This Place of Prose and Poetry. Lucian Krukowski

along a parallel reaching: The world is logical—ergo—logic is physical—it and we all are rational.

      Wonderful! But, of course, there are problems with this conflation of logical thought with a physical site: Logical truths do not justify themselves by waving at the vagaries—excesses and insufficiencies—of the world. They have an internal elegance—but are reticent, often shy, and show their external beauty only to afficionados. They gain their status through coherence in their rules—such rules as govern contradiction, negation, implication, necessity, and the like. But these rules do not show themselves through a correspondence with events which would demonstrate them in the world—they show themselves in language where, in various ways, they talk about the world—or about themselves. Indeed, logical truths need not have support from the outside world (although logicians do). They are in the mind—marvelous creations—and so, are unworldly or other-worldly.

      But they are somewhere—everything is—and this brings us back to the choice of a creator God—who would give them infallibility—or to a primordial chaos that develops into quiescent plateaus—of which our world is one. (Is logic dependent on quiescence? Is there a logic of chaos? Is “God” compatible with chaos?) Help me out.

      But we—as compendia of—dependents on—both mind and brain, do need worldly reference to give reality to our affairs. The beliefs we have in matters of controversy, that, e.g., “our arguments are better than theirs”—first need a logic provided by the mind—from which we migrate across the border to the relevant physical events. The world is actual—the mind is logical—the brain is the transfer station between the two. This is our reality.

      Moving from mind to brain to world, then, involves having (increasingly) adequate measures of compatibility that affirm the completeness of the transfer between the descriptions specific to each. If this is true, then nothing—in principle—should be left out. But as long as the world moves in time—there always is something left out. As a counter to this worry, there is the optimistic thesis of development: “We are getting better at knowing what there is.” True—but as we get better, the subjects of knowledge increase—the “is” changes and gets larger.

      The movement from brain to world is easy; from mind to brain is harder.

      To begin with: We would all agree that our thinking capacity—personal and historic—seems unlimited. On the other side—the billions or so of neurons and their firing pathways also seem unlimited. But the task of correlating these sets (whether they are infinite or merely indefinite) is formidable—even if we knew what the “correlations” are we want to make.

      Are we, for example, trying to explain (as if the neural evidence, long embalmed, could show) why Keats was a great poet? Or are we trying to predict (to find out through her DNA) as to which now-surly undergraduate will write good music?

      Or are we—for the sake of tidiness—trying to avoid the normative and aesthetic questions entirely in our thinking?

      SYLLOGISM

      All men are mortal

      Socrates is a man

      Socrates is mortal

      All men are mortal.

      Some men are also gods—take Jesus and Buddha as examples.

      Then: Ask Parvati about the manliness of Shiva or Danae about Zeus.

      Then: Sometimes, you can’t tell man from god—ask the Magdalen.

      Then: All gods are immortal.

      Then: Some men are gods—and some gods are men.

      Then: Some men are immortal.

      Then: And what about women?

      Then: Remember Mary’s bodily assumption.

      Then: Celebrate the beneficence of Kwan-Yin and tremble at the recurrences of Kali.

      Then: Some women are gods—and some gods are women.

      Socrates is a man.

      My dog is named ‘Socrates.’

      Then: Socrates, my dog, is not a man—as are not some other Socrates’s so named. Then: There is a large rock outside of town that the locals have named ‘Socrates.’

      Then: This rock is also not a man—although it resembles one when seen from a certain point of view.

      Socrates is mortal.

      To be mortal is to die.

      Then: Socrates the man and Socrates my dog will die.

      Then: Socrates the rock, does not die—although it may crumble to where it is an unnamed pebble. Is this loss of naming a form of dying? Are there different modes of dying?

      Then: Some entities named ‘Socrates’ are mortal and will die; others so named will not.

      ‘Socrates’ is a name. (Commentary)

      Names, like ‘Socrates,’ are not mortal.

      Then: ‘Socrates’ is not mortal and will not die—although the name may be forgotten.

      Then: If all the living forget the name, it will not die—but it will disappear.

      Then: Disappearing does not matter—for “forgetting” is a matter for the living.

      Then: ‘Socrates’ (but not Socrates) may—like the god—come back another day.

      Then: Socrates is so-called by the living to name a something which, they feel, will inform, or save, or otherwise commemorate their day.

      Then: The man, Socrates, is long dead, and will not come back—but his name ‘Socrates’ can still celebrate some special day.

      “Socrates” is a memory. (Commentary)

      A memory is not a person—but is sometimes, like a person, named.

      Then: I remember “Socrates”—and often call him ‘Socrates’—

      but I never knew Socrates.

      MEANING

      The poet thinks, as he reads his writings: “This is what I mean to say.” But he (that poet at a later time) might say: “This is not how I would now say what I then meant to say.” How does he know? Well, the poet (as poets do) knows his mind—knows what he means as parsed by remembering and forgetting. Or should we ask someone else—a “neuro-philosopher,” say— to find out the matter of the poets meaning that is embedded in the time-slices of his brain? This version of “finding-out” makes the poet’s inspiration for the poem recoverable from an astute probing of said brain—the “original condition” of the writing of the poem (not the same, mind you, as the poem’s meaning) as it is recoverable from the brain, in which all this poetizing (despite all that distracting “mind-talk”) is taking place. This strategy, messy as it is, would then remove the gap between the physical rendering and the mental inspiration. But where, in all this, is the meaning?

      What to do? If the poet did not (then) write what he wants (now) to say about it, then “intrusive, retroactive, elucidation” is one (hard) way to find out.

      If, however, the poet cannot (now) write what he (then) meant to say, then the urge to write (call it creativity) is challenged by the obscurantism of memory (call it a deviance in recollection)—which is that increasing distance between the formulation of the poem and its future readings. The poet having realized this—and perhaps to spite his admirers, having willfully dropped dead—left “meanings” up to them. They, of course, will get it wrong—as he would predict. That’s why he died.

      Despite the various strategies of retrieval, living memory is always incomplete: On some occasion one forgets one’s keys; on another,