Twelve Sonnets: A Defense of Spirit is a prosimetrum, a collection of poems alternating with counterpoint prose that connects the poems and amplifies their content. The subject matter is Nature, Physics, Spirit, Consciousness, and romantic love. The book argues that the idea that spirit does not exist is a self-contradiction, argues that modern Physics proves that the Universe is not a machine, and illustrates spirit in action both in Nature and within our own being.
Additional description and excerpts are available at EverushBooks.
Excerpts
My viewpoint was forever changed when I read Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Barfield points out that science, as a discipline, has a very specific and limited role: to identify those aspects of Nature that can be represented as mechanism... To say nature is a machine and nothing more is akin to molding a golden calf and saying "This is God." It's idolatry.
The books! O, shining books I'd write for you:
of courtship, wedding, children, nature's peace--
taut words creating light without surcease,
that every moment soul's deep core renew!
Sad form: cross centuries deep you've watched and pined
as logic's triumph warped the Western mind.
Today we struggle to experience the spirit that's in Nature because the universe-as-mechanism logic in our minds influences the perceptual images that are formed within us. It's as though our modern scientific thinking is a lens that, like Sylvia Plath's bell jar, distorts our vision of the true Nature that surrounds us, filters away its life.
Two stately elders grace our spare expanse;
their branchlets, twined, caress and sway, impelled
by summer's aether: splendrous pantheon!
Just so, our naked souls embrace and dance
in light that breathes within: our spirits meld!
Spirit's validity has been reborn:
Physics has proven life unmeasurable--
Newton's machine lies slain. And love's alive!
Manipulating macroscopic things,
controlling magnets, electricity,
induced a smug presumption: that we know.
Beneath the data, Nature's secret sings!
But, hidden in the quanta, Nature teems,
not bound by any human formula,
begetting life with smiling reticence.
Nature cloaks itself in a kind of mist when we attempt to penetrate its full reality with modern logic's rigid gaze. What's on the other side we cannot know--except to know that it's somehow intimately related to our own being, our own reality.
You shun yourself, child, when you castigate
the past--the book of human memory,
a font of sight for those who would be taught.
Words can be conceived as being little containers of spirit that have evolved across the ages. True speech is spirit revealed. Lies are spirit (and life) destroyed.
Our Winter now approaches, precipice
we didn't foresee. Our legacy? A squall
that confiscates our children's wherewithal!
Still, as we die, love, let's embrace, and kiss.
When midnight comes, our lives and limbs embrace--
Harmonious handfasting--our souls enlace!
