Give Me My Pen

Here I find myself on the brink of a new adventure: grad school.  And as I go through my shelf of journals from the past couple years, intending to box them up and store them away in a perfunctory attempt at downsizing, I am drawn magnetically into the thoughts I recorded during and in the year after my last great adventure, studying abroad.  I came across something I wrote in March of 2014, and it struck a chord within me, although notably a different chord than from which it arose.  Reading the poem/passage now feels rather like tasting a wine that has had a chance to age a couple years.  The same thoughts are still in my head, but they've sat for a good long while in the dark, cool shelves of my brain, and thus now have a slightly more complex flavor (or so it seems, probably only to me).  I changed a small thing or two as I typed this up here, to align more with my present palate.


Give me my pen
   so I can draw these thoughts out from the invisible,
   ephemeral atmosphere of my consciousness,
   out from nonexistence---
   for if a thought falls through a mind
   in the middle of a forest,
   but is never written, never spoken,
   does it make a sound?

Give me my pen
   so I can draw these thoughts into my physical being,
   deeper into my Self,
   into the hand that steadies and baffles me
   with its dexterity, and further
   into this organism's modest cave of memory.

Give me my pen,
   for the "smart" mass of meticulously manufactured metals
   that connects me to humanity's collective intelligence
   is weighing too heavily in my hand,
   and does not lend the same satisfaction,
   the same sensation,
   when recording my ruminations.

Give me my pen,
   for the internet feels just as immaterial, just as transient
   as the thoughts in my head.
   And although it may last longer
   than the paper on which I write...
   it doesn't feel that way.

Give me my pen,
   so that I may converse with this nymph called Impermanence,
   internalizing her ink-like footsteps just as they evaporate on the page before me.

Fluxin' Lungs

Melbourne, Australia.  Late September, 2012.  Evening.  The Southern Hemisphere is inching into spring, and tonight, daylight stretches, blithely resistant to crawling under the cover of the horizon.  The sky opens its arms and pulls the daylight in for a prolonged goodnight hug: the two meet in a warm rainbow sherbet embrace of infinite gradient and depth.

Under this resplendent display of atmospheric affection, I run.

More accurately, I jog.  I am appreciating how it feels to move my legs, to warm my muscles and give my blood flow a good kick, but I feel no particular need to exercise.  I feel no urgency.  For once.  Tonight, I jog slowly, merely with the intention of visiting a friend.

This friend happens to be a circular field of grass.  The Royal Park Native Grassland Circle.  It is part of a park just outside of Melbourne’s Central Business District.  A surprisingly large park, considering its proximity to the city center.

This grassland circle and I became fast friends upon my arrival in Melbourne.  When I first walked up to its edge, it opened up to me—much as the aforementioned sky opened its arms to the sun.  With openness, it would seem, comes camaraderie.

There is a path running all the way around the grassland circle, about three-quarters of a mile in circumference.  The location is such that when I am on one side of the circle, I look across and see, behind a wide expanse of gently waving grasses, the glassy geometric spread of the Melbourne city skyline.  On the other side of the circle, however, I look across and see only silhouetted trees and sky; I am in the African savanna, for all I know.  

As I run, I am cycled through views of human and non-human creation, in turn.  Here is the perfect place to ponder the idea that has just been put forth  to me in the Environmental Philosophy class I am taking at Melbourne Uni:

Humans are not separate from nature.

The thought sinks slowly, a stranger’s goggles dropped and drifting down into the viscous ocean that is my psyche. 

Of course we aren’t, says the voice of Science in my head.  We are animals.  We are biochemistry.  We are made of the same molecules as the trees, the clouds, and—as the great Carl Sagan so fondly reminds us—the stars in the night sky. 

I jog along the path, peering at my “natural” surroundings—the she-oaks, paperbarks, and gum trees, the native grasses and shrubs, the birds that chirp and dive—and try to think hard, I am not separate from this.

