————-—for Kevin Hart
Naturalism was always the goal: as philosophy,
It retained the virtues of physicalism and materialism
Without their drawbacks, and in art and literature
It combined honesty and a human need to communicate
With truthfulness, as if they couldn’t exist without it.
I don’t understand it anymore. I still hate superstition—
The miraculous, the easy obvious, the need to cloak reality
In platitudes—yet dreams reflect the natural order too,
And something is mirrored in practically everything we say,
Whether or not we think it might be true. I used to believe in God
For instance, and then it all just fell away, until believing in him
Wasn’t (as William James would say) an option, even if I wanted it to be.
I believe in what I think, including things I don’t understand
And can’t see, like my own mind, and your mind too, and abstracta
And sets and the first stars, as if the world were everything that is the case
And those things meant the world to me. Where does that leave me?
If everything’s a part of nature, and if nature includes me too,
And if I’m the one who has to settle what to say, what’s even left
For me to think of as unreal? Why does it matter what I think is true?
This is an exercise in meditation gone awry. It starts out with
Something on your mind that troubles you, then it carries you away
With the rhetoric of eternity, with no recognizable end in view
Beyond the consolations of contemplation. There’s a sense of urgency
And expectation, but its real point is just the pleasure of the journey,
As a feeling of language and unspoken thought exerts its power over you.
Sometimes it pauses on a word that feels like it’s true. More often
It’s the freedom of not making up your mind or knowing what to say.
Maybe I don’t believe in naturalism anymore, or maybe I do
And don’t know what it means. Maybe this continual oscillation
Is the natural order, or at least my part of it, no matter what I try to say.
I sit here at my desk as in my soul, letting those possibilities wash over me
And basking in their presence, before I forget them and they fade away.
I read somewhere about a drug that people love not for the sensual pleasure
It affords; instead, it’s for a sense of being loved and feeling “absolutely safe,”
As Wittgenstein once said. I wonder if their sense of simple contentment
Might be anything like mine? I know it’s temporary, yet for a while
It seems to lift me out of time. I don’t know what to call these inklings
Of eternity. I only know I have them, and that they’re wonderful
As long as they last, if only for an hour, or a couple of days.
John Koethe’s most recent books are Beyond Belief (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity and Truth (Bloomsbury). The poems in this issue will be included in the forthcoming Cemeteries and Galaxies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Photo obtained from Unsplash+.
