14
Feb
Posted by johnwetherell in tanka. Tagged: being alive, belief, benign, Christian, creator, deity, dream, evil, existence, fallibility, gnosticism, God, good, haiku, hopeless, human condition, low expectations, malign, me, miracle, pessimism, poetry, reality, rotten, tanka, twisted. Leave a comment
the deal was always
from the very beginning
a twisted, rotten,
hopeless business — which is why
I believe in miracles
As with yesterday’s poem, there is really too much extraneous background I need to explain, for this to be anywhere near successful as a poem. The poem is about gnosticism. Not because I set out to write a poem about gnosticism. But my pessimistic belief is deeply ingrained, that the whole of existence shows more evidence of having been created by a malign than by a benign deity. It’s not so much that I believe this in some literal sense — as that I prefer to start with low (or negative) as regards the human condition, and being alive, and then anything good that happens is a ‘miracle’. And I do suspect that this may be closer to the literal truth than the Christian belief in a good God. Interestingly, these thoughts arose from a dream in which it was my own fallibility rather than God’s which was at issue. But maybe my own fallibility is the best proof of God’s that there is. Aren’t we supposed to have been made in God’s image? And, if whatever generates my reality from moment to moment, is itself flawed — then it makes no difference whether you call that flawed generator of my reality ‘me’ or ‘God’.
16
Mar
Posted by johnwetherell in haiku. Tagged: age, choice, creative writing, daily practice, dream, French horn, haiku, home, hopeless, livelihood, magic, musician, poems based on dreams, poetry, science, self-pity, world. Leave a comment
the world was never
going to be a place where
I felt I belonged
This self-pitying item is also possibly, I’m afraid, rather trite. I have a bit of a problem in my life, with trying to understand in retrospect how and why I made the choices in my teens which then shaped my life as a whole. Perhaps one reason this is so difficult is because I have simply lost all contact with, and empathy for, the person I was then. Broadly, last night’s dream highlighted the issue of livelihood. I felt convinced briefly, in the dream, that I could make it as a professional musician if only I dedicated enough hours to daily French horn practice. Then suddenly my true age in waking life dawned on me (59), and I realised it was quite hopeless. So I guess the element of self-pity was there in the dream.
sciencegoodmagicbetter 