What I Don't Know
Once in awhile, I attempt to formulate for myself where I am at with belief. I thought I'd share this recent "epiphany" with you:
I really don't know or understand anything. When I look at the sky and then push through it to the void or the greater universe where time has no dominion and realize that this might only be the beginning or portal to whatever's beyond that, I realize how fully I don't know. I accept the not knowing. I appreciate the mystery. The nudge that comes from what I, from childhood on, was told is the explanation, intrudes on the mystery. Later I was reminded "Pride goeth before the fall" but "pride" was so often defined in terms of having the temerity to question what we had been given in the way of explanation of the mystery for which no man or woman has the "answer." Primitive cultures attempted to name or put a face on the mystery. All mythology including religion employs story forms for the same purpose. No one knows except the individual lying on a chair swing swinging with the sun playing off the trees and off his ears under a sky too close. Does mystery denote complexity or does mystery simply be? No one I've met or read knows. Many think they know, and I suppose that may also be knowing. I too know what I know which is that I don't know very much other than that I'm content not to know very much, and this lack of knowledge is at odds with everything I've been told by all those who know as much or less than I.
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(P2) Poetical
The Poet and His Reader
"The transaction that we call the experience of poetry always takes place between one being and another. The energy circulates from privacy to privacy. Far flung though they may be in space and time, the poet and his reader are, for the duration of the experience, adjacent souls with permeable boundaries. Language can render the inward experience so persuasively that the space/time axis yields. Poetry has no larger 'public function' — it's limits are set. Poetry readings may be good advertising but they can't alter the monogamous character of the real event. In poetry, as in love, two is company, three is always a crowd."
from Sven Birkerts in his essay "The Poet In An Age Of Distraction"
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(P3) Political
Those Who Always Shout For War
from Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger
"The loud littler handful...as usual...will shout for the war. The great...big...dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war...and will say indignantly...it is unjust and dishonorable...there is no necessity for it...
"The the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen...and at first will have a hearing...but it will not last long. The others will outshout them...and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity...Before long...you will see this curious thing...the speakers stoned from the platform...and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men...
"Next...the statesmen will invent cheap lies...putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked...and every man will be glad of these conscience soothing falsities...and will diligently study them...and refuse to examine any refutations of them...and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just...and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
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