Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
If reincarnation be true then let
The wheel be about its turning, for
All the learning got in this life's
Brought me no closer to satisfaction.
Clad in another body, the prizes
I've earned would have been mine
To reach for and claim a long time ago.
When you're still young it's already
Plain enough which ones will shine and
Which thugs will pass their days
Behind bars. It's true! It's no
Consequence of wisdom or fairness
Which ones float and which ones slowly or
Stone-like sink, and I've had enough with
Bobbing about the storm-tossed seas.
So let's get the wheel rolling, and we'll
Pray better pips get turned up the
Next time around.
Lovely rhetoric but I think much too fatalistic. When you are still alive and kicking, nothing is lost and only when you are staring straight into Death's gleaming reaper blade should you feel inclined to wishful thinking as religion and reincarnation just as one French politican, having lived a devilish existence all life long turned to confession in his last days on Earth. I believe Pascal's wager is valid only in such extreme cases.
ReplyDeletewell maybe. well for one thing one never knows, in poetry and/or prose, where the line between fiction and nonfiction overlaps. but also with time some come to view jurisprudence as more a matter of the imposition of something like order than a form of justice, and pascal's wager is about as useful in modern times as any classical philosophy, which means not at all. look at hesse's steppenwolf, for example: aging characters often develop a strikingly different pov of life than they had in youth. this is not, i think, abt suicide or giving up; not exactly; it's more abt desiring an alternative kind of way of starting over. anyway youth, like yourself, cannot think abt the end of life the same way that an old man can. some things can't be explained but only lived, maybe.
ReplyDeleteI see you've been pondering about your beliefs on reincarnation :)
ReplyDelete"All the learning got in this life's brought me no closer to satisfaction." Perhaps that's the point: you aren't worthy of possessing that which makes you happy until you've experienced the opposite. Just a thought.
The speaker's tone suggests that this world has nothing exciting in it for him anymore--he'd sooner die and begin again then be left 'floating' in this world. I'm torn between this point, for on the one hand, I agree, and want to move on to grander things, but at the same time, should we not be happy that we're 'alive' in the physical sense? I'll have to think more about that now...
what prompted this was looking at old yearbooks early this morning, and realizing that all the kids i thought were thugs then really were thugs, and those we knew would be successful really did become successful, and it seems to have more to do with some innate charisma they were born with than brains or wisdom or anything else.
ReplyDeleteto reiterate a little, i'm taking a point of view here regardless of my personal opinions. my narrator is not necessarily seeking an end to life, but is clearly world-weary. i submit we are conditioned to believe that appreciation arises from suffering, which i don't discount, but sometimes there is the suffering w/o the payoff, which youth in particular does not want to accept: this is what is so appealing about youth, in large part. as for your last paragraph, it's not an either-or proposition. life is more complicated than that.