Re: Re:virus: Re: virus-digest V3 #51

joe dees (joedees@bellsouth.net)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 11:01:32 -0500

At Tue, 23 Feb 1999 01:51:32 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Reed wrote:
>>>No one has an unbiased perspective, which is why
>>>we should do our best to unify across the divides.
>
>Joe wrote:
>>This makes logical sense, in that intersubjective perspectives
>>get to contrast and compare for internal consistency and
>>external coherency, thus ending up mure complete and less
>>error-prone than purely subjective ones
>
>Joe, can you see the difference between these two examples? Yours is
>logically correct and says much the same thing as Reed's does, but yours
>uses more words to say less. Such writing will never inspire anyone to step
>outside themselves or to try something that might otherwise seem impossible
>to them. Yet Reed's might, if he set his mind to it.
>
>Can you see how, in this realm of interpersonal communication at least,
>a love of logic and rationality can serve as both a leg-up and a stumbling
>block at the same time?

Poetry demands concision; philosophy precision. They are different (but both playfully serious) language games.

>What kind of poetry do you write, anyway?
>
>-Prof. Tim

Lenses: A Love Song for Salman Rushdie

We are wanderers all
In the shapeshifting dunes of our days
Seeking amidst the sandstorms
The sight of a sheltered course
So we sift our pasts to cast our futures And grind lenses to focus our lives.
Most are less than original
But each has its own eccentricities
Fitted for one eye, one terrain;
No lens is universal, and no path.

Most of us hide our quirks of vision
>From others, and even from ourselves

Lest some fatal slip should betray us
And hew to some hard line or other
Packed by souls of similar stripe
Who confuse the safety of numbers
With the security of a way well chosen
And who, fearing the very existence
Of the walkers of other ways
As challenges to their own decisions' wisdom Strive to herd those they _must_ consider misled Back to the 'proper' route, or failing that Seek to end their journeys.

But some crazed few of us
Too honest for our own damned good
Craft our lenses from every gritty grain Of the wide beach
of experience
Fusing them carefully in insight's crucible Until they crystallize clean and true
And then we wave them radiantly
Before the wandering world.

These folks or followed, or killed, or both. Poets and messiahs are the glaziers
Of living visions, and well wrought lenses May powerfully concentrate the common gaze Promisisng pathfinding clarity.

But- remember this:
Art is metaphor, and metaphors are chameleons. They are colored by our journeys
As surely as they shape them.
Empty and aimless are those who lack lenses If such pathless ones exist
But stumbling blind are those who
Given the lenses of others
Wear them as if they were windowpanes
And polish them not with their lives.

Want More?

Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher



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