I think the words, I see them in my head, but I do not feel them.  I have this brain, after all, this centralized nervous system, with eyes and nerves that make me feel my body is a thing with boundaries.  And I have this culture—oh, Western culture!—every aspect of which has conditioned me to think, perceive, and feel that I am not only separate from but superior to all other living and nonliving things in the world.  Nature is the thing we look out at beyond the windows of our houses and cars; it is the unruly thing we drive into only as we exit our cities; it is the grass we walk on, in all senses of the phrase.  Nature is a vast plane of existence beneath us.

I know that this way of seeing is ingrained into our civilization’s DNA.  It has evolved alongside our practices of procuring food and protecting our communities, and it has solidified into society-wide perceptual granite.

But I struggle against this apparent finality, because in the past few weeks I’ve been given a taste of something else.  Something more vast, more nuanced, and rife with undiscovered meaning.  Someone has pointed to a tear in the fabric of what I thought was reality, and now I am willing myself to look closer, aching and anxious to rip open my preconceived notions and see what, if anything, lies beyond.  I am Alice peering down the rabbit hole; I am Lucy stepping inside the wardrobe; I am Aristarchus of ancient Greece, thinking for the first time that perhaps Earth is not the center of the universe—I am part of a tradition of humans both fictional and real who have tested the boundaries of their perception, almost always with astounding results.

I think back to my Environmental Philosophy class.  I’ve learned that in Australian Aboriginal philosophy, we humans are not separate from nature; we are an integral, indivisible part of it.  We do not stand above the web of existence; we are within it, engaged in its continual spinning and unfolding.  In the Aboriginal tradition, many people derive a deep sense of place and meaning not only from the world of human interactions, but also from the biological and geographic spheres they live within.  Through the eyes of this philosophy, we humans are physically, morally, and spiritually connected to every other living and non-living thing—not just through the touch of our hands, but by the impact of our choices and behavior, both conscious and unintentional.

This perspective strikes me deeply, because it aligns with my knowledge of science even more than the Western philosophy from which science itself sprang.  Science tells me there are millions of atoms and molecules moving across my skin every second.  Science says there are waves of energy moving through me constantly—I could be, at the most basic level, made up of infinitesimally small waves of energy, and nothing else.  On the larger scale, Science tells me I am part of an ecosystem, a network of interconnected and interdependent species.  But our culture, Western culture, completely contradicts and counteracts any awareness we may have of our place within this network.  Our priorities—acquiring status, power, and material wealth—take us far from cognizance of our energetic equivalence with the rest of the universe, let alone our relationship with the cohabitants of planet Earth.

What would it be like to walk through the world experiencing something entirely different?  What would I think, perceive, and feel if I was raised in a culture of humans living as a part of nature, rather than apart from?

These questions echo inside me, bouncing from one side of my brain to the other in tandem with the pounding of my feet on the pavement of the running circle.  My attention inverts, turning from the world of internal thought to the one surrounding me, so vivid on that particular September evening.

I let myself wonder—with no small amount of playfulness: if indeed I am not separate from nature, from these trees and grasses, this pavement even, how and where could I possibly feel that non-separation, that continuity?  What bodily interface could I trick my brain into imagining as a river rather than a dam?

Well! the voice of Science perks up again in my head.  Remember that physiology class you struggled through last year?  What was the one word your professor pounded relentlessly into your brain?

Flux.

Flux is the rate of transfer of fluid, particles, or energy across a given surface.  Or, as I like to think of it, it is flow.  Something flowing effortlessly through something else, as the physical laws of the universe dictate.  The human body is a flux machine.  Flux is happening all the time, in every part of us, to move water, nutrients, and all sorts of other molecules to wherever they are needed.  One organ in particular, however, sticks out in my memory as a location of high flux; a place where particles must be exchanged constantly, quickly, with next to no resistance: the lungs. 

My focus is drawn automatically to my own breathing, which is heavy, and labored—having moderate asthma, running has never been particularly easy.  

Most people know that as we inhale, oxygen molecules pass from the air inside our lungs across a thin layer of cells and into the blood in our veins; and that the reverse happens with carbon dioxide as we exhale.  This evening, however, I have a new and revelatory understanding of this process. 

My lungs are a river, not a dam. 

