a new understanding of today, time and space.

we return to Kant and his questions…

  1. what can I know?
    2.what ought I do?
  2. what may I hope?

now we also have Kant’s three thoughts…
god, freedom and immortality…

so, how do we know god, freedom, immortality?

how are Kant’s three point relevant to “what ought I do”
and “what may I hope”…

now if we take Hume seriously, then we cannot “know” any of these
concepts of god, freedom or immortality… for Hume has shown us,
that knowledge of these concepts is not possible…all knowledge
Hume argues is only possible by experience and god, freedom and
immortality lies outside of our experience…

god, freedom and immortality are metaphysical concepts…
they exists outside of physical experience…(now one may argue that
freedom isn’t outside of experience, but for the moment let us assume that freedom
is a metaphysical concept)

so, what can I know? In light of Hume, we realize that our knowledge
is limited… we have limited senses and limited ability to
understand what our senses tell us, so we are in fact, limited to
the extent of our knowledge…I can tell you, know, that I am in the
kitchen, writing on the dinning room table because that is the only spot
in the house I can write in…we have this limited amount of knowledge…
now according to Hume, we cannot have any other knowledge beyond
simple, basic knowledge like my sitting at the kitchen table…
we cannot have metaphysical knowledge because that knowledge exists
outside of our sensory ability, outside of our senses, outside of our
experience…as the knowledge of god, freedom and immortality
lie outside of our senses…

so, this question of what can I know? Is a limited one, we
can know what the senses and experience tells us and as we
have limited senses and can only have limited experiences,
we are limited in our knowledge………

so we face Kant’s second question, what ought I do?

this is an rather open ended question…… what ought I do in regards to, what?

the answer to this question seems to lie outside of the question…

so we try to understand this question in terms of, let us try possibilities,

what ought we do given our possibilities?

so now we have to understand what is possible for a human being?

at any given time, we have different possibilities… for example, at age
18, I could and did, run a marathon… at 59, not so much, I can drive 26 miles,
but I doubt I could walk or even bike ride 26 miles… so at different ages, what
is possible for me changes…

my thoughts of today, weren’t possible at 20 because I needed time to
reflect upon and read about and live the possibilities we have…
and the years of reading and thinking make it possible to have the thoughts
I have today… my wilderness years as I like to call them…

due to my experience, I avoid the mistakes of youth… I can see, spot
trouble before it ever comes near me, and I can avoid it……
and that is due to my age and experience… in my youth, I made
plenty of mistakes… mistakes I could have avoided if I was a little
more experienced… but that is how we become wise… the wiser
the man, the greater the fuck ups he has had…kinda good rule of the thumb…
a wise man has fucked up enough to have learned from his mistakes…
an unwise man still hasn’t learned from his mistakes…

so, fuck ups are the key to becoming wise… and the moral of this
story is to fuck up and often………

so anyway, what ought I do?

let us think about this ……

Kropotkin

so what ought I do?

society has created myths, habits, prejudices, superstitions and biases
to tell us what we ought to do…… that is the point of society’s
myths of childhood… to point out what we ought to do…

we ought to be patriotic and fight for our country
and we ought to obey the law and we ought to
believe in god…(recall that insubordination is the greatest
crime in the bible and in the state and in business… as a union
person, I can only be fired for two and two things only,
on is stealing and the other… yep, insubordination… think about it)
and we ought to hold certain beliefs and act in certain ways… that
is part of the indoctrination of our youth… we must act, think, believe,
in certain things or we shall be tossed out of paradise…

(to my mind, Adam is the best example of what a real human being needs
to be, someone who rejects authority to become their own person, to
act upon their own reason, not on authority’s reason…
to become fully realized human beings, we must be like Adam
and reject authority and become our own person and yes, mistakes
will me made… that is the moral of that story… become a real functional
human being, but beware, it comes at a cost… are you willing to pay that cost
and for most people, they are not willing to pay the price to become fully human,
it is easier and less complicated to remain under the thumb of authorities)

so, what ought we do?

the example is really more of what ought we aspire to, instead of
being like Adam pre-fall, we should be like Adam after the fall and
try to realize our possibilities by attempting to become more,
not to listen to authorities who try to limit what is possible, but
to become fully human…Adam didn’t become fully human until
he ate the apple, the fruit of knowledge… and we should listen…

(I am saying Adam, but I could have easily said Eve also, as I am
a man, I tend to think in terms of a male, if I was female, I
could have and most likely would have said Eve… it is easily
understand regardless of who I had used, Adam or Eve…)

so, what ought I do?

