Nietzsche said:
“And if thou gaze long
into an abyss,
the abyss will also
gaze into thee.”
I must admit
the first several times
that I read this quote,
I couldn’t tell if it was wise,
or just had the patina of
wisdom that comes from
parallel sentence structure.
Crisscrossing subject and object
lends a ring of sagacity.
“If you can’t take
Mohammad to the mountain,
the mountain must come to
Mohammad.”“Ask not what your country
can do for you,
but what you can do
for your country.”“If you can’t get the carrots
out of the refrigerator,
get the refrigerator
out of the carrots.”
Yes, that last one is nonsense,
but it’s not nonsense like:
“The banana pirouetted fuchsia
all over the underside of
an A-sharp chord.”
The carrot quote probably took
your mind some time —
if only milliseconds —
to relegate to the
trash heap.
That’s why this sentence structure
is beloved by godmen &
politicians: because you can
sound wise even if you’re
kind of an idiot.
So, I was ready to classify Nietzsche’s
quote pseudo-wisdom when I realized
that my smartphone was the Abyss,
and it was certainly staring back at me.
It stared through all the data collection &
neuroscientific and psychological
research designed to keep
a person scrolling.
Maybe Nietzsche was on to something
that even he didn't fully understand.
From a hilltop,
farmland stretches
to the horizon:
parceled into rectangles
of brown, beige, and oh
so many shades of green.
It must be the tropics,
for ripe grain to
coexist with verdant
& fallow patches.
So different from the farmland
of my youth
where all the rectangles
were one of two colors -
because everyone had to
pack into the same tight
growing season.
The evening winds are blowing out to sea,
and carry away all the woes of day.
You see the sway up in the waving trees
that give a sendoff to what's blown away.
The sea grows dark, and darkness envelops.
And sandy scents and fishy scents blossom.
And sounds of crashing waves seem to swell up,
as vision decides it will play possum.
Then stars - in veins - do shimmer between clouds,
the clouds one cannot see but can induce.
Now free from both the light and noise of crowds,
and all the human chaos and abuse.
Midst drifting shapes my mind is lulled to peace,
then all that is - both sea and wind - does cease...
Tiger Riding for Beginners 