“In some remote corner of the universe…”
I found 10 pens lying on the floor
when I cleaned the house
after midterm.
I put them neatly in my book bag
to signify that next week
I would be organized.
Then I pulled out Plato
and turned my mind
to understanding rhetoric and
dialectic and the semblance
of truth and what
pulls us to this.
But I was 10 again when my friends
brought their bikes to my house and we rode in the dark,
hands frozen to handle bars.
Philosophy and poetry and struggling astronomy
students receded into the double dark
of bushes as leaves crunched and flew
up under tires as we plowed through
piles of autumn gold
shining silver in the ghost-white of the moon.
(Nietzsche wondered about leaves
and how all language was only metaphor
for this metaphor:
Experience.)
We biked to Corrinado’s and ate
pizza sprinkled with cheese on a chain,
doubtlessly tethered to avoid
the kleptomanic hands of the drunk.
(Each word we say is truth
twice removed,
Nietzsche reasoned.)
But we were purer poetry as we played an old arcade game
then rode home under clouded stars to chocolate
ice cream and hot
chocolate.
And a stomachache with no name
got us closer to the truth.
The poem has ended. And now I do what one is not supposed to do and explain my own poem. Because obviously you can get whatever you will out of my poem, but it is very much the poem of a college student mired in philosophy! And I want to invite you into that… in case my philosophical references aren’t familiar to you or if I didn’t make them an intelligable way.
Oh, I hope you’ll like this… 🙂
Firstly, the title “In Some Remote Corner of the Universe…” is the beginning of the first line of Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. Which, despite not being a huge fan of Nietschze’s later work, as one of his early essays it was one of my favorite essays as a philosophy student. Which I think is because I didn’t get out of it what Nietzsche wanted me too! (Maybe that’s what my poem will be like for someone?!) Anyhow, the original poem includes this information as a footnote, because the philosophical ideas I reference in the poem are pulled from the essay.
This is a good time to go read the essay 🙂
Ok, you’re back. So… the first line where I find 10 pens is setting up to link with the next stanza, where I “am 10 again” as “10” is mirrored in the stanzas… this mirroring is important because it is inviting the contrast between the first and second stanzas. As all of the details (mid-terms, pens, Plato) of the first stanza are setting up the scene of a college student (me!) who is studying abstract ideas like truth. This will contrast with the next stanza where I am riding a bike and being very present to experience rather than disconnected from it as I was in my ponderings of abstract ideas.
The second stanza in which I am gleefully riding my bike through the piles of leaves pushed against the curb is full of sensory detail intended to evoke a vivid sense of experience to which one can be present. The leaves also set up a connection to the next stanza in which I abstractedly step back from sensory detail to share a philosophical theory… this pulling back from sensory detail is meant to emphasize the contrast between experience and theory and other such abstractions, such as language and metaphor, which Nietzsche is concerned about in his essay.
One aspect of his essay which really stuck with me was him using the example of a leaf to explain how language is a metaphor and abstraction and so, in a way, distances us from what it is trying to describe. That is to say that, holding a leaf in our hand and calling it as such, requires an abstraction from the immediate and singular experience of that leaf: as soon as we name it, we are introducing a distance and separation from what we are trying to describe, especially in so far as that name can also be applied to other experiences of other leaves.
My friends and I end up at a pizza place (This is a true story!), and we are again steeped in concrete detail. But at the same time, I am communicating that concrete detail through language, which is an abstraction– or a step away from– the actual experience itself.
Which leads to the next philosophical stanza in which I introduce physical space in between the lines to mirror the idea within that stanza. The idea being that language is twice removed from the experience that language is trying to describe. So the physical spaces I put in between the lines are representing that distance between language and what it tries to represent. If I remember the essay correctly, what Nietzsche was getting at was that first we experience something in and of itself, but then we abstract the experience of that thing to a concept (We hold something in our hand… then we term it “leaf”.) and then we apply that concept to other similar experiences. And in a way, that double removal from the immediate experience of that thing itself in our hand is a distancing from the actual truth of the thing itself.
Thus we get to the turn in the poem where I merge the philosophical ideas and my experience together and claim my friends and I were “purer poetry”… and that is because– though unspoken, but I hope implied, in the poem– we were living in the moment. We were living to live… not to make an abstraction out of life. We were present. And that is “purer poetry” because it is all the beauty of life and sensory detail of poetry unmediated by words or ideas. What we lived was a direct poem– nothing separating or distancing us from our experience.
This is an idea which is summed up in the closing couplet… which is basically saying that the feelings we were having from our overindulgence in chocolatey treats, in so far as we were just experiencing a very real and raw experience without trying to name it, is getting us closer to the truth of experience than, tying back to the beginning of the poem, my musings on Plato and the truth actually could.
Aren’t those neat things to think about? The nature of life and truth and experience and both the epistemological and existential profundity of living in the moment? Doesn’t thinking about such things leave you in wonder, marveling at life?
Yeah, me too. That’s what I always loved about philosophy: it makes so much room for wonder in life. Now, I have to go eat some ice cream.