Not Our Own Is This World

By B. Ronald Judd

What does it mean to have an individual identity? In this short collection of poems, B. Ronald Judd explores the obstacles that the modern world imposes upon our understanding of individual identity, while also exploring the foundations of individual identity in both nature and community. Far from having total freedom to define ourselves, we must at last submit to the limitations that are imposed upon us.  We must discover that this world is not our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781035813070

B. Ronald Judd

B. Ronald Judd was born in Princeton, Illinois. He holds two bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and French respectively, having studied in Angers, France, during the fall semester of 1997. He was heavily influenced by the French Symbolist poets as he completed his master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Illinois in Springfield. He currently teaches English at a Catholic high school in Springfield, Illinois, where he has lived since 1998

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Author’s Note

This collection of poetry is meant to explore the challenges of understanding individual identity. Since human beings are naturally sign readers and sign makers, it can become easy to think that all that is real can be represented by language and the symbolic order that society has created. Yet, reality must extend to that which is unrepresentable; otherwise, human beings would be the measure of all things, and it is clear from our fallen humanity that we are not. The pariah, by his or her very existence, exposes the inability of society to see all that is real.

The first section persona poems are an attempt to imagine what each of the named historical persons may have thought and felt. In no way do I presume to offer a historically accurate representation, though I based my reflections on the historical information cited within each poem. My intent is to respect each figure whose life encountered significant hardships created by external public opinion.

Section I:

Persona Poems

Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Greeks invented what we today call the theatre. The actors in the first plays wore masks so as to take on a new persona. These actors incarnated another’s identity. They became someone else even if for just a moment. Each poem in this section is written in the persona of someone who has been misjudged or condemned by some element of society: Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated Abraham Lincoln’s assassin; Maximillian I of Mexico, an Austrian who became the Emperor of Mexico at the urging of European elites; Henry Horner, Illinois’ first Jewish governor; Helen Levitov Sobell, wife of a convicted spy during the post-World War II McCarthy era, and a Russian soldier accused of committing the first war crime in the 2022 War in Ukraine. To understand the other, is it possible to see through another person’s eyes, even when that person is persona non grata?

Persona Non Grata

Persona non grata, unwelcomed right here,

I search for meaning to master.

Exiled on earth, without hope of more,

I languish in this disaster.

My exile is perfected by the indifference

Of those who cannot know me.

I suffer in the anonymity of night,

The restless movement of purposeless flight.

Desire confines while choice frees,

But the burden robs one of life.

To conceal desire is enormous work

That rips and tears as a knife.

Work brings freedom when it occupies the mind

From the unending question of purpose.

To be a self-divided from self,

Is a job I cannot master.

To be in exile is a burden,

But thought of home can bring one relief.

To be in exile without any home,

Is a torture I cannot master.

Long-standing sufferance, immortal and strong,

Endure the constancy of my guilt;

Reshape the inner contours of pain

That so freely impale life’s lilt.

Cut open the skin to release the infection;

Free the poison before its rupture.

Or incomplete and unendurable,

My unmeaning shall persist unmastered.

The Death of Dr Samuel

A. Mudd¹

St Catherine’s, Charles County, Maryland—January 5, 1883

With frozen heart hidden deep, winter stops my forward path. Many weaken with disease in this assault of arctic