WINTER ' FOURTEEN
-That was never a fact, it was only a superstition.
-It was more than that – it was a logical deduction from the available evidence.
-So what are you saying?
-I’m saying we don’t know all that we think we know.
-Socrates!
-His questions were always the right ones – there is value in not knowing, which he prized.
-Let’s leave the Greeks out of this – don’t you agree?
-If only I could.
-That’s defeatism, I expected more from you.
-But he’s right. The contours of every discussions has long been marked out by the Greeks. We are their
children.
If so who be my parent?
Fact: no child is fatherless.
Of what terrible union am I the child, the wilful off-spring?
Fact: out of the two issues the one.
Father – who shall I call father?
Fact: or only in the mothering sea find solace?
-We are back at poetry – as I expected.
We are entering terrible lands.
-Poetry as an ideal, not as a practice?
-Now you are too Greek again.
First the separation, then the joining, then the issue.
-And your example is…?
-None that would bear too much scrutiny.
-Your statements are cancelling each other.
-When negations cross what can the result be other than what I have stated?
-You might make a poem of that.
-He might but I suspect that the practice would not equal the ideal.
-And the result would be…
-That nihilism known as pure thought.
-O save us from such sainthood! We have that damnation in abundance!
In abundance he said. Like an old father unto a congregation. Absurd priests – why do I walk among
them? why should I lend my credence to their suppositions? Superstitions of the tribe yet they have not
wandered – no fire or cloud before them.
Yet at gilded animals do they…And I to be the one to break the stones?
From what stern mountain can I admonish this people? With what fire and cloud may I go before them
albeit for forty years?
O people I will admonish!
Out, out, out: declensions into negativity not to my liking yet from language to intimate a conflagration.
The Linnet's Wings