I had always, without much question, thought of my lungs as a sort of urn.  A thing to be filled and emptied.  A thing with distinct boundaries—especially taut and strained when full.  Now, I marvel at the great inaccuracy of that perception.  If my lungs are allowing air to pass freely, instantaneously through my body, a much better comparison would be… something like… a butterfly net…

At this point in my run, something extraordinary happens.  I can attempt to describe it, but words will undoubtedly fail to capture the magnitude of the experience.  It was a visit from a divine being—some magnificent, ancestral spirit of the land.  Or it was some magic combination of endorphins and imagination.  Or both; I don’t believe the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.

As I run, picturing my lungs as a butterfly net, I suddenly feel entirely, astonishingly weightless.  I am gliding.  I am floating.  I am still pumping my arms and legs—I even push a little harder, run a little faster, just to test the feeling.  I am still breathing hard, but in my mind the air is flowing directly into me, through me, without any struggle or resistance.  It does not feel as if I have to exert even one ounce of effort to expand and contract my lungs, and to move onward down the running path.  What is even more miraculous is that the feeling is not fleeting.  Ten seconds pass… twenty… thirty… a minute… And I am still reeling in the experience of weightlessness. 

Along with this sensation is a feeling of absolute groundedness in my surroundings, and in the present moment.  Never in my life have I felt more here, more now.  But in no way is the here and now static or still… It is quintessentially dynamic.  Vibrant.  Energetic.  Flowing.  Everything is moving through me—but not like wind passing through a net—no, the butterfly net analogy has been discarded in my mind and replaced by something else; but I have no real object to compare this experience to.  I can only say that in this moment I am a multidimensional conduit.  All that I perceive is coming into me, across every surface in my body, pulled towards whatever is centrally me—my heart, my brain, my soul—and coming out through me, slightly altered, in the form of my consciousness and my actions as I move through the world.  I am suddenly, sharply, overwhelmingly aware of my own agency—the choice I have in the unfolding of every single moment.  The smallest intentional movement of my fingers sends a jolt of wonder through me—I wiggle them one by one, touch my pointer finger to the tip of my thumb, clench and unclench them all at once.  The fact that I can control these movements is, in this moment, a complete surprise, a positively stupefying phenomenon.  I am filled with the notion that with this seemingly magical power, I can do anything.  I have no limits.  There are no boundaries.  I admit to myself that this is rather how people must feel when they are on an acid trip.  That I have achieved this state without, to the best of my knowledge, ingesting any such substance brings me immense amusement.

I am reminded of something I read recently, from a book called The Perception of the Environment.  The author, Timothy Ingold, recounts the work of anthropologist Colin Scott on the native Cree people of northeastern Canada:

‘the term pimaatisiiwin, “life”, was translated by one Cree man as “continuous birth”’ (1989: 195).  To be alive is to be situated within a field of relations which, as it unfolds, actively and ceaselessly brings forms into being… The Cree word for ‘persons’, according to Scott, ‘can itself be glossed as “he lives”’ (1989: 195).  Organisms are not just like persons, they are persons.  Likewise consciousness is not supplementary to organic life but is, so to speak, its advancing front—‘on the verge of unfolding events, of continuous birth’, as Scott renders the Cree conception.

In this moment, I feel myself on the unfolding edge.  I feel my own continuous birth, my own role as an agent in creating the next moment in time and space.  And I have just been blasted with the notion that every other living thing is also an agent, on the brink of the emerging universe.

I cast my gaze out like a net, eager to bring even more into the conduit that is my consciousness. My focus falls upon the delicate leaves of a nearby gum tree.  Instead of an inert portrait, an array of fixed objects, as I saw most plants in the past, I see a living, breathing organism—as much of a person as I am.  The leaves, inhaling and exhaling the exact same molecules that pulse through my own veins.  The branch tips reaching, like my own fingertips—both the tree and myself hungry for whatever would give us more energy, more life.

