Solitude Poem by gershon hepner

Searching for coherence and for sense,
a man requires solitude and deprivation
of stimuli that cause false confidence,
and lead to a pursuit of approbation.
The arbiter of sense must live apart
from those who cannot understand coherence,
since when ideas are truly off the chart,
the sound of others causes interference.
However, once a person thinks he’s found
coherence and made sense in solitude,
he only learns if his ideas are sound
when he emerges, and they are reviewed,
but even if they turn out to be viable
he’s doomed to find out that outside his cave
rules chaos, where all sense is unreliable,
except for gravitas found in the grave.


On KUSC this morning Denis Bartel played an interview of Alfred Brendel in which the pianist/poet extolled solitude, declaring that it was vital for the creative process, citing the work of the Oxford scholar, Anthony Storr, author of Solitude: A Return to the Self. creative individuals whose principal concern was not primarily with human relationships but with the search for coherence and sense. Storr declares that principle concern of creative individuals is not primarily with human relationships but with the search for coherence and sense. It occurred to me that there might have been two exceptions to this rule, Mozart and Schubert, for whom the creative process appeared to be as natural as breathing, not requiring the solitude that is vital for most other artists and thinkers. And thinking about Mozart and Schubert made me wonder whether I should have added Handel to my list. How else could he have composed the Messiah in 24 days?

I added the last quatrain, with its echoes of the more pessimistic lines from Ecclesiastes, after Charles Vernoff sent me his comment on the first three quatrains of the poem:

Ah, but Camus notes ('Myth of Sisyphus') that existential rage results from the disparity between the mind's craving for cosmos/coherence and the world's serving up only of chaos...... Good luck in the cave! C

1/16/08