Inviting a Friend to Supper (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Of Wittgenstein here’s all I know and

All you need to know, my dear friend:

‘I don’t care what I eat as long as it’s

‘The same thing every day.’ Genau!

Thus spake the great philosopher!

So don’t expect Cornish game hen

Chez moi. I was raised on Swanson’s

Chicken pot pies and the only change

Now is we’ll have the Stauffers brand

Plus an enormous orange Jell-o mold

Which in the days my youth signified

Gemütlichkeit, as the great philosopher

Might say. Dessert will be fig newtons

And I’ll ask you to please bring the wine.

 

 

 

Comments

[Kent L Johnson]

Did the poem get cut off here? It is much shorter than its model. I know, because my dog is named Ben Jonson.

I wish the poet would have continued and not stopped with the aspic, just when dinner is getting going. No cigars after dinner with Wittgenstein?

[Mack Dodson]

This poem really taught me something about the great linguistic philosopher and professor Wittgenstein. But what does it mean to eat rthe same food every day? Is this a parable like the hunger artist of Franz Kafka in reverse? Or is it a search for constancy in a universe of "uncertainty" and inconstant fortune?

[Kent L Johnson]

Hey, Mack,

a bit of advice:

Don't kill yourself trying to figure it out.

[David Lehman]

Mack Dodson may be on to something. A. J. Ayer's 1984 book on W. is excellent. Favorite sentence: "To the extent that they are worth mentioning in this company, such French philosophers as Derrida and Foucault have busied themselves with sociology or with literary criticism." The verb in that sentence is perfectly chosen.