RE: An oaken serenity (original poetry)
If they study dead men's theories, aren't they actually asking the biggest questions? Or maybe you mean that they memorize them without comprehension or participation... When I took anatomy, I remember the Latin names of many of the points of reference would translate into things such as "large hole" or upper bump, and I asked my teacher why we couldn't just write "large hole" since that's what the geniuses that discovered and cataloged them used. It was in Latin then and now as pretense and a way to create class division through education. We see it not only in medicine but rampantly in law and economics. A way to exclude large groups of people from processes (to take advantage of their absences) and make them believe the exclusion is founded, so they play along.
Also I really loved these lines:
The streets are glass
That endlessly shatters but
Never finishes breaking.
This rain is powerfully basic;
It is the sky that's acid.
&
I was sleeping through the creation.
I don't know why but this line just really hits me
&
The spirit of dead gargantua
Cry lakes that boil into heaven.
and this, boil is such a good re-perspectivfier lol
Thanks for the genuine thoughts and reply. I leave it according to your interpretation! I think it could be summed up as the eventual realization that to study others' thoughts and teachings, no matter how revered, is only the beginning step to discovery in any aspect of life. Thanks for sharing that anecdote. I feel that the gulf of humanity's ignorance is extremely wide, yet what we do unveil is no small feat. The sort of pretentious exclusion you mentioned contributes to my calculated contempt for many aspects of academia. I prefer self-education, private education, homeschooling, these sorts of approaches. Hands on is the best, without the extraneous concepts and presumptuousness.
Thanks again for great input and sharing the lines that struck you @kilbride!
I do enjoy the really intense learning that comes from classes or schooling sometimes, though I'm technically a 'bad' student usually because I have a suuuper low tolerance for pedantic tasks lol. But, yeah, I was sorely disappointed when I went to college that so many people were just there fronting or checking boxes on a to-do list "career path". And of course! I write poetry myself, (although much more intermittently)- I know how much energy goes into selecting each word, and how many lines are just stand-alone pieces within a larger piece. It's always interesting to see what parts really resonate with others and how it differs from us.