scruta

“To answer transcendent questions in language made for immanent knowledge is bound to lead to contradictions.”

– Schopenhauer, “The Indestructability of Being – 8”

I’m sitting here at the airport in Pudong in the business class lounge,

Watching the suited salary slingers kicking back with newspapers

Fresh fruit salad, fried noodles, coffee and worldly conversation,

And I’m thinking about myself.

I’m here with them, but I’m not here with them.

+++

There is a part of me across the sea now

With the land that gave me life

That strange working of processes

Of East Coast winds and cities carrying the names

Of long forgotten indigenous tongues

That saw the birth of idealistic paradigms of governance

In the ricochet of gunshells and the wild whoop of riches

Desire, desire in its basest, most productive form

That brought my mother and father together

That brought their parents to prosperity

That instilled in me this spirit to move West

So far West it became East.

+++

Were you to ask me who I am,

I would say that I’m neither here nor there

Neither in the East nor in the West

Neither businessman nor poet

Neither a gun-toting rube

Nor a saintly charity worker.

And yet, much to my consternation

I must assert I’m all of them.