Ideas Are As Real As Rocks
ERIC CHAET
(originally posted at 100 So-Called Poems)
Ideas are as real as rocks
rocks in pastures or embedded among others
on the sides of mountains, or sliding down them
or flying thru the air—
or like cars parked or commuting
or chasing or chased in daylight or in dark—
but ideas are harder to visualize & recall
I don’t know why it’s so—
they start to morph & metamorphose
from the moment they’re conceived
unless consciously confronted & contained—
they’d dissolve & evanesce
or grow like cancer or tyrants’ ambitions—
& become religions, say, or theories
of economics, government, literature—
love of ideas is dangerous as love of money—
money’s an idea, too—
people turn from worshiping
the righteous, kind creator in the sky
to The Golden Calf, the Almighty Dollar
marketing & hustling & closing the sale—
ideals are exponential, heroic ideas
seeds of seeds
of empires & of the undoing of empires—
an ideal self
is a goal toward which we focus our efforts
to realize, to actualize the selves we hope to be
or the deluded egos we imagine we already are
& punish anyone who won’t behave as tho it’s so
driving off whoever’d pity & assist our surviving
& becoming who we insist we already are—
or else we cherish the ideal
but know it for what it is—
it’s hard enough navigating
among so many ruled by ideas
they never turn & look into the eyes of.
SEE ALSO
Eric Chaet, born Chicago, 1945, South Side, beaten, denigrated, sinking, swimming—servant of a refractory nation and species, sweating laborer in factories and warehouses, wearing jacket and tie in offices and classrooms—”so-called poems” published and posted around the world, sporadically, for decades—author of People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (read a review) and How To Change the World Forever For Better—perpetual polymath student, synthesizer of specialists’ insights and methods, solo consultant regarding space exploration and accidents involving obsolete industrial machinery—album of songs Solid and Sound—hitchhiked back and forth between the Pacific and Atlantic, sleeping out for years and subsisting on water and sunflower seeds, stapling a series of 1500 posters he made to utility poles, inciting whoever saw them to seize the responsibility for their own lives—governing without coalition or means of or inclination to coerce or confiscate, from below, approximately invisible.
[header photo from Annie Besant’s Thought Forms, courtesy of Gutenberg.org]
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