Naming

We sit at the edge of time and watch the needle push
through the material, then disappear

then poke itself back through,
rising and turning like a breaching whale

plunging again,
rising again,
pressing again.

Nothing exists until you name it, then

the name is the bane of the thing.

The poem insists, the poem
erases
until it’s present

until it’s gone.

With Nothing to Say

By a flutter of wing on a scale minute in a minute world

the mosquito hitches a ride on a raindrop then hops

to another; this is how she keeps from being squished

in a squall. And you, you stand within the garden in the yard

grossly taking in through every sense the fullness of it all,

naming nothing, perceiving no particular, no shade, no color,

no scent, not even the feel of the air as it vibrates the nerves

deeply beneath the surface of your skin.  

The Urgency of Poetry, a draft

How the biggest mistake most people make, and they make it virtually every moment of their lives, is to believe that their language is both truth and adequate. (Is this one mistake incessantly made, or an infinite number of iterations of the same mistake; the mistake repeated endlessly?) A language can be true without being adequate and adequate without being true. No language can ever be both true and adequate. (As in particle physics we can have speed or location. Never both.) Adequate to what? True to what? To reality. A language can be true if it is partial. If it wants to be true to a contingency. Never to the thing itself, never to its totality. A language may be adequate in that it leads to the desired goal, even the perfect goal. An adequate language will get you through the maze into heaven. But it will deceive you if it leads you to believe you have understood the maze. It can tell you to love but it cannot tell you in this moment what action of yours is love. We can have contingent truth, contingent adequacy.

How reality is NEVER a given, always mediated, always a perception-through-language.

How our self is dependent upon language—how our first memories coincide with our development of language.

How words co-create realities: examples (illimited), courage/cowardice, Nature/culture. Word/thing. Human/animal. Man/woman. Adult/child. Adolescent. Disease. Sanity. Freedom. Homosexuality. Democracy. 

How poetry (and art) enters and challenges reality.

How one either uses language to shore up one’s prejudices or one uses language to see past them, i.e. to take them down, to constantly paint and paper and build and remodel and tear apart and replace and return. To sell and to buy. Never to stop. Never to finish.  

Word and/vs story. Words are concepts, concepts words. Worlds are rooms; worlds are stories.

How who we are is literally the words we use and the stories we use those words to tell.

Fact, Opinion and the Warming Globe

One of the most important skills a citizen of an enlightened society must have is the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion. And yet, facts, the hardest facts of all, are the conclusions of a discipline (science) that is founded on the assertion that there are no facts as such--only evidence, only the best possible conclusions based up the evidence. This quibble, this little instability at the core of the structure, may contribute to the particularly modern, endemically American belief that the conclusions of science have no more force than opinions--that "what's the best restaurant in Kalamazoo?" and "is global warming real?" are questions about which we are equally entitled to weigh in on. An astonishingly large portion of the American public, without a scrap of expertise or training, without the most fundamental prerequisites for understanding how to address the question, assert without irony or embarrassment their conviction that global warming is a myth. The ignorance is mind boggling. What can we say? "I am not an expert. You are not an expert. The question of whether the globe is warming, by how much and in response to what causes is a question beyond  my ability, at present, to answer. I have not the time or interest to get the vast training in math and science that are required for me to have, on my own, the ability to make an assessment on the question. And there is no need for me to do so. There are clearly experts on this issue out there, genuine scientists who with careful and expert research address this question every day. And among them there is no controversy regarding the basic facts: the globe is warming. Human activity is a significant contributing factor. Global warming is dangerous. If we act now, we can do something about it. Scientists disagree with one another whenever possible. Scientists are by nature as well as by profession necessity skeptical. Yet no meaningful number of experts. It is prudent therefore to defer to the experts in such a case." We can say that. I do. But people who cannot see the truth will crucify a savior so they do not have to listen.