Galen Ruminates on The Book of Lies

WHEN, ALSO, ZEPHYRUS WITH HIS SWEET BREATH . . . .

When, also, Zephyrus with his sweet breath (right out of the Prologue to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales") calls to wish you a happy 58th birthday, then I'm put in mind of your 18th birthday (and of my own), 40 years ago, when we were high school seniors together with a lot of other people in Wichita, Kansas. In my memory, that was a magical time. We were coming of age, finishing high school, trying to get ourselves ready for college, driving around in our parents' cars with the windows down and the springtime blowing through our hair, crazy for love and for whatever fresh excitement life could bring our way. I could write an entire book just on that March & April of our senior year, as I'm sure you could, as well.

I keep wishing that I could somehow respond to all of your phone messages and e-mails from the past couple of days in one brilliant poetic open letter which would dazzle all the world while actually proving somehow helpful and healing to you in this spirit of solidarity we seem to have here between us. Instead, alas, I have only this:

The world is very different from the way we were brought up to believe it was -- and from the way most folks have always believed (and probably will always believe) it is. The human world, I mean. The physical universe, around those surfaces of contact where it interfaces with what we are and what we're about. That's what I mean when I say "the world" is so very different.

In graduate school in Utah, by the luck of the draw, I was forced to study under a real a**hole named Robert Mezey, best known at the time (1973-74) as the coeditor of NAKED POETRY, one of the definitive anthologies of modernist (pseudo-leftist) free verse on the market at that time. I'll always remember that one of the tenets of Mezey's poetic aesthetic was that "irony" was old school and old hash, a component of the discredited past (Frost, Stevens, Eliot, e.g.). I remember this because it struck me at the time (and now lingers with me as one of the central tenets of my own poetic aesthetic) as being a crock -- just more of Mezey's pretentious bullsh*t.

Because: IRONY RULES ALL. "Things are seldom what they seem." (W. S. Gilbert) If one lyric phrase from popular music summarizes the zeitgeist of our generation, it would have to be the opening line from Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love:"

"When the truth is found to be lies . . . . "

And it is within the world of words, more than in any other place in the human cosmos that the substance and process of the ironic nature of nature may be found and examined. As you've heard me say so many times before: WORDS LIE. It is nearly impossible to tell the truth with words. Why this is is multifarious. But for brevity's sake, I'm going to quote yet another song lyric, Bob Dylan's "Dirge" from his PLANET WAVES album:

"The naked truth is still taboo . . . . "

And to understand why the truth is taboo, we needs must anatomize the substance and process of taboo. If I were teaching a graduate seminar on this topic, I might begin with that old chestnut (and taboo truth) that IF TREASON PROSPER, NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON.

Courage & wisdom. Courage & wisdom. That's what it takes to stay sane and safe. And both are, of course, the fruits of the womb of our goddess, Mother Imagination.

Whispering Taboo Truth to Youth (Galen & C.G.; 1978)