Kropotkin

so what ought I do?

we use such things as physical activities like running, swimming,
basketball, mountain climbing, baseball, to name a few things,
to discover what is possible for us physically…we push
the boundries of being human with such physical activities…
we try to break the 4 minute mile and we try to hit the baseball
enough to get a 300 average and we climb ever new mountains to
discover who we are………

we use these things to discover our physical possibilities…
we have yet extend this into our mental or emotional life…
in other words, what ought we do to discover our mental or
emotional abilities?

we can use such things as history or philosophy or math to discover
what our mental possibilite are and we can use love and hope
and justice to discover what are our emotional possibilities…

I have have loved… I can love… and if I have learned something
like philosophy, then I have learned my possibilities in the mental…

what is possible for us emotionally is things like love and hope and
equality… for we emotionally hate inequality…

so we have emotional possibilities… things that we learn when
we act emotionally…love is a great example… I haved
loved my wife for over 20 years but it is not a love like the
rush of a new love…I was watching some TV show where the
character falls in love… and it has been a long, long time
where I felt the rush of falling in love with someone like that…
and it is attractive, a wishing for, to fall in love like that again…
but then I have something else… a different kind of love…
whereas my love is a slow burning, steady pace of a long
lasting love… not the bright fire and indeed, explosive
first moments of a new love…

I don’t think I shall ever have the rush of falling in love again,
but it is understanding of where I am at these days…
experience does help us make these understandings…

so, what ought I do?

we should use things like our physical activities and
falling in love to discover what are our possibilities…
we must push the boundary of what is means to be human
with such things as our physical activities and our mental
ones such as learning a new language or learning disciplines like
math or philosophy…

and why? because we cannot “know” what is possible until
we push the borders of human actions in the physical, mental
emotional………… for example, we have seen such events as the
Holocaust and we wonder how, how someone could participate
in such horrible actions… guards and doctors and plain folks who
engaged in such actions… these actions push the boundary of
what is possible for human beings…we see it is possible for
ordinary people to engage in and be active participants
in pure and unadulterated evil…we see what is possible for
people, for us… for despite our best intention, we too can
engage in acts of evil, even in such evil as concentration camps
and the deaths of people whose only crime was to be born a different
religion…or to be born loving someone different then who love…

and this is why we must engage in and become aware of
intolerance and bigotry and inequality…for belief in those
beliefs allow us to accept and possibly engage with evil like
Auschwitz… intolerance and bigotry and inequality gives us
the possibility of thinking that it is acceptable to engage in
and support acts of evil like Auschwitz…

belief in intolerance and bigotry and inequality leads us to
to the possibility of acts of evil…

and is that how we are to define the possibilities of being human
by acts of evil? don’t we engage with our possibilities best
when we engage with our higher possibilities… the possibility
of love and the possibility of hope and the possibility of peace
and of justice and equality…

we must engage with, ought to do, with the higher possibilities
of being human, not with the lower possibilities like hate
and intolerance and anger and greed and lust……

it is not about our oughts being acts of something,
like slaying the dragon or making millions in business but
what we ought to do is explore the possibilities of being human…
that is what we ought to do…discover who we are and
what are our possibilities…and we use actions and event
and experiences to discover those possibilities…

we ought to become more human…

that is what we ought to do…

Kropotkin

we have Kant’s three questions…

What can I know…
what out I do…
want may I hope…….

as I touched upon the first two questions earlier, I wish to
discuss the final question……

what may I hope…

now Kant had taken his three other question of
god, freedom and immortality away from the first question…what can I know…

and he placed in the third question of what may I hope,
the question of god, freedom and immortality…

so we cannot know god or freedom or immortality…
but we can hope for them……….

that was Kant’s position…and in a real sense, he is right…
we cannot know if there is a god or what is freedom or is
there is immortality…

we can however hope for them……….

but that list of things to hope for seems, to me anyway, rather limited…….

as hope is really just another way of saying prayer… what do we pray for,
which is to say, what do we hope for?

so what do we pray for?

