A woman sits in a forest, watching the elemental
Spirits at play - then composes on her laptop circumstantial
Psycho-data around the conceit. I premise
That someone joins her, unfamiliar with her game of empathize
And rationalize, make-believe and make-good. Which will she tell him,
Her ‘Treatise on Environmental Perceptions’ or the poetic whim?¹
WANDERER
Both! The tribute you exact is the budgeting of observation,
Not human brooding - the lab holds the shadows.² Your collation
Of fantasia’s records with the observed facts is tragical,
For it pleads with sensitives to cure their hurt with magical
And untested beliefs inconsistent with reason, while sceptics
Exult in their material and rational being, antiseptic
To the truth, the questions they fear to ask themselves.
So imagination is pixilated,* while reason is blind to its elves.
Shall society be divided? One movement will shift the shadows
From the brainless heart and the heartless brain, and disclose
Reasoning and imagining balanced in a soul, with a reflexive
Soul-searching mode for rationalists and an outward-looking, creative
Routine for dreamers: -
(expansively)
That movement is the 21st, Reculer
Pour mieux sauter.³ Hear how the contrapuntal parlay
Of the tonally ambivalent, desk-bound processor, who rarely
Asks a deep question, with the upwardly spaced-out, barely
Audible, notionally augmented equivalent draws breath
In a harmonious re-working of the material of the 20th!
Note how the latter’s new ability to solve problems and the former’s
Willingness to interrogate goals and self resolve traumas
¹ The historical progression, Erda - Mother Nature - nature - Site of Special Scientific Interest, is one that Mime welcomes but not Wotan from the myth-world. If the woman sees both fauns and fauna and knows the difference, she is an integrated person.
² The problem of balancing facts and values, thought and feeling shadows even lab scientists.
* I.e. pixie-led. But reason, by itself, creates mischief.
³ “We need to take a step back in order to leap better”, a re-working of the last century into a duet between the tonally ambivalent data-functionary, who is backed by the brass (money) and the bass (base), and the mournful or uplifting strings, representing the idealist newly equipped for action.
