a family lies
on cardboard mattresses
to keep bone from stone.
Platform Living [Haiku]
1
Category Archives: Life
Scarecrow [Free Verse]
Scarecrow, n. - that which exists
solely to evoke fear.
There are so many scarecrows:
global - the end of the world
as we know it.
societal - the end of the tribe
as we know it.
individual - scarecrows of the soul.
Scarecrows lead us into the worst
versions of ourselves:
The one who's stressed, and mean
because of it.
The one who imagines conspiracy
around every corner.
The one who sees threat in every
change & in every difference.
The one who wants an orderly world
of people just like themselves -
familiar, cozy, and lacking surprises.
Scarecrows even march us off to war,
and war should be the scariest state
imaginable --
death doled out on a random basis.
War should be the scariest, but terrible certainties
spur less fear than any old uncertainty.
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Big City Sirens [Haiku]
The Most Important Lesson in All of Human Living [DAILY PROMPT]
Describe something you learned in high school.
A Psych teacher told us a story of what he called “a gestalt of expectations.” A man from a city in the East is driving out West, and he passes a gas station – despite being low on fuel. (He’s used to gas stations being everywhere.) Anyhow, he runs out of fuel. He can’t see anything around except desolate desert bisected by a line of asphalt. He decides to walk back to the gas station he passed ten miles back. There is no one traveling on this remote stretch of desert road. As he’s walking in the intense heat, it comes to his mind that the employee at the service station is really going to gouge him on the price of gas and a jerry can. As he walks and walks, skin prickling with the heat, he keeps thinking about how he’s going to get screwed by the gas station attendant and also how he’ll be chided and ridiculed for running out of gas in the middle of the desert. He imagines it in great detail. Finally, bedraggled and with heaving breaths, he arrives at the station. The gas station attendant rushes out to help this poor man, and the man punches the attendant square in the nose (for all the offenses taking place solely in the man’s mind.)
In a broader formulation, I think this is the most important lesson any human can learn. Our personal perception of what we experience is not equal to what it is that we experience (the exterior world.) This is why some people dealt a crappy hand can turn it into a wonderful life, and also why some people who seem to have it all commit suicide in the prime of life.
I could be angered or dismayed that the single most important lesson I learned in secondary school was via off-curriculum ramblings during an elective class, but I choose not to. Instead, I’ve been trying all my life to make that bit of knowledge into wisdom.
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A Life Improbable [Free Verse]
Each of us lives a life improbable, the gift of an ancestor who struggled through some terror which killed others. We each have an iron impulse to maintain a cracking grip on life, but some won't ever be pried away, growing like the stunted pine that juts from the mountainside: gnarled but indestructible. Live improbably with your life improbable.
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The Autumn Trail [Haiku]
the autumn woods - leafless & grass matted - is rife with life, unseen
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Note to Self: A Sonnet
Don't fill your vaults with glowing, shiny stones. It's invitation to all cheats and thieves. Don't know by mind what you don't know by bone. Make sure you've lost before you up and grieve. Then when you grieve, take time to fully feel. Don't let your mind write stories so untrue that they turn melancholy like a wheel that gathers and grows with each turn anew. Be kind and true, but not so kind and true so as to kill with gifts or a mean tongue. Don't do what would be best that you not do, and only sing of those heroes unsung. Oh, every piece of wisdom has its day, so don't hitch so tight that you're led astray.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction by Terry Eagleton
The Meaning of Life by Terry EagletonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
“What is the meaning of life?” This is the question thrown at anyone accused of being a philosopher – professional or lay – though mostly in jest. In the present day, that is. In centuries past, large portions of the population took for granted that it was a question that had a knowable answer (one dictated by religion.) But as that answer became decreasingly satisfying to an increasing portion of the populace, people began to see the question as both fundamentally unanswerable and as a means to chide / test individuals who claimed wisdom or had the claim thrust upon them.
In this concise guide, Eagleton takes on the question, beginning with consideration of whether it is even a sound question. (Or, is it a question like: “What is the meaning of cabbage?” or “What color is a hypothesis?”) After considering many of the problems with the question, from the meaning of “meaning” to the presumptions about what a life has (and what it is) the book also considers some of the post-Nietzschean answers to the question and the challenges that confront them. [One that I hadn’t thought much about criticizes that many of these recent attempts are individualist (i.e. find your own meaning, one consistent with the peculiarities of your own unique life.) Is it reasonable to think that the question can only be answered at the level of granularity of the individual? Maybe, it can only be, but I did appreciate that it gave me something to think about.]
It should be pointed out that Eagleton doesn’t consider himself a philosopher. He’s primarily a critic and English literature professor. This had its advantages. First, Eagleton drew upon works of literature that explore the question, which both made for some interesting insights while also breaking up dense tangles of philosophizing. Second, much of the book deals with linguistic issues. Are the words and grammar of the question, “What is the meaning of life?” useful, and – if so – how do we understand the nature and limits of the question?
I found this book intriguing and provocative. It does have thickets of dense language, but also has its fun moments as well.
View all my reviews
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Epicurean Epitaph [Free Verse]
Born from the Black, He wormed through the World. He dove into Death, Vanishing back into the Black.
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Where Live the Idyllic Folk? [Sonnet]
In rustic cabins far away from here there live some happy people of the woods. With ruddy cheeks, they're exemplars of cheer. They never visit cities selling goods. They live on what the forest can render, and that's not so much, but it is enough. They tune themselves to nature's vast splendor. In cold, they don skins, but when hot, go buff. Or, perhaps, I lie, and no such people exist in this world or any other. And woods people fuss on matters, fecal -- just like you, I, and all our grandmothers. These cheery, simple woods folk must exist, if only in the mind of this fantasist.
the !n(tro)verted yogi 