Poetic Elegance: Debts Owed and Never Payed Back

                 Poetic Elegance: Debts Owed and Never Payed Back   

     The symbols of the English language can be configured in an incredibly large, finite number of combinations. So much literature has yet to be finished, yet uncountable number of tales have never been written. True masters of literature moved the: materialists, idealists, conservatives, Empiricists, Rationalists, and Marxists. Regardless of: ideological classification, religion, ethnicity, race, nationality, or otherwise a man can be moved to tears by: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Thoreau and Wordsworth. All of whom have classics which transcended through the years; as it appears uncountable unfinished masterworks of poems remain dormant. From Russell to Chomsky, so much has been said on the matters of logic and linguistics.

    By simply glimpsing an individual's personal: memoirs, diaries, journals, poetry one can briefly peer into the mind of the sane and the mad. Of course one’s conscious mind is his or her own private agenda and may never be known.

      There is a magical muse which exists and it travels in waves through the air. Majestic beauty gives us goose bumps, inspiration and can invoke the ugliest; however, magic can reveal the fairest complexion of the face of humanity as a whole. It reverberates through our minds and bones yet it is able to accomplish the most marvelous and miraculous feats. The majestic magic of an independent transcendence of time has long been seen as improbable. However, the magical powers which: Rossini, Schubert, Chopin, and Mozart had, have been utilized as spells to conjure strong emotions, and too often evoke emotional acts of madness. Might a sunset do the same as a sonnet or sonata?

The real world has baffled the brightest individuals. Through ambiguity, no single mind has been capable of  completely unraveling reality. What truth is known besides uncertainty? We owe Heisenberg the peace of mind that we shall never know both the position and momentum of an electron.                

The brightest stars have peered into the heavens a great deal: Plato, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein each helped us write the natural order of the universe.

    From stardust recycled back to the dust of the Earth. Ironically, however, modern western values are doing humanity no favors as the planet hurls backward in time. The individualistic nature of the western world prevents humans from reaching the goal of attaining knowledge that we require so desperately. Through greedy fiscal agendas clocks move clockwise yet the timeline of history does not lengthen. We are suspended in time. We owe Copernicus and Newton, the ability to see the most crucial task; to have mankind survive the next generations to witness the moon wane and wax.

Seemingly, the most trivial ideas have attempted to describe reality so elegantly yet was able to stump Albert Einstein. Nobel laureates: Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr were in a heated battle with the sharpest of minds, Albert Einstein who could not come to accept quantum theory. Notions which have seemed to be counterintuitive had the ability to start wars amongst superpowers.

Many scholars managed to rock us to our core. We have been back to the drawing board through time.

Before Einstein, Darwin made man see that we are no different to any other mammal apart from a larger cranium.

 It is part of the nature and essence of our species to ask whether human beings are evil creatures with the ability to do good, or inherently good creatures with the ability to do evil. What does it mean for something to be ‘good’?

The pioneering psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud contributed greatly to the philosophical idea of struggle. Nietzsche has been immortalized, as he sits on bookshelves in offices all over the world. Rightfully, we thank Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud for discovering that human beings prefer an inner antagonist to a light hearted protagonist. We unfortunately find out that: “we are born into a losing struggle...” 1:

      “O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound...” 2

 We owe it to Freud to heat the water and rid it of the submerged iceberg in the subzero waters. However, the arrow of time is not kind to life forms in the universe. Naturally, entropy will increase and the iceberg will inevitably melt. There once was a pyramid which  Marx had loathed. He never witnessed class distinction dissolve. From above Marx shall witness this feat.

        Mere humans must look to the mortal stars for light. The internal, epistemological and existential crises which every living organism face are not always apparent. Looking on the surface using introspection, human beings have the remarkable ability of peering into a mirror and searching with a fine comb for worms which infect the mind.

The impenetrable axioms of unfathomable mathematics can shed tremendous light on the inner truths of the consistency of our universe. For: Pythagoras, Euclid, Cantor, Hilbert, Gödel, Planck, Bohr, Von Neumann, Church, Turing, Russell, Whitehead and Feynman were among the very few who were capable of making breakthroughs in the field of  logic and our species are in debt to them all.

 Do we owe Gödel the peace of mind that the axiomatic truth that states: 1+1=2 remains certain?

Do we owe Plato the unattainable ideal world which no human being actually desires?

Could it be that the most pressing of issues must only be left to be decided by the majority? Should such immense responsibilities be trusted to the people? Can the imperfect human being be trusted as a whole?

Do we owe all scientific progress to a rigorous and formal scientific method? Perhaps not. After all, the looming debate between the classical dualist and non-dualist has been an occurring theme for several hundred years. It is clearly time that humans must re-evaluate knowledge which in the past was taken for granted.  

  Who but a submissive, robotic, bland, dreary and dull individual would desire an uneventful life which lacks any excitement? This is a plausible explanation to accompany the mystery of whether the human being is innately good or evil.

 Please, spare me the cliché: ‘May there be world peace forever. Perhaps, counterintuitively, human beings desire: fright, terror, gore, destruction and depression. The fact is not that human beings are malicious creatures, inherently, with sinister intentions.

 Humans must continue the age old quest for true knowledge and must maintain the desire to quench our sense of curiosity. Scholars find serenity in their work and many generations from today, our offspring shall look to the giants to stand upon the shoulders of brilliant individuals before them.  

Literary References I

1 Hitchens, C. (2011). Hitch-22: A Memoir

2 Greville, B.B.F. (1605). Chorus Sacerdotum

3 Grimm, J. & W. (1857). “Aschenputtel”

4Lacan, J. (1966). Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company.

pg.42

5Lacan, J. (1966). Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company.

pg.139