Van Gogh, Cottage and Woman with Goat, 1885.The best kind of Sunday Goat is the goat that speaks for itself. Thus, I offer you this poem, without comment, for your Sunday ruminations. It is by Aaron Fogel, one of our own here at Boston University.
The Goat
by Aaron Fogel
If you are a goat, do you believe
What people tell you about
Goats, and eat
Tin cans?
There’s no goat that foolish.
Or is there?
The goat of the universe believed
What people told him about universes
And came into existence.
Bang! How naive can you get?
Even the scapegoat is not as naive
As (God help him) the universe that
Agreed to exist.
A word to the wise: Don’t eat tin cans.
Don’t listen. Don’t exist.
4 comments:
No explanation? I just read that poem and was completely confused. Tin cans, goats, universes...I'm not seeing the connection here. What is it you folks really do over at BU? And I thought Emerson was weird. I would have expected you to speak on this poem a little more. Now I'm frustrated with curiousity. Who is this Aaron Fogel and what is it he really thinks about goats?
Allow the Bhagavad Gita to explain:
The man whom desires enter
as rivers flow into the sea,
filled yet always unmoving--
that man finds perfect peace.
Abandoning all desires,
acting without craving, free
from all thoughts of "I" and "mine,"
that man finds utter peace.
This is the divine state, Arjuna.
Absorbed in it, everywhere, always,
even at the moment of death,
he vanishes, into God's bliss.
(2.70-2.72)
In other words, above all, don't eat tin cans. Better yet, even: don't exist. As Kafka would have it: be infinitely small.
I should have added: be a good goat.
Maybe Kunitz can be helpful here as well. Of course, even if he's not, he's worth reciting:
Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don't take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it's time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I'm passing through a phase:
gradually I'm changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
Stanley Kunitz, "Passing Through"
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