as it mounts a challenge to the nothing that others, mostly non-believers, believe lurks darkly on either side of beginnings and ends.
Those who have Faustian souls say we may begin at birth, but do not end in death—as we are a mirror of the world that begins at its own inception and, like us, will only end when it is finished—which is not so much death as a pause (for no worldly reason) in all that has been happening since the start. But pauses, as they are part of time, can herald a world that begins after we and ours are gone.
There are some (austere and nasty ones) who would rather have no commerce with either mind or soul—the brain is quite enough. For them, birth and death is all there is. Speculation to the contrary, they say, is just so much poetry. So much—(a great deal, actually)—for poetry.
Although many may reject theological solutions to the question of beginnings and ends, there remain the difficulties that have to do with the relationship of mind to body—a comparable tension—and a recapitulation in modern dress of the fugue that has provided historical continuity for both art and philosophy. Mind that has no place, and a brain that is empty of mind, are both unsettling notions—perhaps unthinkable. Nevertheless, attempts to resolve this have successively championed one or the other as the only feasible view of reality. But there is this:
Either we create the world (we know) through our perceptions, or accept an unperceived world that is beyond the one we know and live in. Then there is this:
Will God (if we go that way) still exist after all intelligible life in the universe has ended—or does (will) He (continue to) exist in a context that is no longer teleological—one that (for us) has no point or purpose?
After life and progress have ended—after all that—what else can God have in mind?
Those not entranced by the myth of divine creation, might believe that we do not, anymore than do tadpoles, create the world through our perceptions. The world is antecedent to the unexamined solipsism of tadpoles—and it also precedes the fretful solipsism of our own existence. Whether the world will continue beyond us, is a matter of extrapolation from the evidence—itself a matter of belief—that it was there before us.
WALKING
I went walking down the street one day.
T’was not the merry month of May.
It was rather on a rainy morning in October
when, last I looked, I found myself to be
deeply underneath the weather.
The rain came down; the news was bad.
My girlfriend, just turned sixty, had reverted,
rightly so, to her younger dear old dad.
My future had never been so poorly laid.
On reflecting, I could only see a crooked path.
The facts are clear—nothing could be clearer
than that I am alive—although barely, as she said.
But “barely” takes the prize for being better
in every way (I say) than being “not-alive.”
My building will eventually crumble. Weary
It has been of late—and largely empty, too.
But now the rubble shows a face—much like
Papa Fraga’s “Miss O’Murphy” smirking at me
from her couch. I should-a, would-a, jumped her then,
before she could exhale and denigrate my little lust
by laughing with her big and raucous mouth.
But I was proud—yes, proud enough to just
stand still and watch her divine—behind contract —
as the smoke of lust came out in puffs and gusts.
Penelope then showed up—she was tall and bony —
but surely very smart. We left shortly, P and I,
to find a sunrise of the kind that would enhance
our chance to prematurely find that pot of gold
which usually waits for darkness to appear.
But it’s now dark enough—she said.
Sunrise is too late for us to wait.
I know. But I’ll be dead by light of day,
and you will have just passed sixty-eight —
still young enough to do your own cavorting.
I said to her—I need a different now.
I need a woman who will zip me up.
I could use a bitch to knock me down —
not merely nibble at my toes—one that runs
upstairs, will do the dishes and wash the clothes.
Then, on command, she’ll fetch the Holy Grail
from which we’ll drink our fill until such time
when full and weeping,
I set sail to find a whiter whale.
I cannot wait for the crease to cross her dimples,
or hair to sprout from-out my inner ear, or feet
that wander and don’t come back on call.
Did you call just now?
I thought I heard a bell.
No—not the one that tolls.
Write—please do—when
you again are well.
A DEAD HORSE IN BROOKLYN
When I was young, my mother and I lived for extended periods in my aunt’s house, one of many red-brick two-family buildings on east fifth street in Brooklyn, which my uncle had bought with money he made running a saloon—free lunch and a nickle a beer—during the great depression.
The reasons for our frequent stays were always the same—battles between my mother and father. But intrusive as these reasons are on the memories I have of that time, the story I want to tell is not about them—rather, it is about a dead horse.
The year was 1934; I was five, and the streets were filled with push-carts and horse-drawn wagons moving up and down the streets, selling ice and coal, fruit and
