My self-referential inside jokes will smother
your outside jokes in an evidently tragic-looking
event of ostentatious flagellation and suffocation,
bringing the embarrassing night to a disturbing
session of gimped witticisms and idle racial slurs.
Outwardly what one sees is the closing of eyes and some tradition drenched gestures, but most disgustingly, in my view, it is the shutting of one’s eyes, the overt rejection of the experiential, that perturbs my own spirit. The pretense of it is that one is jousting some manifest materialism, even the stark dogmas of naturalism, as awkward as that sounds. As if an act of prayer itself were an argument with a logic or philosophical school. One may commend herself for condemning the experiential; but what is the comparison to philosophy that I seek?
In barring a faculty of the senses, a secret is introduced to one’s self. That secret is of the trajectories of experiences which one can only assume carry on outside of the self-induced event. The secret becomes what one keeps from herself. With eyes closed, the world becomes a secret of a serious whole. What is presumed is that virtue is contained in the activity of this secret one bears–therewith a burden is redeemed only if it is told, but a vice, as the pretense goes, necessarily corresponds.
But in condemning those objects, hidden away by subject-reclusivity, I see a likeness to that philosopher who, in most cases I say, travels on the road of concepts, devoid of attachment because of the principle of the endeavor. The venture of analysis seems to presume a correspondence with reality that brushes me as an article of faith one must take. The cognitions one perceives in taking those careful linguistic steps, in crafting cautiously, seems so remarkably like the shutting of one’s eyes.
The philosopher in the right mood walks so dangerously close to flavors of piety. Often does this comparison consummate my own dejection.
Bound to the rigid necessity of another’s web
Each of us will toggle, as if condemned to freedom,
A perspective, produced from the ebbing of naught,
Where troubled coffins loom without expiration
Exasperating will be the rigor of our chains, but
Compelling will be the harmony which they bear
Therein, as if from without, will our Landlord dream
Of the souls which selfishly confiscate emendation
and find me thorough–
entrenched therein confused
cross-hatches, mismatches,
patterns; tripping, tripping
caverns of ripe lines, verses–
stanzas can catch my hopes;
which notice of me will fluster
at the sight of me?
bend the javelins that express;
queer and clever, see excess;
pander until the distress of
a rhyming poem dies senseless