AUTHOR’S PREFACE
„How can I know what I feel until I’ve seen what I’ve said?“goes the famous quotation from E.M. Forster, or– as Theodore Roethke put it in a more affirmative mode– „I learn by going where I have to go.“
As one approaches forty (the first half of our earthly life, in all likelihood, done) it seems to me only natural that– after some l4,600 days (or 350,400 hours) of reflectively and experientially occupying the condition we call human– one might want to know something about how one feels, about what the term „human,“ in all its myriad possibilities, means.
Or at least I did. And so, nearing the end of my own third decade now almost a decade ago, I did just that: I woke, every morning for several months, and „meditated“ out loud on a subject which, either directly or indirectly, was among what the late theologian Paul Tillich would have called my „ultimate concerns“-issues of love, friendship, art, morality, ethics, psychology and philosophy. For it seemed to me, as it still does, that the living of those questions constituted the core of what it meant to be human.
Though I had been a poet for quite a few years (and four books) before working on these meditations, I saw (and, in retrospect, still see) their task as a very different one from that traditionally undertaken by poetry. For poetry, I tend to agree with Yeats, is largely „a dredging operation into the unconscious,“ a way of discovering what, beneath all our protestations and conscious wishes, we (in Matthew Arnold’s words) „feel indeed.“ In that sense, at least, poetry always seems to derive from the deepest sources– but those which, in fact, it is sometimes safer to feelthan to live.
But, this time around at least, I wanted to know what it was I felt that I also could— and might want to— live. I wanted not, as Roethke suggested, to „think by feeling,“ but to think by thinking. I wanted to know what I thought both withand againstmy own deepest feelings… since our deepest feelings, I agree with Freud, are always (or, at least, often) at their core somewhat sociopathic and destructive. I wanted to know, in other words, what ideas I had as to the morallife, as well as the poeticone… and how, as a poet and a man, I could combine them.
So– although the person speaking here may not always be the person who, in my actual life, I always am– he is certainly at least a kind of doppelgängerto the man I aspire to be. For only (to paraphrase the work of an old philosophy professor of mine) by meditating on an oughtcan we possibly alter the nature of an is. Only by carrying with us some inner sense of what the possibilities of human existence are can we alter its present realities, can we make the human(„of, belonging to, or characteristic of man“) into the humane(„characterized by such behavior or disposition towards others as befits a man“).
„If there is anything concerning poetry about which people agree,“ Wallace Stevens wrote, „it is that the role of the poet is NOT to be found in morals.“ Perhaps what Stevens really meant to say was that the role of thepoemis not to be found in morals… for, if he didn’t, I’m afraid he has at least one dissenting voice right here. It’s that dissenting voice I wanted to honor, or at least wanted to get to know… a voice I would like at least to hope will become the poem’s own voice as well.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Haifa, Israel, Austin, Texas 1991-1997