Today, again, I will write nothing. Just let everything be. There’s no world; only a quiet goat grazing in a field of grass. Gray sky, all clouds. And a light breeze.
Is it warm or cool? I don’t know. Who cares.
I think that people’s fear of death proves that they’re poets. Cuz the badness of life is known, but instead of hating life and welcoming death as at least a change from life’s sure badness, people fear death because they sense its potential to be even worse than life was. That automatic intuition of possibility is the essence of the poetic mind. A prosaic mind would simply race to embrace death, because, on the surface, nothing is known about death; and to know nothing is far better than knowing badness, which is life’s forte.
No, I'm wrong about life being bad... Right? Don't some people say "Life is good"? Can't we see the mistakes made by a robot police-dog as beneficial, in some sense, ultimately? ...I guess I was wrong.
Alright, so I've made my mistake for the day. Now what? I guess I'll do the LORD's work and get a job in fast-food.
Why is fast-food bad, if the world is good? Why does fast-food cause health problems?
The answer to that last question is that God made the human body incorrectly: he should have crafted it so that it could thrive off fast-food. (Why did God not do this, since he could see the future so clearly, when he was molding the very first hermaphrodite?)
Yes, but the reason that fast-food is bad is that food should be prepared and consumed very slowly. When you relax and allow time to melt during prepping and dining, the mind has a greater opportunity to savor every aspect of each experience: Think of how amazing it is to flip a burger on the grill; you hear the sound of sizzling, and you smell the sweet scent of satisfaction. Also think hard about how astonishing it is to chop up tomatoes, pickles, and onions. Behold the bread rise, when baking buns. And truly consider the deep mystery of chewing and swallowing.
2 comments:
Now, there's really the written proof that I AM actually a poet after all, then -- and to a degree that even reading the first half of this entry had my heart beat slightly faster, almost as to convince ourselves that we are indeed to be counted among the living!
I thank you dearly for then reassuring and comforting me by serving the most sensuously poetic and - in fact - the best burger I've ever had, rounding off the initial scare!
Regarding the lovely outburst "I AM actually a poet after all" — I've long believed that everyone is naturally poetic but that we WORK HARD to eliminate this element from our constitution. To me, the phase "becoming a mature adult" is synonymous with "killing my poetic selfhood". Even the most sublime poetry is childlike. I'm reminded of how often smug parents remark about abstract art "My child could paint that", as if this is an insult — I always want to reply to them "Yes, because your child is inherently artistic; unlike you, who sold your soul to the business sector." But it's difficult to snuff out your true essence; and everybody is a poet at night when they dream, even businesspeople. Dreaming is compulsive poetry. Also the word "poet" is one of those terms that, over the eons, has picked up a terrifying eminence that it was not born with; a similar thing happened to words like "genius": we feel that there's a magical superiority attached to them, so that one is making an appreciative value judgment to call someone else a poet or genius; however, I think that EVERYONE is a poet fundamentally, and likewise ALL of us are informed by our own personal genius. Poet simply means "maker", so anyone who's ever made anything is therefore a poet. The word "genius" stems from the Latin word meaning "beget", so it's sorta the same: we make things, we beget things; the dictionary's etymology explains that it first referred to an "attendant spirit present from one's birth..." therefore, you yourself, whoever you are, are a poetic genius. Yet, having recognized these traits as universal, they obviously grow less important to possess: they are literally common — I think this is a good result, because it lures us to be less concerned with the fixed doom of how we were BORN, and instead to care about how we DEVELOP.
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