Re: bad poetry?

The "moon gazing" was the bad poem that earned its author a light flogging, about several posts ago.

When you argue that "the principle of non-discrimination is applied to objects in the universe and not ideas," that itself is discrimination between objects and ideas. Even if Seymour wasn't willing to acknowledge that discrimination in some capacity was necessary to achieve his enlightenment, it was. In the search for truth, some things simply are not true.

Yes, this observation is a Western one. But there again is discrimination between modes of thinking. If enlightenment is truly to be found in eastern philosophy, as Seymour thought it was, then (explicity or not) conflicting western thought must be rejected, i.e. isolated from truth, through one's own discriminatory capabilities.

luke

-------Original Message-------
From: James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu>
Sent: 07/03/03 04:56 PM
To: bananafish@roughdraft.org
Subject: Re: bad poetry?

>
> You're working in a western context, Luke. Enlightenment in Seymour's
context consists of the realization that discrimination between things
and people and the universe and God is essentially illusory. You could
argue that this still entails a single discrimination -- between reality
and illusion -- but this would be a non-response, since the principle of
non-discrimination is applied to objects in the universe and not ideas.
  At the least, it's not a generic concept, but a directed one.

Don't quite know what this has to do with moon gazing, though :).

Jim

jlsmith3@earthlink.net wrote:
> Seymour was searching for some ultimate spiritual understanding (the
"nirvana," but not really that exactly), which by its very nature requires
discriminating between ideas that advance him towards this goal, and ideas
that don't.
>
> So if we're reading poetry as part of a similar spiritual quest in our
own lives, nondiscrimination is impossible. The crap about the moon gazing
has to go.
>
> And, more optimistically, a standard for "good poetry," and our own
ability to create it, need not be abandoned.
>
> luke

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Received on Thu Jul 3 17:07:34 2003