Poem: "Today no one is your friend." Spinoza in housing court, Descartes, an infant

As I was scheduling a housing court appointment in December 2008, a messenger (a legal messenger, akin to a jazz messenger) in a sharp blue suit, smart, really smart, black, offered to represent me. His pro-bono client hadn't showed and he was training a new lawyer.

All of a sudden I had a team of lawyers, both gorgeous, the trainee from Africa. When we walked down the hall a few weeks later I felt like Madonna flanked by her people. Just when things were dicey, Sarah Sarai had herself an entourage of snappily dressed professionals.

A mother walked up and down with her baby while I waited in the wide corridor—111 Centre Street is a boxy and merely functional building. I pulled out my notebook.

My lawyer leaned over to ask me about my plans. Plans? I conjectured on the probable niceness of the opposition; he tried to toughen me up. The title? A direct quote.


“Today no one is your friend.”

Safe for the duration in a risen-cream snuggly
against his mother’s heat down and down
one peeling corridor. An inquiry

from my lawyer: “What’s your plan?”
Start here and end when informed in Blake’s
“autumn of the seraphs” or

by a distraction of friends buzzing
near a white light bright enough for interrogation,
though the only query from

family ashy in the scattered Pacific is
“Nice to see you, did you think you’d end up here?”
Some asking of

a convert from Descartes’ distinction of finite and
infinite (I know that I am finite; therefore the infinite
exists)

(there’s me and there’s You); to the infinite miracle
of Spinoza, who saw perfection as rational and
merely thought

to surpass human comprehension. He polished lenses
every day, an endless impermanence, and was fully lit
with joy.

________
Sarah Sarai, published in Flâneur Foundry, Issue II, Spring/Summer 2010 (http://www.flaneurfoundry.com/).

Poem: Experiential Philosophy

One of my earliest romantic loves was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th Century Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher. My emotions were Wagnerian operas roared. I had no control; gentle Spinoza understood. That man knew me. Blew my mind though I was unable to work his logic on my passions or "consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies."

I read both Spinoza and Descartes while cozied in a chair I inherited from an upperclassman (who was in truth a woman but upperclasswoman feels like gentry rather than year in college). That chair so padded and accommodating was the chair of chairs, the eidos (Platonic form) of reading zones. I am unable even now to distinguish the philosophy I read from my experience of reading the philosophers.

Experiential Philosophy

Descartes was not a philosopher,
but a chair with one arm
around me and another
under my legs,
carrying the puny selfhood
I crawled from at 18
on knees and elbows.
You can live in the ring of mist
around the leaning Chinese peak
if a hung-up life’s enough.
Ah, the consolation of
philosophy.

Spinoza was the man
I’d have married
if I’d moved to Salinas,
worked in a Woolworth’s,
lived over a bar, not “matriculated,”
written. Smiled at the gentle.
To know who you are
is to be complete. “Your mother
tried to protect you.”

Rationality is fearless,
mysticism a corolla of the sun,
a parley with the soul,
hot gold and warm honey
in the melancholy beehive.

Each substance has attributes,
i.e., the cat’s meow: is

proof enough of my existence;
existence proof that paralysis
is a few pages of the history,
that history is just a word and
“now,” this one, I said, here,
is a liberation, if observed new.

Published in Fogged Clarity and collected in The Future Is Happy.
Note: The whimsical and imaginative illustration is from a blog which I'm unable to read (Italian): http://mariodomina.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/lezione-spinozista-8-sub-specie-aeternitatis/ [Blog di riflessione, critica e discussione filosofica a cura di Mario Domina]