This is a philosophical poem. It has to do with our relationship to the earth. Not only is the earth our current address, it is our mother. We are humans, earth beings, raised up out of the humus, the soil of the earth. The second biblical creation story, Genesis 2:7 makes this claim. Adama (Adam) is the Hebrew word for ‘ground.’ Trace the Latin designation ‘human’ back and we find ‘homo,’ meaning ‘man’ to ‘humanus,’ to ‘humus’ meaning ‘soil.’ Our ancient ancestors knew where we were from. Here.
This is no romantic poetic fantasy. This is the heart and soul of the planetary climate crisis we now face. Our religions and philosophies have led us to behave as if we were on the earth, not of the earth. Our earthbound time is part of the spiritual journey we take to higher realms beyond the space/time existence. We live on earth with a mind biased for heaven.
“If you lived here you would be home by now.”
Sign on an apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio
A phrase came into my mind around 1961 and has been rattling around in there ever since. “A Kind of Homecoming.” It seemed to be the name of something I should write. But what? Then, in 2018, driving through Columbus, Ohio on the way home from Florida I passed a just opened apartment complex with a huge sign hanging outside: “If you lived here you’d be home by now.” It occurred to me that we live on the earth as if we were from somewhere else and just visiting earth. I had my poem.
“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a French philosopher exploring the field of phenomenology. Phenomenology examines the way we ‘know’ things, not just mentally as ideas but experientially as moments of revelation. For example, how does the phenomenon of a doorknob come into our awareness? Mentally through our received definition of doorknobs, the idea of a doorknob, but more fundamentally through our encounter with actual doorknobs. In the quotation above, Merleau-Ponty urges us away from the abstract of idea toward the concrete of experience. We do not experience ideas, we experience phenomena.
If only.
If only we lived here,
If only earth was home.
If only we cultivated homebound intimacies with place.
If only we knelt down before the miracle of amino acids.
If only we praised our clay white bones.
If only we built temples on banks of blood rivers.
If only we heard the imp of life singing:
“There’s No Place Like Home”
in the echo chambers of the heart,
we would have no need to come home.
‘If only’ – is a conditional phrase implying a situation different from the actual situation.
We would be present.
Earth would be accounted for.
An allusion to military roll call: “All present and accounted for.” “Accounted for” i.e. taken into consideration.
II.
How did we get gone,
absent without leave,
missing in action?
Because we are metaphysically homesick
have we physically made our home sick?
Metaphysics – a division of philosophy concerned with what is the underlying essence of the everyday world received through our senses. Metaphysics is an invisible lens through which our experience is viewed. From the Greek: meta = beyond physic = the physical material world.
Estranged at birth from mother earth?
A plague of distance,
here superseded by there,
incessant replacement
of near with far.
III.
This world is not my home I’m just a passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
Jim Reeves
These body snatchers are accepted ideas that diminish our expectations
of deep spiritual experiences through daily contact with the material world.
The body snatchers have come,
by gum, have come, by gum,
have come, by gum,
the body snatchers have come,
by gum, and carried us away,
hooray, and carried us away.
Eyes –
distracted by a theory of seeing.
Ears-
distracted by a theory of hearing.
The body snatchers have come,
by gum, and carried us away,
hooray, and carried us away.
Can the flagrant physical be forgiven
for the sin of being tangible, palpable,
brazen as taste, sound, and smell,
more real than the artifice of heaven and hell?
Jesus, the Buddha,
and Jim Reeves knew
we are just passing through.
The body snatchers have come,
by gum, and carried us away.
See July 21, 2015 post on this website: Things! Things!
“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
James Joyce, Dubliners,
A Painful Case
IV.
A Litany on the Manipulative Power of Tools
Can we stand up to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
Stand up can we to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
Up can we stand to all we can do
with all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools?
With all we can do, can we stand up
to all we have invented?
Lord, protect us from becoming the fools of our tools.
With all we have invented,
can we stand up to all we can do?
Lord, forgive us for becoming the fools of tools,
almost and always, end without world. Amen.
This section is modeled on a responsive reading found in many church worship services. It is a call to confession about our relationship with tools. It is true that we use tools to manipulate our world. But is there any way in which tools use us? You’ve heard the saying: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” What we can do is what we will do. Refer to Martin Heidegger’s essay: The Question Concerning Technology.
The last line, “end without world” is a reversal of the standard Gloria Patri “world without end.” In this version, the end will come when there will be no world.
V.
Our heads clouded by cave man Plato’s dreams
of distant incorporeal superlatives,
mere shadows cast on a cavern wall.
This section refers to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave found in The Republic. The allegory portrays humanity trapped in a cave seeing only shadows of the ‘real’ world on the cave wall. The shadows are cast by ‘universal forms’ beyond the physical world. We mistake the shadows for the real. Therefore, humans should not trust their perceptions of the physical world because reality lies beyond the physical, i.e. metaphysical.
Aloof from the present this,
we are promised a superior that,
a heaven worth waiting for.
We look through heaven’s gate,
for signs of life,
for clues that we might use
when we rightly learn to distrust
our presence in this fraught wrought world.
