A Poet's Journal: May 13th, 2013

May 13th, 2013

The sickness and disease with which our constitutions must struggle have, I believe, given rise to those phantoms and evil spirits that we have conjured to exist and have empire over our actions.  A slow analysis of the mind will show us that with the oncoming of a cold our mood will shift and our opinions change, so that we may freely believe ourselves possessed, whether it be of a physical or mental state.  For our definitions and portrayals of these spirits work in conjunction with our modern-day microbes, and that there are good and bad microbes our medicinal science will fully attest.

Thus that spirits exist I could most certainly believe, for the name has become something other than what we know it by today: our term lends more to our scientific mind than our Christian or folkloric mythology would have us think.  But I have heard it said as well that everything animate and inanimate has a soul, knowing that our perception is merely the false eye with which we see the everyday.  For that this or that may act on me with some intention, or that I may offend it, I am ever induced to believe; but if we must degrade it as superstition, we may also revere it as chance; or should we turn aside from both, we may find that the problem itself has its own intuition.

Douglas Thornton