Nietzsche ubermensh, he has said yes, yes to all that the universe
offers and so he has no need for prayer because he has nothing he
needs to hope for… he is a man content with what the universe has
to offer, and we know the universe offers us pain and suffering
and agony and joy and delight and love and beauty and we say yes…
thus we have no need to hope for something when we have all that the
universe has to offer us…………we have overcome what others might
call good or evil because they are simple the same thing thought of
in a different, higher context… and what does the word “context” mean?
experience……….

as a modern man, a man of 2018… what should I hope for?
what should I pray for?

nothing, nothing at all………

Kropotkin

I had a conversation with a man…

he told me that there was no difference between
self help books and philosophy…….

and he was right……… both are meant to help us understand
and improve ourselves………

but what does philosophy do that the self help books don’t do?

philosophy tries to extend understanding to the world…
it also questions everything, creates doubt about everything…
the beginning of wisdom lies in doubt…
the self help book only want to create certainty…
I don’t want to create certainty…

I want to create that Zen moment when the mountains are leaping
and the sea is dancing and the rivers have overflowed their banks…
that is the moment that I look for………

I have said yes…

Kropotkin

in thinking about this ongoing battle between
hate, intolerance, anger, greed and lust
and the enlightenment ideals of tolerance,
reason, thinking for oneself…

the forces of hate and intolerance are winning at this time
and I was wondering why? then some thoughts came to mine…

the lower instincts of hate and intolerance and anger and greed,
need only themselves to exists… they don’t need any plan or goal or
destination outside of themselves…you hate just to hate… it has
no other meaning or goal…

whereas the liberal ideals of the enlightenment do have a goal,
do have a destination……. the enlightenment was about
following the path of progress (and progress was assumed to exist even if
the progress didn’t always follow a straight path) and it was a given that
the enlightenment ideals were part of the overall path of progress…
by following the enlightenment ideals of tolerance and thinking for oneself,
Sapere aude……Latin for “Dare to know” or has some have thought about
it, “Dare to be wise” or for some, “Dare to think for yourself”
one was engaging in the path of progress………
not only individually but as part of a social collective progress…

but hate and anger and greed don’t care about progress and they
don’t care about any individual goal… hate exists for hate and
that is why those who hate seem to, seem to, achieve more
then those with liberal idea’s because it is easier to hate then
to achieve positive ideals by following the path of improving oneself
and finding out what is best in us, instead of what is worst……

hate only needs hate… and is the path of least resistance…

Kropotkin

if I were to say, the ideal society is where
we have ended war and poverty and intolerance and hatred
and bigotry and religions…

the ideal society is one where we only work a few hours a day and
we spend the rest of the day, in some aspect of improving ourselves…
learning a new language or climbing a mountain or running a 5 minute mile
or reading a book are all forms of improving ourselves…changing who we
are……….

now many will jump up here and say, it isn’t possible or it won’t work
this utopia of yours or it is a fantasy or it is what it is…

thus affirming the idea that people can only say no,
they cannot say yes and see the possibilities of change…

we can have a society where we only work a few hours a day
and spend the rest of the day doing things of interest to us…
the question becomes, do we spend the effort to try
to get from point A, which is today, to point B, which is our
ideal society… instead of saying, it is impossible or it is a
unreachable fantasy, we could say, how do we go from point
A to point B………… how do we achieve our goal here……

what will it take to get from our current broken society to
a point where we are no longer a nihilistic society/culture?

instead of saying no, it is possible to say, yes, what does it
take to get to our ideal society/culture………….

we are far too use to saying no,
instead of saying yes…it is possible…

what would it take for you to learn to say yes instead
of saying no?

