Aliens
May 8, 2009
By: Sam Rocha
Aliens come and go,
In time and space they wander.
Aliens say hello,
Yet too much time they squander.
For by the time of greeting,
The alien is no more.
The alien face is fleeting,
A sandcastle on the shore.
And while the alien wishes,
For just a while longer.
It is washed like soiled dishes,
Before it grows any stronger.
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Was this supposed to be some sort of sad commentary on illegal immigration?
“Was this supposed to be some sort of sad commentary on illegal immigration?”
What do you mean by that, exactly? Your tone (as I read it) suggests a rather coarse hermeneutic.
By way of interpretation, this poem means lots of different things to me when I read it, but when I wrote it I was mostly thinking about the inevitable consumption of the “other” in personal relations.
Why is there “an inevitable consumption of the “other” in personal relations”? And, if so, is there not a means to counteract that experience, restoring the other to his/her supposedly inviolable dignity?
Mark: Hard question. I don’t really know but, in hope, I want to think you are right.
Mark: At the same time, there is nothing “sad” about this poem to me. At least not necessarily. The constitution of the self is dynamic, as I see it, and it requires a constant erasure in relations. This is what I take “death to self” to mean in the process of conversion.
I don’t think we, with a Catholic anthropology and worldview can claim that it is inevitable that the other be consumed.
A materialistic/physicalistic perspective on fallen man and how he treats the other may lead us to think that. Reflecting on my own life may think to think similarly. But redeemed man, living in the life of grace can certainly rise out of this inevitable consumption and instead offer himself as a gift.
Certainly many of the saints can be said to have lived thusly?
A poem somewhat related to the thread topic, by Gerald Manley Hopkins
The Lantern out of Doors
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.
Now, I don’t know what “a Catholic anthropology and worldview” means, exactly, and doubt that it can have much epistemological certainty, but that is all beside the point.
I would like to leave my poem a bit open-ended—it would be too ironic to kill it with a monolithic interpretation. But that doesn’t mean you can make of it what you like (even though you can to some extent).
In the interest of charity here are some of the many themes that come to mind when I wrote and read this poem: The death of God, the death of the Author, identity, the human person, memory, perception, education, immigration, Foucault, Derrida, James, and eros… and more.
Mark: Thanks for that, it is wonderful.
Rhyming words is a cute trick,
And writing poems, therapeutic;
But aside from your mother,
The response of another
May be rough, or even hermeneutic.
Sam,
I can see how the poem describes phenomena such as dealings with people in situations in which they are conventionally ‘owed’ at most (and barely) polite formalities.
Anybody who has ever worked in retail, for example, can attest to how hard it is to get treated as a human being in such a role. A genuine “hello” to a customer can evince indifference, sometimes impoliteness and even a near scandal once in every great while.
David: Touche!