I ran and respired.  I floated and flowed.  A part of it all.  Coexisting more mindfully than I ever had before, and perhaps more than I ever would in the future.  I circled the park more times than I could count.  I ran farther and longer than I had ever run.  The daylight had, by this time, fully retired to the opposite hemisphere, and darkness settled softly into all the curves and crevices of the grassland circle.  Even once I could no longer see the color of all the living things around me, even once I resigned myself to running back to my cold, lifeless dorm room, the extraordinary feeling of oneness lingered.  That, and my awareness of choice.  The Edge.  The exhilaration of leaning perpetually over that Edge, falling into the unknown—yet knowing that I had influence over how each unknown moment materialized, future into present into past.  Arguments about free will be damned.  I felt, and still feel, the sense of choice.  That is all that matters.

Some experiences never leave you.  This one will be with me, in some deep but essential corner of my soul, until the day my consciousness dissolves back into that from which it came.

Why I Named My Blog The Nudibranch

How does one go about deciding on a blog name?  I posed this question to myself a couple weeks ago when I made the resolution to start blogging more.  Could I come up with a phrase that rings with candor and subtle symbolism?  Or would any such phrase sound obviously contrived?  Would it be more prudent to pick a word or phrase at random, and let its meaning and identity develop over time?

The latter logic did not occur to me the last time I confronted this task.  I am embarrassed to note that the previous name of this blog was “Of Passionate Proportions.”  Let it be known that: a) I was 18 when I chose it, b) I was suffering acutely from the requisite 18-year-old need to prove myself, and c) I had an obsession with alliteration (or should I say, an adoration of alliteration?  I suppose that hasn’t completely faded…).  Needless to say, upon revisiting my long-untouched Blogger, I knew I had to switch the name to something a little less… melodramatic.  (Understatement)

What about… an animal name?  I thought.  I majored in biology, after all.  I have an unreserved, nerdtastic, probably-unnerving-to-strangers love for all things living.  An animal name could be meaningful and yet unassuming, strong yet not overbearing.

But what animal?  Most already have myriad connotations attached to their names—associations with myth or masculinity or femininity or fiction… If I did choose an animal, it would have to be one that almost NO ONE really knows about...

And that’s when I thought of… the nudibranch. 

Allow me to explain my own awareness of this esoteric animal:

Last winter, in my senior year at UW, at the urging of my wonderful friend Olivia, I signed up for an Invertebrate Zoology class.  Initially, the thought of taking an entire course on the spineless creatures of our planet—worms, bugs, sponges and the like—seemed less than exciting.  However, after the first couple weeks of the class, I learned that invertebrates are quite possibly the most underrated group of living things on earth. 

There are invertebrates so ancient in origin, so outlandish in appearance, they don’t even seem to fit into the category “animal”; much closer, rather, to the classification “alien”.  There is a microscopic marine organism called the tardigrade that can freeze all of its metabolic processes when it encounters hostile environmental conditions—I’m talking Austin Powers The-Spy-Who-Shagged-Me-style—until it senses the coast is clear to come back to life.  There are jellyfish that can reverse their life cycle, going from their adult form back to their juvenile form, in effect making themselves nearly immortal.  There are so many strange and fascinating invertebrates in existence that given the knowledge and time, I could go on detailing them until the sea cows come home.  But there is one creature in particular that captured my heart, one alone I came to know intimately, appreciate immensely and revere almost religiously.  Olivia and I had to give a lecture on this organism as an assignment for our class, and thus got to spend many hours learning and taking delight in its quirks.  This invertebrate is, of course, the nudibranch. 

The nudibranch is a special group of—dramatic pause—sea slugs.  Yup.  It’s a slug.  Of the same phylogenetic class as those banana slugs we encounter so often in the Pacific Northwest and sometimes, with varying degrees of remorse, step on.  The nudibranch is so named for the unique finger-like appendages that project from its dorsal side (see below).  The numerous protuberances create a high surface area ideal for respiration (breathing).   For this reason, whatever biologist had the privilege of first discovering this sea slug gave it the Latin/Greek equivalent of the name “Naked Gills”—nudus being Latin for naked, and brankhia Greek for gills.

