You hear enough of my thoughts and opinions. It’s a rare treat when I get to hear yours. I think most people keep their thoughts and opinions to themselves. I choose to think this because the alternative is, that every person walking around is a hollow zombie of null thought. Well, I suppose there is another possibility. Maybe they are polite, and keep their ideas and opinions to themselves out of respect for other people.

But I don’t believe it. Silence is self-interested: doubt in oneself, and not wanting to be exposed. Or, maybe just walk around, not caring, unaffected, until something unavoidable or inescapable happens. Actually, the second is the most self-interested of all.

But I did hear from three people about the last piece I wrote called Price Check on Isle “P”. Actually four people. One person asked why I hadn’t considered the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney’s candidacy for President. I have no good reason — and I’ll get into that later. The other three people told me that “Isle” was spelled “Aisle”.

Now, that’s an interesting thing to tell someone who writes poetry. My response to each was that an “aisle” wasn’t nearly as self-contained and isolated as it needed to be. My previous post, which wasn’t mailed out, was actually a poem called Pretend which happened to have “aisles”, and no “isles”. Those were narrow things, in supermarkets.  But Price Check on Isle “P” wasn’t a poem. And since it wasn’t a poem, I must have made a mistake, placing a big body of land surrounded by an ocean into the middle of a store. Well, I won’t concede. Because it was a big store - a huge store. So big, in fact, that it didn’t even need entrances or exits, because the curvature of the earth would just bring you back to your starting point before you managed to walk far enough.

Now, I know you scientists. You’re thinking, that’s just silly. Why not just say it’s a store that’s as big as the world? And that’s just nonsense, because we don’t have enough resources to build something like that. Imagine the lighting bill! Unfortunately, I can’t kidnap people, blindfold them, take them across bridges, and then set them loose. Hell, I can’t even build bridges. They’re already there. I can only jump up and down, yelling and pointing, wearing pinwheels and elephant ears. It’s a good job.

Not too unlike, except for being a little bit opposite, Plato and his republic. Plato believed poets should be banished because they promoted sloppy and dangerous unreason. Now, “unreason” is actually a word. That is, it is a proper word, blessed and sanctified by whatever committee blesses and sanctifies such things. It was the proper word to use there, to portray what I meant. But it would have been the proper word, even if it wasn’t a proper word. And I would have used it. And that’s some tension.

Philosophy and poetry make uneasy bedfellows, unless they’re rolling around in that bed in your head together. Philosophy wants to be clear, rigorous and inescapable. This requires words with little ambiguity. Poetry, on the other hand, has different ideas about what clarity is, and you can come and go as you please. And as for being rigorous, well, it depends on the mood.

But, uneasy or not, Poetry and Philosophy are bedfellows. Both are concerned with the most basic essence of the subjects they deal with, not just appearances or the presently accepted “how the way things are”. In the terms of Philosophy, Philosophy is concerned with more than just the epistemological and ontological. And from Poetry, I have yet to embrace all that might be seen.

It is very narrow and short sighted to believe that Philosophy is all about logic and reasoning, while poetry is all about feeling. Poetry can, and often does, delve into the heart of matters that lies beyond both emotion and reason. And the philosopher might ask, what can possibly exist that is beyond both emotion and reason? And that philosopher might find themselves smack in the headspace of a poet, while still being a philosopher. Which, of course, through logic, epistemology, ontology and a good splattering of aesthetics, might be just a chemical sea within our gray matter — devoid of the skepticism required by the limitations of our human sense, that seeks to know itself, through limited means. And then, well, we’re mostly just back to poetry.

And no, you scientists don’t know any better. Science is the epitome of hubris. Science believes that epistemological continuity is enough to reveal an ontology when they can make empiricism fit nice and snug. Unfortunately, they just can’t see, even if by some crazy chance they happen to be right, that it just loops right back into Philosophy, landing with a thud into metaphysics. It amazes me how many scientists fancy themselves philosophers just because they run around with calculators and rulers, and can go, “see! see!”. Their domain within philosophy is narrow indeed, but it is formidable. And of course, it can be spectacularly helpful.

It’s like this: philosophers can talk about love in great depth, just like poets (if they can get past the embarrassment of being associated with a cliché). Scientists can poke at pleasure centers in the brain, and fiddle with areas of memory that might contain people we know. Or other scientists, who some scientists consider only pseudo-scientists, whatever that is, might say that you feel love for a particular person because your father was always away from home working, and that person scratches their ass just like your father did.

Or, some people might spell tomato “tomatoe”. Either way, it’s a big yummy juicy red thing. Does it matter? Well, were you supposed to imagine walking around with squishy red phalanges in your sneakers? If you’re not, then it’s up you whether the tomatoe guy is an idiot. You’ve got the tomato in your head either way. And it’s hard to tell, if you correct their spelling, will they accept it, happily corrected, and be smarter? Or will they turn into an even null-er headed zombie, even less likely speak?

Most people wouldn’t bother considering that question. They’re too happy being more clever, even in silence. At least clever in spelling. But it’s a good question to consider: how do you help someone expand into something more, without making them feel like an idiot, or get all defensive and shut everything down? Well, philosophers usually just let the scientists have their delusions of grandeur, knowing that the grandeur to which they aspire will engulf them soon enough. However, scientists have an edge. They are motivated to learn more. That’s not a widely shared human characteristic.

Yet strangely, even despite ourselves, we all do learn more, and in wildly different ways. Maybe this has something to do with those zingy pleasure centers of the brain. It feels good, even learning, when it’s something we like. The hopeful bit for me is that all of us have been surprised, at one time or another, just how pleasurable something was, that we never imagined might be. And in that spirit, maybe hope yet exists for people, who might find a way to arise from the self-interested zombie null head that presently plagues us.

We are dominated by the literal and the empirical right now. And I just told you a lie.

We believe in the literal and empirical right now. The trouble is, the literal and the empirical are not standing on solid footing. If you start asking the questions, you find the answers quickly - and those answers are, there are always more questions. And after a while, you might stop asking why this or that things is blah blah blah, and you start asking, why am I believing this? Why am I doing this? Is this really who I am? Is this who I want to be? Skepticism is a step. But I’m talking deep, personal and all-encompassing skepticism. A friggin baptism in the reexamination of everything.

And suddenly, you find out that you’re not an economist after all. Or that politics is a spider web. And it’s okay for politics to be a spider web, even when it’s literally not — but that it’s NOT okay that politics is a spider web. And Santa doesn’t like to shop. And energy is abundant. And when everything just dissolves like that, and you manage to avoid medication, maybe you might find, if you need it, that being a philosopher or a poet is something that is still okay. And in all honesty, they’re not really uneasy bedfellows. They just seem that way, when you haven’t crawled into the covers yourself. But it’s true they are very marginalized in our society. And considering our society, that is not surprising.

OK. So now I have a dirty little secret to tell, after all this. It turns out that I did not, in fact, purposefully use “Isle” instead of “Aisle”. It happened on its own. It’s also the better choice, that wasn’t a choice. Which is also the greatest thing about love, squishy, sweet and cleansing as tomatoes. And really, all kinds of other nifty little doo-dads, buried right under our noses.

Now go work your calculators on that.