external to themselves, which somehow they aim to capture. No philosopher has ever succeeded in capturing the truth of reality – or World - as such. The best they have done is to ask questions which have no certain answers, questions which ultimately only reveal the limitations of human language itself. In the end, the ‘object’ of philosophy is no less spread across its discursive apparatus than the ‘object’ of poetry is spread across its metaphorical apparatus. It has no referent beyond itself and in that, it is rather like poetry. Look at the metaphysics of any philosopher – from Plato’s Forms to Leibnitz’s Monads to Descartes dualism to Spinoza’s monism to Hegels’ Spirit to Schopenhauer’s Will to Nietzsche’s Will To Power to Bergson’s Elan Vital and so on and so forth. None of it really stacks up. Nor has it got us any closer to the truth of the world. In the end, philosophy is about itself; in that regard it is no different to poetry. It travels along a different trajectory perhaps, but that’s really it in the end. Of course, it might be good as a sort of training for the mind, a way of exercising and stretching mental capacities. But beyond that, I suggest, it is self-defeating as to its aims, and its quest for the truth and veridical knowledge.
I have tried to show that philosophy and poetry are not so different from each other as Plato suggested. Poetry might even share some of philosophy’s concerns – and vice versa, of course. There are fluid cross-over points between poetry and philosophy. Many poets have certainly been influenced by philosophers and I am sure many philosophers have likewise been influenced by poets. In the end, they may simply be different ways of exploring the world, or rendering the human predicament, without, of course, arriving at any answers to the questions they pose.
Finally, it is ironical that it is not philosophy but poetry which has the real freedom to explore metaphysical themes, because its use of metaphor allows it to short-circuit the need for argument. Free of the protocols of discursive reason and rational debate, poetry doesn’t need to justify or qualify its metaphysical assumptions. All it requires is to find the right images – or tropes. This freedom doesn’t belong to philosophy. So perhaps Plato should have recognised that poetry can actually take one further than philosophy in the field of thought, because it doesn’t have to keep looking over its own shoulder to see whether or not it is following the correct procedures. The hierarchy Plato tried to set up between philosophy and poetry should therefore perhaps be reversed. Could it be that this is what Plato feared and was secretly envious of about poetry? Or is that a question it would be foolish to try and answer?
According to Plato, poets were to be banned from the ideal republic because he considered it subversive of the rational norms he believed it should be ruled by. It was not just that Homer had misrepresented and disrespected the gods and made them appear disreputable, but also that poetry deflected the citizens’ attention away from the truth – which, of course, was the province of his ‘philosopher-rulers’. Plato, it should go without saying, was a forerunner of all those who have wanted to impose an ideological straightjacket on art.
Poetry, it seems, was a form of mimesis, but it was a form of mimesis twice removed from reality, which consisted of the Ideal Forms of which the external sensible world – which is what the poets apparently only copied – was itself just a copy. That point of view might be valid if poets were just empiricists who simply registered surface phenomena, but I think there is more going on in poetry than that. I don’t want to argue with the rightness or wrongness of Plato’s actual metaphysics and epistemology here; what’s important to me is the way that Plato devalued poetry and placed it alongside sophistry because it apparently relied on the same sleight-of-hand tricks of deception. Philosophers, on the other hand, were concerned with something called the truth and therefore with the forms of argument you should employ to arrive at the truth. Poetry only pretended to be about the truth, but the fact that it ran roughshod over philosophical methods and procedures for arriving at the truth was enough for Plato to place it alongside sophistry as an enemy of reason and therefore an enemy of the Republic, which could only be governed properly if reason was respected and adhered to. And the truth, according to Plato, could only be arrived at through rational procedures – which poets had little respect for
Furthermore, for Plato, good Pythagorian that he was, the ultimate ideal of philosophical truth was the matheme, which was different to the poem because of its reliance on transparently rational and deductive procedures, while poetry depended on procedures which were much more opaque. Alain Badiou, in his book, The Age Of The Poets, and more specifically, the chapter called Philosophy And Poetry From The Vantage Point Of The Unnameable, disputes the distinction Plato made between poetry and philosophy. And he does so in order to redeem poetry from its Platonic obloquy in the name of a more heterogeneous and less univocal conception of reality than Plato proposed. Badiou, invoking mathematicians like Gödel, Cantor and Cohen, recognises that the unnameable haunts mathematics – and, by extension, philosophy - no less than it does poetry. Poetry may not employ philosophical methods or forms of argument, but does that mean it is so completely different to philosophy? For Badiou, the difference lies mainly in the fact that one employs discursive methods, while the other employs metaphor.
