Truman
I watched The Truman Show with Zack on Saturday, and after that I was tempted to find my poem "Of Non-Existing Country", which I wrote in November, and I tell you that it has so many points in common with The Truman Show, or so many points inspiring reflection, and that it is one of the saddest things I have ever written.
I wrote that poem when I saw its epigraph on Brian Gaeke's home page:
Once upon a time I was a member of the University of Cincinnati Linux Users' Group, but that group seems to have disappeared. It's kind of like Andrei [Moutchkine]'s "I am a citizen of non-existing country", only somehow less ...urgent?
The poem itself has no connection with either Andrei or Brian, or with any actual non-existing country (does that make sense)? It is an elaboration of that line, "I am a citizen of non-existing country", for myself, and brings in the Aeneid, Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Odyssey, John Donne, the Iliad, the Somnium Scipionis, and at least six other sources I've forgotten, and likely didn't identify as I was writing it.
One interesting thing is that it's almost all about mental states, emotions, and beliefs: the poem takes place almost entirely in what some people would call interior monologue. There isn't any action in the physical world -- except an action at the end which is doubly removed from reality by being not only metaphorical but also hypothetical. That is, I hypothesize about performing a metaphorical act.
