True To Real
“Wait a minute!
Feeling is what saved poor wretched reason right back there at the start!
Yes! We have a little caveat for you sleeping dogmas
While ever you lie in your rant of cant, husk of elbows and egos
We still tend the fires of mythological desires.
Dead cold hand of reason’s had it’s season
Fearful of the fires of mythological desires
Custodians of logic fuddled masses to oblivion
Circumcised the imagination of it’s young with nothin’-buttery reductionist rhetoric
All appetite for life was lost in a mean-spirited sulk against noise-colour-tang
Middle-aged imam-bishop-teacher-scientist-guru-lama in his pyjama gobbled up my panorama.
Be that as it may, beware the lies of angry peacock-poets spin-doctored blind by a thousand years of rage.”
I already knew…
You preachers of feeling aren’t helping me when you talk it up.
You talk as if mind and fact were all to blame
As if the fact that I cannot feel what I know to be a fact must make it a lie!
As if to verify that snow is white, I must now feel that snow is white
As if what I have seen in the light I must now feel in the dark
But you just wanna cheat and make the fact whatever you feel.
But here’s a fact: true to real is only done when you put the money with the mouth
And what faithful feeling ever voted for her suicide?
So are you mad?
If this be a quest of deadly peril—who would ever chance it on a guess?
Or let fine feelings be the judge of what lies beyond a dark decisional-door.
So leave the child at home and take a hardy gang
To search the cold, the hard, and find the gold
And trust and dive and take the action
Trust and dive and take the action.
But if, as you say, I must allow the veto to the shivering tendrils of the heart
Must make myself feel as if I believe
Must play a game of make-believe…
Then the fact must now be that the feeling is greater than the fact.
But you give me a speck of fact any day, place it on the scales and weigh it against a ton of imagination and fine feelings
Watch it sink a ship, ruin a nation, wreck a marriage
Float a ship, build a nation, save a marriage.
“This gonna be a long story or what?
Personal and hot or just another man on a screen
And me sittin’ here, suckin’ the glass teat of an i-Pod dream?”
Personal man: always personal
See you talk as if black or white, fact or fiction
Is what started the friction of stonins’ and bombins’
Cuttins’ and Karmas, Klansmen in pyjamas.
But you need to pull your head out of it’s little peace full of bliss.
If this be a quest of deadly peril
Who would ever chance it on a vote
And let reality be the most popular goat!
So don’t talk to me about verifiable, falsifiable, justifiable
Love that shit man/love it!
Follow the evidence all the way out
Til your mind’s convinced beyond reasonable doubt.
If it ain’t, relax man, have a coffee and a smoke—the jury’s still out.
Me? I was taken on a melancholy tour of a blood stained killing tree/dark hilly calvary
By that grim and faithful gang of three: logic, reason and bloody honesty
And there ‘my hosanna was born of a furnace of doubt.’*
And there in that garden of black
The faithful three who’d served him well in carpentry
Who’d shown him that the feeling of straight could never be a substitute
For the flat, cold voice of fact
Whose dim little shed made him learn to doubt the guess
And to trust instead a wooden, hard, straight-edged piece of sanity.
Paved the way for him to walk the hill for you and me
Not by the blind hysteria—nor the by the stoic of the heroic
But by that still small voice that says to the Father
‘If it be your will let this cup pass’
To the soldier,’I thirst’
To the friend, ‘Behold your mother’
To the crowd, ‘Father forgive them’
To the dying thief, ‘You will be with me in paradise.’
“See!
Feeling is what saved poor wretched reason right back there at the start!
Yes—we have a little caveat for you sleeping dogmas
While ever you lie in your rant of cant, husk of elbows and egos
We still tend the fires of mythological desires.”
Peter Volkofsky – 2010
