Showing posts with label Problem of Evil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Problem of Evil. Show all posts

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Beyond Words Alone: Poets as Artists of the Intentional


 

In his wonderful The New Book of Forms, Lewis Turco tells us that poets “focus on mode, on language itself.”  Focusing on language, a poet in Turco’s view is therefore an “artist of language; his or her concentration is upon the language itself.”  Taken this way, “[p]oetry can thus be defined as the art of language.”

Though these definitions of poets and poetry are correct as far as they go, they do not go far enough. Poets are artists of the intentional; they are artists using signs that point to things beyond the signs themselves.  Since words are not the only signs, why should poets limit themselves to words?  Using C.S. Peirce’s terminology, there are in fact three kinds of signs: symbols (arbitrary signifiers such as words), icons (signifiers such as paintings that resemble what they signify), and indexes (signifiers like photographs or weathervanes that participate in what they signify).  In the realm of symbols, why should poets limit themselves to words?  In the broader realm of signs, why should poets ignore icons and indexes?  They should not of course, and William Blake gives us excellent proof.   

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Simon Magus: Beyond Your Heaven and Beyond Your Hell (Addition to "The Apology Box")



        Simon Magus's Case*

Stand back, Jehovah!  I do not concede
Your jurisdiction over me. Instead,

I’ve secret knowledge shared among the wise
Of greater gods that reign above your head
And rest unstained by your Creation here.

Before this secret knowledge made me wise,
Men used to drag me to your temples where
They made me watch the helpless lambs within
Writhe as men slit their bleeding, bleating throats.
It was no better outside than within. 
There children starved and there poor animals
Would tear themselves apart in roles you made
Of prey and predator.  I saw the scrolls
Recounting other evils you had done.
You made the devil.  You made man without
A sense of right and wrong then punished him
For disobeying orders not to learn
That difference giving knowledge of your wrongs. 
You tainted Lilith and her progeny
Though she obeyed and never bit the fruit.
You baited Cain to murder by your whim
Of arbitrary anger at his gift.
You killed by indiscriminate deluge
Both beasts and infants that could not have sinned.
The common language of survivors you
Destroyed at Babel where (to add insult)
You forced your syllables on men though you
Had once told Adam he could name the world.
You tortured Abraham with felony,
Made him conspire with you to kill his son.
You baited Sodom with slick angels so
You might destroy again--this time with fire.
You burned up infants, animals, and turned
Flesh salt before a husband's frightened eyes.
You tortured your good servant Joseph in
A foreign land whose tongue he did not know
In a repeat of Babel’s cruelty.
Your mind on Egypt then, you unleashed plagues
So horrid I would rather not recount
The sufferings of men or beasts whose blood
You craved on doors or threw down from the sky
Or swallowed up attached to chariots
Beneath the crashing waves that closed on those
Not choked in waters turned to blood before.
For forty years you marched men in the sand
Where you dispensed bizarre rules governing
Such things as beards and testicles of priests.
You called these “laws” so you could claim the right
And pleasure of your awful penalties.
Bored with the desert, you then turned to war
Both in the taking and the keeping of
A “promised land,” an oxymoron of
Word rightly kept to steal another’s ground.

Not only does such evil bring you down.
Your very mouth betrays you, too: "I am
A jealous god!”  Such jealousy requires
An object.  By your own admission you
Have competition and are not supreme. 
Consistent with us both, I thus reject
Your sovereignty Jehovah.  I would dwell
Beyond your heaven and beyond your hell.

*Simon Magus was a Gnostic who tried to solve the problem of evil by creating another and better realm beyond the one in which we live.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016
  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.