Last week's prompt began with an aphorism from Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Followed by Mr. Lehman's modification: “Doubt isn’t any fun, but certainty is madness.”
And finally, to use this phrase as either a title or a topic: “the minister of loneliness.”
This prompt proved fruitful, for there were numerous entries of high quality. So many that Mr. Lehman was forced to award three first place gold medals, the following being the first (and my personal favorite).
Patricia Wallace’s “Toothache” which incorporates all the elements of the prompt:
No doubt about it. I have a toothache
even if I can’t locate the source of the pain
(that iffy tooth the dentist’s been eyeing?).
It isn’t any fun, this toothache. It’s making me
crazy, thinking about how certain is the possibility
of a root canal or worse? Of course, it’s trivial,
my toothache, beside the impenetrable mysteries:
life, death, etc., where there’s no avoiding
the knotty family relations between certainty and
doubt. According to the Minister of Loneliness,
my brave if cryptic guide in these matters,
“doubting itself presupposes certainty.” Some doubts,
it follows, are properly ignored. Why waste my time
doubting the chessboard, or my two hands
or the stars in the wintry night sky? It’s too exhausting.
In the remotest cold, the Minister of Loneliness tries
to unravel these knots. Some call him mad. Even he
thinks his work could be merely “a synopsis of trivialities.”
He’d rather be listening to Beethoven, who howled
and screamed as he composed, making from the chaos
of sound a symphony, not of separate notes
but their connections, like stars in a constellation.
Another notable entry was Courtney Thrash in “Professor of Doubt” which explores the relationship between faith and doubt:
faith and doubt
are not
mutually exclusive
in truth,
one cannot exist
without
the other:doubt
without faith
is an impossibility,
like heartache
without loving;faith
without doubt
would be certainty,
were not certainty an illusion,
like loving
without losing
And now for the next prompt!
Below are six lines quoted in the column:
“He’d rather be listening to Beethoven”—Patricia Wallace
“will one day pack her suitcase”—Cheryl Whithead
“And once, I took a turn at the bedside of a dying man”—Donald LaBranche
“and all the Patron Saints of Paranoia”—George Kaplan
“an illusion, / like loving /without losing”—Courtney Thrash
“I have been to the abyss”—David Lehman
Pick one of these phrases and use it—first line, last line, epigraph, a pivot, etc.—in a poem dedicated to the poet whose line you lifted. A possible subject: the ides of March.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post and to enter your candidate for next week!
