Ecopoetry; Another Truth?
What is TRUTH? Maybe it is ONLY what mathematics does and what mathematicians decide through exhaustive argument. If so, what part of mathematics is absolute truth and what is tentative truth. What is close enough? Statistics, after all, is our way of dealing with uncertainty. Is something true, if you don’t understand it; cannot explain it? Biology has its cell theory, evolution theory, laws of genetics, and a clumsy system for writing about the organization of plants, animals, microbes and even viruses. Descriptions of characteristics of life range from fuzzy to less fuzzy. Photosynthesis and respiration can be presented with well established biochemistry which seems not fuzzy or less fuzzy until someone suggests that what we think we know, think to be true, is only true in meticulously controlled conditions of the lab and may not fully represent what happens in a plant’s cell. The laws of genetics have acquired a good deal of fuzziness over the 50-60 years that I have known about them. Mendel’s garden peas were not the whole story. It turns out that two blue eyed parents CAN have a brown eyed child; all without invoking a role for the milk man.
There are so many nuances of truth – perhaps too many – that truth is a language artifact, a word with ostensible meaning, and has to be a focus of an evolutionary learning conversation that enables participants to emerge with something akin to pleasure. Maybe that pleasure emerges with a disambiguation of “truth” as a state belonging only to mathematics and mathematicians who can really, deeply explain a truth in a way that leaves everyone nodding affirmatively and saying “YES!” that is true. It is a pretty good bet that poetry will not get us there. Manipulating words may lead to pleasure; one objective of all art, poetry included. But pleasure is mostly fleeting unless there is a powerful emotional component to attach new words and memory and choice with just the right flow of our chemical messengers.
Mathematics holds our feet to the fire with rules. Remember the rules. Apply the rules. Or, go home, knowing that you are not a mathematician. You pretend to break / rules about which you are dumb / ignorant beyond. Maybe a little like spelling … where the mind is able to fill in irritating gaps partially filled.
As with math, don’t pretend to be a poet when you are not. You will not find yourself any closer to the truth with or without the rules of poetry. But you may feel pleasure. Is that enough to satisfy truth? Let us hope not. But, except for a chunk of math, that is all we get. Like it or leave it, this is where we all go home; empty and struggling for meaning.
Blending a hierarchy of quantification and description beyond mathematical certainty seems satisfying even to some point of pleasure. Physics, geology, chemistry, biology, neuroscience. psychology, sociology and even epistemology, ontology and ethics give us the ideas; the mental things we love to bend and blend. Blending inevitably means bending; and bending, to call forth an assertion of truth never quite seems to get us there. Closer perhaps but like an algorithmic asymptote only closer, not there yet. We live and survive with approximations. Maybe there is no there, there. The illusion of truth is only another turd; a wonderfully complex blend of undigested food and microbes. However, eating is not recommended.
Straight is the line that we hope will advance our lives.