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To render existence down to its purest essence… Is the purest essence the physical routine of waking and sleeping, of hunting and gathering, of ingesting and digesting so that one might live to reproduce? Or is the essence mental? Is the essence found outside of the fabric of everyday life? Life cannot be separated from the actions that maintain it, but it can be separated from the contemplation of itself. The hunters and the gatherers must feed the poets. Yet the poets could not continue to exist if there was not a poet’s soul in every hunter and gatherer. Every laborer on the street has a sense of himself as a being of poetry.
He looks up from his jackhammer at his reflection in a storefront mirror and watches the cloud of concrete dust roiling away in the slight breeze; he sees the reflection of the sky in his sunglasses as he pulls off his hard hat and wipes the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. The vision fades. He looks back to the work at hand. He puts the flat bit of his 120lb air hammer against a bulging piece of concrete and pulls back on the trigger. He locks his elbows and leans his hips into the machine for more leverage. He grits his teeth and grimaces with the exertion. As the morning wears on the traffic increases, the sun gets hotter; there is no longer a breeze. Occasionally he looks up from his work to see a passenger in a car looking intently at what he is doing or to see a woman on the sidewalk pause to wait on her son who is plugging his ears with his fingers and attentively watching him as he chips around another piece of rebar. He vicariously sees himself as they see him. He sees an animated version of his own reflection and knows that it is true to form.
The capturing of a thing, a time, an action, a feeling is poetry; even if it is only a silent acknowledgement between a man and himself, it is the marker of a poet’s soul.
When I sat down at the computer this morning I originally meant to explore the idea of there being a physical self and a spirit self that are recognizable and inseparable entities in the existence of every human; Yet perhaps the spirit self is what can be perceived as the poet and artist that lives in every person. It is the part of us that loves the grandeur of the mountains and the excellence of Michelangelo’s David. It is the part that marvels at the magnificence of the ocean and is perpetually astonished by the perfection of a baby’s hand. This soul of man desires to express and to expose itself for the world to see, in stark opposition to the physical self which covers its nakedness and protects itself with walls and doors and locks and guns.
It is not hard to see what part of a human is immortal; for that part does not fear.
c
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| | Posted 8/8/2008 4:36 PM - 5 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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