See through this air this ocean and this earth
All matter quick and bursting into birth
See nighttime sky when the clouds give their leave
The heavenly bodies at their stately dance
That like dreams all generations
Have esteemed as significant
See in the hay infusion the animalcules
Who scurry to the sidelines when heat is applied
Desperate to escape the scalding
Frenzied to maintain bodily integrity
Who lack a nervous system
Ill can they afford to pause and consider
That this integrity is but an effect of consciousness
The stout perimeter plastic and thoroughly permeable
Through which the nutrients the wastes
Ceaselessly come and go
The wastes of one the nutrients for another
And the apparently individual insistently dividual
The organism into cells the cell into organelles
Even unto the fundamental particles
Which must not be fundamental
At most a ratio of matter and energy
And what pray ultimately are they
A perplexing congeries of object-sub-object
And the apparently separate a mingling of vectors
That waver within the eddying solute and converge infinitesimally
Even as they diverge in rainbow refraction
Phenomenal flux thus comprising a regularity of collection and dissipation
The hay infusion but an index of that more deeply interfused
But protect they will this semi-fictive coherence
And in that service nature has bequeathed them pain
And pain is bad
Pain must be bad
Intrinsically bad but extrinsically good
To perform its adaptive service of notice and alarm
Its service to the will to life
And pity those for those there are
Who regard that will as shameful
A will exercised by the smallest of things and the largest
The striving to nourish and to thrive
To thrive not merely individually
But for the progeny the species the world
To maintain the flux in any case
And real things that exist
Real situations that obtain
And most especially real events that take place
That happen happen happen
Are merely that portion we can perceive of the greater world
With our labyrinthine neurology and clever microscopes and orbiting observatories
Perceptual apparatus that we can set aside by effort of will
To glimpse those transcendent entities
Among which number facts of mathematics and of morality
And what is a thing but an effect of the mind
That struggles to define and defend the stout perimeter
Though no less real for that
Which takes and extracts the arrows of time
Hence the experience of life
Is the also the experience of pain
The epitome of that which is to be avoided
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to avoid
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to refrain from imposing
Hence we should not respond reflexively to pain
With the infliction of more pain
As if our punishments and retaliations
Would somehow even the scales and pay a debt
What are you a moneychanger in the temple
Converting act to coin
And what authority have you to impose suffering
When suffering already abounds for people and animalcules
What arcane knowledge have you
As to how another is and where they come from
Did you create yourself
Do you know yourself
And in your self-creation do you know yourself to be perfect
For perfection is not a thing in the phenomenal world
Where only the approximation obtains of sphere
In the form of sun or planet or scarab-driven turd
Let us do what we can to assuage not augment pain
And let us observe that sometimes stronger reasons obtain
For the endurance of pain over the avoidance of it
As the surgical procedure induces temporary pain
To relieve the larger malady
And just as with pain nature sounds the alarm
Pleasure signals all clear with heavenly harmony
The epitome of that which is to be embraced
And observe also how near allied are pleasure and pain
As plumpy youth takes love’s agony
Revels proudly in love’s agony
The torment of delay
In anticipation of delight
The torment of uncertainty
In anticipation of knowledge
Anticipation stronger than consummation
Delight intensified by delay
Relishing in love’s agony the epitome of passion
No mysteries exist
Not in the sense of the permanently unknowable
Permanence like perfection unavailable in phenomena
Nor in the sense of knowledge forbidden
For how often does foul transgression open the eyes
Alter eye to alter all
And we do not know the final digit of pi
For there is no such thing pure and simple
We do not yet possess all knowledge of things
Not merely owing to the numerousness of things
Nor to the orders of infinity
But to the flux of phenomena
And to the fluxuous historical challenge
Of comprehending that which lies outside sensation
We know to some extent what we can see
And we know to some extent what cannot be seen
As figures geometrical and properties arithmetical
We know in short our experience
In which transience figures more prominently than does permanence
We know that beings other than ourselves experience the world
And we know that the division of the world
Into those fretful antinomies
As subject and object and masculine and feminine and pleasure and pain
Outside inside up down great small black white predator prey nutrient waste
Dead matter and spiritual life
Phenomenal fact and transcendent truth
And into objects things discrete entities and stout perimeters
As phototaxic alga and a sweetgum named Sally
Distinction sometimes useful sometimes nugatory
But always more or less illusory
A consciously composed and sharable fiction
Derived merely from the evolution
Of our gelatinous if labyrinthine primate brain
Which perceives things separate distinct individual
Sources of nutrition or poison
Sources of pleasure or pain
Sources of acceptance or rejection
Objects of interest or of apparently negligible significance
And indeed from our cultural traditions
Source alike of expressions in language
Indispensable for mutual understanding
And of baneful acquired ignorances
As prejudice provincialism and superstition
And ignorance being infinite because fact is infinite
We know not yet whence the infinite variety
Or rather the merciful regularities
Characteristic of the flux
Which we perceive
Whose progress we arrest momentarily with a gesture of will
As freezing the flight of birds of indistinct plumage
As imagining the digits of pi or the square root of negative one
In our representations which do not accommodate
Much of the overmuch real world
Which oft resolves itself into vertiginous torment
Say Muse nurturing mother
Mother of nature
Mother before nature
Peaceable womb of all things visible and invisible
What barrier prevents the full unfolding of totality
No doubt the primate labyrinth has yet to accrue sufficient extent
To perceive much less grasp the originary or final truth
Truth that surmounts proximate beginnings and ends
That requires the deeper-than fundamental higher-than overarching
And yet no mystery obtains
How entirely natural that truth prior to understanding should baffle discourse
Especially given the difficulty even of posing the question
The superfluous dream of genesis or denouement
Hence the vagueness of locutions like something interfused
Hence the necessity of poetry with its free recourse to metaphor
Hence the elusiveness of sufficiently rigorous expression
Though the possibility persists as suggested by
The unconquerable conviction
That if change obtains then something changes
And therefore something persists
That truth is therefore unconstrained by sequence
This being only the phenomenal part of the world
And that we can say that which we see
And by discoveries in mathematics
And by salutary disruption of neural pathways fallen into harmful habit
Alter eye to alter all
And we achieve in moods simultaneously sublime and restful
Teasing glimpses in the beautiful the true and the good
Which we perceive if often only indirectly
In art in nature in ourselves and in those we love
Which we perceive even amid the welter of experience that crowds in upon us
To lift the veil and see that space before space
Wherein dwells something prior to sensation substance sequence duration or name
Call it will or consciousness or soul
Or nurturing mother
Our compulsion to name an epitome of striving
To nourish with knowledge ourselves and our posterity
The mere possibility of metaphor an earnest of the unity of being
Of situation of event that happens happens happens
And hence the possibility obtains
If only theoretical
Of restoring peace
And peace is always the return to peace
Before the tumult intervened
Peacefully prior to space time change or distinction
That activates the measurement
That moves the needle
That configures the experience
Whereof we speak for we must speak
Primates being such great singers and speakers
As will or life or unity or consciousness or soul
Or that which is deeply interfused