This Place of Prose and Poetry
Lucian Krukowski
This Place of Prose and Poetry
Copyright © 2015 Lucian Krukowski. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-3078-0
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-3079-7
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
PRELUDE
It was an older building on the campus of an affluent mid-western university. Inside, a group of students stood around a bulletin board on which was written:
Schedule Change
Phil. 369
HARD AND SOFT PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Krukowski
MWF, 11—12
A man walked slowly down the hall and stopped before the group. “Good morning to you all. I am the Dean and I want to ask you a question: Why are you taking this course?”
There was silence, then a student said:
“I want to find out who I am, and I want to know what I should do.”
The man who calls himself the Dean kicked off his loafers,
placed his hands flat on the floor and pressed into a handstand.
He held the position for a moment, then lowered his feet back to the floor.
Lightly flushed but beaming, he intoned:
“Beneath this pelt of hair and blemish, there is a living spirit.
Long before your time, I was totally—like you—with it.”
There was silence, then another student said:
“You need to cut your toe-nails.”
MY PLACE
What place, Place, do you have in art?
Do random visits create clutter in your spaces?
In my house, tidy sweepers safeguard clarity
and promote friendship between the lookers-on and runners-in-place.
When die Reine, die Feine, die Eine, comes knocking, I let her in.
She knows I am as one with her despite our many names.
Truth, Goodness, Beauty, need no subordination.
They are engorged—enough already—with their parochial instances.
They should not—cannot—be further reduced to just one.
But their progeny: The purely factual, wholly universal, and
indisputably tasteful—although too hard, too soft, and too just right —
can be made friends.
For this, they need a nice cold shower in the all-together
which would merge their separate quivers into one big shaking.
Otherwise, the long contention between inherited forms
begins to smell of sediment and a stale crotch quaking.
Red-spot-here-now, you are not invited to my place.
For you are prone, with your cowboy hat and downtown spurs,
to cutting my continuum into separated pieces.
In a different light and other times, you appear as
four-square, large and somewhere there.
But your now is mostly past and yet not here.
You do not care, alas, that each true piece of reference,
when bereft of out-of-date compliants,
becomes more overtly nasty than the last.
Why don’t you then, failed reference, abandon
the Church of Truth that preens as context-free —
avoid out-of-date states of the Good and Beautiful —
and join the flow of beer and bragadoccio
that woos and cools us on a summer’s day?
This is my place—the best I know
where I can be free of you—
you nit-pickers for the knowable.
But now the day is done.
I have to let the sweepers go
in order to let all the Reine, Feine—
and, yes, Meine—stay.
PLACES IN MIND
Mind, when considered in its purity, does not show us something in a place.
Rather, it shows us that there is nothing in experience which can construct a something that denies the attraction of other times and places. Particular minds that are appalled by the notion of a something-become-something-else, will always want an inviolable place—like a brain—to which we can trace everything we think and do. Some such minds may want more—perhaps a Heaven, or a Hell—which conquers time and change, and gives us ways to approach before-beginnings and after-ends. But such wanting requires making a nothing beyond existence into a something which has value as pure and boundless being—and also is the source of our becoming us. God is like that, but may not—however often it is said—want us to believe in something so arcane. But most believers do not want a cherished something to come from nothing, nor do they either want that something to end in nothing. For them, existence stretches infinitely in both ways, 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