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AFTERWORD

Gentle Reader,

What you’ll find below is an upside-down book of sorts: a journal of my nearly nightly musings from January 2008 till now, in reverse order.

Most of what I write here is verse in traditional rhymed iambic pentameters, old fashioned in form but contemporary in topics and idiom. It asks to be read aloud so that the effects of rhyme and meter may be felt.

Sometimes I write brief prose essays, but even my verses are essays, or attempts, pursuing a line of thought to some conclusion, though more sonorously than those in prose: discursive verses, I call them.

In either case, you’re the reader over my shoulder as I write, which makes my writing different than when I have no audience in mind but only a vague urge to express. So I thank you for whatever attention you give my words and thoughts and feelings because you might so easily attend to something else, and you soon will.

To beguile you to linger longer, though, I’ve coupled each of my compositions with a photo I’ve taken or borrowed, which sometimes corresponds with my words of that day.

Thank you for visiting here. I hope you enjoy your stay and are moved to come back soon.

—Alan Nordstrom

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A ROLLINS PLAN PROGRAM PROPOSAL: THE HUMAN FRONTIER

Prologue

What a wondrous time it is to be traveling aboard Spaceship Earth, otherwise known as the Spaceship Human Enterprise! How amazing and exciting to be a member of our enterprising human species just as we are breaking free of so many previous constraints of ignorance and inability keeping us both Earthbound and mindbound, except in our venturesome imaginations.

In only my lifetime have we propelled ourselves off our planet and traveled to our moon, and then shot robot probes to Mars and detective instruments to the far reaches of our galaxy, delving as deep as to the origins of this universe itself.

Then, even on Earth, many of us have become globetrotters, or rather globedashers, while millions more have learned to negotiate the World Wide Web of nano-communications, zipping around networks of information superhighways nearly instantaneously.

Wow! Astounding! And think what’s next: what new potentials of personal and scientific and technological development lie just ahead to be revealed and employed for extending the reach of our achievements all along the human frontier.

Now is the time of adventure, exploration and advancement that our earliest visionary scientists like Francis Bacon could barely dream of. Although our hugely enhanced powers make this the most exciting time to be alive, they also make it the most perilous (aside from periods of natural cataclysms caused by asteroids, volcanoes or pandemics).

Our present challenge as a species, whom we’ve named hopefully Homo sapiens, is to grow more sapient and sane—and quickly—so we might wisely use our potent knowledge and our ever-extending capabilities to the benefit of the amazing endeavor we now realize we’re bound upon, as our tenuous human enterprise traverses space and time toward infinity and eternity.

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MOVING ON

Fellow named Ansel called the other day
from Forest Lawn in Buffalo to say
some cemetery plots had just become
available, and since that’s where I‘m from,
I just might like to come back home to rest
near where my parents lie in urn and chest,
and since cremation’s now the common style,
the trip is cheap. I couldn’t help but smile.

He was, as you’d expect, solicitous,
his manner sober and lugubrious,
yet somehow comforting, until I thought
just how do cemetery plots once bought
“become available?” Have they moved on
who once lay there, and where now have they gone?

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MIND YOUR MIND

An Academic Homily

What kind of house have you made for your mind to live in? How is it arranged, appointed, and furnished?

You do as much for your bodily needs—why not for your mind’s needs?

If, as they say, your mind is a terrible thing to waste, then is it not lamentable to let it languish in poverty of circumstance, unprovided for in whatever helps it to grow, develop and function optimally?

What, then, does your mind need to be well accommodated in a place where it will thrive?

First, your mind needs to be recognized and valued. Yes, you have a mind. Yes, it can grow stronger, keener, and more capable. And that’s all to the good, because to be mindful rather than mindless helps you survive at the least, and live wisely at the best.

To be strong minded rather than weak minded is an obvious advantage in a world of competition for resources, just as it is to be mentally disciplined instead of absent minded.

What is education intended for most fundamentally but to shape and shape up your mind, to add new rooms to what should become your mental mansion: a room for contemplating, a room for imagining, a room for writing, another for calculating, for designing, for building, for enjoying (such pleasures as music, dance, art, literature), and rooms for congregating with like-minded and other-minded folks.

The point is that you don’t study subjects for their own sakes, but for how those subjects affect you subjectively, how they alter your mentality, reshape your mind. Your educational job is to cultivate your mind. Keep your eye not on your report card or your transcript but on your thought processes and on the well-functioning of your brain.

No brain, no gain.

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JUSTICE VS. MERCY

The dilemma of justice vs. mercy is a classic instance of the two-truth paradox found so prominently in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. While it is true that the enforcement of just laws maintains orderly rule and decorum in a civil society, it is also true that rigorous strictures and harsh constraints unfeelingly applied ignore our natural human fallibility, which pleads guilty yet begs pardon and forgiveness.

Mercy, then, seeks not to supplant justice but to qualify, leaven, or season stringent enforcement of the law. Such equilibrium, however, is difficult to maintain, for while justice overdone is rigor, so mercy overdone is permissiveness: severity and lenity represent the dark sides of each virtue to be avoided. The human capacity to avoid either extreme would define “wisdom.”

Just such wisdom appears be the quest of both Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure and Portia in The Merchant of Venice, both of whom prevail in their respective plays by demonstrating the principle of generous clemency; yet neither character avoids criticism, the one for pardoning Vienna’s malefactors too prodigally, and the other for executing an overly ‘severe mercy’ on Shylock.

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ON ESCHEWING TEENSPEAK IN COLLEGE

In college you are urged to learn a larger language than Teenspeak. There you are introduced to the idiom of the intellect and the discourse of scholarship. While your language in college remains English, the collegiate dialect is a richer, subtler, and more complex contrivance of diction, syntax and rhetoric. Collegiate discourse speaks more from the head than the heart, and hardly at all from the gut; whereas Teenspeak is the reverse: gut, heart, and then, like, I mean, you know, head.

To a teen, the collegiate idiom may at first seem baffling, stodgy, and off-putting; yet it needs to be acquired to succeed, as much as learning French would be needed to earn a degree from the Sorbonne. Since to write Collegiate is easier than to speak it, writing should come first as the more deliberate, cautious and correctible way to proceed. Then, after you’ve grown more accustomed to the grander vocabulary and more complex linguistic configurations, you’ll find those locutions slipping into your speech, at least in the classroom, if not in the cafeteria or down by the pool.

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UNFREE VERSE

Why is it that the music’s gone from verse,
As if that gives it some new liberty?
I think it, rather, a dismaying curse
Dispelling magic from our poetry.

In former days a verse was to be sung,
Not vocalized in boring monotone,
But tripped off lightly from a trilling tongue
And then reverberated to the bone.

Yet more than mere sonority is lost
When poems leave their meters and their rhymes:
Intention and invention pay the cost
If sound with sudden sense no longer chimes.

Such freedom is instead imprisonment,
While liberating form is heaven sent.

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