Democracy as a beacon of hope to people, not nations.

Fallacious is our predetermined vision of life.

Let us instead follow natures imperfect, meandering river.

This river flows, creeks, and bends in total congruence with the lay of the land,

Needing no eye to judge exactitude of order.

But we can seek to better understand the chaos!

 

To discover is to attune ourselves to one another.

Wise are those who abstain from dependence on innate truth.

Only by fostering ties of mutual support can we build knowledge.

Knowledge, being inexorably tied up with our elemental conditions.

Acceptance of our influence on neighbors empowers the individual.

 

Inhibitions and self-reverence bring a halt to our evolving collective thought.

Absolute delight is found in uplifting each other and breaking bonds of ignorance.

Proclamation of victory over philosophical quandary charges unworthy action.

First comes recognition of humanities stark limitations.

From here self-awareness acts as the middle path of the reasoned seeker.

 

Finding inner centeredness clues us in to the quasi-telepathic sharing of reason.

To break down this illogical wall of suppressed brotherly fraternity

Sacrifice for the strengthened interdependence of our unwavering quest.

The journey must stand even as we question the fundamentality of this quest.

 

For this pursuit of reason to succeed there must be a form.

To be the unseen seer.

To take up roots in the tree of philosophy and grow.

To love the time devoted to truth.

To move beyond procedure, in its place questions to invigorate the soul.

 

Relieving tension is the opium of the inquiry.

Dullards and zombies alike, inquiry acts as the antidote for uninspired life.

 Reason is constructed from language,

And without human reason, Universal law and order disintegrates.

Granted limited experience of infinitude, idiocy becomes inherent in judgment.

 

Shall we embark on an awakening, a renaissance?

Did they ancients really know so much?

Farcical is the labeling of our way as deconstruction of constructive civility!

We yearn to bring philosophies together, while suppressing religious zeal.

 

The community acts to embolden the wise.

The community acts to make a change of the stubborn.

The community acts to free the chained by a world passed down.

The community acts as a collective, within a democracy.

The community acts as the glue, as the stitching.

The community acts to save you from the road to perdition.

Discourse of Creativity

 Teacher: Students, I want to propose to you a radical idea.  All of you have the innate sensibility to produce creative ideas.  Although this sensibility does not naturally emanate from you, there are methods which may draw it from the chambers of your locked mind. 

 Students: But teacher, not all of us have shown to be able to logic with an acute perception.  Some of us get our thoughts all addled when we strain to understand the books our English teachers assign to us. 

 Teacher: Well there you have it!  Whether your English teacher knows it or not, she is training you to think on a strictly critical altitude.  The questions asked of you have already been answered, and the game is to find out if you have been well trained enough to react to the questions in the prescribed mode. 

              There is also a danger involved in leaving the thinking to analytics alone.  A practiced analytical thinker has the ability to twist, bend, and undermine a question or problem so that this question or problem may better fit their answer.  This was the practice of the sophists in the time of Socrates, and the Sophists were no different from street performers, except in that they would play tricks with words and meanings, and not hoops and balls. 

 Students:  Ah but even your explanation becomes muddled in our heads!  At least in our other subjects, the teachers tell us what we need to know.  Then we go home and learn it, then we perform marvelously on the tests, then we receive accolades, then we become successful.  We can already tell that this class will give us nothing but headaches.

 Teacher: Very good, my young philosophers!  You would do just swell at Plato’s Academy.  You have just done here what you never managed to do in all your other studies.  You have questioned the very merits of the information and challenged the structure of the institution which is my classroom.  Beyond passively responding to my explanation, you have reached underneath all my jargon in order to perceive the purpose of our whole exercise.  You have invented a category all your own.  You have taken this class, which you may have allowed to continue as a series of lectures, and introduced a new complexity to the structure.  My best hope is that you will abjure from straightforward critical thinking and forever incorporate creative thinking into all your studies. 

 Students:  So you want us to disagree with everything our teachers tell us? 

