Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

A function of poetry is to have an outlet that none of the other arts have. That function provides a kind of scale for human activity, as in documenting an experience, absorbing a landscape, describing varieties of love and loving, be it a pet or a person, coping with all the other emotions, explicating the finite or explaining the infinite.

This writer got recognition for writing an essay in his Philosophy class that claimed that there was no time without motion since some kind of measurement in space is required to identify time as when your watch stops, or you miss the bus, or a galaxy disappears into its black hole. Something usually happens like waking up in the morning that proves, apparently, that you exist even if it is different for everyone each time that occurs. That event brings up the fact that it is indeed different for every individual. The cycle of our lives varies as well except for twins and even they get their own name and have personal identities.

There is no permanent measure that gives a scale of life. Even if there were a set time for each person to die, the previous practice of having stayed alive establishes its own span in its length. Some of us have long lives while others are short. The measure of a life varies for each of us. A certain kind of bug lives one day and that is its own cycle while a human being experiences its own conception of whatever cycle he undergoes between birth and death. We can compare the differences but we can’t predict them. It is the prediction that confirms the length of an inch or of a foot on a ruler. Our eye sees the movement from one to twelve or whatever. Again, if motion were to stop there would be no time. Rulers of any kind do not set up any time period. Without motion we would always be whoever we are. But youth, maturity and old age are developments of motion or of aging and have no established speed to go by.

As in a poem, the only evidence of time is the present tense when we read it or otherwise interpret it. The only time that is real is now. There is no constant rate that everything is measured by because everything that moves has its own pace, be it a collapsing nebula or a surprise attack in a chess game that alienates all the other defenses we had prepared in our own plan to win. No one ruler fits the whole cloth we are trying to make fit for every circumstance since every event is, as we know, an individual situation beyond any final control. A poem recognizes this and lets us stay almost sane in the midst of the huge chaos out there by letting us momentarily feel self-confidant in an inexplicable universe that we still believe in without knowing why.