THE BIG QUESTIONS, 15: QUESTIONS---NOW AND THEN. WHY BOTHER ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS, WHEN THEY COULD NOT BE ANSWERED NOW?

This is Poem #15 in our series of poem responses to the Big Questions (as defined by Philosophy Professor Simon Blackburn) to celebrate National Poetry Month (NaPoMo, April 2013). As an interregnum, this poem should bring the reader back to what the series was all about---the task of man as a homo sapiens is to ask questions while he is around, because his effort to answer them also defines whether or not his existence is meaningful, as transient as it is while it lasts.

Why bother to ask these questions, when they could not be answered Now?

QUESTIONS: NOW AND THEN

1.
What good is a brilliant question,
If it could not be answered now?
Of what use is an inchoate answer,
That begs the essential question?

It is the cat catching its tail, a snake
Swallowing itself, it is the circle
That will not break, a spinning gyre
Spitting back unanswered riddles.

Is not time past after all the now
We worry an answer for? Is it time
To be anxious for, when tomorrow
Has not gone past the hurdle Now?

A condemnation by circuit pulses,
Is always an unanswered curse.

2.
That is precisely the imprecision
That presides over the fate of man
Who must answer for a finitude
He did not want nor grovelled for.

Why must time past be time future,
When there is no now save a passing
Passion for all that looks beautiful
For just a little while, a vanishing
Vision---a grand mansion of thought,
A perishing still point, a broken
Promise of eternity he cannot know,
Nor understand for its briefness?

He will ask all the bright questions,
But they cannot be answered now.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

* This poem was inspired by a post by Ohio poet Hannah Stephenson. "How do we know/ what now is /if it’s always passing/ through us/ before we can get a good/ grip on it. ---From “What Do You Have in That Headlock”, Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist

Simon Blackburn, The Big Questions, Philosophy, 2009, Quercus Publishing Plc, London, UK. Mr. Blackburn is a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge in England.