'Poet Eternal', by Nolo Segundo
“I wrote the essay because because I see a relentless 'narrowing,' a diminishing of what it means to be a human being, taking place: All the arts today—poetry, prose, music, film, paintings, dance, etc.—are, as they have always been, affected by the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, in our culture. And because people are as egotistical in the aggregate as much as in the individual, each generation thinks it is better, smarter, more sophisticated than the previous: I think it 'quaint' that my grandparents courted in a horse-and-buggy, yet their marriage lasted 63 years—how many could say that today? We have more wealth, comfort, technology than any of the tens of billions who came before us, but are we happier? We don't even see what we are losing: a sense of transcendence, of meaning innate in our lives as the only sentient species. I learned over 50 years ago that life, this world, is really just a long dream shared by billions, with many, many thousands falling asleep every day while many thousands wake up—what we celebrate as birth and fear as death.
“The problem today is that materialism, the belief that only matter has reality, has taken hold to such an extent that wonder, hope, and 'seeking,' soul seeking if you will, have all gone by the wayside. If we see ourselves only as 'clever dirt,' animated dust, than what does anything matter in the long run? We need to become more aware of our uniquely human transcendent qualities, starting with words and language, creating art and music and dance, to at least having an openness to having a consciousness that, as the Dali Lama, has said, always exists—without beginning or ending. Then maybe we can understand that chance is the real illusion, that everything we think, say and do has meaning, that some Great Mystery is permeating the universe—and us: For we are as well as being the only sentient species, the only one capable of good and evil, seeking light or remaining in darkness. Yes, it's 'heavy stuff', but I believe every great artist/writer/composer throughout history has felt its weight: Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, my beloved Emily...they all felt it, I am sure.”
*
What is the role of the poet in society, in life? The first part is easy: there is little or no role for
poets in American society today. [It was not always so: in 1850 Longfellow sold a single poem for the
price of a modest house.] Most Americans today wouldn’t read a poem if you put a gun to
their heads, perhaps because so much of contemporary poetry is obscure, idiosyncratic, abstract, leaving
the reader wondering, what the heck does it mean? It is as though so many ‘modern’ poets are
competing for the you’ll-never-figure-this-one-out-award: if the reader ‘gets it’, the poem is a failure. This is
sometimes characterized as show-don’t-tell, but often, what exactly is it that they are showing? Great
poetry, the poetry that resists time’s relentless collective memory wiping, is never off the wall.
It is accessible, often simple in its wording, and most of all, it talks to you: to your mind first, then your heart,
and the very best poems will sing to your soul—and maybe sting it as well! Homer shows us the utter
brutality of warfare: read the opening lines of the Iliad and you realize that war was as deadly and
vicious three thousands of years ago as it is now. But he also tells us the terrible price both the Greeks and
Trojans pay to wage their war—he makes it clear there are no winners, there are no heroes, there are
only fools.
And I meant it literally about great poetry being able to sing to the soul: that is why one can see—
even without being religious—the profound beauty, angst and wonder in the poems called Psalms
even though they were written thousands of years ago. This is because human nature never changes,
nor ever can change, despite there being a plethora of ideologies—communism, fascism, humanism,
political correctness—that keep trying to mold it to their liking. It can never change because we are not
the rational creatures we think we are but are emotional beings at our core, and all our thoughts
have an emotional underlay. [Something I learned in a terribly hard way when as a young man
I suffered a deep clinical depression and all my affect gradually withered away—my emotions were dying,
and so soon actual death looked like the only escape].
Poetry may not do very much for society today but it can do a great deal for life, for the living
of a life in truth and beauty, as Keats put it so well. Not so long ago all the creative arts—literature,
music, art—were seen as a way of attaining such, but no longer. Today it is brutality, ugliness, that
plays well amongst us ‘moderns:’ incredibly ugly art that sells for multi-millions, extremely violent films,
songs that sing not of love but hate and debasement, fiction that is detached, cold, dead. It all
makes sense in a way, for though we see ourselves as advanced, progressive, enlightened (unlike our
ancestors who built great houses—temples, mosques, cathedrals—for their ’imagined’ Deity), we are in
reality far more brutal, uncaring, egotistical, and often downright mean than probably most people in
human history. It is quite possible that more people (with estimates in excess of a quarter of a billion)
have been wantonly killed in the past 120-odd years by a slew of atheist dictators—Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, Tojo, Pol Pot, and many more minor despots, than in all of recorded history. We have created the
means to destroy all life above ground: What species in their right evolutionary mind would do that?
Yet, poetry today may answer an even greater need in the lives of its readers.
