The Naked and the Nude by Robert Graves
left: Julius Stewart,
The Glade, 1900.
Detroit Institute of Art
"A way of being in the world": does that phrase ring for you? Viggy, The Philosophy Merchant, tells me it's common, tosses it off the way he might say, "Your shoes are brown." However, I think it speaks, or implies, volumes. It resonates. It reeks, and it perfumes.
What material object, including the material human, does not have a way of being in the world? The banana? The typewriter? The blind grandmother with her blanket and her rocker?
In this time of holiday shopping, are you not picking out a present for Logan because of her/his way of being in the world? If he loves rap, will you give him The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Because you're a provocateur? Is that your way of being in the world?
Based on his poem, "Don't Let That Horse," how would you describe Lawrence Ferlinghetti's way of being in the world?
And here again is Robert Graves' "The Naked and the Nude," this time black print on white background for easier reading, a more accomodating way for it to be in the world. (So even if you saw it here December 2, please give it another chance).
Of course that raises the question (by the way, it does not "beg" the question! Make them stop saying that! What is their way of being in the world, which permits or causes them such endless parroting? What is a parrot's way of being in the world?) . . . .
I was going to say, before you interrupted, "Whom and what do you know that goes naked in the world, and who or what goes nude?"
I've recently seen the (compelling!) movies "Inside Job," about the recent Wall Street fiasco, and "Fair Game," about Victoria Plame and Joe Wilson's plight in the early months of the second U.S. invasion of Iraq (2001 - 2003). What could be a more classic and obvious case of nudity than politics, all that subterfuge, double-speak, and sociopathy, even when it comes to the lives and deaths of other people? Isn't it true that we like to see such fruit exposed in order to convert the nude to the naked?
Well, that ought to keep you off the streets for a day or two. I wonder if I'll ever let go of the topic, "way of being in the world." I guess I'm still teething on the Slim Jim of Life.
Don’t Let That Horse ... by Lawrence Ferlinghetti : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
The Naked and the Nude by Robert Graves
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