A story about myself I’ve often retold was provided by my father. He recalled the time when he heard a six-year-old voice pipe up from the backseat of the car. The middle sister of three asked the question: “Daddy, where do they get the things to make the things to make the things to make the things….?” At that moment, says my dad, “I knew I had a philosopher on my hands.” Indeed. Getting down to causes might be considered the essential issue of philosophy, beginning with Thales in c. 580 BCE. (see note)
Even so, it never occurred to me to study philosophy as such until my senior year of college. Among my friends at the Wesley Foundation (Methodist hangout) was a coterie of older girls endlessly arguing about things like a priori and a posteriori. I admired them a great deal, and understood them not at all. So, with a block of hours to spend on anything, I signed up for Intro to Philosophy. I might have been seriously risking my grade point average.
The course was taught by Professor Sevin Kunt, a petite woman of Indian heritage who had the gift of making things clear. I’d study the assignment from Herodotus or Hegel or whomever, entirely befuddled, until, in class, she announced, “Let me help you make the distinctions.” And she did. Ideas clicked into place, at least for a time. Dr. Kunt once allowed that she fell in love with her husband-to-be when he said, oh so romantically, “I worship the ground on which you make distinctions.” He was right about that. In addition to helping me learn how to think, the professor won my forever gratitude when she returned my final paper. It was, I noticed in later years, a rather naïve defense of my Christian theology at the time. Dr. Kunt had nothing to say about the particulars of my belief, only this: You have answered the essential philosophical questions. She gave me an A.
Early in life, with this undercurrent of philosophical speculation, I began to express my thoughts and ideas in the form of poetry. I didn’t “intend” to be a poet. That’s just the way it came out. I liked some poets, and some poetry, and I discovered that my teachers did, too. Good for brownie points. (eg. “Why I Daydreamed in History Class” dedicated to Mrs. Vann at Greenville High School.) A poem could be short. Rhyme and meter were fun. I wasn’t good at making up stories, but I was good at looking around at nature, for example, and putting two and two together to make infinity, as in metaphor and other imagery.
My poems that survive in my books and in my portfolio are about telling the truth: This is what I saw. This is what it felt like. What does it mean? In the end, the meaning is left up to the reader.
Turns out that simply seeing things and speaking the truth is also what prophets do. Poems from early in my writing life continue to speak, if only to me, in new ways. They are truthful and meaningful in ways I did not necessarily appreciate or anticipate at the time I wrote them. They are timeless as documents of experience and insight. That is what could be called a prophetic voice.
I wrote poems as they came to me, often in a rush of “inspiration.” In fact, after decades of work as a poet, I think the poems that come “in a rush” are my best. “A rush” also describes the way I end up with blog posts like this. The impulse to say something comes to me so strongly that I can’t get on with anything else until I write it down. I think it’s a form of addiction: the urge, the high, the relief of writing.
Call it what you will, the voice of the universe sometimes speaks to me. I don’t decide what or when. I merely transmit it as best I can. Over a lifetime, I’ve collected the tools—words, grammar, history, experiences—and I use them to make the transmission as clear and truthful as I can. Philosopher, poet, prophet. Same thing. I was born that way.
As to the original question that came out of my six-year-old mouth: I might have grown up to be a physicist had my dear old dad (or anyone) been able to make me love math.
Note: My go-to book for understanding Western philosophy is my 1988 copy of Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter by Donald Palmer, teacher and humorous illustrator. You can still find it in updated editions. Recommended.
These and other colorful details dress up the festivities we Christians play out year after year. The Nativity Story collects several different versions of what may or may not have actually happened into one seamless pageant. It brings to children, and to childlike hearts, a sense of wonder and joy.
Recent Comments