Poem
#31
the
whole soul
sees
what traps it
in
bloodshot eyes
squinting
behind lenses
in
glasses resting
on a
nose jutting
like
a crag
from
a face
and
wonders how
beyond
this trap
beyond
the length
width
and height
of
its fleshy clothes
it
can escape
when
it can
shed
its rotting body
and
float
on
the wind
like
a moth
aiming
for the energy
of
light
Dan explicates in a very vivid manner upon the human duality of spirit and substance, an incorporeal spirit imprisoned within a base corpus. Philosophers, and especially theologians, have long argued about this distinction (generally in much less effective language than Dan's), and have even proposed a trichotomy of body/spirit/soul. In her typically iconoclastic manner, Ayn Rand proposed her own paradigm amid her criticism of the usual mode, in the form of a radio speech by John Galt in the novel ATLAS SHRUGGED: "They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that ... his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth.... They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost.... Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason. he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations--he was left as a passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone."
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