The Phenomenologist Poem by Thomas Edward Puleston Rickarby

“Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

To an untrained ear the term may sound
like an invention; a poet's fiction, thought up
to bring attention to some unusual way of looking
at things. Perhaps it means to study human happenings
as they look from within the hard lines of science.
Not far off, but listen - its real: designed by Husserl
as a method to determine the size and weight of the world
in conciousness. Tuned by Heidegger, who looked deeper,
took us back to the question of being and gave us
one or two suprises about what that would mean.
You might think all knowing changed in that moment
when he found more than things at the bottom,
more than theories and facts in the mechanisms
of knowledge. You could also argue that we are all
touched by that shift in the Zeitgeist of thought
(which is, by the way, a Hegelian term)
just as we learnt from innumerable sources
that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger
and that learning the truth can be a disaster
thanks to the work of Nietzsche (sic the History
of Western Thought) .



References please!
Shouts some scholar, as if truth could be stock
piled in dense, slim volumes, kept safely
encrypted in esoteric terminology
like supervenience or onto-theology.
In poems we find all the references needed
to get the story. Plain words hang in the world
not only labels, also arguments and metaphors
that lift or disable our being-at-thinking.
I imagine trains leaving stations, blood
in the bloodstream, meaning surges
and cannot be turned from its path.
So let us not laugh at those absurd
secluded creatures, cosseted in books and paper
thinking that what they do matters. Some boy
on a desert road in Morocco, hiding from his father,
more from humiliation than pain, figures out
how past and future is known only within
our perception right now. If something
is true, it needs no special acknowledgement,
no translators or custodians, there are infinite gates
and infinite ways to go through them.
What scholars of humanity fear most is duplication
not knowing that everything has been said
countless times in countless disciplines and forms
of life. Sometimes, I imagine, in the next office over,
by the man from Psychology that they quite fancy
because of the way he drinks tea and walks
to work every morning to save the planet.
The myth of what they want to accomplish
is blinding. There is no direct line to the manual
written in the Creator's ink. There is more than one script.
Of course, few will admit that they believe in God
and they don't. But neither do they heed the point
of his departure or of the death of all authors,
they still try to claim knowledge like prospectors
and make for themselves a name. I don't blame them.
Its how they make sense of their world and get paid,
make things easy or interesting. This philosopher,
however, prefers chess and poetry - understanding-in-action.
I talk with a friend who makes a few quid
from posh schools selling chess lessons for kids.
We drink Carling and talk about Carlsen, exploring
the French - Tarracsh Variation - whilst I catch a glimpse
of a girl strolling in, undressing to the clothes beneath
her coat. I notice myself doing so, interpret my bodily motions
as signs of attraction and head over with a smile.
I'm hoping to pass all the tests, but happy to fail.