So far so good and I agree with Badiou. However, I do have other problems with Badiou and they lie in the fact that both he and Plato seem to privilege mathematics as a species of knowledge in the field of philosophy (Of course, its influence in science is another matter entirely.) Badiou appears to give mathematics and Set-Theory an ontological status which I don’t think it deserves – despite the fact that he draws attention to its post-Gödel aporias and paradoxes, which introduce undecidable and unnameable elements into Maths. Maths is essential, of course, to science and its account of the physical universe, but once you go beyond empirical phenomena, what do you have to anchor it in? Something indeterminate, a sort of epistemological “X” or Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself beyond the structures of perception and consciousness which would prevent us really knowing ‘things as they are’ – supposing, of course, that there were any ‘things as they are’ in the first place. From this point of view, it seems to me simply dogmatic to conflate mathematics and ontology.
I am perfectly willing to admit that I may have a naïve idea of mathematics (I was dreadful at it at school and have viewed it with horror ever since.) but it does seem to me to involve the idea that every integer is commensurable with every other integer, because, for all maths’ complexity, one 1 is still exactly equal or identical to another 1. On the other hand one orange is not exactly equal or identical to another orange – though each is still one orange. In other words, maths operates at a formal level of abstraction which excludes difference, while what Louis MacNeice refers to as World appears to embed difference as fundamental. Maths operates on the level of the rational (Of course irrational numbers exist as well, but that’s another question.) and the rational divides and subdivides World into artificial homogeneous units which have some kind of exchangeable equivalence to each other in the way no two dogs ever will. So there is a problem in treating the matheme as a fundamental aspect of our view of reality in the way both Plato and Badiou do.
Philosophy, no less than poetry, is imbued with – and also defeated by – this heterogeneity at the heart of World which is always escaping its grasp. It can no more place its hopes in the homogeneity of being than poetry can. Language cannot round up and arrest reality, whether that language is philosophical or poetic. Poetry has long since come to terms with this deficiency. Philosophers like Kant – and, more recently, Deleuze and others - realised it too. Hegel seemed to send philosophy on another wild goose chase with his notion about the real being rational and the rational being real and therefore susceptible to being known - dialectically. The fact is, reality can no more be known through dialectics than it can be known through mathematics – and for the same reason. Dialects are formal and abstract. They may be a great help in correcting a too one-sided perspective on issues and thereby giving more nuance and complexity to arguments, but can they capture reality as such, or what Louis MacNeice meant by World when he wrote, “World is crazier and more of it than you think.”? I suspect that, in the end, the likelihood that it can’t gives philosophy no more of a nameable object outside itself than it does poetry and, at the same time, it brings philosophy and poetry closer together – once you remove philosophy’s hubristic blinkers. Poetry is different from philosophy, but the relationship between them is not the hierarchal one that Plato assumed. Philosophy enjoys no more of a privileged relationship with truth than poetry does because neither of them have an object outside of themselves to capture and render in their own terms. The truth of them both is what they are in themselves. In the end, all philosophy does is keep asking the same questions in different ways without ever arriving at an answer. But they are questions which probably need to be asked because it is in our nature to ask such questions. But whether there are any answers to these questions is another matter entirely.
