Song of Innocence
The orange light
of the setting sun:
it tells everyone
that the day is done.
It’s time to unwind,
set the day apart,
to empty your mind
and to fill your heart.
Song of Experience
The bloody light
of the setting sun,
it tells the night
that the day is done.
There is no suspense
for the die is cast,
you can drop pretence
and relax at last.
When as a child you look into the world
the magic of reality is there.
The world is fluid,
boundaries – weak,
cause and effect – unclear and remote…
The world is full of patterns to discover,
it’s varied and exciting to behold,
but also frightening…
and you begin
the job of organizing your impressions
in surfaces and colours,
when collected,
they can define the things;
you give them names,
the names are then collected once again
and through another level of abstraction
form into language –
so much more useful
than spots and lines,
but so much more rigid –
the magic’s almost gone…
You look again,
look carefully –
it’s bleeding through the edges,
it’s seeping in through places of confusion,
creating chaos,
giving you the option
to see new things,
to name them, change the rules,
expand the language
and the world we live in…
The spiral turns again.
“To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
(Plato, The Republic)
Perception is but shadow, forsooth,
both images and thoughts – reflected glow;
You cannot tell illusion from the truth.
Choose prettiest, sit back, enjoy the show.
Black and white thinking –
a useful evolutionary short-cut for quickly reacting in an emergency,
an extremely dangerous tool that simplifies experience into lies.
Language is just as much an instrument for seeing as eyes are.
Look at things – and you will see the world.
Look for things – and all you will see is the inside of your head.
Sometimes, in the middle of the day on a country road,
the essential strangeness of the world
staggers you.
Micro-world – so different,
where minute forces create different structures,
where water is spherical and flower petals rough and ribbed…
so strange and yet so oddly familiar, almost by touch.
We see the sky above and call it majestic.
We see the sky underfoot and call it a dirty puddle.
The picture is the same.
