Upon the Death of Sartre

I know not the truth of fact
beyond the tongue of faith;
knowledge not of mind but prayer,
the simple sweat of palms
that drips so neatly on the page.

The social implications of family are maddening. The misappropriation allotted by kinsmen ridiculous. Man by nature soldier. Nurture thus the death of all things natural. To justify actions with a phrase of “well, he/she is family”, is the negation of natural law. The hyena son who is mentally castrated by his mother is removed from the pack so his sister will not eat him. The mother bear leaves her mate to protect her children from being devoured. Our children, gnawed and empty stumble at the foot of life as their duties are dictated in full. Honor and save me; a child is the ultimate crutch. A parent will never be alone.

The Tao of Pooh

Tao of Pooh…hmm…not too much was learned about Taoism that the Tao Te Ching has not covered. I nstead, I found that I learned more of myself. I find that a person can come to know themselves better through un-fun activities rather than through complete hedonism. It is how a person reacts to boredom, frustration, and offense that truly shapes the person, for anyone can dance around and have fun; fun causes similar reactions in everyone: laughter, smiles, and of course the occasional flatulence. However, it is the bad emotions do not always carry the same responses. For example, a teacher challenged my intentions for his class; accused me of bribery, laziness, and bitterness all before the first week of the semester was over and any assignments were assigned. If there are three things I am not it is cunning (enough to pull of something such as bribery), indolent, or reminiscent of a spinster; so one could imagine my inner self’s face when such an ugly remark was made. Every bone in my body wanted to grab the heaviest book in my bag and through it with my best girlie toss right at his fat head. But, avoiding expulsion, I simply left his office, stuck my tongue out at his closed door, and aced the fathead’s class. What does this have to do with The Tao of Pooh? Well, around page twenty-six, paragraph six, lines four through seven (approximately); I was lost. Not lost in the sense that I did not understand, but lost because all I could concentrate on for the rest of Mr. Hoff’s rant was: “…writing pompous and pretentious papers that no one else can understand, rather than working for the enlightenment of others.” Perhaps I take intellect a bit too seriously (it would not be the first time such an accusation has been made), but it would seem to me that by making such a statement Mr. Benjamin Hoff is himself bringing out my most irritated and immature faces. It is the uneducated mind that allows fallibility to reign.

“What do you think,” I asked, turning to my right, my good friend Mr. Allan Bloom at my side.

“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is. Some dogs just cannot learn to sit.”

The problem is not that intellectuals are pompous and pretentious (although it is sure they can be), but that people are no longer interested. They could cross reference, pick up a dictionary, or discuss the topic with someone who can comprehend the topic. “Yes,” I added, “but you must understand the difficulty, especially when Friends comes on so many times a day.

”It is the struggle that is life. Without the struggle we are dead."

“When you try too hard it doesn’t work,” explained Mr. Hoff; Tigger in the kitchen, trying desperately to open a jar of pickles.

“Yes,” I replied, “but if you bash the jar against the counter with just the right amount of force, it will open.”

“But the Mess!” “Hoffey-My-Man, if one is Hungry enough, there will be no Mess; for the Hungry Man undoubtedly will eat the Pickle off the floor and lap the Juice from the countertop. But given an Open Jar, the Hungry Man will catch his fist and starve.”

“If he has patience, he will eat.”

“Oh, Hoffster, you must have never been Hungry.”

“Speaking of hungry,” started Pooh, “where’s the honey?”

“Exactly!” I said.

“Huh?” begged Ol’ Hoff and Pooh with perfect assimilation.

“One who waits,” I replied, “does just that. It’s in the cupboard, Pooh, help yourself.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“Simple enough.” Self improvement: the fish may not be able to whistle, but it should try. A white girl: I cannot rap, but it doesn’t stop me from blasting the radio and busting a few rhymes.

“So find Cottleston Pie to be ludicrous as well?”

“No, I didn’t say that, but if a man’s mouth is filled with Cottleston Pie he can hardly speak of anything, let alone what his mouth is full of.”

“Kerumpaph!”

“Why, thank you Pooh. What do you think, Allan?”

Mr. Bloom looked up from his book, nodded his head, and stuck his nose right back between the pages. “Well, haven’t you anything to say?”

Mr. Bloom looked up from his book, shrugged his shoulders, and stuck his nose right back between the pages. “Good enough. Now, Benny, please recite me another story of this wonderful bear and all of his friends. This Milne character has quite a charming way of putting things.”

