Beyond Dualisms

Words like “skepticism” pose such obvious problems. Skeptics are always so sure of themselves. They have to be. How could you be a skeptic if you doubted your skepticism? There’s then no point in deconstructing them. Nor can you fall back on the old saw—the logical impasse of contradiction—to take them apart. You must be able to know something if you know your ignorance. And if you can know that why can’t you know other things?

Because you can’t. And this is why….

And then the skeptic like Finnegan goes back to the riverrun and starts over.

Only in time is time overcome. Fortunately, we are only in time. So if I have one belief left, I suppose it is this, and it is as much a religious as a philosophical (which is to say logical conclusion) belief, which is to say something I understand intuitively as true as well as logically as valid, insofar as it can be logically validated: set aside all conclusions. I suppose it’s a mildly Hegelian position. Setting aside all that math or the scientific method can attain (I don’t want to get into the absurdity of an earth that is other than metaphorically flat), in areas that actually matter, where science and math are of negligible service, come to whatever conclusions you will, and then set them aside. Don’t fail to arrive at these conclusions, which we could just as easily call propositions because we are at the place where language’s fundamental dualism betrays us (that statement too will have to be taken in, then set aside).

This matters most where most is at stake. Starting with God, God who is absolute otherness and absolute presence. Unattainable, incomprehensible, but also here, and inescapable, the radiance of love. It’s all true and therefore all not-true. And the biggest sin is to think you have it. And the other biggest sin is to proclaim that you don’t. Did I say Hegelian-ish? Also Hinduish. Sufish. Part of all mysticisms, secular or religious, but only where mysticism marries the dull quotidian, where secular and religious don’t signify different realms.

Sign Language

My students tell me all poems are open
for interpretation.
I tell them I do not dispute that statement,
adding just that this not only doesn’t define,
it doesn’t even distinguish
poems from any other deployment
of words. Not from these
You’re now reading (did you really
think this was a poem?) but neither
from the most carefully crafted contracts
or laws, nor from your mother’s
hello, your uncle’s be careful, or your fumbling
attempt to go out with a girl
or to lure her to bed.

Signs are signs
even when they stand high above the parking lot
of the store
that was never built.