Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Old Lovers Revisited
Old Lovers Revisited
I think I am allowed
to go there now.
Even if I have transcended time,
and all its prescriptions.
Even if I disdain
what some say
never happened anyway,
not to me,
just to that unnamed Other.
I believe I can
reclaim
all of it,
that precious stuff
of half imagining,
half desire.
Who cares
if it was real or not?
Why bother
to test it by acid
or flame?
We were together,
that is what matters.
Sometimes bodies
are allowed to touch,
to remember who they are.
Dorothy Walters
July 22, 2014
When we enter the purely transcendent realms, we are tempted to leave all our past experience behind--some call this earlier self merely an expression of ego. And indeed, some systems of thought--especially Buddhism--claim that enlightenment occurs when we realize that our sense of ourselves is only a fiction, a myth we have invented about our own self and its experiences. Actually, I embrace this latter concept, though in the poem the "I" rejects this notion for one which does not exclude our personal experience.
Even when we realize on one level that the "self" does not exist, we are called on to live in the human realm as if we were in fact an existent being. And as a personal reality we are likely, in the latter part of our lives, not so much to live in the past but to reflect on and re-evaluate it, for life review seems appropriate here. In the moment of profound awakening, we seem to "transcend time," but on another level, we still realize that time (for us in ordinary reality) exists--there is past, present, and future, and all are equally valid.