Kropotkin

to properly understand experience and how we understand experience,
let us follow through experience…

we are born…the senses like vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell…
give us information about the world, about experiences……

but at birth, we are unable to make sense of these sensations given
by the senses… in other words, we might hear a voice, but we cannot
understand the voice and we do not even know the voice is a voice…
for us at birth, it is simply a sound that has no meaning for us…
as the year passes, the 1st year, we begin to make some small sense of the world…
we might be able to connect the sound we hear as a voice to come from
a specific human being…but we still don’t know what the words are yet……

in other words, we learn from experience what voices are and what sound is
and what smell is and what is touch…and at the same time as we are experiencing
our senses, we are also being indoctrinated and this indoctrination continues to the
point of when we are finally able to get clear of and escape ourselves from
this indoctrination…usually adulthood…

so we are getting information about the world from our senses
and we are being told what that information means from
our parents, the schools, the media, the state, and that information
is given understanding by the myths and biases and habits and prejudices
we are being taught/indoctrinated with from childbirth…………

the form of the world as we understand it comes from the indoctrinations
that we are taught from childhood……

or to say it another way,
we don’t know anything a priori…

our information of the world comes to us from experience, empirically……
from parents and school and the state and classmates and we
take an experience and understand it from that information
that we were taught about the world from parents and school and the state
and classmates…

let us say, something dropped from the sky…
we would attempt to understand that something
from our experiences…the object is silver…
so we compare other silver objects to this object,
but it doesn’t seem to compare… we then
try to match it with other items that we know of…
but we are stymied because we cannot know or understand
an object without knowing, from experience, what an object is…

can you know a priori what an aspirin tablet is?
no…… simple as that………you cannot know or understand
what aspirin is before you have already experienced it in some
fashion……

the object from the sky… how to you understand something
without an experience of it… the object from the sky is
a tool meant to repair a space ship…would we be able to
understand that without any experience with it… perhaps
if we compare the object from space with tools we already have
and we might, might be able to relate the space object with tools
we already have, but it would mean we can’t “think” our way into
understanding, we would have to measure and compare and give context
to the space object… in other words, we would use experience to
connect the space object to our tools… to our hammer or to our screwdriver
or something like that……….

now one might try to save the a priori concept by relating them
to mathematical concepts…
but once again, we learn math by experience, we are taught
1 + 1 =2…… we don’t have that knowledge instinctively, because
if we did, then why do we go to school to learn it?
I recall in my youth, 50 years ago, of learning my math tables…
I recall spending hours reciting the times tables… 8 times 5 is 40…
9 times 5 is 45, 10 times 5 is 50… we spend a whole lot of time
in our youth reciting such stuff…if it were a priori, then we are
wasting a lot of time in youth learning stuff we already know…

our very childhood learning is argument enought that we learn
via experience, empirically and not by any a priori means…

the practical matters of our educational system is proof enough
that we learn empirically and we understand by experience…
although you have emprirically and experience, those two words
really mean the same thing…

Kropotkin

Human beings are creatures who act and engage with
actions, activity, movement………

we do things every single day…
we wake up and we go to work
and we make love and we run traffic signals…
in fact, we do and engage with hundreds of
actions a day…

what we do is try to create value and meaning in those actions…
for example, when I give my wife flowers… that action has value,
giving flowers “means” I love my wife… the action, flower giving,
has value and meaning to me…

we try to give our actions value and meaning…

let us try a thought experiment…

let us think about work and work in a factory or
a factory light… factory light is a supermarket
where checkers stand all day and scan items or
weigh items…as I have done that for over 10 years,
it is something I am rather familiar with…

the reason why factor work is so dehumanizing and so devoid
of meaning is because of the nature of the work…

what meaning or value can I give or create from
scanning bread or cans of corn or weighing apples all day long……

the very repetition of the work means it has no value or meaning, no point
to it…… I cannot create value or meaning out of scanning bread all day long…

and we humans, that is what we do, try to create value and meaning out
of our actions……….

some actions don’t need that… that are of value just by their doing…

for example, playing a game or watching a game has its own value,
its own meaning… when I played baseball, I enjoyed it and it had
value for its own actions… tonight, I watched the SF Giants played
the LA Dodgers in baseball… that act was its own meaning,
it was its own meaning or value……… play and games don’t need to search
for some value or justification…their have value just by their doing…

that activity of playing or watching baseball has some value already…
we don’t need to search for meaning in baseball or in play…
baseball has value and meaning to me already……

we also have value and meaning in the arts…… we don’t need to
find value in the creation of art…we can just engage in art, whatever
art that maybe or we can look at art and we don’t need to find some
external value or meaning in doing or looking at art… doing so
is its own value, meaning… unlike scanning items all day which has
no value or meaning… it is simply busy work… we cannot find
value or meaning in such work as in scanning items all day…

