YOU AND I ---OR IS IT "I OR YOU?" (AS BENCHMARKS OF CONSCIOUSNESS)

MY POEM (For January 13) WAS PROMPTED ABOUT A POST ON "CONSCIOUSNESS" as the brain describing itself to itself. Can we know what we really claim to "know: or is it just a construct (however inchoate or incomplete) in our brain to explain what we sense or even perceive? Science still has a lot to explain before it claims to have arrived at the invention "artificial intelligence." Or are we simply using a portion of the "force" we have primordially? May the force be with you. I...s that it?

YOU AND I --- OR IS IT "I OR YOU?"
(AS BENCHMARKS OF CONSCIOUSNESS)


Words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. ---John Locke


Are you talking to me? Are you writing to me?
Answers to questions you pitch into the dark
are meanings I assign to the questions you ask.

Always, you and I, will be at opposite ends
of a half-lit hallway where echoes are as urgent
as the tremulous confessions we burden ourselves
with each time we look into our reflections
on the one-way mirrors we look into when hiding
hurts hurled like hunting knives at target trees.

When I call you, I mean to quickly hold you down,
to find your voice, to shape your feelings, to own
your thoughts, to mould you as I want to have you.

I interpret you through my own lenses and mirror
you as you would me and have our confluence
in this reflection, a dragging into a cold dungeon
of thought constructing meaning instead of finding
it, and the “You” becomes the “I” held in bondage.
Except that in this conquest, I lose everything.

Questions and answers become elusive phantoms
of meaning, configurations of troth to the other
turn into fantasy, dreams and desire but delusions.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

*This poem was prompted by Simon Blackburn's "Can We Understand Each Other? Treating Words Carefully," The Big Questions: Philosophy, Quercus Publishing, London, UK, 2009