The Point

Inspired by Branch Isole

Sitting in a Nintendo rocker,
a shade akin to cold, hard truth,
devouring a pamphlet about the
existential and eternal box that
is most oft-subscribed to in
this land that's lost it's
exceptionalism in the eyes
of Mailer and others,
he sees, he reads,
he comprehends,
he devours savagely
another in a long line
of tracts that try to
be like their formers,
like McDowell,
like Lewis,
and somehow convince
a modestly read,
modestly intelligent,
majorly recalcitrant
skeptic that a simple man
was more than a carpenter.

All because he said
he was God Incarnate,
and his life was documented
greatly and beyond belief
by, at least, the standards
of the first century.

But, hints are revealed
within the text that set
it apart from other
evidence tracts that
these eyes have seen,
these ears have heard,
these senses have taken in,
there is possibly more than
one path to the divine
because the divine
exists in process.

God is an artist,
Mailer concedes.

And not some All-Powerful,
All-Good divinity that has
tied the minds of men
and women alike into
theological and philosophical
Gordian knots since the dawn
of Western civilization.

The creative endeavor
is one that taxes the
divinity, and he is on
equal footing with his
archrival and they battle
eternally in an almost
Manichean death struggle
for hegemony,
for supremacy,
for superiority.

Like a game of backgammon
on supernatural steroids.

It may explain
rather pointedly,
rather profoundly,
why existence is weird.

But, for the follower
of the backwater carpenter,
it's not a bone of contention,
it's not a bane of existence,
it's merely a point of acceptance
on the existence of the
quadrature of omni.

And it's a point,
a paradox that's become
definition, because even
Ockham held to that idea.

A point names a location
but has no dimension, but the
truth reveals that humankind
marks a location in space with
a small circle, something that
has two dimensions of span
and a micron or two of depth,
a millimeter of thickness even.

Either it is knifed,
sliced or dissected,
man's religious impulse
remains intact, and the
conversation, the
creative, convoluted
process that it is,
continues onward,
and like us, maybe
it evolves along the way.

That may be the point
of the philosophy of
religion after all.

Reviews

[Chris Taylor]

A very elevated, high thinking,poem. While I do not agree with all the points you make here, I can definitely see the genius in the words. A well constructed piece.

[Ed Hart]

a further proof that there is no such thing as a simple person