so we try to discover value and meaning in our actions by such means
as the myths and habits and prejudices and superstitions and biases
of our childhood indoctrinations…

work is suppose to have some higher value, but that is a lie, meant
to give us some reason to work…

in our efforts to find meaning and value in all our actions, we
sometimes lie to ourselves…… and pretend that these actions,
or those actions have some value, have some meaning…
but we find as we grow older… that actions we thought
were of value, actions that did have meaning, don’t have value or meaning…
I find work to be of no value or no meaning……
it is a pointless exercise of futility with no value or no meaning in our lives…

we engage in actions all our live and the point of those actions is to
find some value or meaning within them………

Kropotkin

problem of existence…

how to find meaning in our lives……

we try to find meaning in the actions that we have…
we look for meaning in the flowers we give to someone…
we look for meaning in the music we listen to…
we look for meaning in the books we read………
we try to find our own personal meaning in these actions
and other actions…………

take the Japanese tea ceremony… by the simple creation of
structure in their ceremony, they have created value in it…

we can find value, meaning, purpose in such activity, in such actions
as the Japanese tea ceremony… but separate it out from
day to day life that we take for granted… it cannot become routine
or factory like when we do actions continuously to the point of
boredom or ennue or complete indifference as is the result of modern life…

to infuse our lives with meaning, purpose, we must begin with
infusing our actions, our acts, the events we participate in, with meaning
and purpose…we find meaning in our lives by giving our actions meaning,
purpose…

that is one possible solution to the problem of existence…

Kropotkin

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero,
Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Buddha, Nagarjuna,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Sartre, Heidegger………

each of these people taught a version of reality…
each of them told us the truth…
but each “truth” was just another aspect of the blind
men who went to discover what a object was and
because they each grabbed a different part of the object,
they thought the object was different for each… but it wasn’t…
the blind men all went and grabbed a different part of a elephant…
and because they each grabbed a different part, one grabbed
the trunk and the other the tusks and the other the leg and another
the tail and because of this, they thought they were touching many
different objects… but because they were blind, they couldn’t see
that they were all grabbing the same object……

each thinker listed above all thought they were grabbing different
aspects of reality… but the reality is, they were all grabbing the same
reality…they just didn’t realize it………

should you study Kant or should study Plato or should you study
the Buddha or should you study Sartre… yes, for they all write
about the same thing…… the same reality just different aspects of
that reality…does that mean we have one reality for all human beings?

no………

I exists in our modern time and my “reality” is going to be different because
what I see and hear and taste and touch and smell is different then what
Socrates or Cicero or Hume saw or tasted or touch or smelled or heard…….

we are just describing a very large elephant which is the current reality around me…
and those thinkers are just describing the reality that was current around them……….

you can study each and every single one of them or just one or two and you will
find that you will reach the same place… they are all just a means to reach
the same place…and that place is?

as a means to understand the “reality” you exist within……

and when you describe “reality” it is just another side of the
elephant……….

Kropotkin

have you figured out the “reality” all those thinkers were
trying to understand?

its simple, they are describing different aspects of being human…
one says the legs and another says the arms and another says the ears…
but they are all describing the same thing… what it means to be human……

they each described a different aspect of being human… and one says
being human is to escape suffering and another says being human is
eternal forms and another says, duty to ancestors and another says,
duty to god and another says, everything is simply experiences
and another says…………

they each describe a different aspect of being human…….

and that is the “reality” they each try to understand…

what it means to be human…

Kropotkin

the attempt to find the meaning in our life
via events, experiences, emotions or actions…
is not going to be successful…
mainly because we cannot answer an “inside” question
with an “outside” answer…….

we can only answer an “inside” question with an
“inside” answer……

in other words, to find meaning is to find the “truth”
within us, not outside of us……….

the outside world certainly can show us the path to “truth”
“truth” is just another way of saying, meaning…
but the outside world is only a guide, nothing more…

the path to being human lies inside of us, not outside in
any experience or event or activity…………

those outside experiences, events, activities can help us understand
our path, our “truth”, our meaning……….

the process to becoming human, fully human lies inside of us,
not outside of us…….

