But enough about physics. There is something fundamental that is lacking in these expositions, as clever and enlightening as they are, and it is poetry. One may also call it "art" in general, but I am calling it poetry because of a conversation I had on the phone with my son last night. Speaking of the novels he had read, he then turned to poetry: why the obfuscation?, he asked. "If I read 5 pages of a book, I know what it's talking about. If I read five paragraphs of a poem, I have to go back and analysis it 5 times and I still get it wrong. Why do they write this stuff like a puzzle?"
Ah, excellent question, my boy! And it is as true with any art as it is with poetry, that some wish to sound wise by creating something that no one else can comprehend. But that silliness is found in the social sciences, too. No: what sincere poetry tries to do is to draw the reader from the discursive - from what words ordinarily are - to that something or other that is the point of the poem. If it were to convey a message, as might be in a novel, it would be best to say, "Bill went down to the river and brooded over his failures. Then he came back to the house and kicked the dog." We are led beyond a standard "right and wrong" or "black or white" into human emotional responses, but that is it and all there is intended to be. A poem might read, "And he trudged through the dead grass under a heavy sky /to stand at the edge of frozen waters;/and there looked down at his whitened hand, trembling and wrinkled with age. "Why?" is all he could say, and the sky echoed back only that, "why?"/ And so he turned, lost again in silence, to lights dulled by the gloom." Poetry/prose would be more exact, and this is only off the cuff, but the meaning is not found in analysis - rather, it is in the picture painted and the setting set by meter and combined meaning to bring you to - what? Something beyond your ordinary self. To the vast impersonality of nature and the hovering of death over everything. What good, it asks, is anything? The question might be taken by the reader and he might have a reply. But he is drawn none-the-less into something beyond the ordinary by the mere act of reading, whether he wants to or not. He is brought to the edge of the imponderable, and maybe the beginning of his own wisdom. Poetry, as all true art, tires to do just this: reach beyond.
The physics of reality does not, even as it does. The demystifying nature of its reasoning, even as it might assure us of the infinite and exciting principles it is discussing, does not similarly light the same fire. It takes the moon and turns it into space dust,or a projection of information "packets" connected by energy patterns oscillating at the speed of light. It is fascinating, but not deep.
A few blogs ago, I mentioned the Gospel of the blind man, of Jesus healing the blind, and how he told the Pharisees that the blind would see and the seeing would be blind. Discursively, this does not make logical sense. It, too, is poetry, the art of spiritual knowledge. That there might be a physics to it is, I think, probably the case, as discussed before. But the real plunge, the real hit, is in the finality and authority of the overall impressions: one, that the world is not what you think it is, and the more you think you know it, the less, or more blinded, you are; and two, that it is time, THE TIME HAS COME, for a reversal of everything you thought you knew. God will be man/will die of man; the weak shall conquer the strong; the blind shall be the sighted ones. The world is about to be turned on its head, in accordance with the will, or way (yes, we could read 'physics') of heaven, and it is big. Apocalypse, struggle, and finally victory and the reign of everything that is right with Heaven and crushed by the world of Man. In it, we hear the ringing of a wisdom far greater than our own, and we know it is BIG.
And so it is with the great religions. They are the poetry of God, guiding you not by discursive knowledge, because we cannot understand, but by divine poetry, painting the picture and giving the sense, the awe, the depth to it as best as we can grasp. It, like poetry, is a bridge to something beyond (only further). Further, I'm afraid to say for our scientific friends, than science could ever go alone. FK
Ah, excellent question, my boy! And it is as true with any art as it is with poetry, that some wish to sound wise by creating something that no one else can comprehend. But that silliness is found in the social sciences, too. No: what sincere poetry tries to do is to draw the reader from the discursive - from what words ordinarily are - to that something or other that is the point of the poem. If it were to convey a message, as might be in a novel, it would be best to say, "Bill went down to the river and brooded over his failures. Then he came back to the house and kicked the dog." We are led beyond a standard "right and wrong" or "black or white" into human emotional responses, but that is it and all there is intended to be. A poem might read, "And he trudged through the dead grass under a heavy sky /to stand at the edge of frozen waters;/and there looked down at his whitened hand, trembling and wrinkled with age. "Why?" is all he could say, and the sky echoed back only that, "why?"/ And so he turned, lost again in silence, to lights dulled by the gloom." Poetry/prose would be more exact, and this is only off the cuff, but the meaning is not found in analysis - rather, it is in the picture painted and the setting set by meter and combined meaning to bring you to - what? Something beyond your ordinary self. To the vast impersonality of nature and the hovering of death over everything. What good, it asks, is anything? The question might be taken by the reader and he might have a reply. But he is drawn none-the-less into something beyond the ordinary by the mere act of reading, whether he wants to or not. He is brought to the edge of the imponderable, and maybe the beginning of his own wisdom. Poetry, as all true art, tires to do just this: reach beyond.
The physics of reality does not, even as it does. The demystifying nature of its reasoning, even as it might assure us of the infinite and exciting principles it is discussing, does not similarly light the same fire. It takes the moon and turns it into space dust,or a projection of information "packets" connected by energy patterns oscillating at the speed of light. It is fascinating, but not deep.
A few blogs ago, I mentioned the Gospel of the blind man, of Jesus healing the blind, and how he told the Pharisees that the blind would see and the seeing would be blind. Discursively, this does not make logical sense. It, too, is poetry, the art of spiritual knowledge. That there might be a physics to it is, I think, probably the case, as discussed before. But the real plunge, the real hit, is in the finality and authority of the overall impressions: one, that the world is not what you think it is, and the more you think you know it, the less, or more blinded, you are; and two, that it is time, THE TIME HAS COME, for a reversal of everything you thought you knew. God will be man/will die of man; the weak shall conquer the strong; the blind shall be the sighted ones. The world is about to be turned on its head, in accordance with the will, or way (yes, we could read 'physics') of heaven, and it is big. Apocalypse, struggle, and finally victory and the reign of everything that is right with Heaven and crushed by the world of Man. In it, we hear the ringing of a wisdom far greater than our own, and we know it is BIG.
And so it is with the great religions. They are the poetry of God, guiding you not by discursive knowledge, because we cannot understand, but by divine poetry, painting the picture and giving the sense, the awe, the depth to it as best as we can grasp. It, like poetry, is a bridge to something beyond (only further). Further, I'm afraid to say for our scientific friends, than science could ever go alone. FK
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