Critique of Judgment, and The Apples
- Critique of Judgment, and The Apples
Critique of Judgment
Reason informs us that birdsong is sublimebut can’t be beautiful: beauty is conferredsolely by operations of the human mind.Meanwhile, from that low-hanging branch, the lyrebird
is waging an ongoing, spirited battleagainst philosophy. Its melodious rebuttalsowe a little something, I’ve just realized,to “That’ll Be the Day,” as immortalized
by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Tell me, isa song a living thing? Does a song possess a shelf life?A half-life? Will your favorite song enjoy an afterlife?Do you have songbirds in your pockets? Is
there time for one last harvest? Would you like to filean objection once the lyrebird is done with his? [End Page 38]
The Apples
What gods have they fed, or failed to,while I lingered on the wilting grasswatching men clutching dark gray briefcasesand sporting half-hearted beards enter and leavethe Museum of Absurdities, the harsh,cinereal light playing on their shoulders,sprinkled like salt in their black, wavy hair?What would a bowl of them be worth,that I might present to you, their glossy,crepuscular skins glowing slightly, as ifthey were making a promise, or, if not that,as if they were half-remembering some promisethey had failed to keep? The night you and Islowly climbed the steep stairs from the beach to the bluffs,I thought I was on the verge of possessingall I’d been wanting. Now three monthshave passed, and somehow we still have yetto reach the top.
The crisp, almost corky texture that meetsyour teeth and tongue, the first bite’sviolation of the orb’s integrity,its divine perfection—you want to drawa moral out of it, a lesson,but the apple has only itself to offer,which is more than enough, or would be, if onlyour hearts weren’t made mostly of ash.What gods have we entertained, or failed to,in our relentless pursuit of solace,of truth, of the soft parts of each other’s bodies,as we take the torch in our hands and pass itinto the hands of the next runner, notnoticing, or pretending not to notice,that the flame was extinguished some decades ago,if in fact it ever burned at all? [End Page 39]
Troy Jollimore is the author of At Lake Scugog: Poems (Princeton, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House, 2006), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a philosopher he has authored On Loyalty (Routledge, 2012) and Love’s Vision (Princeton, 2011). He has published poems in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Poetry, Believer, and elsewhere. Jollimore is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.
