I.
Existentialism confuses
me with its wordy
enumerations on the subjectivity
of faith
and the being of nothingness
and the absurdity of life
and the anxiety of free will
and really I think it could all be summed
up simply and shortly, with brevity and wit.

“Live.”

Why don’t those philosophers
just say that?
Why do they have to ramble
on in French and German?
They be just and if not more famous and influential
if their books were shorter—people would actual
read them, live
by them and not just flip around to the interesting
parts. But I guess since they were Existentialists
they weren’t going for fame, just going for

reaching
their hands out and tattooing
onto humanity their mark,
trying to make it as large (read: as long) as possible.

II.
Sartre said “Existence precedes essence,”
and I think that applies to the Existential
movement just as it does to life.
None
of those dead
German guys even knew the word existentialism
when they were manically writing their tomes;
they just knew they were doing (in the subjective sense).
Of course they were laying the planks
the French would build on, but that essence
wasn’t there yet, the meme of the movement though was; it existed,
as Sartre would say.

So then, to sum
up, in the objective sense,
existence preceded essence
for the Existential
movement. But why is this important?

No clue.

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