----- Original Message -----
From: "andrew burke" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 8:32 PM
Subject: Re: "Being and Time"
> Yeah. Grand poem, Fred.
>
> I'd pull part two out and make it another poem, and edit out the
> parenthetical comments. But, hey, it's your poem, not mine. Maybe I'm
> stealing hubcaps off a Bentley.
>
> And I too like the image of you opening your mind and yelling, 'Who's in
> there?'
>
>
> Andrew
>
>
I think Part 2 is integral, Andrew. Its paradoxes - the student's
creativity being linked to her masochism; people with vision being condemned
to dig in darkness, forgetting if they seek wealth or escape - are connected
to other paradoxes in the poem. Reason being unable to triumph except by
miracle. The speaker in Part 4 cherishing retroactively - enumerating her
objects - someone he could not love when she was alive. Hope (the last
thing in Pandora's box, and the last "thing" in the universe) being a
poison. And hope being effective only if the arrow of time is reversed, and
the past becomes as malleable as we think the future is, and (by
implication) Epimetheus, not his brother Prometheus, becomes the
clear-sighted one. --- You're right that I use parentheses too much; it's a
quirk I've been trying to fight. But the voice in Part 2 is very
professorial, and profs speak (at least this one does) in parenthetic
quibbles.
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