[Tony Barnstone]

Things
“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

A thing, a thing, a thing, a thing, a thing:
wind maddens my hair, whiskers of ice,
panther heat of summer. What’s a being
who’s made of things to make of these things? Nice
to have a mind, to parse the alibi
of love, the grace of doves ascending, rods
of insect light in the dark wheat, the why
of all things born of nothing, as if gods
were golden trumpet songs of butterflies,
the void resolving into bells, and not
beings we dreamed to dream us up. Here lies
a phone, here books, sweatpants, a blue ink blot.
Is being behind these things? What else exists
but things, and lists of things, and lists of lists?

1) changed lies to lie for grammar
2) Changed "of insect light in the dark wheat, the why" to clarify they are fireflies; then changed it back again because of a comment (was it Matt?) that the insects had better connotations here. But changed "light" to "glowlight"…then back again
3) Changed "of it all, meaning of things," to "of nothing born as things" to address how applying meaning to things relates to question of being and nothingness.
4) Then changed it to I seek in nothingness, to make it clear I'm not truly getting behind the idea of there being a meaning beyond existence
5)...and per Matt, going back to slightly changed of nothing born as all things, as if gods, or as of all things versus nothing, as if gods -- not sure which is better, or of all things out of nothing, as if gods, or of all things versus nothing, as if gods. Or what I just changed it to, of all things born of nothing, as if gods
6) line 11 changed "invented" to "dreams" for meter
7) changed "brain" to "mind"
8) Tried to fix the lie/lies problem by changing "a phone, a book, sweatpants, a blue ink blot" to "a phone, here books, sweatpants, a blue ink blot."

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Tony—
Wow. This sonnet really challenges me. Starting with the sound effects, you have syncopated IP just up to the breaking point, yet still managed to hit all the bases of meter, rhyme, and structure. Lines 2 and 11 were hard to scan, but I finally figured them out.
Moving on to thematic concerns, you are working with the ex nihilo problem that you have been exploring in “The Singularity.” Sonnets seem at first glance to be an odd choice for metaphysical and epistemological meditations, but all of yours—this new one, especially—bring the focus back to the speaker’s feelings in a very effective way.
I like “panther heat of summer,” because it links to “panting” but also as a sleek, sinuous image. I’m understanding “to parse the alibi/of love” as a reference to I John 4:8, “God is love.” Is the “alibi” the idea that God loved us into existence, creating us from His own being?
I’m at a complete loss with “rods/of insect light in the dark wheat.” At first I thought “insect light” might have something to do with fireflies as an obscure reference to the randomness of the cosmos, then I thought “[Aaron’s] rod” and “insects” might be an even more obscure reference to the plague of locusts in Exodus. Sorry, I got nuthin’.
Lines 8-10 play off an idea from C.S. Lewis that God sang the universe into being.
Line 11 alludes to Voltaire’s remark that “If God did not exist, we should have to make him up.”
The last two lines are powerfully effective. You return to the repetition (“but things, and lists of things, and lists of lists”) that you began with in line 1 (“A thing, a thing, a thing, a thing, a thing:”) to suggest that your whole meditation is a bubble of consciousness appearing in a meaningless white noise of absurd being.
I’m reminded of a quip by philosopher and rabbi Sidney Morgenbesser on the question of why there is something instead of nothing: “Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!”
Very good work—
Glenn

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

The echoes of Blake in the angst of being, the panther and brain triggering Tyger is delightfully done. This is just a flyby Tony as I will have to mull, enjoyably I add, and there is much to mull.

Given Heidegger’s sympathetic view of Nazism and his philosophy it always begs the question what did it mean to him for Nazism to be?

Jan

[Carl Copeland]

Tony, this is philosophical verse that even I can love. I love the audacity of L1, matched with the provocative last line. A few thoughts:

I’m innocent of Heidegger, but I find the epigraph misleading, because it seems to ask why there’s anything at all. Your poem, as I take it, is about why or how, given the existence of things, we add on a layer of meaning and metaphor. I love how you’ve illustrated that layer with the exquisitely random “whiskers of ice,” “panther heat,” “grace of doves,” etc.

I might prefer “mind” (or even “soul”) to “brain,” since a brain is a necessary but insufficient condition of meaning-making.

I’m a bit of a stickler, but I honestly didn’t notice the problem with “lies” until you corrected it. I’d let it agree with “phone” and think of the rest of the list as add-ons (encouraged by the absence of “and”). A shame to spoil your near perfect rhymes.

[John Riley]

I like the poem. It’s full of great imagery and sounds. What I can’t get out of my head though, and maybe I should, I don’t know, is that what Heidegger meant by this question and a good part of the book is that nothingness does not exist. He wasn’t skeptical about being, he was convinced of the impossibility of nothing.

