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The Ineffable
Posted: 22 April 2003
Word Count: 58
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God is dead. God is.
Existence precedes essence.
I am God,
Creator of my own destiny.
Brilliant luminescence. Brilliance.
Darkness to light,
Dusk to dawn. Enlightenment.
I am God. I am.
Faint flicker of a fleeting flame.
Nurture, nurture. Nature.
Extinguished. Everlasting darkness...
God is dead. God is. God.
I am God. I am. I.
I am God,
Creator of my own destiny.
Flower waiting to bloom,
Beauty borne of hope.
A waking dream, half-remembered.
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Comments by other Members
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 Anna Reynolds at 13:57 on 25 April 2003
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I like the strange, dislocated feel of this... and the last line makes me think of Keats, Ode to Melancholy or one of those poems..
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 James Graham at 21:42 on 25 April 2003
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This is intriguing. The first line was enough to have me printing the poem out. I'll get back to you.
James.
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James Graham at 16:10 on 27 April 2003
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I find this poem quite elusive, which is maybe a pretentious way of saying I don't quite understand it. It does leave an impression of being, not a statement of long-held belief, but an expression of a transient mental experience. Something like Keats's 'Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty', something that seems in the moment to be a universal truth. I also get the impression that the repeated 'God is dead' and variations are reassertions of a thought that is progressively, as the poem goes on, losing its conviction. These variations are very striking. 'God is dead' is Nietzsche's famous saying, meaning (I think) that humankind no longer has a need for the idea of God. 'God is' then makes us ask, 'In what sense?' and maybe answer, 'In us' - meaning created by the collective imagination and still as meaningful as any other human creation. Then 'God', just the word without a verb, as if to say it's difficult even to make a statement about God, it's a subject without predicate, as 'I' seems also to be in the next line. I seem to think the poem begins with the subtext 'Aha! The meaning of life! I've got it now!' and then gradually changes to 'Ah well, it's not as simple as that'. The last line is intriguing - for me, the 'waking dream' could be Nietzschean, suggesting humanity's myth-making and god-creating capacity which has faded with the dawn of enlightenment; or it could refer to the individual life, one's own memory and past. Well, that's about as far as I can go, and it may be nothing like your own understanding of the poem. It would be interesting to have your own commentary on the poem.
James
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 Adam at 19:26 on 27 April 2003
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James,
You seem to have totally understood this piece. The poem is an attempted metaphysical expression of the meaning of life, the nature of our transient existence, 'the ineffable' of the poem's title. Words are simply too crude, too ambivalent. It explores what it means to be human, to be subject to the bittersweet existence inflicted on man. 'What a piece of work is man' - Hamlet. I'm glad you liked it, and enjoyed reading your useful comments. Thank you very much.
Regards,
Adam
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James Graham at 11:35 on 02 May 2003
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I thought I wasn't getting it, but now I think maybe I was! This poem has a lot of strength, i.e. a lot of meaning going on below its surface. As Anna says, there's a strangeness and sense of dislocation about it, which I think any imaginative reader would tune into.
James.
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