Archive for the ‘metaphysics’ Tag
Tha stance toward Reality
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: Charles Olson, metaphysics, poetry
Leave a comment A week back I shared an unpublished poem “Unreal, that is, to the real itself…” and in the week since by a kind of weird serendipity I’ve been engaged in a dialogue concerning evolutionary psychology, reductive physicalism, by extension materialism and transcendentalism, so on and so forth, all of which tie into the question of the Real and what can be known of it.
I’ve made my polemical stance in this regard known in an ironic manner in the poem 
“Get Real” (it is a poem after all; how can it not be ironic?) so in light of the past week’s ink spilled (what is the on-line, digital version of this expression?) on the matter, I share here the prefatory poem to my second trade edition, Ladonian Magnitudes ‘topos tropos typos” (a confession’. The opening words are Charles Olson’s.
“for nine years
“three words constantly
“forced me down
“or kept me
“in or possibly
“steadied me…
topos tropos typos” (a confession
there is a freedom to be learned
a tradition earned
every wave of particular
not men or women, some
generation, not a sapling
scored around the oak’s core
but decision
not to attend what’s passed
for the new, not to accept the world
as given), &
stopped my reflection
stepped
the light
red
antistrophe
more vivid
that night
than the rain
wet street
(“E’en thus along the gulf moves every flame,
“A sinner so enfolded close in each
“That none exhibits token of the thief
O
read
the archetext!
Get Real
Filed under: Poetry | Tags: aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy, poetry, reality, Tim Morton
Leave a comment Tim Morton recently posted the proceedings of a conference on the nature of reality. In response to the make-up of the panel, Morton remarks the absence of, for example, a humanist perspective, which got me thinking along the following lines….(And I mean lines! Damn WordPress, HTML, or my own lazy ignorance for the lack of hanging indents that would indicate that each of the seven statements that follow are each a poetic line!)
A neurobiologist, a theoretical and a computational physicist, an anaesthesiologist, and Deepak Chopra walk into a lecture hall to discuss The Nature of Reality.
Better to have staged a dramatic recitation of Plato’s Sophist, the Tao te Ching, or The Divine Comedy; even better if nobody knew Greek, Chinese, or Italian.
Better to’ve performed Schubert’s last sonata in B flat or had Ahad Master improvise, had everyone enter an anechoic chamber to hear their blood circulate and nerves hum,
Gone to The National Gallery of Canada and gazed on Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire,
Had everyone guided through a sequence of novice yoga moves or instructed how just to sit and fix the wandering mind on the breath swelling their bellies,
Fast forty days and forty nights, take a heroic dose of Psilocybe Cubensis (with due care to set and setting), cry for a vision, or participate in a potlatch,
Consider the view of the proverbial fly on the wall, the air in the room.
Poeta Doctus 