I don’t trust poets. Therefore, I don’t trust myself. They are fundamentally dishonest people. We grant far too much authority to artists, we mistake their technical skills for practical wisdom. I speak out against myself as a source of wisdom, because I possess none, and no matter how smoothly and adroitly I express myself, nothing that I say is rooted in revelation or special insight. These are just words. Philosophers are rare, maybe even nonexistent. Less rare, but nevertheless uncommon, are the poets, writers, journalists, the class of linguistic artisans. And one rung lower you have the common man, with his undue deference to the particular class of scribes that best represents his feelings and beliefs.
Force of feeling is not truth. Minority status is not truth. Wealth is not truth. It seems the closest we get to the truth is the episodic awareness of our limitations, the perpetual darkness in which we dwell. We are so far removed from the truth that we need fictional devices to adumbrate it. Metaphors, narratives, myths; whether crudely fashioned or finely tuned, all revolving and mutating around an immovable, inexplicable core. Is death transcendence, the attainment of ultimate reality, or the last of all our desperately cobbled hopes?
theemptysubjectblog 