JOURNEY THROUGH THE LABYRINTH

Journey Through the Labyrinth:
Philosophy 51 – 58

Plato knew δεον's content chanted an ancient name since agency and deontic logic
parallel being no one because self is merely a phenomenal reflection of conscious
experience merely a process never a thing in itself in the best of all possible worlds
merely a story of philosophers a story of god and evil available in limited quantity for just
nine ninety eight after which the book of Dennett offers a comprehensive theory of mind
if you don't mind my mounting a good analogical argument flourishing articulate
reasoning with no empirically respectable causal indication of the existence of a
persisting subject buried deep within mechanisms that create and sustain deeply
unreliable beliefs and capricious operations of a prank infested humanity not ends in
themselves but critiques of handwritten emendations and marginal notes in Kant's own
hand as demonstrated by William of Ockham discoursing on posterior analytics and
Kierkegaard's grouchy old man trembling in fear of orders to slaughter a son in the
wilderness repeated again and again through all our yesterdays and across bloody sands
and broken glasses half empty as the ontology underlying the semantics of language
speech acts intensionality phenomena and sentential and lexical meaning flop like
flounders on the decks of the sinking ship of what ought to be the case or what we ought
to think without even Nietzsche accounting for überhuman recurrence and nihilism on a
tightrope of historical evolution claiming morality to be or not to be founded upon guilt
and ressentiment as love of fate elevates and cleanses the herd the herd the king of all
vogels singing songs of love but not for me nor for Pico Della Mirandola focusing on the
existential roots of evil originating in humanity's flight from death or varieties of possible
worlds diminishing in confusions human all too human for you and only you to fail a
Turing test but mistuh Alan he dead or at the very least far upstream entangled in green
vines with flowers and scents so sweet or something ...

Jitterbug Canyon

I remain secure in the knowledge
that I never have to jitterbug
if I don’t want to

what a great country

you know I keep trying to write little stories
like just now that’s what I decided to do
write a little story aka a little lie
but with a pithy ending
after which everyone says ahh
but I can’t lie
not even about fictional
characters and their lives
especially about fictional characters

what was I saying
oh yes never having to jitterbug
you have no idea how much
tension dissipates

to begin with
what is the jitterbug
well it’s like the Lindy
who hopped across the Atlantic
so aviation and 12 humans on the moon

resulting from the collision
of proto-Earth and what I like to call Ares
blasting one another all to smithereens
resulting in a duel planetary system
four billion years later
orbiting Sol

well
how often
does that happen
two planets
in the same orbit
—jitterbugging

It’s not me. Honest!

Fancy the Cro-Magnon man lodged in the Tower of Babel!
He would certainly feel out of his element.
Camus, The Fall
fine flowers flog my naked calves
running through the meadow
in springs and cavortings
not unlike creatures of myth and romance
perhaps lactose intolerant at least for now
3000 years before the Romans started having trouble
grappling with those genocidal monotheists
fearing all others of whom they knew so little
yet in the future known as now remembered
though nothing has come to passion cold morning
under skies of pink with no breaths for the wicked
and no heath for thirst or sore eyes
sore eyes which evoke one to
imaginez l’homme de Cro-Magnon
while demanding linguistic purity
so their red scarf matches your eyes
darting about in mystified rhythm
pensionnaire à la tour de Babel
in would be enough for the centrifuge
of father crying out the shipfitter blues
il y souffrirait de dépaysement au moins
because everyone hears but no one listens

John Marvin is an 84 year old cancer and cardiac patient who still feels young. Journals have published over 200 of his poems and he has 6 Pushcart nominations. He lurks in the dark woods between art and science with his dog, Hugo