One should, of course, acknowledge the chief difference between philosophy and poetry, that is to say, between rational discourse and metaphor, because the difference is fundamental. However, both in the end are concerned with some kind of ‘truth’ or other. The only point to make here is that this ‘truth’ is not something outside of a poem or philosophical treatise which it intentionally aims at, but hidden inside the poem or treatise and dispersed across the whole of it. I believe that you have to get rid of the notion that poetry or philosophy might be concerned with a truth external to themselves, which somehow they aim to capture. No philosopher has ever succeeded in capturing the truth of reality – or World - as such. The best they have done is to ask questions which have no certain answers, questions which ultimately only reveal the limitations of human language itself. In the end, the ‘object’ of philosophy is no less spread across its discursive apparatus than the ‘object’ of poetry is spread across its metaphorical apparatus. It has no referent beyond itself and in that, it is rather like poetry. Look at the metaphysics of any philosopher – from Plato’s Forms to Leibnitz’s Monads to Descartes dualism to Spinoza’s monism to Hegels’ Spirit to Schopenhauer’s Will to Nietzsche’s Will To Power to Bergson’s Elan Vital and so on and so forth. None of it really stacks up. Nor has it got us any closer to the truth of the world. In the end, philosophy is about itself; in that regard it is no different to poetry. It travels along a different trajectory perhaps, but that’s really it in the end. Of course, it might be good as a sort of training for the mind, a way of exercising and stretching mental capacities. But beyond that, I suggest, it is self-defeating as to its aims, and its quest for the truth and veridical knowledge.
I have tried to show that philosophy and poetry are not so different from each other as Plato suggested. Poetry might even share some of philosophy’s concerns – and vice versa, of course. There are fluid cross-over points between poetry and philosophy. Many poets have certainly been influenced by philosophers and I am sure many philosophers have likewise been influenced by poets. In the end, they may simply be different ways of exploring the world, or rendering the human predicament, without, of course, arriving at any answers to the questions they pose.
Finally, it is ironical that it is not philosophy but poetry which has the real freedom to explore metaphysical themes, because its use of metaphor allows it to short-circuit the need for argument. Free of the protocols of discursive reason and rational debate, poetry doesn’t need to justify or qualify its metaphysical assumptions. All it requires is to find the right images – or tropes. This freedom doesn’t belong to philosophy. So perhaps Plato should have recognised that poetry can actually take one further than philosophy in the field of thought, because it doesn’t have to keep looking over its own shoulder to see whether or not it is following the correct procedures. The hierarchy Plato tried to set up between philosophy and poetry should therefore perhaps be reversed. Could it be that this is what Plato feared and was secretly envious of about poetry? Or is that a question it would be foolish to try and answer?
POEM - Stellasue Lee
Ode To Broken Bones
The clavicle, fractured in two places—left side of my body.
Blunt trauma received falling off a bicycle at a beach
on the coast of Mexico.
Compound fracture of the right foot—twenty-six bones
found there, four have been on the receiving end of trauma
while cleaning the house. O Lord, is there a lesson here?
Six ribs of the thoracic cage—broken three times.
Once in an auto accidence with a murderous cab driver,
again by a wave that had the strength of Hercules,
a third time by a man who meant no harm when he swung
his arm out at the exact moment I would rise from a chair.
Navicular bone, or broken wrist—with a retrograde blood
supply that feeds the bone and bone cells—snapped
when that hand made contact with the floor to break my fall.
O Lord, please, show mercy on this oft-mended soul.
REVIEW
Paul Murphy
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at THE ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN, on Saturday 28th March 2015
CREDITS
Fiona Bell - Titania and Hippolyta
Andrew Bennett - Nick Bottom
Des Cave - Robin Starveling
Declan Conlon - Oberon and Theseus
Shadaan Felfeli - Indian boy
John Kavanagh - Lysander
Peadar Lamb - Francis Flute
Stella McCusker - Peaseblossom
Barry McGovern - Demetrius
Gina Moxley - Helena
Máire Ní Ghráinne - Mustard Seed
Áine Ní Mhuirí - Hermia
Des Nealon - Tom Snout
John Olohan - Snug
David Pearse - Egeus and Peter Quince
Geraldine Plunkett - Cobweb
Daniel Reardon - Puck and Philostrate
Helen Roche - Moth
Gavin Quinn - Director
Aedín Cosgrove - Set and Lighting Design
Jimmy Eadie - Composer and Sound Designer
Bruno Schwengl - Costume Design
The Imperial tongue has no great incongruity at the Abbey Theatre since all the great Irish (but really Anglo-Irish) playwrights wrote in it rather than the native Gaelic but the presence of the great avatar of the English language is really most welcome even though he never set foot, as far as we know, on the island. Yet this tale of a Fairy Queen has precedence in Shakespeare’s contemporary, Sir Edmund Spenser, who certainly did live in Ireland, possessing an estate at Kilcolman in North Cork where, it is said, he wrote his magnum opus The Fairie Queen. Eventually Spenser’s castle at Kilcolman was burnt down and he had to return to London where he unfortunately died but not before authoring a blatantly inflammatory tract A View of the Present State of Ireland, supressed for more than a century because of its content, in which he advocates a scorched earth policy to subdue the rebellious native Irish and the eradication of the native tongue which in itself stood for an act of defiance: "Out of everye corner of the woode and glenns they came creepinge forth upon theire handes, for theire legges could not beare them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of theire graves; they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them, yea, and one another soone after, in soe much as the verye carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves; and if they found a plott of water-cresses or shamrockes, theyr they flocked as to a feast… in a shorte space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentyfull countrye suddenly lefte voyde of man or beast: yett sure in all that warr, there perished not manye by the sworde, but all by the extreamytie of famyne", which, he concludes "they themselves had wrought".
