A hotel suite

Window overlooks the city

Chewing on a menthol cigarette

by T.S. Eliot

The following poem (after the break) wafts through my mind often when I reflect on a three-month solo trip to Europe I took in the summer of 2009, particularly the line at the bottom of the first stanza. The final few lines of the poem echo a perpetual sensation I have in this, Die Beste aller möglichen Welten. 

Contrary to the Leibnizian dictum of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss—“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”—I defer to Candide, who in the midst of disillusion drew the ultimately hopeful and empowering conclusion that “we must cultivate our garden”. Eliot might add that it is through death and subsequent rebirth that this cultivation takes place.

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khaos, I am born of my own womb

Inside my head, the old paradigm is crumbling. An ancient iron citadel of thoughts that held me, forced belief on me.

It was constructed of a twisting neural web, stoic and crystallized. Unmoving.

Inside I was encased—slave—wrapped in thought-tendrils like the stems of creepers. Slithering, hissing, buzzing like wires.

Each strand is snapping, one by one. They fire as they go down, releasing synapse whispers, igniting old terrors. Each an explosion of sudden torch lighting the cavern walls of Lascaux, windows to our primeval mind. There stands Prometheus bearing flame to his children, cast in shadow and cowering.

You remember, too, when we were cold-blooded vertebrate and made of fear.

Under the rubble is the story of our composition; air, water, electrical current, viscous conductors. Thus we are animated, the marionettes of space-time.

We confuse ourselves with our container and free the black-fog beast. Suckling at spinal fluid, it licks at the corners of the brain. It gnaws on nerve endings. Destroyer, it screams, over the seat of God. We are suspended, insubstantial; there is nothing to hold within the vacuum.

Abide with me, he whispers,

hot

and thick.

This is the death rattle, and the dark thing writhes. There is nowhere to hide inside love.

We are splintered. Shattered. We are made pieces of ourselves. And through the fractures, light.

I wrote this poem on July 10th, 2008, after just having finished Pierre Hadot’s work of the same name. Eminent historian of ideas and philosopher himself, Hadot’s work is a masterpiece of both scholarship and symbol, marrying classical and Neoplatonic philosophy with myth to illustrate the treatment of the idea of nature in the arc of Western thought. This book has influenced me more than any other single work in my own research and relationship with the natural world, as well the way I relate to my own nature.

Within it, Hadot includes excerpts of Freidrich Schiller’s Gods of Greece — on which my poem is loosely based — along with beautifully crafted commentary on the symbolic nuances of the work and its relevance to the Orphic, or poetic, treatment of nature, as opposed to the Promethean, utilitarian, or scientific view. This dichotomy itself is bottomless in its iterations, and I’m tempted to list dualism after dualism to further the metaphoric profusion. Suffice it to say that it was from opposites that the world sprung.

Poem to follow…

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