Naked gills.  Does that not accurately capture what one does when writing a blog—writing anything, really—and putting it out for the wide, weird interwebs to encounter and analyze?  Here, let me lay bare what I use to breathe; let me reveal the thoughts and machinery that keep me chugging à-la-Thomas-the-Tank-Engine; let me attempt to verbalize the musings that make up my mental panorama, amorphous and pale and vulnerable as they may be.

I haven’t even begun to touch on why the nudibranch itself is so darn awesome. First, let’s talk aesthetics.  These slugs take “colorful” to a whole new level.  They are an oceanic embodiment of fire and passion.  Fire once got jealous that it couldn’t hang out with Ocean, so it fashioned the nudibranch to be its official ambassador.  If Picasso had a brainchild with a marine biologist, it would be the nudibranch.  If Picasso had ever actually known about the existence of nudibranchs, he would have painted portraits of them that put Dora Maar's to shame.  In these slugs, one finds a testament to Mother Nature’s frivolity; an exhibition of her evolutionary creativity, child-like in its unfettered freedom, reminiscent of fairy tales in its juxtaposition of the beautiful and the bizarre.

You think all slugs are fragile and easily squished?  You don’t yet know the nudibranch.  It won’t go down without taking you with it.  You see, those finger-like appendages I mentioned?  They do more than just respiration.*  With these appendages, called cerata, nudibranchs give honey badgers a run for their money in terms of brute badassery.  Inside those cerata is a fearsome array of toxins and venomous barb-like cells called nematocysts.  But nudibranchs are not born with these defense mechanisms.  They HIJACK them.  That’s right.  Our innocent-looking sea slug friends actually feed on some of the most poisonous animals in the ocean, ingesting their prey’s chemical defenses and concentrating them inside their cerata, thus becoming even more poisonous than the deadly creatures they feast on.  One of my favorite examples is the glaucus atlanticus, a one-inch-long, electric blue little beastie that feeds on the Portuguese man-of-war (See below, and/or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucus_atlanticus for more info).

So.  I just happen to have an extremely personal connection with a little-known slug that is beautiful and strange and evocative and unexpectedly fierce.  I named my blog The Nudibranch not with the assertion that my writing IS all of these things, but rather so that I will always have something to hold in my mind and strive to emulate.

Also, sometimes I find myself bewildered by my own existence.  But then I think about the fact that this guy exists too:

…and I am humbled.  And amused.  And comforted.

*There are actually two different types of nudibranchs.  Only one type, the aeolids, have the finger-like cerata which are used for both respiration and protection.  The other type, dorids, have feathery, branch-like external gills, which only do respiration.  Both types of nudibranch hijack toxins from the things they eat; aeolids just store the toxins in their cerata, and dorids, as far as I understand, store them along their dorsal side, not in their protruding gills.  I figured this was too much detail to put in the main text, but might prove interesting for those I've converted to nudibranch-lovers =D

On being 23

Three more years have passed since I last posted something on here.  Partially because I was trying out Tumblr, and partially because I really haven't written much since 2011, besides haphazard journal entries.  I'm trying to change that.  And I need a real blog.  So... here's a poem I wrote tonight, sitting in Scratch Deli before (and ashamedly during the beginning of) their open mic, because I accidentally arrived 45 minutes early.

I'm 23
with a little less optimism
than at 22,
but a little more certainty.

I'm 23,
and as much as I don't want to admit it,
I know now my earlier years
were neatly packed with naïveté---

not stupidity---
there's a difference.
It's got something to do with innocence,
with good intentions, with newness,

with the sense that the universe
was waiting for me to unravel its mysteries,
that each of my epiphanies meant something...
(and that means something...)

I'm 23,
and obviously,
I've lost some of my egocentricity.
Or maybe I've gained some. Damnit.

I know, at least,
that the world seems to have lost its simplicity.
But I also know that that belief
arises from the fact that I'm no longer being coddled by society,

insofar that universities are, relatively,
bubbles of beautiful ideological and intellectual exploration,
blankets of superimposed structure
and collectively cultivated purpose.

I'm 23,
and the existentialism that brought me wonder and glee
when I was 21
is now preventing me from being able to fall asleep.

