Sunday, October 09, 2005

Poem for Sunday

Thinking About Thinking
By William Matthews


The purpose of art is to save us from truth,
Nietschze thought, perhaps because he feared
the purpose of truth was to save us from art.
I don't feel in such constant peril, except
perhaps from the urge I have to know what
I think and then say it over and over
like a cupiditous schoolboy using a new
word in a sentence. Suppose what we think
we know proved instead to be a chance
to think again. For example: the cat
walks by itself, but not to the dinner bowl.
Or: even paranoids have real enemies,
and, likewise, mirrors. Or: the cut worm
forgives the plow, twice. My love says I think
too damn much and maybe she's right.
The sorrow of thought is that it replaces
the world that stunned us into thought,
and leads us not to awe but to new
morose connections between language
and desire. So is the purpose of my love
to save me from thinking? I think
not. And this time, for once, she agrees.

--------

Snicked from . My paper is late being delivered, probably because of the weather, so I do not yet have Poet's Choice. Tomorrow!

Because it poured for so much of Saturday with the remains of Hurricane Tammy, and Rock Creek Parkway was closed in places and there were many local road closings, we decided not to try to brave our way to Baltimore Harbor (which may have been closed for all I know) and figured we could try to see the ships on Sunday. So we went to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit which was absolutely hysterical. There was quite a bit of visual humor for adults that went right over the heads of the kids in the audience (and there were a lot -- there were two showings at 2:15 at my multiplex with more an hour before and after, and both theaters sold out). Visually it was wonderful -- I had always assumed that Wallace and Gromit lived in an industrial city, Manchester or Liverpool or something, but apparently they live in a town that looks a lot like the more northern ones we stayed in while we were in England last spring, and the art made me so nostalgic (it goes without saying that the stop-motion photography was fantastic). Of course there were any number of fantastic devices, and rabbits that looked like pigs, and Ralph Fiennes as the villain which is as it should be!

I spent this evening sorting Star Trek: Voyager stuff, including the epic poem Carole and I wrote for Now Voyager back when I was editing it. I did quite a bit of combining older entries from my first months on LiveJournal, putting meme-only entries together or with entries that actually said something, and that was a fun nostalgia trip too...Tamara, I miss you so much! I wish you were still on the east coast so we could go to art museums for our birthdays again! I kept trying to get work done but I couldn't get into the pivotal web site so I just gave up after awhile. Sunday evening will be busy!


Butterfly on the apple trees at Butler's Orchard last weekend.


      
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