The Woods, Acoustic on February 8th, 2009

People tend to enjoy this song. As much as I don't like stating that one particular song is my trademark, and my material is stylistically varied, perhaps lyrically this particular reflects who I am and my thoughts more than most. One of my favorite poets who has been a great influence on my style is the 19th-century French poet, Mallarmé (see www.mallarme.net for poetry, bio, and more links)
I'm quite taken, perhaps more than I should be, by the concept of la poèsie pure, as well as symbolist poetry in general, that is to say poetry that speaks without a subject, pure unmitigated objectivity (N.B. Mallarmé was one of the artists that influenced our Uptown Salon). The problem I see with this method is it tends to be overambitious. How can our poetry be emotive if it lacks subjectivity, emotion's source. We are of course subjects, first and foremost;
However, when we focus too wholeheartedly on that subjectivity, our artistic lives exist in a unique vacuum, open to no one else.

Although I usually try to write in this objective, highly evocative but not so emotive style, I think many of my best moments as a poet and lyricist come when I bulk this ideology and embrace subjectivity. Perhaps this is evidenced in this particular song, "The Woods."

I wrote it when I was first feeling like a stranger in Boston, hoping to go abroad for some time (which I did upon graduation from the Berklee College of Music in 2003), considering conversion to Judaism, living in Christian simple suburban Boston, and having both a love and discomfort for my environs.
On the one hand, it was the only place that I had ever truly known at that point in time, with the exception of travel throughout the U.S. and Europe. I have long since made my peace with Boston, and consider it my rightful home where I would be satisfied settling and having a family one day, but when I wrote this I was quite torn.

For many years I had a Boston brogue, it still rears it beautifully hideous head periodically, and I took diction classes as a child to subvert it. This is actually a fact that I struggle with quite frequently as I don't speak at all in the same way as my family, people from whom I came. Although this seems like a minor point, it has deeply affected me, as did the eerie view of woods that I glimpsed from outside my room as a child. Although my town, Billerica, was by no means rural, it did have a rural past. The colonial in which I grew up on the main residential strip touts woods to the back of all the houses on the left as you enter town. There was something truly eerie but at the same time welcoming about those woods, like the memories that I have both of them and my past. Perhaps nostalgia itself is glanced as from a glade within foreboding woods. In any case, here are the lyrics to the song. The performance featured here comes from the Bitter End and was recorded along with Andreas Brade on February 8, 2009.

The Woods (leave it all behind) (track 2)


Written by: Andres Wilson


In the woods behind my house
When November haunts the air
I would swear to you that I have
Seen some ghosts at play out there
They are something like the wind
Pining for the orange sky
Bearing nothing but a sound
Have they left everything behind?

Behind, can I leave this all behind?

In the woods behind my house
Where I used to carve my name
I can’t find it anymore
Does that mean it is not the same?
Could I still pronounce it right,
If I read something I’d signed
Or would it become something foreign if I left it all behind?

In the woods behind my house
Where I tripped and scraped my knee
And the old dogs met their rest
Is that the place I’ll bury me?
In a strip that bears no leaves
Under branches in a bind
If a man equals his land
How can I leave it all behind?

Metaphysics and the Search for the Truth

In the thought of Aristotle, metaphysics, which our contemporary society has perhaps mistranslated as “beyond physics” was actually made up of the most basic yet seemingly unattainable considerations of philosophy. In scholarly circles it is widely acknowledged that this type of teaching in the written works of Aristotle simply follow what are known as the physics in his writings. Thus, the Greek “meta” really means “after,” as in “after the Physics.”

That is to say, in the thought of Aristotle, metaphysics is concerned with defining Truth and knowledge of Being and, ultimately, the true nature of reality itself. Why has contemporary society fallen into such subjectivism on all levels so as to deny that absolute Truth could, and in fact surely does, exist? This is a critique that I am making on all levels of society from theism, i.e. in religious faiths to atheism.

My teacher, philosopher Paul Edward Guay, perhaps quoting someone else, said that classical atheism used to meet the idea of G-d with a shaking of the fist. Thus, from this perspective, if G-d exists than we must hold Him accountable for the presence of what would seem to be evil in the world. However, modern atheism, as the saying goes, is more of a shrug of the shoulders. We just don’t care. This is troubling, for if one doesn’t struggle to make sense of what sometimes seems a crazy and chaotic world, what is the point of life?

However, my critique here is to extend that same criticism to modern theism, or religion more generally. Organized religion has in many cases become subjective and/or draconian and patriarchal, focused either more on how it makes one feel or what one believes and the laws themselves, respectively, than in the pursuit of Truth. Why is this? Have we as a society as a culture abandoned the belief that there is an absolute reality that can be attained?