Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Ships Passing in the Night

Ships passing in the Night

Before moving on to Courses of Action…I would like to turn now to Finnley’s poem. It is written on two tracks. One describes a man of some means, who is an old bachelor. The other is the Gentleman’s maid.

On the Gentleman’s track it shows someone who had dreams of finding a perfect woman but never found her. For thirty years he looked and nada…no significant other.

On the maid's track it shows someone dutifully tending to this man's material needs, and likewise never connecting.

The poem begs the question, why the two never connected?

While poetry tends to be obscure, seldom leading directly to anything… it leads the reader to “Think,” to read into the poem and decipher the meaning. Often what the reader thinks the poem means and what the author thinks it means are at odds. The writer can always try and settle any dispute by saying in a huff, “WELL! I wrote the darn poem… If anyone should know I should….“ but this is only true if you believe that poetry originates inside the head of the poet.

Often, as Socrates laments, the reader sees things in a poem beyond what the writer might have intended.

“I went to the poets…I took to them some of the most elaborate passages of their own writings and asked them the meaning of them…I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better of their poetry then they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry.“

Socrates was a bright guy, and the implications of this statement, if true, are staggering to the way Westeners look at how the mind works. This goes to the issue that I blogged about earlier, that poetry does not come from inside our minds but rather that we connect with it externally via our muse. A great writer need not have an exceptionally powerful bioprocessor or sophisticated software...all a great writer needs is a great muse and be ready to start scribbling when the muse speaks. Cultivating a relationship with that muse and maintaining it is huge. An individual mind regardless of how blessed only holds a little bit...A muse connects with the universe and knows alot of "People" and can network in ways we can hardly imagine. The issue here is was Socrates right or wrong regarding where we get our material from. Inside our head or from an outside source.

Oh well….I guess I really beat that dog to death! What ever is going on here, I was struck reading Finn’s poem that the Gentleman and the Maid were using two separate thought processes and the two never crossed.

In the Gentleman’s case, he had defined his “Ideal Woman” in a manner that left the poor Maid outside the box. For example he seems to have defined his problem in this manner. I need to find a wife that conforms to the woman of my dreams. The criteria for this woman are That she comes from my social class, she is beautiful, she loves me as much as I love myself, she is sophisticated, well educated and is someone Mommy and Daddy will approve of. It is easy to see from this hypothesis that the Maid was at a dissadvantage. The only criteria she met seems to be the one “where she loves me like I love myself.”

The Maid does not appear to have used any reason at all. She waited dutifully in the shadows working hard for thirty years, hoping that love and persistance would find a way. They didn’t.

He was doomed because his problem was narrowly constrained and if there were any females out there that met the criteria he didn’t find one, or if any qualified, they were not interested in him. She was doomed because she did nothing but wait hoping nature would provide an outcome to her hopes. This is a case of “Dumb and Dumber.” Had he relaxed the decision criteria she might have been a candidate. Had he cast a broader net she might have turned up in it. Had she defined the problem as “I need to determine the best way to attract the man I love,“ instead of instead of hoping “Love will find a way.“ She might have created a situation that rewarded her patience. Neither did either, and while the opportunity was ever present, for a long duration, nothing came of it.

Now before we start chuckling and shaking our heads let me be so bold as to point out that most of us have make these very mistakes. What Finn describes is all too common. It isn’t an aberation of two fools and some bad luck mixed in. How often have you seen two people perfect for each other but they didn’t pick up on it? How often have you missed the nugget that glittered beneath our very nose. How often do we see someone who is too timid to reach out and boldly go….? How often is that someone, ourselves?

This is my take on the poem and Finn might see it entirely differently…That is the beauty of poetry and bears on what Socrates, after about twenty-five hundred years is still trying to get us to realize... that there is stuff going on in this world that doesn't quite add up to what we think it should. There are aspects to life that science can't explain. That there is actually a spiritual dimension to life that goes beyond Church, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and Tooth fairy.