Wednesday, December 16, 2009

gilded seahorses escape the carousel (10)


gilded seahorses escape the carousel

“I had only one answer to give: 'You're free, choose..."
Jean Paul Sartre

gilded, glitzy sea horses, man-wrought hippocampi,
escape the carousel wondering if anyone
can flee anywhere from themselves. mounted for seeming
millennia on prim posts, they grew disenchanted
with simulated galloping, the bevel gears &
offset cranks, the looped circus music & going round
& round, up & down on suspended circular floors.
they longed for general righteousness & happiness
in an indefinite future. if true freedom is
given, & the self is the goal, can even gilded
sea horses have invisible interior lives?
can they find themselves anywhere save within themselves?
is such their own quaint crisis of subjectivity?

©Joseph McNair;2009

8 comments:

  1. my favorite of the ten wonderful pieces. if gilded seahorses late of the carousel have invisible interior lives, there's hope for elves and people , too!

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  2. I agree on this ink block I do see two or more seahorses in this picture. The ink block to me shows the life of the ocean and how animals interact with each other.

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  3. I like this poem very much.
    I believe the main idea of this poem is that an innanimate object like a sea horse, who seemingly has no life to live but to constantly go "round and round, up and down", yearns to be free, then what can be said of us? As humans, we yearn to be free, but what is freedom? Sartre, an existentialist, would himself question what freedom truly is as well. Our hippocampus, in the shape of a sea horse (good use of vocabulary there), retains all our memories, those which influence us in our behavior. If some past memories are negative and fear lives within us because of these memories, are we free? Would then real freedom be forgetting all our memories and living each day as if it were our first, like the gilded seahorses on the carousel? That is the real question. I see the sea horses facing each other, as they would be, trapped on a carousel.

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  4. I enjoyed this poem. I do see the two seahorses facing each other and I see two more behind them, but very subtle. They left what they were so used to and tried to discover other ways of living. They tried finding righteousness and happiness and tried changing themselves. As the carousel continued moving, they continued wondering what was offered out there.

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  5. looking at the gilded seahorses escape the carousel, i see two people frustrated about the same thing and ready to kill each other alive, but when they come to contact there is a stronger and more dangerous force ready to defeat them, if they dare to touch.

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  6. This poem is showing the comparison of a seahorse to the human brain. It is showing how we all long for freedom and happiness. Our lives are like a carousel that keep going round and round like circles, yet we still want freedom along the way. I really liked this poem. In the picture I do see two sea horses facing one another.

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  7. I really liked this picture. It looks so nice, I can see as if the 2 seahorses are escaping from the carousel. It looks peaceful and on the sides there are 2 more seahorses. I can picture the music of the carousel while these seahorses are flying out. Its a beautiful picture.

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  8. I believe the seahorses are actually men and sometimes their meaningless lives that they carry every day. I mean living your normal life everyday without meaning is the same thing as being in a carousel going round and round without any end. It’s until we find a meaning or purpose in life that we can really say that we are truly free in this world or this life for that matter.

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