 Teacher:  No no no.  What I want is for you to break beyond the stored patterns of thinking in your mind and to challenge even your elders to adopt a higher level of discourse.  Instead of just mirroring the patterns handed down by your teachers, the idea is to spark a fresh pattern.  This is a skill which will be quite useful even beyond formal schooling.  Your small universe will constantly be bombarding you with information directed towards getting you to respond in a desirable, uniform, and scripted way.  At the heart of being successful in this class, is taking with you the ability to take up an internally aware dialogue between this outside information and yourself.  Yes you are an active agent in your own lives!

 Students:  But here you are telling us about how to tackle some problem of which we have no idea about.  This class seems like all smoke and mirrors!

 Teacher:  Firstly the comforting solidity of the issues you seek have become all too sacrosanct.  Your parents have spent the whole of their lives dueling with certain opinions on certain issues.  Many of these opinions are recycled, and most of the issues are immemorial.  Nothing is new, even the atoms which make up you are as old as the Universe itself.  The purpose of the class is to retrain your minds to carry an open reflexivity into all of your classrooms and all of your future lives.

 Students:  Very well, your lessons seem to hold some abiding worth to them.  But our parents demand justification in the form of quantifiable facts, besides the A+ to make the property tax worth it. 

 Teacher: Ugh, just as I am beginning to believe that you are getting the hang of it, you regress to the standard pattern.  But I suppose that I cannot win the war in just one battle.  You will learn strategies of creative thinking.  To counterattack the restricted road your minds have inhabited, you will learn to stretch the road both indefinitely wider and longer.  You will also break up the material on which the vehicle of your mind is driving on, and seek for an alternate and stronger surface.  The fuel on which your mind drives on should be tested again and again to see if it is most suitable and in fact one which will last.  Your mind should be a resource which is both reusable and easily mined.  Finally you will build bridges beyond the islands you live on today, which will take your minds to new lands and new people. 

  So please if you must, take home this analogy to your parents as proof of the merits of my class.  I hope they might understand the allusions I seek to establish.  Your homework is to come up with some rules and criteria for how our class should proceed upon.  And try to do so creatively!

 Students:  Ok we will do your homework, but we have some serious questions and doubts to raise with you next class.  For instance, does innate knowledge really exist?  Also, how can you expect all of us to relearn how to think, and how can we tell if we are getting any better at thinking creatively? Finally, what if we forget all of this by next class!?!? 

Grednielk, Ecyoj, Ydennek, Nampil

 

1 How do we unlock curiosity, wrinkles on expired dogma?

 The answer is as multitudinous as the cultures of all the lands.

Will riddles of disorienting puzzlement unleash a torrent of ingenuity?

 Better to cultivate the mind; to harvest imaginative deconstructions.

 

The teacher may pose as the inquisitive facilitator.

2 Incognito, the umpire takes the field to play.

Each lesson we expound transforming us to beginners.

Guide and pupil together, the mindwalk is travailed.

 

Valuable spontaneity; upon the road less traveled we set sail on an uncertain course.

*“There are patterns I must follow, just as I must breathe each breath”

3 The souls form of forms toils to obliterate the condition of bounded chance.

In states of ephemeral brilliance the race of homo verges on evolving.

 

Common sentiments, episodes, inspirations are realized.

As stimulator, you awaken the listless, into skeptic undertakings.

Soaring in ecstasy, cradling the gift to mold modern conceptions.

4 From divided fractures of the whole, a re-awakening of the grand illustration.

 

Each generation yearns for a role in regenerating the structure, the arrangement, the fabric.

Brilliance resonates from the beautiful mind, in circles, where we create new dance.

History towers over our shape, our shadow, refusing the possibility of the possible.

Greece is history, renaissance is history, enlightenment is history; what new story may we birth?

 

*Thanks to Lipman, (L1) Kennedy, (L2),  Joyce (L3), and Simon (*)

Thomas Hipereon

Part 1

 

Thomas Hipereon unfurled his heavy eyelids to reveal a bleary vision of the gray ceiling of his bedroom, the only bedroom he had ever known. 

            This, as Thomas immediately knew, was a special waking.  The scattered fragments of a puzzling dream were filling up Thomas’ head.  It is not every morning that a boy remembers any of his dreams, and Thomas was sure not to lose this one.

