Aesthetic Atheist

Hi. Remember these? They're called text-only posts. They used to be the norm here, but not lately. Ever since my parents found the blog I've felt I have to hold the cards close to my chest, so to speak. Well, fuck it. I think I'm going to start writing on here again. I just won't use my words.

In my workday internet research I came across the poet Wallace Stevens, who I never heard of (forsooth!) even though he was one of Harold Bloom's top five twentieth century American poets.

Well, he's an atheist that still thinks there is something to the serenity humanity used to feel in worship and contemplation of gods. To those religious people that wonder how one can be atheist (I wonder how one cannot be) because there is no mystery, no spiritiuality, no faith and no hope (being good is only to get rewarded later with heaven etc.) There are all those things in me too, but they aren't based on magic, rather, art and aesthetic. Or sex, I forget.

On with the poem - by the way, I already posted this on MySpace at work, so to you person reading it twice: suck it!

Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness

A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

-Wallace Stevens