Completeness— At West End Gallery
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, — it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
Below is a poem from the late Nobel Prize-winning Polish poetess Wislawa Szymborska (1923–2012) called Possibilities. I featured it here back in 2015 but it struck my fancy this morning and I thought I’d share it again and maybe add a bit to the original blogpost. It is basically a laundry list of her personal preferences. Some are small and some significant but all contribute mightily to her wholeness as a person. We are all the totality of our own laundry lists of preferences that define our character and personality just as our DNA determines our physical characteristics.
It’s a simple yet thought-provokingly complex poem that leave me wondering about my own preferences, my own possibilities. What are those small things that give you shape, make you who you are? Do we rely solely on these preferences in making the choices that we face in this life? Or do we sometimes make choices that do not align with our own preferences?
There are a lot of Symborska’s preferences that strike a chord with me. For instance: I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. That certainly has been my preference for most of my conscious life.
Then there’s: I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. Like writing poetry, painting can often seem like an absurd thing to do. I often find myself asking why I am alone in the woods smearing paint on surfaces. Is there a purpose or meaning in it?
But I have known the other side of that coin, living a life where I wasn’t painting, and that existence was far more absurd for me. Absurd to an unsustainable degree.
And that final line says it all: I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being. We may never know whether there is a reason for our being but that should not take away from the life we have here.
If this is all we get, live by the possibility of your own preferences and not those of any other.
Live as you are. As you want to be.
You might not agree with some of her preferences. That’s okay– they’re not yours to determine. She is simply giving us a loose outline of her individual nature, her humanity. And there’s poetry in that for any of us.
I am also including a song which was a favorite of Symborska, who requested that the version below from Ella Fitzgerald be played at her funeral. The song is Black Coffee and since being written in 1948 by Sonny Burke it has been covered by some of the great vocalists of our times– Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, k.d. lang and so forth. You could pick any as your preference and they are all special. It’s that kind of song. But this version from the great and grand Ella Fitzgerald is extra special.
POSSIBILITIES
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.
–Wislawa Szymborska
Redtree Times 