Thomas questioned himself, “Now what was I dreaming about last night?  It must have had something to do with the bedtime story mother sung to me last night.  Her voice is incomparably beautiful, and I love it when she takes old stories and puts herself and me in the place of the characters in the stories.”

           

Part 2

 

Concentrating intently, Thomas’ thoughts were stuck on the confusing images and strange language brought on by his dream.  Thomas set aside his dream to consider what he might eat for breakfast.  “I see waffles, french toast, cereal, eggs, and muffins.  No, this simply won’t do, because these are the foods I have always had for breakfast, and today I will have something new!”  Thomas proceeded to scoop out two tablespoons of strawberry ice cream into an edible waffle-cone, separating the layers of scoops with diced banana and melted marshmallow fluff, topped with whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles.  “No adult would ever approve of this!” Thomas exclaimed.   

The exciting thing was that Thomas continued to wonder.  He wondered about where the food in his pantry did come from.  He wondered about why he had to spend so much of his life sleeping.  He wondered about what might happen to him at school that day.

 

Part 3

 

Leaning his growing body against the broken down, withering front door, Thomas stumbled outdoors, and into the chilly, drizzling Spring morning.  “Oh my”, Thomas yelped.  “I didn’t realize my own strength.  I don’t think I was quite so strong even yesterday.  Tomorrow I must remember to push even easier!”

            The droplets of rain fell upon Thomas’s outstretched hands in a rhythmic pattern.  Plip, plip, plop, plip, plip, plip, plop, plip.  Nature’s music, try as it might, could not disturb the boy from his ponderings. 

 Thomas decided that his mood, his energy, and his emotions all changed as the weather changed, “or maybe”, he said to himself, his mood, energy, and emotions create the weather!

Thomas looked upon his neighbor’s homes, the homes of people who lived lives full of circumstances so similar to his own, and decided that the world must look like a completely different place to each and every one of them, even though they all open their eyes to the same sky.

Before Thomas’ striding feet hopped a curious looking rabbit.  Quietly, so as to not to disturb the rabbit, Thomas whispered, “This rabbit is certainly looking at me, ready to ask me just what sort of creature I am exactly.”  Thomas was thinking how this rabbit, just like Thomas himself, had awoken this morning, searched for food, and was now setting out on its day’s journey.

Part 4

 

Fixed in a trance, looking out at the woodlands surrounding the school, Thomas was approached by Freddie Eris, who was laughing gaily.

“My, my Thomas,” exclaimed Freddie, “how embarrassing it must be that your little toe should stick out of the hole in your shoe for everyone to see!  Could you not even afford the tape to patch together the old scrap of leather you wear upon your dirty foot?!?”

  Thomas thought to himself how his shoes would now have to last twice as long as they had to before.  The family now had to be careful with their money.  This was because Thomas’ father, a once stoic idol for Thomas to follow in example, had been laid off from his job, and now lived in a state of self-pity, sleeping the daylight hours away. 

Hesitating, Thomas stammered, “I, um, I am saving my new shoes for a better day.”

“You’re lying to me Thomas!” shouted Freddie.  “Didn’t your mother teach you not to lie?” 

And before Thomas realized what was happening, Freddie was towering over him, threateningly.  The one looking ready to square off, and the other dismayed and petrified.

“Hey, you two!” called out Ms. Astraea, the ancient languages teacher.  “This school will not act as an arena for sparring!  We’ll have this settled between yourselves and Principal Updike after school today.”

Although much relieved to be free of his current plight, and the hard pain which was sure to ensue, Thomas stood quite angry with the unfairness of the whole matter.

 

Part 5

 

Alone, Thomas paced the halls of his red brick schoolhouse, arriving at science class, and taking the seat in the back row, closest to the window.

The lesson was on global climate patterns, and Mr. Triton, who was going on and on, very much characteristic of his personality, was professing to the students about how global warming, the worldwide shift in temperatures inducing a myriad of ensuing calamitous consequences, was real and was the result of people turning their backs on the mother-child relationship they once held with the Earth.

