Facts and Truths, Friendship/Love, and Meanings of Life

Facts, Truths, Friendship/Love, and Meanings of Life

Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French literature, stopped writing poetry when he turned nineteen or so, and turned to various schemes to make money, one of which was gun running. I read a long time ago that once during a high school exam involving writing poetry in Latin, the teacher found Rimbaud fidgety and distracted and not terribly interested in the task required so he came over, asking in a sarcastic tone, "what's the matter? the great prodigy is having problem with the exam?" Rimbaud complained that he was hungry and therefore couldn't write." "Is that all the problem is?", the teacher said, "go get something to eat and come back here to write."  So, the story goes, Rimbaud left, came came back with a full stomach and wrote feverishly for an hour or so and aced the exam. 

I don't know how true the story was, but it was cute, and I like cute things in life, just cute, not too cute because if too cute, things seem affected and artificial. At any rate, I think the story illustrates a fact, in my opinion, that poetry belongs to the realm of the sublime and the mysterious, and seems to hit people at an early age. Poets tend to write their best poetry when they are young, impressionable, hot-blooded, and morose. Rimbaud and Neruda certainly did that. And all famous poets, in my unscientific estimation once more, are known only for no more than 5 poems. The Muse of Poetry does not stay for long with one poet. She is fickle and unfaithful. And she likes young men and women, usually in their teens or twenties. And the fact is that either you can write poetry or you cannot. There's no way in between. Yes, you can put words together and make them rhyme, but that does not make you a poet. A poet is the one who is drunk with words, crazy with ideas, and he pus them together in a striking, memorable way. Words roll off his tongue like nectar from the gods. We taste them, and we are transformed. For brief moments, we feel like God-like ourselves, powerful and beyond space and time. Yes, I am a "grand" theorist about poetry, but I am not sure if I am a poet myself. Take the latest "poem" I just wrote a few days ago, 

More than kisses, letters mix and mingle souls;
More than words, feelings travel across space.
Tonight they threaten to get out of control. 
They demand a place, they want to leave a trace.
Won't your heart open the door?
Need I say something more? 
I guess I do, so here is some e.e.cummings for you:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
---the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph 

and Death I think is no parenthesis 

The poem owed its genesis to the line of John Donne, "More than kisses, letters mingle souls". An old, antique, and ancient friend sent me that line, out of the blue. I didn't know what she meant with it, but it resonated deeply with me. The line refused to go away after I read it. It echoed and reverberated in my mind. "Letters" can be more than missives, even the love ones; they can just be the alphabet letters. At any rate, it is a great line, but not musical enough for me, so I add "mix and" to it and I took off from there. The next 6 lines were my own creation, addressing and confronting real sentiments that have been torturing me, then I felt that I had to drag in e.e. cummings, the master of oblique understatements, to further make my point. Taken together, the line of John Donne, my lines, and those of e.e.cummings, constitute a haunting, romantic, beautiful sentiment; a command to seize the time and translate the feeling iinto action for Death, at my age, is real and pressing, and not an afterthought, not a parenthesis. 

But the title of this "essay" is about facts, truth, friendship//love, and meanings of life, not poetry. But poetry is a fact of life, and it is sometimes a way to higher truths. I don't know why I've been obsessed with facts and truths, even when I was a young boy, more so than most people I know. These people seem to lie more easily and to believe in nonsense more readily than I do. I suppose my penchant for and predisposition to facts and truths have something to do with my desire to get to the bottom and into the marrow of things. I also want to know if I just act and show who I really am, without going through the charade of lying and putting on a facade of being somebody who I am not, whether or not people would still like and love me. As a social being, I can't help but long to be accepted, liked, and loved. However, as a person with pride and ego, I want to be accepted, liked, and loved on my own terms. I happen to have a disdain for conventional wisdom and social mores. To me, they are for morons, cowards, politicians, and "religious" leaders. I think it is the search for friendship, camaraderie, even love, that led people to join gangs, cults, and ISIS. Humans would do anything to fill the void they feel within. To be a human being is to be cursed with the longing to be understood and loved. To be loved means one must be lovable. For that to happen, one must be fair and unselfish. Selfish people are the loneliest people in this world. They only know their needs; they don't know or bother to know the needs of others. Emotionally they are stunted. They remain children. They don't know the meanings of friendship, love, and life.