Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Reflections While Flinging a Dead Snake Over the Fence

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com




 


Reflections While Flinging a Dead Snake Over the Fence


 


Is reality filtered through one’s culture


No longer reality? Or is it


That reality without a cultural filter


Is not reality at all, but only


An unobserved function of biology


Chemistry, geology, or radiation


Whose purpose is unknowable because


Without the perception of God or man


It doesn’t exist


 


And neither does the snake, which might have been


But then, maybe it is Schrodinger’s snake
Or was
Or might be


 


They say that the first cultural bias you kill


Is the most difficult, that it becomes


Easier after that. But it isn’t so.


 


After a hard life along existential trails


Of assumptions examined to dust, you want


To put away your Hegelian dialectic


And settle down in a little cottage


In the country with a few good books, a garden,


And Aristotle’s unities, but there’s


Always a young concept-slinger who thinks


He’s faster on the synthesis than you


And calls you out on your legendary denial


Of the knowability of objective reality


 


For the rest of your life (but do you exist?)


No matter how carefully you sharpen your syllogisms


Somewhere out there in the darkness it lurks:


An ontological proposition with your name on it


 


 

No comments: