A Poet's Journal: February 4th, 2014

February 4th, 2014

It is in our nature to fashion understanding after intellect; from the first breath of consciousness it has been said that man is the thinking animal and whether we agree or not, the tradition with which our thoughts move is to place one object up against another, or one thought or memory up against another, and proceed through reasoning or logic to come up with a strategy that will invariably prove or not prove that one is better or worse than the other.  We place upon the scale of importance efficiency and fact, and hold with words those ideas and matters of thought that have not yet been fully understood.  To speak, or more generally, to use the senses, is our way to enlighten understanding, whereupon it is only those things that are left unsaid, or that have yet been revealed, that the intellect truly understands.  By the concept and definition of a word, we give boundary, by which is meant exclusion, so that the objective reality that we come to take as truth was at one point the subjective understanding of an only half-realized idea.  When understanding stops thus, it is seen that the intellect has, at bottom, indecision as its true value.

Realization only comes when the words stop and the question that has long been in front of us plays itself out in the sphere in which it exists.  Beyond intellect there is an understanding that has already understood, that only we ourselves can take part in individually, and hence in the most profound sense of togetherness, by looking inward to perceive and accept that exterior realm which birth and death have created and which the intellect still unceasingly tries to understand.

Douglas Thornton