Kropotkin

as I continue my study of philosophy,
I am also studying the society at large
and I am studying history…….

as I have read various philosophers, I am now on Kant…
thing I have notice is that they, the philosophers don’t
have any type of historical study in their works…
in other words, when say, Hume works out an idea,
that idea doesn’t exists in history, it is an isolated idea
that exists outside of history…ideas are treated as
separate from or isolated from history…
even Kant doesn’t work out his idea’s historically,
they exist outside of and independent of history…
philosophers before Kant would bring up prior philosophical
idea’s only to refute them, not as historical idea’s in themselves
but as ideas to argue against…………

we modern man has in fact done is take an idea and place
it within history… a writer who doesn’t look at the historical
aspect of an idea is a pretty piss poor writer, in our eyes anyway,
beginning with writers like Goethe and Vico, we begin to understand
ideas in a historical context… we no longer look at ideas as independent
and separate from history… idea’s have an historical context
and that is an modern viewpoint… that is an modern invention…

we begin the modern idea of the creation of context of history within
philosophy with Hegel… and every philosopher thereafter must
put philosophy into historical context………. idea’s do have history
and we must account for idea’s in a historical context……
the birth of this idea of philosophical ideas having a historical context
is a good thing and a modern invention worth celebrating…

I guess I must credit the enlightenment writers also, as they focus a great deal
on history… Voltaire and Hume wrote well respected histories……

context which means experience is everything……
history creates context…

Kropotkin

we have two separate and distinct societies today,
those who believe and those who don’t……
I don’t believe and I have never tried to hide that……

but it has occurred to me that belief in god is a different thing
then non-belief…… and the difference, one of them anyway,
is belief in god negates history… belief in god is belief in
one world, created by god and populated by god with no reference
to any historical context of the world, people or animals…….
and then exists end times, where we exists outside of time forever…
on the right hand of god as it were………

believe is ahistorical, it doesn’t need history to exist…….

whereas non-belief is about historical context…
if you believe in Darwin and I do, then you believe in
the historical context that Darwin places on the world,
man, animals… life……

the history of life is historical… whereas belief is not…

everything is historical when you are a non-believer…
and everything is not historical when you are a believer…

I am born, I live and I die… everything about me exists in history and
must be seen in a historical context… whereas if I am a believer,
I don’t need or want history because god is not about historical context…
that is why it is easy to dismiss global warming or over pollution or overpopulation
warnings because it doesn’t matter in the universe of god… because
all that matters is heaven and getting to heaven and heaven is not
about historical context because you are there forever… and who cares
about earthly concerns when it is about spending time on heaven…
or so says the believer……
and so we have one root cause for the indifference to the major
problems of humanity and existence…….believers don’t care because
they are ahistorical and non-believers are historical and they must
care because they exist within history and is part of history and
a legacy of history and a creator of history……

history is before us and history is during us and history is after us…
we exists in historical context… while history before us could
be considered like the Zen problem… where before Zen, the mountains
are stable and the sea calm and the river stays in its bank…
while during Zen, the mountains dance and the sea rages
and the river overflows it’s banks and after Zen,
the mountain are stable and the sea becomes calm and
the river stays in its banks…

that is us… in the middle of history and in the middle of Zen……
the mountains are dancing and the sea is wild and turbulent
and the river has overflowed it bank’s…

and how do we return to the after Zen and after history…
we don’t… but we don’t allow the during Zen to claim our
understanding of what it means to be human and how to become
more human……. what are our possibilities? to have trust in
history is the only trust we need to have…………
if we trust Darwin to be right, and he is, then we must have some
faith in history……… and simply work out our issues, both individually
and collectively…….

to state you believe in god is to say, you don’t believe in history
and to say you don’t believe says, you do believe in history……

Kropotkin

poetry and truth… that was the name of Goethe’s autobiography…

since the days of the Greeks, Poets were thought to have
a direct connection to the gods…… they were honored and
vilified and given the highest seat and thrown into jail……

Plato wanted to ban the poet because his verse too incendiary for
the common man……….

and this was true until, until the “modern” age…
few poets of the 20 century were even noticed
and those who were noticed are the honored “unread”…great poets
who no one actually reads… but their name gets a place in
in the textbooks as “great” poets of the 20th century…

Rilke is one such name…

but the real question becomes, why have we killed the poets?

