GOETHE

JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE*
(1749-1832)
(A Biographical Poem)
*pron. Gerta

What is poetry without romance?
abstractions without people?
Philosophy without insight?
Courtesy without love?

So it was with Goethe:

Brilliance without admirers;
Humorless French theatrics
that mimicked Greek tragedies;
A Napoleonic perception that tragedy
only befalls royals and monarchs
thus keeping their subjects in awe;

Goethe’s poetry is filled with alchemy and darkness depicting conflict, dread, and tragedy.
Among his poems,
- “It is Good,” is a conflict among Adam, Eve, and God;
- “Dance of the Dead;”
- “To Luna,” where spirits wake at night;
- “The Fisherman,” who meets his fate by the lure of the siren’s bait.
All eventually leading to the infamous debate
between Mephistopheles and God
about the worth of man, who is always destroyed under God’s grand plan.

Thus began the dark struggles of FAUST!

He, a God-fearing man seduced by Mephistopheles,
by willing his soul to Hades.
But God’s heavenly restraints win out.
Despite Faust’s newly restored youth, wealth, scintillating sex, and fame,
after the fun…his soul is redeemed, and God wins the game.

A devoted author of Weimar Classicism
in a privileged German-Jewish heritage,
Goethe lived a life of tragic formulations
always haunted by a stern father’s aspirations.
Six languages by the age of eight,
philosophy, medicine, and law by eighteen,
self reliant and unconstrained he fell deathly ill,
returned home to struggle with health, love
family aspirations, and new social skills.
Transformed by this turmoil, his coherent vision
of good and bad produced a remarkable Dicter**
who influenced freund** Frederich Schiller
on his poems of death:

- The Secret Ring of Polycrates;
- Nadowession Death, and
- A Funeral Phantasy,
inspiring Schiller to write Tales of William
Tell, and Don Carlos, both as with Faust stories and operas of great poignancy.
Alas, Geothe’s wish to be buried alongside Schiller
who predeceased him.
A fitting end to this Greek tragedy, but that was verboten**.








** Poet, friend, forbidden, resp.

A HOROLOGY OF TIME

INTERNAL, EXTERNAL, ETERNAL:


Inaudible, noiseless, Time stays we go,
a tenseless presence of past, present, and future
yet measurable down to quantum Plank units
beholden to no single theory after
2,500-years of trying.
The essence of Time is physical,
continuous, and eternal
with no time for philosophizing
about metaphysical entropy.
Time is temporal, an accretion of
the past (present-day Time has a past),
and an absolutely predictable future
(present-day Time already has a future),
grounded by physical repetition
and preparation by Earth’s inhabitants;
human, animal, and vegetable.

Ontological and faultless are the metrics of eternal Time
People’s daily habits are predictable
Animal migrations are unchanged,
Seasonal crop growth is known
Axial rotations of celestial bodies are measurable
Flood and ebb Tides are chartered
Night and day is repetitive
all are physical elements of eternal Time.

So how is it we run out of Time?
The 2nd law of thermodynamics states,
“a closed system is not self-correcting,
and eventually dissolves into chaos.”
Time is a closed system perpetually working in tandem
with cosmic gravity to maintain the momentum
of an ever-expanding physical universe,
and a future identical to its present and past .
While we merely pass by.

What of time travel?
Is not Time accretive, tenseless, and akin to a
kinetic state?
Once spent it is left in the wake of an expanding universe
abolished by dark matter.
Traveling back is to deny its existence and traveling forward
must exceed the speed at which the whole universe expands—
the speed of light.
That too, is impossible…so enjoy the ride and stay put!