Mr. Triton was enumerating the calamities.  “…and the oceans will rise, and the sun’s most dangerous rays, those of ultraviolet light, will pierce through the ozone layer, and the crop cycles will be devastated, and millions upon millions of people will be displaced from their homes, and…”

This impassioned speech had no hold on Thomas however, for Thomas could only make conclusions on what he had direct experience with, and Thomas had noticed none of the changes Mr. Triton was talking about, and though Thomas did not speak much in class, he felt certain that this idea was one which was worth the change of outright embarrassment.  He did not even raise his hand.

“But Mr. Triton,” Thomas called out, injecting his words into the air, which had until that moment, only been occupied by the teachers words.  “I go to the same beach every summer, and the water never gets permanently closer to the beach-houses, only sometimes closer and then sometimes further!  And the sun feels the same on my skin today, as it felt this time last year!  And in my refrigerator we have rice, and corn, and beans just like we have always had!  And most of my neighbors have stayed the same since my family moved in eight years ago.  I mean some have moved out, but my father says this is because they were taken advantage of by the banks and mortgage companies.”

“That’s quite enough Thomas,” interrupted Mr. Triton.  “I won’t have unruly etiquette in my classroom.  Next time you call out, you’ll be sent straight to Principal Updike, and he’ll know just how to deal with you!”

Thomas, anticipating his already scheduled visit to the Principal’s quarters, had no intention of setting himself up for further reprimand, and decided to drop the matter, right then and there.

 

Part 6

 

            Ears intent, mouth agape, and eyes mystified, Thomas sat back in his seat as the English teacher, Mr. Appelon, read aloud a story about a young boy trapped inside the world of some book.  The story was intended to bring about forced interaction between the stories protagonist, and the personifications of grammatical terms like comma, quotation mark, and abbreviation. 

            For Thomas this story brought on an all too real epiphany, and so when it got to be his turn to read Thomas read his part, but before relinquishing his turn, he continued, “Mr. Appelon, I think this story is sort of about all of our lives.  Just like the world of grammar was there before the boy in the story was written into the book, wasn’t the world and all that it’s made up of, like the weather, natural disasters, plants, animals, and maybe even numbers, already here before we got here.  Couldn’t it be that we are part of a story, and that even our planet is part of some bigger story?”

            “Now now Thomas,” said Mr. Appelon soothingly, you are letting your imagination get carried away, and before you take the rest of the class on the ride with you, let us get back to business.  Grammar is not going to teach itself you know!”

 

Part 7

 

            “Compete, compete dam it!  Run harder!  Pump those arms!  Smell the finish line!”  Thomas was sure he could have heard the military like commands of Mrs. Ekin, the physical education instructor, from two dozen miles away, and not only from the other side of the track. 

            Thomas hated gym.  He had always believed that gym class brought out the worst in his friends.  Why couldn’t Mrs. Ekin be more like Ms. Efreisone, the music teacher, who always told the kids that music should be individual, not about creating art that is better or worse than others, but creating art to bring people together peacefully.

            Thomas huffed and puffed as he reached the end of the race.  He had learned nothing, and his body was in no better shape because he had pushed himself too hard.

            Mrs. Ekin was ready for Thomas and screamed, “That was weak Thomas! Weak!  You’ll never make it out there without an edge!

 

Part 8

 

            Numbers had always confused Thomas.  Thomas understood that there were numbers behind everything.  Moving from one place to another was traveling some distance.  How hard a baseball was thrown, or how fast the bat was swung was measured by some speed.  The right heat to cook Thanksgiving Turkey was measured by some degree.  These numbers, as they were applied in the real world were understandable for Thomas, but what he could not understand was the way numbers were manipulated in math class.

            “Thomas,” said Ms. Piebald inquiringly, “Can you solve for the inverse ratio of 4.23 squared?”

            Despondently Thomas answered, “No, and anyway why?  I guess numbers could be used to help medicine advance, to grow great works of architecture, and to get an idea of how the universe works, but the numbers, and the problems you give us don’t touch our lives at all.”

