Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade

This is a work of doing, of poesis, an enacting philosophy and theology through immediacy. It seeks to call to mind our original interrogative stance in Being, as did the Eleatic poem, the dialogic power of Plato, even Heidegger's indwelling. Should the philosopher want to recover philosophical wonder, then this is the road to be traveled; thought needs raw unmanageable experience. Ordered thought dies without the first eventful taste of time briefly eclipsing Being, and Being thrusting time back down into supplication. Without this confrontation, the very measure of humans as the horizon between time and eternity, closer to angels, but neither angel nor fully animal, our thinking becomes ideological and self-enclosed patterns of attrition. The ten cycles of poetry--God, Sex, Surrender, Death, Time, Art, Prayer, Love, Rosary, Suffering--intend a new kind of philosophical and theological thinking. Here, the poet begins from the unrepeatable courtship with the intimate new, with the blushed and chaste forever-firsts of existence as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in actus. In this new kind of philosophizing, love is the architect of the game. The poet has no chance of winning against the designer who can remove the pieces.