“Science is rooted in the will to truth.  With the will to truth it stands or falls.  Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core….The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of its existence.”

--Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880-October 12, 1943)

“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” --Eric Hoffer

“Poetry is the language of life.” --Bill Moyers

“Philosophy is the guide of life.”

 --the Greek motto signified by Phi Beta Kappa: Philosophia Biou Kubernetes

“In no language on earth is there any word more sacred than the word mother.” --Kahlil Gibran

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”

“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I had been learning how to die.”

--Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452-May 2, 1519)

When I was three years old, I read my first book on physics.

I still remember my great pleasure of learning, of understanding, of knowing.

Remember?  I don’t just remember that sacred happiness: I still feel it.

From my earliest memory at six months old,

My mind has been exponentially growing.

Science and mathematics; philosophy; history:

Learning, understanding, and knowing, still remain my greatest joy;

Touched closely only by poesis: the power to create.

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Poetry, music, paintings, sculptures, literature, and all art,

Spoke and still speak volumes to my mind and heart;

Philosophy wove a web of wonder for me, from Aristotle to Jean Paul Sartre;

Science sainted me with holy knowledge of reality, and made me a primal part.

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Science and poetry remain together my life’s top treasure and prime pleasure:

Joys and agonies of God’s greatest gift, the human mind;

Part of historical humanity’s legacy to me, and my grandest gold.

I love poetry of all kinds, with my whole heart.  Among my loves and joys,

Poetry was my first in time, but still—by a hair’s width—second in place.

Science, my second in time, finds first place.  Science soars supreme.

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A physics book told early me: “Objects have mass, volume, density, and weight.

Objects take up space; volume is the amount of space an object occupies.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

Delicious reality-revelations of perfect simplicity, unweaving grand complexity;

Seemingly obvious, because they can be observed;

Yet deep mystery, which had to be painstakingly, experimentally discovered.

Physics revealed this: “A moving object will continue to move in a straight line,

Unless acted upon by an outside force.” 

My baby mind, that learned all this, took upon its brightness a greater shine;

Finding—for highest happiness and ethical honest thought—one true course.

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I’m glad I could not know then about my final fate.

I’m glad I did not know that time brought forth my bright living mind,

And gave it to me, as God’s most glorious gift, only sooner or later to steal it.

Like Chronos, producing children loving life, to chase them down and devour.

As Shakespeare said, we “ripe and ripe,” only at last to “rot and rot,”

With each succeeding hour.

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I was reading very well at three,

Because my mother read to me.

She read to me, even before I was one, and also after I turned two.

She read all sorts of things to me,

Including precious poetry;

The good and bad of history; and priceless science, too.

And every word, as she read aloud, her finger underlined,

Before my watchful eyes and my all-absorbing mind.

And so she taught me the meaning of words and how to read.

I was already reading, off on my own, before I reached age one.

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Her reading voice enlivened thoughts and dreams embedded deep in ink.        

When I was a glimmer of mind, she early taught me how to love, by loving me;

She taught me how to feel and dream and care and give—

In short, how to live—

And also she taught me to love learning; and also how to reason and to think.

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Some say the world is here, and is the way it is, by unmeant happenstance;

Born and bred of blind necessity and mindless chance.

Others proclaim the world was made by God, or at least intelligently designed.

I don’t know.  And they don’t know. 

We are all too ignorant of such things.  We cannot know.

Thus argumentum ad baculum is how so many religions unreasonably go:

“Argument by means of a club”—such religions use a mean and cruel club—

Threatening punishments for not believing and for not having absolute faith;

Pain or death for not pretending to know things that we cannot possibly know.

Among ultimate questions, we are barely feeling our way, very nearly blind.

We cannot rationally “only believe,” or “just have faith,” final answers to find.

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But God could still be true, despite any religionist’s irrational cruel view.

Cancer gives me sorrow and fear; I have to hope: but it cannot make me know.

So much less the religion-threatened heavy, bloody, bitter blow.

But the cruelest thing used by such religions, is not the club of threats—

But the heartless dangling of promises of happiness and life—of life eternal—

In return for rejecting reason and science,

The best fruits of intellectual honesty and the truth-seeking disciplined mind:

The human mind, the most divine part of the gift of self, sublime and supernal.

But if any ultimate truth can ever be found,

It must stand strong on reason’s ground;

And it must be science that says that it is so:

For science and reason comprise the only ways that we can really truly know.

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But I still feel, within my deep self, this intrinsic truth: the human mind

Gleams absolutely wonderful and glorious, whatever origins for it we may find.

Whether or not the human brain,

The most complex structure in the universe,

Came from the dense life and intense intelligence of God:

Or whether the mind, somehow mindlessly—and sight, somehow blindly,

Emerged—living in time, and dying toward eternity;

Or whether or not the seeing mind was by powerful God intelligently designed:

I feel God, and I feel grateful to God; though God does not now seem to care.

I feel God, and I feel grateful to God; even if God is not really there.

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My cancer has confirmed for me,

The truth that I, in song, so long ago was taught, in words I loved in childhood,

Singing in heedless joy, words that tell the terrible sad truth of life;

Innocently, ignorantly, and joyfully sung, in my new young life, so very early;

Words scientifically sound and factual, and also true poetry;

These words:

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily—life is but a dream.”

And, as John Lennon sang—which for me now, too, is coming true:

“The dream is over.”

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So to God, if You are there;

And if You hear and care:

I thank You for the life I love so much;

And for all the time of life that I have had;

And for the songs my mother sang to me; the books my mother read to me;

The works of words that I have wrought;

And for all the great gifts to me of living and loving and dreaming and thought;

And for all the things I learned and knew.

What happens to me next?  I cannot know.  That is entirely up to You. 

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Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, May 7, 2009  10:02 am
Winds  3 mph  Temperature: 860  F.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael L.P.  All rights reserved