who writes poetry and who reads it? you might as well be
making prayers to Ra as so far as writing poetry… for all the good it will do you…

why have we lost the feel, the touch for poems?

what has happened to poetry?

we have our truths, oh, we have so many truths, we need
years, decades to understand and remember them…

the earth is 93 million miles from earth
and New York has 8 million people…
and the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago…

do those truths equal this truth…

Nur im Raum der ruhmung darf die Klage
gehn, die Nymphe des geweinten Quells……

I leave it untranslated on purpose…….

we have cast out poetry because we have cast
out of paradise… emotions, feelings, sentiments……

in our name, IQ45 has separated children including infants from their parents
and most of the country has a collective yawn…

if a Kardashian has a hangnail, the country will hold a telethon to raise money
for such a crisis for humanity……………

in losing the example of poetry, we have lost our understanding of
what is really important…………… we have lost our ability of
discovering what is really important, emotionally, in feelings,
in sentiments……………….

we have clowns like IQ45 who “feel” that important matters are
emotional… they have opinions that they disguise as facts……
and they think that their feelings are a substitute for logic
and facts and “truth” but that is different from what I am talking about…

we cannot overcome our emotions until we understand that they
are a part of us, they are an essential part of us… when
we think we our reasoning, we are really emotionally weighing
out our options, not with logic or rational thought, but with
feeling, with us being emotional……….

we cannot tell the difference between our emotions
and our rational thought……. we think they are the same thing…
they are not…………

and this failure has cost us our poets, our poetry…

why have poets, when we can’t even tell the difference
between emotions and rational thought…………

Kropotkin

why waste the time on poetry one might ask?

Because as everyone knows, poetry is dead…
and has been dead for quite a while…

Killed by its own boring nature…

once upon a time, while poetry was still fashionable,
people thought the search for the truth was really a search
for an Aesthetic theory…

Aesthetic:

1: concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty…
2: set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a
particular artist or movement…

the search for the truth was a search for beauty…
and if we found beauty, we found the truth…

and this was how the truth was perceived for generations…

we moderns, no longer know what is beautiful and so we
no longer know what the truth is… or so goes one such theory…

Poetry is dead…

or said another way, we have lost the Aesthetic……

in my wasted youth, I wrote poetry… laid waste to
many tree’s in search of poetic truth…………

now those poems sit in some box wasting away…
most likely being eaten by rats…
I couldn’t think of a better fate for those poems……………

poetry is dead…

and with it, the ability to wonder and feel ashamed and fall in love…….

in my youth, I read almost all of Blake and Tennison… in fact, all
of the English Romantic poets I read…………

and I was moved… to tears…….

I read them today and they are just words on a page, meaning nothing…

just well written words that no longer move me to tears…………

have the words changed? no, I have changed and in my old age,
I am no longer moved by words bathed in Aesthetics…….

the dance between words and the human soul no longer move me…

I have lost something very important… but I can’t remember what…

does the dance between the words of poetry and the soul, still move you?

I hope so…… it means there is still hope for you…….

I am waiting for the Autopsy on poetry…

was it suicide… was it death by murder… or was it death by indifference…

Aesthetic: the theory that the search for beauty actually matters…….

do we understand that today?

Kropotkin

I went online looking for poems to post here…

to understand why poetry has died

and I found this……

come
home.

that is the entire poem……

let us start small and work our way up…

is this a poem?

and if not, why not?

Kropotkin

recall that poetry is a search for truth or truths not found
any other way… what truth does our little poem convey?

come
home.

Kropotkin

we try to understand our little poem…

what is “home”?

it is a place… I am a home body now… but it didn’t use to be that
way… I would work my shifts then go out to the bar……….
I rarely spent any time at home… then as I got older,
home became more and more important……

Now, I rarely ever leave home unless I have to…
to work and that is about it……………

Home is a value………

and we come to an understanding of poetry…

it is about values…

and what have I said about philosophy?

science is about facts and philosophy is about values………

so poetry is just the other side of philosophy in its
quest for the “truth” about values………

what values are really important?

both philosophy and poetry try to seek out the truth of which
value are really worth living………

and we see the connection between philosophy and poetry…

it becomes a question of values……….

which values are really the values should be seeking?

Kropotkin