To Thine Own Self Be True Shakespeare wrote "To thine own self be true!",Declared Oscar the Grouch, the cockroach.When his acquaintance, Groucho Marx,Thoughtfully touched his chin replying,“However I become lost upon pondering,”“How exceedingly fortunate I have been,”“To know of my own wondrous existence!”“To which neither time nor eternity can ever bring diminution,”“This miraculously everlasting, vibrant living soul was born!”“Even to ponder such a sublime eternal truth in any depth,”“These are beautiful words, and I lose myself in thought!”“Yet the immortal Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,”“How do I love thee?”“Let me count the ways.”“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height,”“My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight,”“For the ends of being and ideal Grace.”“I love thee to the level of everyday's,”“Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”“I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;”“I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.”“I love thee with a passion put to use,”“In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.”“I love thee with a love I seemed to lose,”“With my lost saints, ...I love thee with the breath,”“Smiles, tears, of all my life! ...and, if God choose,”“I shall but love thee better after death!"
They say when you learn systems logic the first thing you learn is that half the world doesn't even know such a thing is possible. This particular poem is another root logic one that manages to express both traditional Asian and Western taboos concerning ego. In recent years the English language word "narcissism" has become popular among Asians whose cultures tend to suppress any expression of ego. For many of them its a bit voyeristic to listen to westerners talk about ego and narcissism in ways they never hear expressed in their own culture and, in the poem, I combine traditions from both cultures. The sarcasm of Groucho Marx quoting Elizabeth Barret Browning is a distinctly western tradition, while explicitly referring to Oscar as a cockroach and putting quote marks around everything are foreign traditions dating back to primitive tribal traditions. Spanish speaking cultures sometimes share these traditions, but not English speaking ones, because they are used to promote systems logic for the purpose of introspection and, if anything, English speaking cultures tend to suppress that knowledge with, for example, one republican once declaring Big Bird a communist plot because introspection is taboo among western fundamentalists who will typically reject anything not written in the Bible.
