The title of her latest posted poem is a play of the old metaphor “food for thought,” and a back handed tribute to French philosopher Rene Descartes, who is perhaps best known for his maxim, “Cogito, Ergo, Sum,” (I think there for I am) – one of the most controversial claims in philosophic history. Many more modern philosophers tend to rephrase it as “I doubt, therefore I am,” meaning if you are consciousness enough to doubt, you have consciousness Still, others in the age of AI believe it is possible to have thought without existence. Many accept that our existence is the only absolute truth, and that doubt is a firm foundation for knowledge.
In this poem, she moves further away from the idea she expressed only a few weeks ago when she talked about lulls in her life, possibly generated by the increase doubt about where her life is headed.
She has returned to the hamster wheel in her head and the parade of “manic ideas” spinning and knocking around in her brain, bashing against the barrier “between my mind and the tips of my fingers, the roof of my mouth.”
Ideas she can’t quite get out, therefore, she is unrewarded, ideas that appear to make sense in her thinking, but which she can’t fully express, ideas endlessly buzzing as she becomes numb.
As with some of her other poems, the speaker is someone trying to understand the inner mysterious process, explain it from the inside out – a logic of a being who by using Descartes as a reference once more places herself at the top of the evolutionary heap, rejecting those limitations of older philosophers for the potential of absolute freedom.
She seems to be searching for some new direction and, like a bee inside a jar, ideas buzz and spin and knock against the barrier that keeps these things from materializing, leaving the tips of her fingers numb as they hover over her computer keyboard, or she can’t even articulate verbally. So many ideas, so many potential directions.
An so she concludes from all these ideas that if she exists, she must be ten different people, or possibly crazy.
This comes at a time when she is looking for a new career. Her life has lived up to the old nursery rime about being everything except maybe a tinker. She’s been a singer, a teacher, a writer, a chef, even a horse back riding instructor and needs to focus on what she might become next, semi-trapped in a political circus amongst a pack of wolves, who would use her, but bring her no closer to becoming someone of significance.
This follows her previous poem about her need to sell herself in order to find her place among the greats and near greats, to convince someone to take a chance on her, to give her an opportunity to prove herself.
Where do you start?
She clearly has a lot of ideas, but no idea of how to express them in a meaningful way, driving herself crazy. After all of her history, she’s already been ten different people, ten different career paths, and for all that experience, she seems not to know how to take the next step.
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