(I have radically revised a poem of a few days ago, and wanted to post the finished version.)
Prologue:
When you are the tempest
You don’t notice the gale
Swirling tumult menace
In the calming after the threat
You shudder at what could have been
Destruction skirting rash choices, obnoxious, noxious
Act I:
For this life it was long life in schools,
For others it could be other—say, family, workplace, working the land, art
My academic life so much this life, persistent
How I absorbed—no—consumed knowledge, consumer of knowledge
A student indebted to the luxury of lux, illumination
Guided and goaded through many books, no one could count how many books
No one could count how many names and footnotes,
Greater and lesser luminaries in the skies of every age—
Rishis, Lao Tzu, Homer, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammed
Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, T. S. Eliot
Adi Shankaracharya, Plato and all his footnotes: Thomas Hobbes, Descartes, Immanuel Kant,
Soren Kierkegaard, Auguste Comte, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor
Reasoning, disputing, inquiring, assimilating, dissipating in pubs after class
Academic identity, subjects discussed, discussing how to discuss
Utilitarianism and Deontological ethics, epistemology the great, narrative, and the favored child
Deconstruction
Learning to learn to continue to learn
Living to learn at leisure and pleasure
Learning to grow trying on life, lives
Trying a Hemingwayesque character (to become a man), or The Artist as a Young Man, evolving into self
Yet it wasn’t the schools, the books, the names, that academic style, for this, my life
Nor would it be family, workplace, working the land, art alone for others
In a critical life worth living, not unexamined—passing time unaware
To see in a single vision the course of a life
While karma is lived out of developmental stages
Surrounded, bounded, encased within
The facts, that academic style, the collegial camaraderie
Do not make the personality’s lasting completion
Make person, mark lasting brain synapses firmware
Within the encounter with environment, the contours of self are carved
Not necessarily unchanged but the self, persistent
Act II:
A seed, a stem, a blossom, growth—becoming
The single flower—but is it?
From raging adolescence into combative adulthood
Through economic cooperation vocation teamwork
Emergence: genuine caring, community, the other
The shell that was learning and environment
Husking through what becomes self-development
In fact, new self, though persisting
The process of my formal education was
But a shell in which I formed.
The facts, forms of knowing, interlocutor interactions
Outside, the self incubating within the process
How ill-suited I was for a serious academic career
Working through the karma of a developing self,
Headstrong, too sure of a developing self
Indifferent to social norms—“What have I to do with thee?”
The wisdom I acquired was not in the books—
The many books, no one could count how many books, the names and footnotes
But in the crucible the walls of which were the process of my education
Epilogue:
In the calming after the threat
You shudder at what could have been
Destruction skirting rash choices, obnoxious, noxious
A narrow escape from who I was
The wisdom I have acquired am becoming, balance in choices affirm
And decorum, more or less, contours of cooperation—no—eco-operation
In sync. Sympatico I become at peace, bright affection alone with together
David Fekete 