| The Poetry of Richard Sansom Published by The British Sansom Society | |
 
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| Search Lights I didn't know I had an ego, regardless of what the books say, until something broke through the back room, something large and terrifying, that held me fixed, and made me smaller, and smaller, until I saw the world as huge. That little self was the center I had lived off of for all those years, and suddenly it felt wan and thin like a plant that had been grown with no light. This is when one gets to know themselves whether or not one wishes to know themselves. No, I have not reached the edge of a vegetable gloom that entirely overcomes my human honor, nor is it a confession I make in a dark and empty room, to assuage another self I may possess - or think I do. Out in the light, all the faces I failed to understand are still there, drifting in the haze. I cannot go back now and speak lovingly to them, and decide that I am one of them, since I am not. We cannot germinate again, especially once we have opened the seed pod and witnessed its organization. I wish that we could become our own salvation like the Buddha says. He makes it sound so simple. But remember, the Lotus is rooted in the muck of the river bottom, and is a complex thing, however beautiful it may be on the surface. I somehow take refuge in this fact, and try to see the white petals opening up as a metaphor that I can hold dear, regardless of where my feet are planted. I know, I know, time will tread on this moment like it treads on all such moments and that will be that. But that won't be that. Our transformations, however gilded or covered over with the membranes of deceit, fear and apathy, love and hate and time, push us ever into regions which we will try hard to fill with clear waters and denouements. I have decided that the little person hidden in the seed is part tyrant, and part primal liquid that is forever trapped in the struggle we call thinking. Nietzsche said all of this is "beyond good and evil" and hence we are free to break away and soar from each moment, as we choose, and rise over our past and future like search lights. | |
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