            Ms. Piebald glared with outrage at Thomas, furious over the words she had heard one too many times, and responded, “Thomas Hipereon, you are just disguising your laziness, your indifference towards putting in the time required to learn the information, with elaborately developed, yet fanciful words.  The fact of the matter is that you have a test on Friday, and your score on this test could influence your final average, and your final average will influence your placement in high school, and your placement in high school will influence where you go to college, and where you go to college, will influence your job, your wealth, your happiness, and will do so for the rest of your life!”

            Thomas was baffled, and felt that he had been hoodwinked somewhere along the line.  His mother had always filled him with the idea that what you learn in school is only as important and the personal meaning one attributes or takes on from it.  She had pleaded with Thomas to learn as an end in itself, and not as a means towards attaining superficial happiness and superiority.  And here was his math teacher, situated in the school and in Thomas’ life in a position which carries tremendous respect for its virtuous undertakings, and perhaps she was teaching him for all the wrong reasons. 

Thomas thought to himself, “Could it just be her?  Oh my, what if I have had other teachers in the past, whose advice and knowledge I have accepted out of some misplaced respect for teachers as paragon’s of truth tellers.  What if there are adults, walking all over the world preaching to kids about what is right and what is wrong, who are actually no smarter than the kids themselves.  Is it too late?  Is my mind spoiled already?  I hope not.”

            Thomas looked up at the clock.  Ironic how an approaching time, represented by a number, would mark his freedom.  3 O’clock.

 

Part 9

 

The sun flashed between Thomas’ eyes, as he walked through the wide school doors on his way home.  Thomas’ mind was racing.  “I do feel different from yesterday.  Everything and everyone seemed to be teaching me a lesson or moral today.  I dreamt of living away from home.  Everyone has a home, everything has an origin.  Adults would have you model your home after theirs.  Two sets of eyes see two different colors.  I am an animal, I am a calculator.  What is fairness but chance?  Does the world go on when I am sleeping?  Am I a protagonist or an antagonist?  I’ve got to keep on running, or else I am sure to be caught.  What makes us adults, what makes us kids?  I am new today; I will be new again tomorrow.      

Elegy for a Demoralized, Stabbed, Cannibalized, and Transfigured Schoolteacher

 Body disemboweled, poetic pith eviscerate

Authorities flummoxed, what reality is this?

An end so sordid, only verse could demonstrate

Morbid reports told candidly with remiss

 

Silently did she opine, muted by ravenous hoards

Karma was her truth beheld; adrift did its virtue vacillate

Hysteria is the loathsome state; rhyme repels it with her swords

Rapier blunt, she succumbs in battle to brutes who imitate

 

Brothers of the ballad, fade from inexorable missions

Found in canine earnestness, missing qualities of the civilized

Corporeal doubles of beasts whose lives found remission

Our flesh too is glutted, pronounced to all with prosaic eyes

 

Unchecked classroom lunacy was her solemn crime

Counseled to engage in foreboding dread, not finespun allocutions   

Best to disseminate certainties, than to weight the heaviness of time

Those gripping to their loneliness will come to know a swift execution

 

Disguised as her own doppelganger

The raven spoke words fraught with foreshadowing havoc

Poet released into blissful surrender

Laid down with poetic justice, shame it was by girls myopic

 

Headmaster blamed the television

Some feared the girls would suffer a severed education

The quack suggested a villainous inclination

Some called for unsparing castigation

 

The public was fed its dose of troubling tidings

Then officials induced to smile in a glaring paradox

To forge a future free of the archfiend’s abiding

Teach dates, avoid misgivings with the flock

 

  

My Very Own Cinquain

2, 4, 6, 8, 2

Excess

Treasures of trust

Masks our necessity

Alluring heavinly domain

We fall

Ballad number 1

Success she beckons enticingly

And he always had his sights in the stars

But would he be willing to sacrifice all

To stand above others, alone upon Mars

While mankind babbles in its infancy

The mark we have left is to be felt for sure

One strives to be taken so seriously

The questions we answer just propogate more

With mortality looming round the bend

We solopsise and cry to make indelible feats

Still the actor will not be there to witness

How the years make remembrances cease

The road to contentness can now be bought and sold

But the answer remains elusive to most

If we accept that lifes callings are simple

Then even the farmer may boast