THE BIG QUESTIONS, 7: WHAT MEANING MEANS

Poem #7 for National Poetry Month (NaPoMo, April) responds to the big question: What do we know? Virtual Realities and Valuable Authorities.* (What is knowledge? Do we know what we know? How do we know what we know is the truth? Do we need to go through the rigours of epistemology?)

 

 

WHAT MEANING MEANS

Giving up on giving up is a better choice,

when being sensible and clear are futile.
Words would lose meaning, ours will not.

Where you see a vine leading its tendrils

up to a broken branch shedding a last leaf,
you make me see its undulant plummet

to the parched pond mottled by blackened

and brittle leaves long dead even before
the end of this long hot summer. It is real.

Is this not our faultless way of knowing

what we pretend to know when we can
no longer see the dancer from the dance?

Would not the falling of that lonely leaf

trace the slower climb of a clinging vine?
Like seeing both sides of the wall at once.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

*To celebrate this Poetry Month, we thought of collecting a series of poems that would respond to these Big Questions posited by Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, in his book The Big Questions Philosophy, 2009, Quercus Publishing Plc, London, UK. pp.38-47. He says about knowing: "...we need our confidence to match what happens. That is the gold standard for knowledge and truth alike." (Ibid, pg.47)

 

Painting: Adam and Eve in Paradise by Ian Brueghel the Elder.

(The apple from the Tree of Knowledge? What does that mean?)