But magically, or mystically, or just surprisingly,
there still lies within me
some faint memory of a foundation,
some glimmer of the feeling of groundedness,

and I tell myself that means I heaven't completely lost
that thing, which encompasses so many other things:
that holy thing,
that happy thing,

that thing that the subconscious
of Western society
tells me I don't have a chance of,
but that thing that my heart tells me I need.

I'm 23,
and I'm redefining--
just for me--
what it means to have hope.

Picking up where I left off...

And so it happened that nearly three years passed, and I all but forgot that this blog existed.  Tumblr?  Blogger?  I don't know which one I prefer!  We'll find out.

My last post was about Robert Frost.... Written during my first bout of poetic bewilderment!  I had just dipped my toes into the beautiful pool that is poetry.  And now, after many months, many experiences, and immeasurable growth in the scheme of life, I've begun writing things of my own!

Here, a product of my seasonal nostalgia:

The Pillow of Autumn

I’m running on a pillow
of vibrant leaves
that softens the impact
of the pavement beneath.

No color is withheld
by the crescendo of the seasons;
so I’ll revel in this rainbow reprieve,
however fleeting it may be.

I’m floating on the pillow of autumn;
let me bask in the sun
before the shadows come.
I’m resting my head
before I roll off the bed
and fall back to the depths
of winter’s monotonous hum. 

If you hint at a word of winter,
don’t be surprised when I cover my ears;
why concern ourselves with shivers,
when the warmth is still right here?

I’m filling my lungs with autumn
and willing myself to get a head start
before the frost sets off for the race to test
the resilience of my heart. 

The Eternal Genius that is Robert Frost

I posted this in another spot already. But I like it, so I'm putting it in here too =)



My newest love:
Poetry.
Surprising? It is to me!

A while ago, while poking around the classics section at the Bookworm, I discovered a golden nuggest of a book, called "Immortal Poems of the English Language". It is a small but thick and slightly yellowed anthology, with a copyright date of 1952. Opening up the book to the first page, you see an introduction of sorts that starts out with a simple sentence in bold type, laid out as such:

TO LOVE,
TO SUFFER,
TO THINK...
is to seek poetry.

Captivated, I bought the volume, and now keep it in the glovebox of my car, pulling it out whenever I need someone else's insightful and organized words to calm the chaotic thoughts floating around in my own head. I'll flip through and stop at any random page, reading whatever catches my eye, and bookmarking the ones I really like with a neon colored post-it.

A coincidental string of findings lead me knee-deep into my now full-on infatuation with poems... All of a sudden I understand their magic, their ingenuity, their power.

My interest was initially sparked in my IB Lit class two years ago, when we were forced to have a poetry section in our curriculum. Though at first I had to force myself to get into it along with everyone else in the class, I ended up becoming fascinated by the works of Robert Frost. His works seemed to brim with the intelligence and thoughtfulness the man must have possessed, and many, if not all, of his poems have a focus on some element of nature, which I loved. It was only after becoming attached to a few of his works that I got up the courage to buy an actual book of poetry.

Sure enough, a few pages into my anthology is a quote from Robert Frost, which I think describes with utter perfection the sensation one gets when finding a poem that for one reason or another hits you at your core. He wrote:

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-- that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry, as in love, is perceived instantly. It hasn't to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but we knew at sight we never could forget it."

So, just recently, while flipping through the book, I settled on a poem by John Keats. Loving it, I looked up more of his works on the internet, and finally came across this particular one, which... to be poetic, struck me as if I had "taken an immortal wound." :)


"Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death."



Yes, it has to do with stars. Which, yes, I admit, is most likely the reason that it has such intense meaning to me personally. But I think it's beautiful in any case.

Anyways, I decided to look up the word Eremite, since I didn't really know what it meant. An lo and behold, what comes up in google but a link to another Robert Frost poem! Reading it, I fell even more in love than I had with the previous, partly because of the insight and uniqueness, but also because of how he manages to stick in a perfect allusion to Keats' poem, skillfully and seamlessly aiding his own point!
Again, with the stars-and-me thing. But I hope other people can find some enjoyment from this too!


"O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid."



I say it's marvelous. Purely and transcendentally marvelous.