Silhouetted trees reach neuronally
To converge with the pinpointed curiosity
A patient and speechless analogy
To our Grand and Universal quandary
Post Script
This poem began with a visual resemblance. Silhouetted branches spread across the sky like neurons, while points of light appear beyond them. The mind recognizes something of its own structure in the landscape and reaches toward what it cannot yet understand.
The resemblance remains “a patient and speechless analogy” because the world does not explain whether the pattern has been discovered or projected. The branching tree may resemble cognition, but the analogy cannot tell us whether the similarity belongs to nature, to the observer, or to both.
The Flammarion engraving extends that question. A human figure reaches through the apparent boundary of the sky to glimpse another order beyond it. Yet the observer never stands outside the universe. He can only press farther into the structure he already inhabits.
Read now, the poem seems to hold an early intuition that continues to interest me: cognition does not inspect the universe from a distance. It branches within the same world it is trying to understand.
Image credit: Flammarion engraving (1888), anonymous wood engraving first published on page 163 of Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Primitive Joe 