Most nights I wake before dawn and scratch a few words onto a piece of paper that most likely will be lost by the time the night departs and returns. But if I do not reach my pen to paper I will be neglecting the sounds of the shadows that crawl across my bedroom ceiling. The daylight follows as though to confess a love for a sin too grand to understand, the passionate mingling of the sun tracing the moon in the hours we call twilight. But when the two share the sky, nature is at its truest and most beautiful. I chase the night, and shall not rest until we can intertwine, until I also am true. In order to discover oneself, one must know, first, the laughter of the clock. Insomnia can truly be a blessing, however, it is said that the oblivious are the satisfied. I never have done anything the easy way, and I do not intend to do anything unless it is done right. I refuse to minimize myself; the world will be mine, I will save it. Anyone with the belief that I deceive ears with my tongue surely has never stared into the trees’ dance in the light of a streetlamp. I am willing to walk the most pointed rocks of this world with only my soles to hide behind. For I am a traveler, one of many spinning spitters, wanting only to know the night, and learn her secrets.

Mankaure and Khamerernebty

So speakest silence; love
(and lover not). I am
no sound, no viral cry.
Be thou not and I no more
of life than the numbers we once counted.

That by which existence measures northward, escapes;
if not weary as to break some northward walls.

Time not time for minutes' sake,
but the insecurities of our most false
memories.

Opening and Closeting

The lights of a nightwise Friday
shine like those of a Saturday.
Perhaps it is Saturday.
It is impossible to know.
As far as Friday goes,
it is gone.
Steadfast: it is Sunday
and I have Somewhere
lost fifteen years.

In a dream this certain Sunday,
up and down the stairs
by Dover Castle

and I wake there.
Plain sun and cloudless rain--
the pleasant kind
when it warm, yellow.
Monday morning with the great Gatsby glued to my palm;
he will not come off.
Oh give me wind!
and I will be a happy sailor,
a seaman so crude the Culprit dare not follow,
breath so foul to fall the moon;
Tuesday dead at the stink.

But it is fresh,
my arm, racked by a jig
and tuesdayfuckingwednesday.
"'Yes, Highballs,' agreed Gatsby."
Wednesdayfuckingthedrunk
and I am drunk again on Wednesday Wednesday Wednesday.

Home Gatsby!
Home on Thursday, the shower's running.
"'It's the funniest thing, old sport,' he said hilariously,"
"'I can't say anything in this house, old sport.'"
"'Look here, old sport,' said Gatsby leaning toward me. 'I'm afraid I made you a little angry this morning…’”
With harm, no foul.
Four days, Gatsby.
“’The poor son-of-a-bitch,’ he said.”

Waiting for On-Oui or Godot Ain’t Comin’
To say that man is unaware, in his understanding of the significance of humanity, is at times truth. A man, such as August Wilson, can tell a storyto which the human is chief. Then set forth, without total grasp of his story, to publish the story. It is upon publication the author transforms himself; an author not of words he has written but of the condition he has illustrated. Wilson, unsure the exact nature of his condition, tried to duplicate it. “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is not a condition of humanity (the ailments shared by mankind by means of reactive, and at times volatile, nature of emotions), but a story of characters never alive. The characters are not humans—raw and unabridged in an almost festering form—but as follows: Seth Holly, a man in his early fifties, son of a freedman. Living in Pittsburg with his early fifties wife Bertha; Bynum Walker, rootworker and neighborhood creepy old man; Rutherford Selig, a greasy white man; Jeremy Furlow, a young man with three equally non-functioning brains; Harold Loomis, the anti-climactic, miserable mystery; Zonia Loomis, a daughter; Ruben Scott, the definitive boy (still, perhaps, the most complex and rounded of the characters); Mattie Campbell, defined by her legs; Molly Cunningham, defined by her wallet; and Martha Loomis, who is absent, even in her presence.

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” states that every man must find his song. The character who have not yet found their song are degenerate, disincarnate, and ash: only a memory left of what they once were, or possibly could be; primordial soup, the promise of a human being. The raw creature that is man alive in the first several pages of a play, August Wilson destroyed in eagerness, the feat of a play for every decade. Wilson’s characters are waiting for complexity, the wheels of Wilson’s brain spinning performance for the reader, but the characters: not but dust of potential, ugly while they wait.

The nature of the human condition is on purpose the recollection of that which is us against the monkeys. Maybe the metaphysical angst of the French in combination with the Twainist contemplation of the River Liffey traveled by none other than the entire Oblonsky family? If not, defiantly then, by any means, the conflict of existence parallel to the directness of extinction. The construction of the human drama is character beyond action; for words are without meaning when meaning is restricted to the page. It is the human condition that eliminates the arguments of white v. black, man v. woman, rich v. poor. To allow publication of a work that is clearly limited in its audience and/or stunted in its diversity of emotions, conflict, or even opposing light and dark; it is almost to declare: “I am not of the human race!” Whether by mind such a declaration is that of seniority/inferiority is dependent on the declarer. Still, the refusal of one’s existence is beyond Parisian.