LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

Hiding in the caves of his own categories his mind is leaping words formed down in the daily intercourse with the people. Civilization! History! Dreams of Youth! Language! Freedom! Science! War! The categories that fill him, overwhelm him to the point that he imagines that a beautiful woman is with him in the cave, taunting him that he is captured by the abstractions of men.

"No, the world has captured me. It speaks to me its mighty voice. What sort of man am I if I can't give value to that value, its range and orbits bring the biota of men's cleverness to me and I must interpret it. Ha, forgive me."

It is not the world but only the world that the poet can experience. A world that can be contradicted! The world that the poet experiences is chased down by the specialists who view all content of the mind as a dance for his theories. Isn't the specialist an instance of his dreams? He smiles at the implication of one who captures the genius of the poet in order to barbecue it in some paper in an obscure journal.

Run poet, to your cave! Meanings fold like the continents over rich but raw minerals for the one who mines the most efficiently.

The scientist doesn't know true emptiness. The scientist can not exist in the depths of space without passing the light that isn't his; light that may turn out to be the death of the universe rather than the door into another one.

He must return to the world. He resists the world now that he is satisfied that the categories he has experienced in his cave are authentic and can be built through time. Ah, bitter world you desire to destroy the fine categories I have labored with, the poet thinks, and you will succeed but in succeeding even you, tough world, will glow with fire. And they will see that fire from far off galaxies and communicate their pleasure that the poet's words are poured through the elements that supports all life.

What the world demands is some definite attitude toward the categories; from the sardonic to the pathetic that undermines their efficacy. That is where the poet resists, he resists until he has the confidence to present the evidence of his investigations in the form and with the vital sprit of the free man and not the slave who is run down in the field attempting to dance to his god.