Late Lament

Breathe deep the gathering gloom,
Watch lights fade from every room.
Bedsitter people look back and lament,
Another day’s useless energy spent.
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.
Lonely man cries for love and has none.
New mother picks up and suckles her son.
Senior citizens wish they were young.
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white,
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion.

Poem Late Lament by drummer Graeme Edge found in Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues.

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What animates the world?  What powers the rotational force of the human world? 

I am compelled to ask when I think “world,” — if anything at all exists apart from our joint ability to conceive the term “world?”  Nothing truly exists apart from what you and I mean by “world.”  Do we not mean to mean, everything that orbits within the shadow of our understanding?

My short list:  subatomic packets of dancing energy; viruses partially alive seeking a host; the amoeba in the creek that flows behind the house; the coyote that hunts in Braeburn Marsh; the welcoming warm glow of this interior space of Starbucks on a chill, windy Monday morning; and my nearly new Kia Forte (parked nearby), a marvel of computer technology and mechanical engineering, etc. etc.  What is meant by “world” is infinite and expanding.

The mind of humankind creates and sustains a stunning, variegated, matrix of the real, the articulated being, which is beyond good and evil.  Everything that exists for us, — is a product of our minds.

All of which sharpens the point of the final two lines of our poem.  Since good and evil is internal to the dynamic matrix of world elements, ought we not to proceed carefully?  Should we not expand the circle of our knowledge with sensitivity to the long term effects which necessarily will be concealed from us?  Should we not care for the well being of a future generation which we have not met?  I think so…

On the other hand, there’s always the possibility of giving in to madness.   We can always attempt to wrest control of the arc of time by shear will-to-power.  To succumb, — that is illusion.