I guess I’m being a drudge to be hung up that a poem organized around answering Heidegger’s question isn’t answering the question he’s asking. It’s a rhetorical question that leads to his premise nothingness is impossible, not being.

It’ll be easy to say that isn’t what you’re doing but it’s easy to interpret this way. But again, maybe most won’t be bothered by it.

[Tony Barnstone]

Hi John,

All true. Here is what I was thinking: starting from the premise of being versus nothingness, he then proceeds to redefine the metaphysical as immanent, "Being" with a capital "B" you might say, setting the grounds for existentialism and the phenomenology he cribbed from Husserl. So, once you dispense with nothing, you are left with Being, both as a whole, as experienced in the world of objects, and as processed through the human beings thinking their way through time. Of course such a grand conception of "authentic" Being that can only be truly accessed by poets and philosophers might simply be a resuscitation of the dead God manifested as either non-metaphysical humanism (Comte, Mill, Sartre) or through the will to power of the elite "man of prey" (Nietzsche). Yet Heidegger ultimately comes down on the world-building aspect of the thinking animal (the human) as what saves us from Nihilism on the one hand and an essentialist humanism on the other. So, "Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell," and through language we can move towards "authentic" being. Yet, in such a move I feel Heidegger is being a Romantic, the Emersonian poet as representative man, the Shelleyan poet as unacknowledged legislator, the poet as priest in Blake, etc. So, his debate with Carnap was a debate really about what to make of living in a world of objects that we can describe but to which we cannot ascribe an ultimate cause. For Carnap and his ilk, Heidegger's ideas were pseudo-thoughts, not verifiable, and thus nonsense. So, I was hoping to explore the question of whether Heidegger's search for authentic Being was just another Romantic answer to the question of why is there being instead of nothing--i.e., whether it's a false question. There is being instead of nothing. "Why" is besides the point once God is dead. I guess the question is whether the essence of this is in the poem, or still too much in my head?

[Glenn Wright]

I’m with Carl on keeping “lies.” One possible solution is to finesse it with punctuation:
. . .Here lies/ a phone—a book, sweatpants, a blue ink dot
Or
. . .Here lies/ a phone. (A book. Sweatpants. A blue ink dot.)
The bonus in this one is that the parentheses imitate the grouping of random items into lists that you mention in the last line of the poem. It’s as if the speaker is struggling to create meaning by comparing and contrasting. “How is a raven like a writing desk?”
Glenn

[Alexandra Baez]

Tony, another lovable rigorous philosophical poem. The first line is an inviting usher.

In the list of three that follow, I’m a bit bugged by the grammar of it. The first item is a statement, while the second two items are just items--unless the second item were intended to modify the first’s “hair” (I don’t think so)—but then that would leave the third item as an outlier, even though “panther” has a certain nice association with “whiskers.” “Wind maddening my hair” would tidy all that up, although it would change the meter (but that’s already varied, and there are also possible subs for the verb). Granted, the disorientation of the syntactical shift arguably enhances the sense of the chaos of things, so it does appeal to a certain part of my brain (or mind)—but it rankles the other.

Nice next sentence.

“The alibi of love”—hmm, I wonder what that could be, and if it could be tied to the “grace of doves descending.” Like some others, I do rather enjoy the disorientation of the randomness of this second list.

I wonder too a bit about the “golden trumpet songs of butterflies.” Of course, butterflies don’t sing, nor do they play trumpets, although they might feed on flowers shaped like golden trumpets. Are you fancying them as terrene angels of sorts? I guess this is simply a whimsical way of saying what you say more directly two lines later--that creation creates its creator. But there might be a way to do so that seems a little less odd. ?

How about a semicolon after “phone” to clarify the grammar?

I love “beings we dreamed to dream us up”—or even “beings we invented to dream us up.” A nice "snake biting its tail" effect.

And I like the way the last line resolves things in its tidy progression, starting out by biting the tail of the first line and then expanding outward from that.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

I miss the fireflies, their seeming blink, to be and then to not.

I feel differently to you on his espousal of Nazism. I believe Habermas asked him twice to recant and he could not do so even in the face of all the whispers becoming shouts.

I admit I have no clear understanding of ‘Dasein’

However, the poem triggers thought in me I enjoy it on many levels and in the different levels of incarnation. One cannot ask for much more.

Jan

[Tony Barnstone]

Jan,

I hear you. I am conflicted in that I find his ideas interesting, but as you say his silence spoke volumes in his refusal to recant. I've read a few books and articles on the Nazi legacy--by his defenders and accusers--and can't say he comes off very well.

Dasein--that's a hard one. Maybe something like the (authentic) phenomenological experience of humans and how they exist in the world of space and time as compared with the (inauthentic) world of human interaction.

But this is what opens him up to accusations that he is reverting to or simply secularizing Christian ideas of grace and damnation (authentic and inauthentic), even if they are this-world instead of metaphysical.

Thanks for the good words!

Best, Tony