Tree of knowledge

Emergent leaves of information
Trace tactile branches
Extending limbs artfully lopped
Implying terra firma
Hermetic roots occlude revelation
An untapped epistēmē, yet
Passionate fruit is grasped

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Post Script

This was the first poem I published on Primitive Joe. It begins with what can be seen and followed: leaves, branches and limbs. Beneath them, however, the roots disappear into an unseen ground. Knowledge presents its forms while concealing the conditions from which they grow.

I was also carrying a passage from Bertrand Russell’s The Scientific Outlook, in which he compares the rational mind to “a stormy ocean of passionate convictions,” with scientifically tested beliefs floating precariously upon it. The poem turns that contrast into a tree. What can be traced and examined remains above ground, while the deeper sources of knowing remain hidden. Still, we reach for the fruit.

Read now, it feels like an early form of a question that has remained with me: how fully can knowledge reveal the ground from which it grows?

Image credit: Tree of Knowledge (Initiation) (1975), Mordecaï Moreh, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Inspiration

“The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based on desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs.”

Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook