A Poem from Sophomore Year

“Notes and Exegesis”

AUTHOR’S PREFACE: The following was composed as an experiment investigating the borderline between academic notes and artistic expression. Bits of a lecture, the sort out of which opinions and ideas are forged, have been blended into the prose and poetry that was later inspired by it. I believe it is impossible for a true artist to create without these sorts of influences, so this piece is at once a testament to the source and the product.

“It is not our task to complain or to condone, but only to understand.”

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, belief and order. Like Legos, click, we collectively connect individuality to the division of labor. Fractured totality, a parceling in whose reassembly awaits society. To labor is to live, admirably. Harvesting, punching clocks, singing and smiling, the workers flood the fields and the subways and the high rise industrial parks. Shovels swinging, we are children on a playground. In his held up hands, our nameless cultured man stands against the leveling force of the once and future society. (Hear that bulldozing engine groan) But he raises a triumphant fist and we watch him evolve, adapt to external organizations. Bamboo shoot incorporations, forest his fields…we call it prosperity. Oh Gods and guardians, Taste the sweat of his brow as it slowly sours yellow to rancidying breams of golden curdled milk. Feel the fine silk of the bellows his belly lets loose when overworked and underfed and Smell the stench of his decaying dreams. He peels off scything a path through the elephant eye high weeds of vinetraps and jealousy. As creatures, our creation depends on differences. Crack! Can you feel the earthquaking echoes of the fracturing faultline of St. Paul and Luther! The metropolis can be conceived as an (icy) intellectual or “rationalizing” force (emulsifying bastion). The small town is still mostly swayed by the bending currents of emotional inputs. A city man reacts (a cold cry of bloody laments is heard wafting over puddles in the night) to stimuli in a rational manner. Money economy and the intellect stand in close relations to each other. Some suggest it is objectivity while others hold out for beautiful unity (emotions are for the weak or startled). Money reduces everything to a common, “impersonal” element, for a heart is a heart is a part of a corpse. Life in a city fosters the disconnect of producers from consumers. Life in the city builds opaque walls of glass and snags hooks through bellies like boneless eels and jerks, snap and bits of bones and blood and sinew seize them backwards, Away Away. Modern life is calculating and mathematical. Binary scrolls dethrone Nostrodamus with the rising pitch of volumes of 0s. But if all the clocks that talk in New York City suddenly chimed misaligned, chaos would tear apart the town. So frail and misunderstood, this Goliath. The historical movement has been a loss of subjectivity. Life is money is…Value is now set against the “time standard.” Riff: “This date, dinner, two entrees, two glasses of wine, a little sorbet, she had to have the sorbet, of course the god damned sorbet, is the equivalent of five hours of work, or three and a half days of living naturally without work, which took up two hours of my night and afforded me a moderate degree of sociability, a slightly heightened degree of erotic engagement, and a less than satisfactory intellectual input. Had the time been spend eating boiled rice and reading _________, the intellectual input would have been supremely satisfying while sociability and erotic engagements would have dipped down to dangerous levels. Mental stability: improved. Mental capacity: detracted. The value summation…” Individuals grow desensitized to external stimuli both intellectually and emotionally. The blacking shroud of anonymity, the hazy din of cool clear white noise. An indifference towards distinctions spawns upon reduction. Money becomes the junction, or common denominator of all values. Time is money. Hollowing harrowing emaciated forms out from uniqueness, ultimately dragging down all colors and identities into a singular pit of valuelessness. Lessness. This strange citified estrangement stretches aversions like scaly tentacles to our tentative fellows. Whitewashing them the blasé, blasé, and indifference turns to reserve turns to suspicion turns to aversion turns to hatred and conflict and crack! Crack! Do you hear it? Do you hear it through the icy night? The sound of skulls cracked out upon concrete. And that’s indifference! Indifference! A cold calculating callous of rationalization, people as numbers and inputs like sources! In it all, is great deflection. No reflections! No conceptions! Just deflections and hardening, huddling and guarding. Hold the broken heart tighter and tighter so every little bit matters every little bit is taken, accepted, deflected, and passed away. Step on forward into the perpetual night with perpetually glowing candles like the furnace fires of the pits of…Easy engagements are found only in small towns. But piggybacked on lubrication come a stricting in a sense. Limitations are defined in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have been. Off in the distant townhouse attics, ghouling eyes are always watching you, you and your behavior. And quiet snaky grins sit shrouded behind dusty veils, for they know and they eat, and you’re there, just for them. The narrow cohesion of tightly bound groups are leather straps slowly tightening, stranglingly wrapped where no arms can shift, no chests can lift. Domination grows like shadows with the setting sun. And important nefarians wriggle wrinkled soiled fingertips and the ghostly traces of long-dead submissives wither and writhe with crying voices echoing on through the end of time. Just cries and shadows and no room to breath, no choice in momentum. We were dead before we even shook their hands…Conversely; the modern metropolitan citizen is the freest of all men. Though also the loneliest. Economic, personal, and intellectual relationships are heightened, but only under the pretense of connecting value judgments to them in a wholly new way, which manifests in the need for clear-cut, to-the-point engagements. It becomes difficult to escape the quantization of relationships. Significant individuals hold less and less sway. People are sources like books to be leafed through. There are sources for business, enlightenment, and the ease of confession. Plug and play, assuage your urges. Let them lift you to the great greasy heights of a personal bestering. Where you may stand on green bronzing pedestals and glimpse scared and unblinking down to the corpse-strewn rocks of jagged broken standing that await with happy jaws below. Pfff pfff instincts fade away. Ptpp Reification. Climbing higher and higher, bringing polished down sandstones from quarries far and wide to create a bigger, stronger, and more productive self. A conglomerate mass, rising higher and higher like William Penn amidst the skyscrapers of Philadelphia. Farther and farther away from hearts and loves and all those pettifoggeries now so distant and arbitrary, like…like…Who? The life force of the city grows of its own accord and can not be reigned in by mere men. It breaths. It laughs. It creates. It consumes. The flow of men into subterranean transports: a great inhalation. The massive clouds of smug smoggery: the exhale. The struggle to live in nature has now transformed into the struggle to live within the company of men. With hand-carved knives among the wolves and the jackals, very few changes have occurred. (Thicker coats, really) The need for distinction in a city creates the strangest eccentricities. The pressure to exist, rising. Pressure rising. The need to exist. Harder harder harder, Pow! Sending spiraling sideways and batty: the need to be different. We strive for the singular most individual forms of personal existence. With desperate eyes and fabulous hats, we buck and howl the execrations of a dying beast; nobility lost, paradise burned. And we try and we try and we pray and we cry and still, pennies jingling in pockets…they just…walk on by. Through our windows we hear their calls like wolves under the moon: horns and shrieks, shattering glass and gunshots. Culture, meanwhile, grows more objective; individuals more arbitrary. The end of time; the end of art. We witness the atrophy of individual culture before the face of a brimming totality. Mass sweeps hurl bundles of bodies on the breathing flames of the bonfire of the vanities. Amusing calamities. With fashion and sex appeal, power and fists of solid shining gold. Ideas are polished, depth is penetrated, people lose their use and are softly and casually swept away with all the tenderness of yesterday’s newspaper.

But from beneath the heaps, snapping leather straps, and quietly creeping away, we may rise. We rub the sand from soggy eyes, and peel off our molten skins, thick wiry callouses, and financial sensibilities and together we commune. Inside out the small towns break and the livers turn backs to faces and slowly, on legs they’d once forgotten, into the light we commune. Off to the east, we see, as the first glimmering crack of a golden dawn, the nubile buds of beginning. And off on the epithet of a hundred year grave marked simply Simmel. We read only: With our minds and hearts…we transcend their game…and quietly march… together to freedom.

“It is not our task to complain or to condone, but only to understand.”