All writing is transcendent and may be the singular achievement of our species;
in its ability to encapsulate thought-emotion, poetry is the most transcendent of all, fiction or non-fiction,
because it can create a moment of awareness in the reader, a thing so remarkable and profound that I call it the
‘satori’ of poetry. And as in that Zen term, the reader can suddenly, unexpectedly, have an awareness
of a transcendence that for a moment lifts one out of the mundane and touches upon…something
more, something far, far beyond even one’s imagination, perhaps the ultimate in beauty and truth.
Now there are many fine poets who believe in only this world as experienced by our senses:
no God, no soul, no heaven or hell, no re-birth. Larkin, Plath, and a poet/astrophysicist/atheist
friend of mine come to mind. Yet as my friend will admit, seeing sentient human lives as ending in
extinction can only mean life is meaningless: there really is no way to sugarcoat it (though some
atheists resort to a kind of grin-and-bear it stoicism). I suppose I would have counted myself in that group if I
had not almost drowned at 24 and had what since has come to be called a near-death experience.
For half a century I’ve been trying to understand what it all means. The only thing I can be certain
of is that I have a consciousness that existed before I was born and will exist after my body dies—a soul
that exists endlessly, has always existed. People will believe or not based on their own intuition,
reasoning, and experience. [Oxford University did a study showing that 71% of the population had
experienced at least one paranormal event in their lifetime.] So for most of my adult life I’ve known that the
problem is not that life is meaningless but that there is so much meaning to life, the world, the Universe, that
the best of us can only get a small part of it...fragments. But this is exactly where the poet can come into
his/her own, for the poet’s unique apprehensions when ‘caught’ in the right words can hint at the pervasive
mystery of the Eternal as it weaves itself through the temporal world: what a great poet called
‘intimations of immortality’. [Walt Whitman was another great poet who seems to have had some personal
metaphysical awareness that is often striking in his ‘ Song Of Myself’, as when he writes,
‘I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself;
They do not know how immortal, but I know.’ ] I try to do this myself: whether it’s looking at that not so brave
new world called old age, or how the soul might feel when, freed of its mortal body, it finds itself in eternity
longing for its loved ones who are still in the temporal world, the world of time, of life and death,
who doubtless themselves are mourning the person/soul that has ‘moved on.’
Some—those materialists who see only matter as real—will see such poems as nonsense
while others may see some beauty in them. And in truth, I don’t write my poems so much as they
write me; they always come to me unbidden [often in the morning] and if I don’t write them down soon,
they’ll likely leave, never to return. So where do they come from? My unconscious mind, or somewhere deeper than even that?
That is a tough question to answer because it touches on the old debate about nature vs. nurture.
How can an ordinary couple give birth to a genius like Einstein, or a stable, middle-class family
a serial killer? How in the world was Mozart able to compose music at 5, when most of us haven’t
learned how to read yet? Today thanks to Freud most people are at least somewhat aware of the power of the
unconscious mind to affect consciousness. What we’ve lost is the sense of how our souls affect us,
drawing us either towards Light—and the freedom and warmth of that light—or else dragging us into an
ever deepening and terribly engulfing Darkness, be it depression or addiction or greed or racism or
narcissism—evil comes in many forms.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it will be poets who lead the way, as they did throughout history
until relatively recently. For each time an awareness is sparked, an opening towards the Light,
a small miracle happens: one human mind reaches out to another human mind, unseen, unknown,
while creating an awareness, even if ever so brief—a little awakening from the slumber of the ego.
Such has taken me a lifetime to learn: When I was young I wanted to write but only if I could be a great
writer, an immortal writer whose words would never die—in short, another Shakespeare. And so—
bounded so tightly by my ego—when I encountered problems, like a rejection of a novel I wrote based
on my time in war-torn Cambodia, I gave up! For over 30 years I wrote nothing, and then—for some
reason, God knows why—I began writing poetry again, and in the past half dozen years have had some
modest success getting published online/in print. And whether it’s one or a thousand who read a
poem of mine, I’m happy, for I have been part of the miracle of creation, and the wonder of transcendence.
And if we wonder why it’s so hard to apprehend God or the Big Mysteries, well, we often
don’t even see the small ones. As I’m writing this, a pair of birds alight onto my brick patio just
outside the glass doors. They’re a couple: I can tell because one is the male, handsome with a red head,
and moreover he seems to be feeding seeds or whatever he’s finding scattered about to
her—they dance about each other as he appears to put something into her mouth. Perhaps I read too much
into it, or perhaps not enough: for could this be love, maybe not so different from what my wife and I feel for each other?
Now if I could only write a poem that ensnares this little mystery….
Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J. Carber, became published in his 70’s in over 70 online/in print literary journals/anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Romania and India. A trade publisher released 2 book-length collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020] and Of Ether and Earth [2021]. Recently he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022. A retired teacher, he’s been married 42 years.