Where the mind is free
Encountering difficulties is the most humbling
And inspiring experience on planet earth.
I have known hunger and thirst,
Lived in limited spaces,
Drowned in the waters of indifference,
With not a single grain of compassion.
I never dramatized poverty.
Poverty is dramatized by fools, says J.K
Fowler.
Because I treated my rags with pride,
God gave me the riches
Because He knew I would treat them with
humility.
I sit not marveling at my riches,
I focus on the diseases and disorders
Of this world where life is a cacophony.
With my pen, incredibly fortunate to have one,
I raise my voice on behalf
Of those who have no voice.
I arouse the thinking mind of man
Helping them make that liberating discovery
Where intellectual finesse
Rises to the surface.
Because we think together,
We behave like sheep.
If we thought separately,
We would have walked like lions,
Cautious, commanding respect,
Moving with pride and sure of ourselves
In any environmental condition.
We would have that clear-sighted earnestness
Powerful enough to enlighten
Our lucid and luminous insights
And all our weaknesses
Would fall like Autumn leaves.
Albert Camus, in the depth of Winter,
Finally learned that within him
There is an invincible Summer.
O man! save and shape your mind,
Liberate it from the chains of slavery,
Slaves of the race of power and prestige,
Slaves of fake ideologies and philosophies,
Slaves of living and thinking styles,
Slaves of standards and bench markings,
Slaves of others, the world as a whole.
Free yourself from the traps
Of the gloomy world.
Be your own true self,
Detached from those stuffs
That pull you down to the status
Of the inferior man.
Rise up and touch the sky
Where the mind is free.
In 2011 J. K. Fowler founded Nomadic Press, a literary non-profit organization with various sites across the US (Oakland, California; Des Moines, Iowa; Brooklyn, New York). “The agency of the author pre-exists the publisher,” he maintains.
ReplyDeleteAlbert Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature at 44 in 1957, 3 years before his death. In his novels, reviews, articles, essays, and speeches he made important contributions to a wide range of issues in moral philosophy. He began his literary career as a political journalist and as an actor, director, and playwright in his native Algérie. In France he developed the philosophical concept of the Absurd, a metaphysical tension or opposition that results from the presence of human consciousness (and its demand for order and meaning in life) in the face of the “silence of the universe,” which is essentially meaningless and indifferent. “The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together … it is the only bond uniting them.” He posited 3 responses: suicide (which he rejected as a cowardly repudiation of life), a positing of some transcendent existence beyond (which he also rejected as "philosophical suicide"), and to accept existence as it is: Life can "be lived all the better if it has no meaning." Paradoxically, he combined this with an insistence on Revolt, an attitude of heroic defiance against any perceived unfairness, oppression, or indignity in the human condition “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which ... are common to ... all men.” He asserted that an “analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist” and asked rhetorically, “Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in the self worth preserving?”