Page 12 - The Irony Board
P. 12
Into the Mind
Fence with words
Until cut
Down to size
Them up for
Building a
Fence with words.
The irony of a good thing is in its bad consequences. The mind
must think, use symbols, make distinctions. And, in so doing, make
trouble for itself and others. This poem goes down and up,
overlapping directions in “to size.” The first fencing is a noble
activity, gaining the upper hand over a crowd of opponents;
reducing symbols to harmless neutrality is a worthy goal. But the
mind, insecure despite its victory, may then build an impregnable
fortress using the vanquished as bricks and mortar, lay down its
sword of analysis, and ignobly retire from further effort.
Gluckman appreciated the Eleatic school of philosophy in its
exposition of the misapplication of logic: the poem may thus yield
an opposite interpretation. Here the first fencer represents immature
wordplay, an unintentional or unconscious effort to keep symbolic
content at bay; this might, like the paradoxes of Zeno, satisfy the
person at play or his audience, but what is reduced by slicing and
dicing is the fencer himself. After that humbling, the latter might
have the raw materials for constructing a more mature symbolic
structure.
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