Member-only story
The Faces of Reality
When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.
…Such an artist can discern the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life.
— Tarkovsky
*
THE FACE
I once ran across a book describing the scanning patterns of the pupils of new born babies. The most basic pattern was a circle with a cross in the middle like a rifle scope. If memory serves me one hypothesis the scientists made was that infants may be born looking for a face.
It seems to me Eiseley was weaving a tapestry by alternating between science and poetry. He was both describing a world that did not need to have been created by a humanoid deity, but one which still left us with a sense of being profoundly addressed by life…
Reason and science are irreplaceable torches for our journey through life, but our bodies also need a vocabulary for expressing what may be the embodied memory that we belong to the web of life. Our bodies may be remembering those connections when we seem to sense a…
