Swift as the hunter is subtle the reindeer is fleet

Swift as the hunter is subtle   the reindeer is fleet.

Lush as the honey she suckles   the queen-bee is sweet.

            Soundless today but for the sounds of local living

            by those too small to heed another noise.

Baked as a bun in the oven   the brick sitting suns,

stréaked with blate   white   as a street  waves    the brook-water runs.

Bereft as a river in winter    the mourning doves sing

in a   soft as the low clouds are lofty   sad song to the spring.

            Far as the eyrie    precarious upon a pinnacle

            wings  the eagle    balancing aloft a wind.

Bright as a butterly's coloured    the chrysalis spins

by a   thin as the thorax is timid   thread,    gently in wind.

As lean as a finger is crooked,  the millipede crawls

on the rim of these   brick as a river is    back-garden walls.

Bent as a boat to the task  wends the ant through the dew,

fálling down, violent and tiny, and rising anew.

Rash as his hunger is lovely   the bumblebee stings

falling     dead as the  red as an orchid   flesh     wretchedly wrings.

Yet what is that new scent upon the wind,

            as were danger a flower?

            The doe has sniffed the smell of him

            whose hand would bow her.

Hushed as the lace of a coverlet   borders the woods

upon   green as the season is grasslike   sweet cloverful field.

Tough in the trunk of the oak   bark grows tempered as teak;

corrupted as sponge   stigmas yield  neath the hummingbird's beak.

Crouching, senses tensing, he is nearing her now

            Sniffing, sensing, drawing the bow…           

-- Rushed   for the hunter is running   the reindeer now flees,

while   hushed as the petal is supple    buzz  humming  the bees.

            The hunter blunders blindly in a rush

            to track the doe whose high hoof gores the bush.           

Seeker… sought… and some one other thing…

            Then lo  as from the woods she bounds

            the doe is frozen:  for the sun has seized the scene.

            Nor does such as herself  would seize

            (whose boot  one last dark root   treads   as he leaves the leaves)

            'scape seizure: sun-seized equally

            ev-er-y-thing.

As subtly and as quickly as the deer   now rusts his gun;

the hunter ages eighty years; his bones bake in the sun.

The doe draws up in sunlight, and her eyes in query blink.

The noble neck untenses, by the stream she droops to drink.

All memory of chase now fades, for danger now is passed.

Protected from all age she grazes,  timeless as the grass.

[A note on prosody:

The initial, unindented couplets  are of eight beats each:

Five dactylic, and three of silence.

The indented lines  have no meter, save that of speech, or thought.

For an example of dactylic pentameter (an isolated line in an otherwise speech-timed prose-poem by Whitman):

   Nature  now without check, with original energy.

The language of the poem  is only-somewhat-older English,

mixed with a bit of

prenominal-descriptor-pileup

German.]

[As for the state of mind here embodied, cf. this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/07/schroedingers-cat.html ]

Enten-eller

Philosophers have scribbled  much ink, and later worn out many a typewriter ribbon, and finally expended great bushels of pixels, discoursing upon the status of “logical truths”; such as, paradigmatically, the following:

            (I) Every man is either married or a bachelor.

(We simplify, since the matter is not really of interest; leaving out of account, for instance, the curious case of Schrödinger’s groom.)

It is agreed that such a sentence tells us nothing about the world, unlike that time-honored exemplar of informativeness,

            (II)  The cat is on the mat.

which has been so oft repeated. down the years, that said cat has achieved the immobility and timelessness of an Egyptian idol.

            And yet its affordances are quite different from those of another statement of the same logical form; say:

            (II) Every number is either even or odd.

For, although the sentence (I) does not perhaps baldly state anything substantive about the world, its presuppositions speak volumes.  For one thing, it gives us to understand that there is a sharply defined institution, Marriage, into which a man may enter or not; and that his resultant state is either-or. Even so much will give our Martian anthropologists  sufficient grist  for many turns of the mill.

            By way of contrast, consider the practice, not of marrying, but merely dating.  In our junior high school, this was a fluid concept, not either-or.  At one end, you had parties, where a fairly consistent set of friends would get together, certain twosomes of whom  spent more time together around the punch bowl than did others.  Then, with various gradations, to the Double Date in its pure form:  wherein a pair of guys, both pals, dated a brace of gals, both chums;  and to be sure, John might scope out Mary more than he did Sue, but her own returning gaze was as likely to be skew as coincident with his; and the only time two people were alone together  was when the girls went off to the sanctum of the ladies’ room, leaving the boys together to sigh and wonder at the world.   The practice finally became sharpened into a digital, bivalent institution, with Going Steady:  this was a relationship as definite (inaugurated with certain ceremonies, and marked with a ring) and as monogamous, as any that has ever been sanctified by the Holy Mother Church.

            Pursuing further this musing line of thought, we might with diligence  tease the meanings out of (I), until we have managed to extract virtually the whole of apostolic theology; and paraphrase the statement (freed of the parochial assumptions of atheist Cambridge) thus:

(I’)  Every Christian man of sound mind and body, falls into exactly one of the following two categories:   (a) he is a layman in his ordinate state, or (b) he is a celibate priest, or else a fellow who needs to find himself a wife.

Such are the fruits that come tumbling out of the cornucopia of a tautology, for them that have ears to hear, and tongue to taste them.

[Update 25 July 2015]  Robert Buissière on Médi1, re the  (presumable eventual) Presidential front-runners (after the Trumpwad has been flushed):

Jeb Bush, frère de son frère,

et Hillary Clinton,  épouse de son époux.

As they stand, these are “analytic”; but we understand the import:  Jeb and Hillary got where they are today, largely owing to family association.

Cf. & contrast the common expression “He is his father’s son.”  Normally this means that he takes after his Dad, and not that he is getting any special favors from other people owing to that filiation.  To imply the latter, you might say “Daddy’s little boy” or something.  By contrast, the French phrases in the above context  do not imply that Jeb’s politics are a close match to Dubya’s, let alone that Hillary’s are a close match to Bill’s.

Platonism is not the problem

Thomas Tymoczko, introduction to New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (1986, rev. 1998), p. xiii:

To account for the indubitability, objectivity  and timelessness of mathematical results,  we are tempted to regard them as true descriptions of a Platonic world outside of space-time.  This leaves us with the problem of explaining how human beings can make contact with this reality.

Well, yes, that is indeed a question;  but not a new one.   The same conundrum confronts us in the Mind-Body problem; the problem of Free Will; and more simply, the problem of how you and I can communicate at all.  There are even puzzles at the level of mid-level objects.  The thesis of Mathematical Realism may or may not be valid, but it does not introduce a problem which we might otherwise avoid.