Reality: Truth, Words and Love

About the Book

The mélange of poetry shared here develops internal connections respecting the elements of its title and the lifelong sensibilities of the author. The title of the collection revolves around how we as modern persons realize Reality as a function of Truth as revealed through the innuendo of Words and the existentialism of Love: Reality – Truth - Words - Love. These elements are manifest in the most mundane and commonplace facts and phenomena through to the most arcane and erudite ideas and emotions. We usually separate erudite and mundane on the one hand, and facts and emotions on the other. But here is an effort to mix the two extremes with each other and the in-between. Not included in the title is something embedded – some might say “implicit” – in the four words just discussed: Time. That is, Reality, Truth, Words and Love all require (or in some way depend on) Time for their respective intensions and extensions (as Ludwig Wittgenstein might say). Time is an element of Reality and that fact is literally in the many of the poems shared here. The reader should be sensitive both to the unspoken allusions to Time, as well as to the spoken ones (e.g., “moments,” “first,” etc.). Juxtaposing these elements and the circumstances of their manifestations hopefully provides a new perspective on the Life that is the Reality for us in the 21st Century.

About the Author

The author was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. In late 1947, his family moved to Southern California. He went to UCLA, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, and had a very strong attachment to the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He graduated in Georgetown University Medical School on June 6, 1966. He did his internship and residency in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he met his wife, Susan (an element of many of the poems), a nurse in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital. They had met in February 1967 and were married in July 1967. His genetics fellowship was at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Hospital. He was a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from July 1970 to the end of 1971. His academic faculty career took him to Denver, Colorado; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Houston, Texas. In Houston in 1981, he founded and directed the Neurofibromatosis Institute. In June 1990, they moved to La Crescenta, California, and he was the director of a chromosome analysis laboratory. At the end of his contract, he obtained an MBA and founded American Medical Consumers. He gave up his medical license in 2015. Vincent started writing these poems in medical school and continued composing them at present.