by David D. Horowitz.
“Red-orange-pink,” I mused to myself, watching a mid-summer Seattle dusk settle over the Olympic Mountains. Almost nineteen and soon to begin my sophomore year at the University of Washington, I had taken to jotting down poetic inspirations in a spiral-bound notebook: “Waves sparkle like diamonds” and “misty mountain ranges” and now “red-orange-pink sunset.”
Yet, I felt impelled to refine my phrasing. “Red-orange-pink” was too long, cumbersome, obvious. I aspired to eloquence. Each night for the next few weeks of that glorious summer I walked a block from my home on Greenwood Avenue North to a residential hilltop from where I could absorb the dusk colors: “purple-pink-orange,” “red-smoke-azure,” “violet-orange.” Still, I was not satisfied. One evening, admiring the dusk horizon, about three weeks into my first serious poetic search for the right word, I felt thunderstruck: “Salmon!” Yes, the Seattle summer sunset is salmon! The description fit and resonated with consistent connotation, as so many salmon swim Puget Sound. My persistence at last had yielded a genuine inspiration. Salmon!
First, though, I was a philosophy major. Studying philosophy inspired me to rigor and honesty, as true philosophers consider all aspects of an argument. I learned to ask difficult questions, to probe. Many of my teachers and classmates might have been liberal, but I felt honor-bound to consider arguments such as those favoring capitalism and self-interest, and I began admitting fear of inner-city crime without apologizing for myself as a presumed racist. I had recently endured six years of upper-division public schools beset by racial tension and violence. I had been mugged in a school hallway and threatened on ball fields and in bathrooms, as had many of my friends. I needed to be honest about my hostilities and fears, not smile innocuously to avoid accusation. I learned not to censor myself. I gained the liberty to admit my true political feelings. And consequently I often felt I was swimming, salmon-like, against the current.
Eventually, long after graduation, I associated with some free market devotees. Nevertheless, my sense of integrity and liberty impelled me to question their and my own assumptions. Perhaps some government intervention could prove beneficial and fair; perhaps some government-sponsored assistance in emergency situations is justified. Moreover, despite my friends’ general hostility to religion I felt stirred to posit the worth of emotive as well as rational connections to nature. Stirred to wonderment and gratitude by a starry night, why shouldn’t I acknowledge longing for the infinite and eternal? This is not superstition. It’s pulse, vitality, aspiration. It’s recognition of accountability to a grand natural order—and call it “God,” if you wish.
However, the same impulse that pushed me to articulate “salmon” to describe a sunset and to question statist and then free market economic assumptions now pushed me to reach past reliance on traditional religious formulas. I articulated my own form of deism. I asserted connection and accountability to a vast natural order while guided by ideals of consideration and vitality. Consideration and thoughtfulness became my favorite words; they are inclusive, describing simultaneous kindness and reasonableness, self-interest and sympathy. I could commit to such a balance of ideals, whereas I could not give myself to faith in a messiah, miracles, prophets, and holy book to be obeyed by a chosen people of God. And this spiritual independence fed my poetry. I would espouse what I genuinely believed, not what would ingratiate me with powerful people expecting a commitment to Judeo-Christianity or an established alternative with ready-made networks to help speed me to enlightenment and success. And I would write poetry the way I felt was best: in rhymed metrics, imagistic, and radically concise. So, whether as a poet writing rhyming lyrics about a salmon sunset or as a philosopher swimming salmon-like against the current of majority opinion, I still champion the liberty that lets me search past dogmas, formulas, and clichés.