Unhidden

Out of the mess – today -
The joy of my friends, sea’s product,
Making us fear the coming past
For what’s next -- we see ourselves
For the first time in stages,
Fragments, alterations
At the tailor’s hall.

It could happen
But it never does
I told myself not long ago,
But couldn’t believe it --
Our truths are easier to hide
Than to find.
We find it is harder to see
Than admit we are blind

I take the day off to devise:
To accept common sense
Is to accept
Unexamined opinion –
What a mess.
Could I ask: “How could
I hide this?” – With results?
The last second
Is the longest.

...the coming past....

we were just talking about this kinda in bruce's thread.


elsewise,
is common sense, then, to be equated with an unexamined opinion? are they one in the same, but different?

Red,

It seems to me that there is more than one species of unexamined opinion. Often when we simply accept the opinions of our parents in our mid-teens and earlier, we accept some of them without much examination, and that crutch seems necessary for some situations until we can make up our own minds...about sex and religion and politics etc. If we never take a close enough look at our assumptions, to either accept, deny or find equivalent alternatives, we are captives of the opinions of others, no matter what the justification for their authority...that is the lesson Bacon taught so long ago in establishing the foundations of the scientific method, which questions everything, including its own basic principles.

Regarding common sense, it is an old saw that it is neither common in most cases not sensible is others. I did a study of the origin of 'common sense' among the Scots philosophers around the time of David Hume and they showed how intricate and unsimple an idea something like 'common sense' can be, even when it is carefully examined...it is so often too unreliable and simply a projection of one's own sub-culture's preconceptions and prejudices.

Most of the time someone has said to me, 'well, that's just common sense,' I've had to go off and figure out what to do myself....

Thanks for dropping by,

amo,

Peter

regarding the 'coming past, me believeth that to be the 'undiscovered country.

cheers

I love the title and the philosophical approach your poem says. There is much wisdom here:

Our truths are easier to hide
Than to find.

K.Q.

Thanks, Khalida, I threw in as much philosophical wisdom as I could find lying around on little scraps of paper, hoping it would all make some sense in the end.

Cheers, look at the time!

Peter