Rhyme and Reason
Poetry Inspired by Teilhard de Chardin
by
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Prologue
It seems that the operative principle, or an operative principle of the universe is reasoned rhythm. „Universe” connotes clearly the intuition of a neat, measured, balanced, descriptive, beautiful, singular entirety. If (as is the recent rush to „chaos” as an operative principle) chaos is the factor, then the All must „logically” dissipate into the nothingness that defines the Nirvana of pessimism, the final, hopeless oblivion of Sartre. Chaos either is or is not the fundamental principle, and we need not to refute its validity, for any defense of „nothingness” (Sartre’s baby) requires an exercise in the use of syllogistic reason! But, nothingness and reason are necessarily inconsistent, which makes Sartre’s 800 page tome; „Being and Nothingness” inconsistent. The empirical phenomenon of the universe stands as the eternal Q.E.D. that chronicles the truth of meaningful being.
As vitalist philosophers would argue, entelechy itself is the a priore empirical condition that yields and energizes the basic urge to the rhythms and yes, the rhymes of reason. The very beauty of the world as we know and feel it, is then a ramification of order, of rhythm, of cosmos! Einstein himself, the very icon of truth and wisdom, stated in an essay called; „Look Up and Wonder,” that; „God does not play dice with the universe.” All science, all mathematics, all philosophy if fully challenged, necessarily yields that some fundamental psyche directs all of being from beyond the infinite parameters of the „All.” Some supra-being, or force, or „person” who’s reality we cannot prove seems necessary and sufficient to the universal mind, some call Him, It, God. Some as did Mortimer Adler, allow that at least the nature of this „Power” is most surely; „That than which nothing greater can be thought” (An attempt at defining the indefinable attributed to Thomas Aquinas in the year 1250). This „power” caused life, dimension, symmetry, flowers, „cabbages and kings,” love, beauty, Rhythm and Rhyme!
Mankind seemed compelled to couch the truth in balanced, metered, quasi-musical forms so that the beauty of the universe would burst out in sound, just as the beauty of the universe bursts out in sight, in the form of flowers and the natural symmetry of all living things, as found in the microcosms of all matter and the very macrocosm of cosmos! It is probable that the conscious „thought” of the efficacy of such rhyming was no tin the beginning a considered objective, but rather came into the mind of man as an unconscious response to that same entelechy that directed the radial symmetry of flowers and the symmetries necessary to all things, living or not! The urge for symmetry and symmetry itself does not preclude beauty and love and good, rather it nurtures and frames it.
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About the Book
The poems I proffer here, all spin around, one way or another on the axis of generic love. They run a spectrum from frivolous to serious, inane to germane, and short to long. Each one is a specific response to some spontaneous feeling brought on by such a demon as “Puck” of perhaps Erato. After each “Rhyme”, a reason ensues to explain, apologize, “rap” about or otherwise attend the poem at hand. Each itch has its very own scratch! Isn’t that what we all do while waiting for “Godot” and otherwise enjoying the poison ivy of life?!
We all remember the days of our youth, when we, as scholars, students, (or at least pupils) were tortured in the name of homework to write that infernal essay by which we attempted to explain (in five hundred words) what the poet, John Milton, perhaps was really saying as he lamented his blindness.
As for my “ocular rectitis,” perhaps God will be kind and not exact day-labor when my “Rhyme and Reason” is considered in the dim twilight of my years as a late day, latter day, would-be poet.
With Love; I Say, Enjoy!
Sincerely, Jake Dillon
About the Author
The author is a “very used” octogenarian, a charter member of the “Greatest Generation”, a World War Two veteran who saw and smelled the sinful waste of war at such theaters as
He came home then, to take full advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights and an athletic scholarship in football and baseball at
Jake Dillon is a proud “liberal” who knows the salutary connotation of the word and is in full accord with the prospect that mankind will succeed, necessarily, as is projected philosophically and scientifically by the most prescient of all latter-day sciento-philosophers; the great Teilhard de Chardin; a bleeding heart liberal!
The author is a catholic who yearned for a fully rational argument to justify the legitimacy of all religion and other impulses that seed to find God. He found the solution in the magnificent, totally tautological argument for “first cause” in a paradigm which in and of itself contains the universe and precludes nothing.
The author is after all, what he believes; a person who knows that mankind is the very reason for, and the operative principle of the universe which cannot and will not fail.
As he groped through life seeking the truth, he has been an athlete, aesthete, race car driver, teacher, coach, mechanic, a winner and a loser and feels he is a rich man who never had to endure the impediments of a mammon.