Last Saturday, I posted “I Desire Some Things for You”. It was a tribute to Max Ehrmann’s prose poem “Desiderata”. In my post, I added a video of an animation of Mr. Ehrmann reading his famous poem.

In the post, I mentioned that I once heard Vincent Price recite this poem on “The Carol Burnett Show” but I could not find the segment on the Internet. Well, I kept searching because as someone once said of me, “he’s like a dog digging up a buried bone.” Alas, after many hours spent searching and many dirty looks from Mrs. Trudge for neglecting my family duties, I was not able to find the Price piece.

However, I was able to find this most sublime parody by National Lampoon. I played it several times. After I stopped laughing and started listening, I noticed this “parody” had some seriousness to it. Then, I listened to Ehrmann’s poem and switched back and forth between the two.

By comparing and contrasting these two poems, I noticed that Ehrmann’s poem is the thesis: an ideal I should live by, and National Lampoon’s parody is the antithesis: how I sometimes feel (whether those feelings are founded in reality or not). Which then raises the question, what is the synthesis?

To me, the synthesis between these two poems lies somewhere in the middle between the illuminating affirmations of Ehrmann’s piece and the dark humor of National Lampoon’s parody. It lies between the black and the white. It is the gray. While it is supposed to be tongue in cheek, so many of the things mentioned in “Deteriorata” apply to me more than “Desiderata”. Yet, I still strive (and in some cases, I have been able to reach) the ideals mentioned in Ehrmann’s poem.  

So “rotate your tires,” “hire people with hooks,” and remember “the universe is laughing behind your back”.

"Desiderata" or "Deteriorata"

Which one can you really relate to?

Sources:

Deteriorata

National Lampoon’s Deteriorata

Images in the Video are by Voice of the Void

Text © Trudge164, 2010