My pen pal Prabhata Kumar Sahoo used the word UNEVACUATED in a poem. He was describing the feeling of being surrounded by miles of fog. He must have been walking in fog when he thought of it. What a fine word to capture a lonely mood! It reminds me of a disaster site which cannot be reached by any vehicle...or the self which cannot be emptied of pangs, because it is both container and content. I am the sole (soul?)witness, the privileged observer of events in this subjective zone, so science will have to rely on my reports. But my reports are irritating to science, like a burr stuck inside its boot. Science periodically throws up its hands and decides my inaccessibility is not worth the bother, being filled with mostly expendable phenomena, these inner states which are constantly renewed and constantly strewn about like falling leaves. If these leaves succeed in leaving any trace, it is when they engage with some kind of residue-producing instrumentality (some kind of machinery) , which is the sort of thing science is suited to dealing with. At any rate these inaccessible corners of subjectivity are too numerous to deal with, so they had best be left to deal with themselves. Anyway, they are unreliable sites for colonization by objectivity. What good are reports from someone who periodically gets lost in his own fog?
I say to heck with science! All I know is that I was left hanging out on a limb by the exuberance of creation. The creation strewed life in every direction, until it filled all spaces of possibility with rampant growth, and some of that growth went inward and developed an inner world...and here I am! I am like an invisible peacock's tail of sensibility that can only show itself by evoking similar states in other tails spread across the inner void. I am left hanging on this strange limb and there is no way to develop out of it...I can only develop further into what I am. So I am like the hop of a kangaroo, the busyness of the bee. The kangaroo develops by hopping farther; the bee gets busier. I have to conspire with other fruits that were hung out on such limbs. Together we can build an outer structure that is internally filigreed with our special loneliness. Then we can feel alone together while continuing to hang on this limb of inwardness! And occasionally a flash of lightning will leap from limb to limb!
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I probably will have to read Prabhata Kumar's poem to appreciate your thought. But the inner world is certainly mysterious and fascinating. Every now and then a spark flashes out to illuminate that dark place...may be just to make us aware of its existence. It's strong connection effecting our outer being.
somehow, the following line made me laugh. it MADE ME! ! ! honest! ! Then we can feel alone together while continuing to hang on this limb of inwardness! i will try not to picture you and others as plums or mangoes swinging in the breeze. the poem is rather 'fanciful', i believe, for me. but i liked it and read the WHOLE THING! now i'm reading the comments. too bad Tom misspelled his first word; i may have to tease him about it. as for your response to Tom, i have never gotten straight (and kept straight) in my mind the definitions of subjective and objective. so, as you may guess, much of this poem is 'wasted' on me, except that it was not unpleasant to read. coincidentally, we have a haze/mist/fog outdoors this morning which may not be caused by 'wildfires' in this part of California. my mate thinks and says to me that she feels it is particles dropped into the sky by the government or other forces to the detriment of human residents, perhaps to help coerce 'us' into moving to the major urban centers. i said it may be fog from the nearby ocean. oh well. we live until we die. or do you believe we live beyond death? bri :)
What a lovely poem that hovers on 'Mist ' inside our consciousness- - -A philosophical write touching both science and literature.Kudos to you and Pravat Kumar Sahoo whose poem inspired you.
Unevacuted is indeed a fine word and you have developed it with speculations of real quality. As for science, I think what a blessing is the Uncertainty principle. It has shaken Science to the core and allowed us the freedom to stop paying so much homage to Realism. Perhaps then we can clear the fog and construct that new aesthetic your Chinese friend envisages. I hope so and I think your poem is going in the right direction, Denis.
I like what you say about the Uncertainty Principle. Indeed, materialistic thought makes pretensions to absolute objectivity which have been shaken, and rightfully so. As you say, this relates to the fog we sometimes find ourselves in. One reason for our fog is that we make stumbling efforts to justify ourselves, because our thinking has been colonized by the demand for objectivity and objectification. We tend to see ourselves as a thing. And as my friend Luo Ying says in his essay, there is an element of nihilism in modernity which we need to guard against. (Pretensions to absolute objectivity are susceptible to irrational but hidden subjective forces.) Thanks for reading his essay.
This is brilliantly expressed throughout....