Bamboo Dancing In The Snow

Plain stuff is shrouded in mystery.

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Swirling gusts of snow set the bamboo in motion. It seems as though the bamboo is dancing in savage celebration of the winter storm. Nonsense of course. The bamboo does the same dance in summer storms. The bamboo dances in all the storms.

I’m given to anthropomorphism. I’m human.

All I see, I see through human eyes.

No one is confused when I say bamboo is dancing. It’s understood as metaphor. Human’s understand metaphor. Anthropomorphism is a tool poets often use to create metaphor. No one objects, save those hidebound to literal realism.

Literal realism is useful. It’s not compelling to those who seek transcendence rather than just the facts.

Seeking to know what’s behind reality is not the same as seeking to know what’s real.

Reality is more shrouded in mystery than revealed in measurement.

Yes, it’s so many feet high or wide, and weighs so much – and what else? Why is it there at all? Calibration can’t say. Mind is free to imagine. It’s a delight of intellect that imagination

is wide-ranging; free to explore what can’t be quantified.

Quantification may reveal no more than the features of a mask. To see behind the mask is to glimpse the sublime. The sublime glimpsed may be illusion. We can’t say for sure. That may not matter. Exploration may be worth more than finding.

Plodding through the data is useful. Sailing the ether is always more appealing. Science plods by intent. Poets sail by inclination. Both promote understanding.

Some things that aren’t true, should be. Scientific measure is about what’s measurable; Poetry is about what isn’t; poetry is about what ought to be.

So, I watch the bamboo dance.

I know the bamboo is only driven to and fro by the gusting wind. So what. The fact that it looks like dance is as true as it’s being forced into movement by the wind.

Poetry is about what ought to be. I prefer what ought to be, to what is.

Thomas Howard wrote a wonderful book titled, Chance or the Dance. The poem he quotes in preface is from, Christographia XIV, by Eugene Warren. It is perfect introduction to the essays inside:

Is it chance, or dance moves, the world,

Is the world, blind and dumb, or bloom, festal,

A vain jest, or Holy feast?

By K. L. Shipley

Website: https://www.eclecticessays.com