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3 Thoughts & A Poem

Last week of classes. I feel a bit bittersweet. Like I haven't learned enough to earn any credits. There is still so much that I don't know; I wonder how I will feel at the end of the degree and whether it will still seem like such a tiny fraction of the things that could be known.

Next week is exams, and then I'm going to get out of Dodge (Ford) City and have a silent weekend of thought and writing to see what to do with all that this fall has held, in and out of classes. I'm quite excited for a getaway, the friends coming along, and what it means to be together without speaking. No, seriously - speaking is not allowed inside the monastery we're staying at.

I've started reading poetry before bed. It helps me unwind and encourages me to think creatively. I am almost finished a volume of Czeslaw Milosz' work that I started 18 months ago. Here is one I particularly liked last night:


VOICE

It was in hospitals that I learned humility
and I walk, listening to a voice that weeps in me
and laments, as it pities us, human beings.

Our muscles are universal.
The pumps of our hearts are universal.
Our guts and reproductive organs ready for dissection.
The same bones to be laid in the ground.
Skulls to be racked in a pyramid.

We are a wretched species,
That in anger hurled rocks ripped from the ground at the enemy
And thus came to invent the first tool.
Polemos pater panton.
War, father of everything,
Said Heraclitus.

That voice in me weeps for us.

Yet if human intelligence, dimmed as it is,
Discovered two times two and other laws of mathe matics,
Then if only it were brightened, it would discover more,
Unto the whole build of the universe.
And that is where the concept of incorporeal intelligences, or angels, is based.

All conceivalbe nonsense,
All evil
Stems from our struggle to dominate our neighbor.
And every individual entity
That separates itself from the dying body
And lives in the No-Where, is tainted.

Whence the dazzle,
The aerial architecture
in the kingdom of the sun?
Emaciated, naked, they crawl and likc the crumbs of light,
Of their majesty revealed,
Of their religion of man.

On the cross.
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