[Newspoetry] Small Objections to Lakoff

[DL Emerick]

Don't think of an Elephant!

Well, framing is half of it.
But, if this were a debate,
you'd say state the affirmative,
but also overwhelm the negative.

You have to think of both sides,
because values will be weighed,
contrasted, compared, chosen.

He's half right on values --
you've got to show your own values
in an appealing, pleasing fashion,
so people who choose choose yours,
as closer to their own than not.

But, he's half wrong and blind,
when he calls politics a choice
of models, of a strict father
or of a nurturing parent,
because he casts both terms,
strict and nurturing,
into the mode of the past.

Values, I say otherwise,
have two faces,
one of which, like the moon,
is always hidden from us.

The Romans marked this fact
by Janus, who sees two sides,
one of the future to be,
one of the past that was.

And the Arts mark this fact
by tragedy and by comedy,
the prime modes of theater.

Love, you see, is missing --
hate comes from the past,
to destroy all future difference,
destroy any novelty or change,
any growth or learning,
any advance or improvement,
any laughter or loving.

Fear always allies with hate,
but unanchors it from particulars,
abstracts and universalizes it,
so we tremble before the unknown,
to decline idea of uncertainty
that the joy of the future has,
as a promise of the yet to be.

Democrats must have a dream,
not one that grows out of a past,
like the ones Jung traces out,
where man only dreams of the past.

What is missing is imagination,
which only happens in day-dreams,
and not at all in night-mares,
despite their vivid symbolics,
transforming past experience.

Imagination means wanting change,
not for a defined knowing why,
but for the sake of something new,
some new transformative renaissance,
and not for the sake of resurrection.

The idea of reason rests in the past,
the idea of joy lives for the fun of it.
Something of Nietzche says this,
in Apollonian vs Dionysian terms --

Against Weber's Spirit of Capitalism
we create the Body of Joyous Being.
This is no cynic like Zarathustra,
this is no alienated Stranger,
who can scarce say why he lives.

Joyous being lives in the future to be,
but not past the end(s) of his own life.