With lists and catalogs of categories
we hold the world at bay.
We identify a flower: ROSE.
We classify a tree: PINE.
We name the seven dwarfs,
the seven continents and
their seven concomitant seas,
the five lakes that are great,
and thousands not so great,
a million ordinary average lakes,
each nouned with a name.
What would we know
if we didn’t know names?
I wake up at 6:08 a.m. without words,
no tags, no titles, no terms.
I touch the wordless world touching me
until the magic hour when languid language
catches up with the revolving daylight hours
and dresses everything in a veneer of labels,
the indispensable dictionary of stickers,
codes, and algorithms organizing my day.
The immediate is defeated.
The intermediate reigns.
What would we know
if we knew not a thing?
“Poetry is the art of letting the primordial word
resound through the common word.”
Gerhardt Hauptmann
VII.
This poem is a thing,
it is crafted and made,
an ink on paper noun.
an object, an item.
The words punching
through the page
are themselves things,
the sounds they make
with brisk consonants
and lingering vowels
are things, what they mean
are things revealing thought.
Words hit hard to open our attention.
VIII.
Our body is not in space like things.
It applies itself to space like a hand
to an instrument.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I am composing a symphony from
the convolutions of a conch shell,
the warmth of a lately held doorknob,
the livid heat of a drift wood flame,
a pilot light burning ready to ignite,
t.v. commercials I sew into a quilt
with midweek camel Wednesdays,
and kings serving burgers and fries.
Walking while working on a poem I knit
a backfiring dump truck into a robin song.
I am fondled by grass, caressed by a cricket,
massaged by a churning cement truck drum.
Dog doo doo morphs to symbol on my wingtip shoe.
I articulate Romaine lettuce, extol radishes,
try to work in my neighbor’s lingerie hanging
on her backyard clothesline without offending.
My mind scurries from Eros to Jesus to Marx.
Maidenform becomes a socio-economic emblem
for Wall Street’s objective of forming maidens
into commodities men want.
At night my fingers are excited to play
a reinterpretation of my Stravinskyesque day,
to know the world without the help of light,
to touch a dark way toward knowledge.
Assuming the horizontal plane of the horizon
just beyond the limits of my suburban town,
I slip into my skull’s grotto where night things
live mostly holy and unknown.
They come as desperate and disappointed angels
sent to scare me back to life:
Don’t gaze so high you
miss the feel of earth.
IX.
How can we continue to be at once astonished
at the world and yet be at home in it?
G.. K. Chesterton
Can we fix the fix we’re in,
escape the invisible bubble
of our world-defying
world-defining mind?
Definitely. Definitely not.
Define definitely
I object to objects being drained
of infinitude.
The mind relaxing alert,
rehearses reversals,
flipping our understanding
of our standing in the world.
Two faces
or
a candlestick
an optical illusion
alluded to as real.
This refers to the well-known optical illusion which can be interpreted as either to faces in close proximity or a candle stick.
We live on August Ferdinand Möbius’
inner/outer convoluted outside inside strip.
Refers to the Möbius’ Strip, a figure 8 twisted to form one continuous surface even though it appears to have two surfaces, one interior and one exterior.
X.
‘the inexhaustible perceptual plenitude’
Ted Toadvine
The ways we are able to interpret the perceptions of our reality are endless. But we prefer to limit ourselves to the standard consensus of reality.
It has been said in days of old:
“Home is where the heart is.”
Now we say:
“Home is where the sensations are.”
the oscillating mosaic of sensations
sightsoundsmelltexturetaste
tastetexturesmellsoundsight
we weave into the warp and weft of our world.
We experience not many separate sensations but a whole gestalt of sensations perceived as a whole experience.
Warp – the vertical threads and weft the horizontal threads used in weaving on a loom.
XI.
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
This late in the day,
can we make ourselves at home,
look through the patina of designations
which furnish and finish
-our hike through the forest,
-our ramble on the beach,
-our walk down the street?
Can we bore down through dense
layers of mythistorima
into the echo of the primal word?
Let us put imperceptible systems in their place.
Let us see the techniques and technologies we use
to manhandle the world for what they are.
Let us puncture, pierce, penetrate
the dense clouds of knowing until
we arrive at the primal unknown
our original being at home.
“Unknowing” is an allusion to the Cloud of Unknowing, a book of Christian mystical instruction written in the 14th century. In this poem it means breaking through our interpretations of a thing until we experience the presence of the thing itself without distorting interpretations.
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James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish short-story writer and novelist most famous for his novel Ulysses.
Jim Reeves (1923-1964) a country and pop singer-songwriter.
mythistorima – a word combining a sense of myth, history, and story coined by George Seferis (1900-1971) Greek poet and Nobel Laurette in Literature (1963).
G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) English writer and philosopher.
Ted Toadvine, a philosophy professor at Penn State University’s who works in the area of phenomenology and ecology.
Gerhardt Hauptman (1862-1946) German dramatist, novelist, and 1912 Nobel in Literature Laurette.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) French philosopher whose book The Primacy of Perception
advanced the practice of phenomenology, a method for recognizing how we experience the world.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) Anglo-American poet and Nobel Laurette (1948)