Look to the familiars in your life-the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane. Do you know to question or how to question its meaning? When questioned, what seemed obvious and concrete becomes ineffable and ephemeral. Morris calls this the Aporia-of-being. Seek the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange, and the Aporia-of-being forces you to consider the how-is-it and the how-can-it-be of your own existence.
Such is the challenge confronting us in Melancholiandesire, by philosopher/poet Gilbert N.M.O. Morris. Under intense Influence through his childhood exposure to theology and his academic field of logic, phenomenology, and ethics, Morris explored the factuality of existence-and the harsh truth that whichever road we take, all journeys end in tragedy.
The words, narrative, and structure in Melancholiandesire are developed with meticulous care to escape the pitfalls of previous expressions of tragic representations of b-e-i-ng: Aristotle's dramatic/cathartic notion; Hegel's dialectical options; Heidegger's fatalistic conception or the posturing tragic sense in continental philosophy and postmodernism. Readers are compelled to infuse Morris's intentions with their own interpretations, because from imagination to poet, from poet to reader-this is the turnstile from which poetry emerges, producing an imagined world as real and immediate as the world we encounter at birth; endure in life and take leave of through our physical demise.
Join Morris as he tackles the most vertiginous dilemma of human existence, acceptance, and awareness of the immutable laws of inevitable change, while enduring the travails of its impermanence that author the only permanence in life: our own inevitable endings.
About the Author: Born in the Bahamas, Gilbert N.M.O. Morris was raised in a devout household where theological scholarship and debate were the norm. He first discovered poetry through the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. who made references to a wide canon of poets, from Dante to T.S. Eliot and Countee Cullen.
A former chairman of the National Investment Agency & National Bank of the Turks and Caicos, Morris's education included law, philosophy, and scientific methodologies. He was a visiting scholar at George Mason University, where as a professor he taught across four disciplines.
In his final university lecture, Morris wrote, "The Poet brings forth a certain hospitality of thought and feeling offered from a mere glimpse of Being-as-it-were; tendered to the page-in reliance on technique and empathy to defeat the frequencies of a discursive vision-to produce not merely poetry, but the possibility of the world."
