Re-Generate

There have been many turning points in my life, some that at the Time, seemed for the better, and others, at the Time, seemed for the worse. However, in whichever way we look at things, we end up where we are, for better or for worse. Looking back on the path can cause regret, or perhaps better remorse. To re-gret something is to literally go back to it, but, unless you have a flux capacitator, then at the moment, that’s not possible. However, one can have remorse, or literally a re-chewing of the Past or past events. But, like a stale piece of gum, you can only re-chew something so many times before you need to cast it away.

As I wrote previously, 2013 has begun with a series of challenges, and since that posting, they have continued, to the point that I literally was worn down physically and had to stop a while and look around about what was going on. It was a deep moment of re-flection, but ultimately neither of re-gret nor re-morse, but merely a deep, profoundly deep re-flection.

From that, in what sounds a bit farcical, but for me is very real, I realized also one of the reasons that I do like the BBC series “Doctor Who” so much. Doctor Who has endured over the years numerous re-generations, not re-births so to speak, but literally enters a new generation of Be-ing.

I have felt that many times in my life, and these past two weeks were yet another example for me of such a re-generation, one in which I emerged, almost quite literally with a “new face” as does the Doctor.

Although I have posted this poem once before elsewhere, that was another “Doctor” Fulton, and I keep coming back to this poem, because it speaks to me like no other, and I imagine that if I were to wish an epitaph on any memorial, I would request to have this poem engraved as such.

Again, for me, there is no poem greater in my Life than Wallace Stevens’s

“The Poem That Took the Place of A Mountain”

There it was, word for word,

The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens