II.
This is the story of how I began telling the truth. The truth I defined as “two truths and at least one lie.” The truth of my experience.
Poets often carry sorrow in their sockets – some underlying angst influencing attention. There’s sclera, iris, pupil, and a deepening mirror of perceived pain…or seared “ego.” Grief or grudge – and difficult to distinguish.
As much as there is to learn or to know, some simple patterns give the slip. Once you figure a composing context, the information is derived. Look out for what might constitute survival for each respective entity. Aim your inquiry there.
Parents hurt as much as heal. As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being). All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.
Everyone canvasses sorrow. The surgeons in their trembling hands, the librarians in their order. The therapist’s reflective stance, architect’s angles, businessman’s mettle. We all know that we’re going to die. Celebrities in their acclaim, the athletes in their strength, and whores in their affection. Everything is risk.
Polysemic Stupor 
“Everyone canvasses sorrow”
Great line. We seek out the highwater marks in both pleasure and pain. Without those, we have nothing to compare our present experience to.
everything is a risk – especially love, and the greater risk to refuse to love.
Thanks John… we certainly do
i agree – thank you for reminding
Like your posts
thanks a lot.
Do you think if “Parents hurt as much as heal. As do love and risk and wisdom (or well-being). All that is given in life is also taken away – exactly when it is given.”, that this leaves us exactly where we started – at nil? If what is given is taken away in exact measure then we’re at zero, right? I’m searching for the way forward in your thinking, in my own thinking actually. Perhaps what we must hope for is that what we are given is more than what was taken from us. Or that by being taken from we become more and that we what are given adds to that, that we are more than the sum of given and taken? I’lll think some more.
Very good questions. The somewhat parable-like pronouncements aren’t intended for scientific or logical analysis, but I am happy to see that they perhaps pull through it. Maybe the “more-than” of continuity of the present arriving and going is, in fact, ourselves? The experience comes and goes entire, but how we apprehend, process, select and act WITH it may be the additive of experience? I’ll think some more as well. Thank you for pointing at this.
Teasing apart into this and that, glowing piles of good and bad. The labels are not the thing, but short circuit our emotion, so smart we are. The truth is made of lies, and bears our name. Is, is not. Is not, is. Neither is nor is not, is and is not. Truth within lies. Truth lies within. Within, the biggest lie. Equations in a flow. Freeze frame missing the real. Paradox paradiddle. Shiva’s drum. This way, that way.
I think that your right – although “parable-like” might be a stretch. If you haven’t noticed we have become a people who live by slogans “no pain, no gain” etc. The problem, which you rightly identify is that these short pithy pronouncements don’t begin to cover real life. Here is what real life is for people who suffer ongoing pain – it is not redemptive. It does not make you better a better person. That is what our culture tells people to make themselves feel better. We have a lingering hangover from deep religious philosophy that says pain and suffering are redemptive, edifying, and cleansing even. Having suffered daily with pain for 10 years I can tell you that is crap. Also crap is conflating psychological pain with physical pain. Physical pain causes psychological pain, make no mistake, but physical pain will exist independent of your psychological state. I will take that argument with anyone who wants to tell me to have happy thoughts and I will fill better – 10 years of trying and I am still in pain tells me that. You need to clarify in you argument and in your thoughts the difference between the physical and psychological. Death is very physical and also linked with physical pain, but there is also a strong overwhelming psychological aspect. Teasing this apart will give you a richer deeper understanding of the very human condition of suffering. Just a few thoughts from someone who suffers daily.
thank you. “the difference between the physical and psychological” – if i or you are able to “clarify the difference” – my will we be far along the way! I appreciate these comments very much. Thank you.
our “paradox paradiddle” – every trying to understand… SOMEthing…!
Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer, said in an interview some time ago: the truth always has it’s face half-turned away. And there’s a song by Bob Marley, I forget which one, that has a line: every need has an ego to feed. I somehow tie these two unlikely sources regarding truth, or earnestness in finding it. And regarding billigncs’ comment, maybe not so much refusing to love but being afraid to. It might get taken away the same instant it is realised.