Gavin Quinn’s innovative production takes place in a nursing home and the shiny, translucent surfaces set the action somewhere inbetween films like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and The Shining. The central conceit seems to really work, providing incongruence, setting the script alight, propelling everything forward with immense verve and impetus. There are three main groups in the play: the court of Theseus of Athens, for Theseus is marrying Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons: the fairy world, represented by Puck, the King of the Fairies, Oberon, his Queen, Titania, and the other minor fairies, spirits and sprites: the rude mechanicals who present their amateur play concerning Pyramus and Thisby which is to be performed on Theseus’s wedding night. One of the players, Nick Bottom the weaver, is magically transformed into an ass, managing to combine the world of the fairies and that of humans which is perhaps the theme of the work, transgression of the world of magic, dreams and fantasy and the wearisome human realities of class, caste, marriage and status. Amateur theatre is also a theme and the enduring mysteries of mistaken identity ensured by the central McGuffin of the love potion.
There is good use of space and lighting as the two leading characters sit inside a booth designed to observe the patients and then the moon is painted on the wall beside them. The prosaic surroundings become the magical world of the poet through imaginative transformations. Then encroaching night is suggested by the lighting design as sheets of plastic are painted black and projected on OHPs and the natural world encroaches by parts. Imaginative use of scenery and costume suggest a good deal more than is explicit and the action is wound up the mechanicals own play completed by a Bergomask dance (which is actually a kind of rustic dance originating in the town of Bergamo in Italy) to techno music and the famous ending song. Andrew Bennett stands out as Nick Bottom as does Gina Moxley as Helena but the ensemble cast is genuinely fantastic.
Paul Murphy, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, March 28th, 2015
Gavin Quinn’s innovative production takes place in a nursing home and the shiny, translucent surfaces set the action somewhere inbetween films like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and The Shining. The central conceit seems to really work, providing incongruence, setting the script alight, propelling everything forward with immense verve and impetus. There are three main groups in the play: the court of Theseus of Athens, for Theseus is marrying Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons: the fairy world, represented by Puck, the King of the Fairies, Oberon, his Queen, Titania, and the other minor fairies, spirits and sprites: the rude mechanicals who present their amateur play concerning Pyramus and Thisby which is to be performed on Theseus’s wedding night. One of the players, Nick Bottom the weaver, is magically transformed into an ass, managing to combine the world of the fairies and that of humans which is perhaps the theme of the work, transgression of the world of magic, dreams and fantasy and the wearisome human realities of class, caste, marriage and status. Amateur theatre is also a theme and the enduring mysteries of mistaken identity ensured by the central McGuffin of the love potion.
There is good use of space and lighting as the two leading characters sit inside a booth designed to observe the patients and then the moon is painted on the wall beside them. The prosaic surroundings become the magical world of the poet through imaginative transformations. Then encroaching night is suggested by the lighting design as sheets of plastic are painted black and projected on OHPs and the natural world encroaches by parts. Imaginative use of scenery and costume suggest a good deal more than is explicit and the action is wound up the mechanicals own play completed by a Bergomask dance (which is actually a kind of rustic dance originating in the town of Bergamo in Italy) to techno music and the famous ending song. Andrew Bennett stands out as Nick Bottom as does Gina Moxley as Helena but the ensemble cast is genuinely fantastic.
Paul Murphy, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, March 28th, 2015
