[LINK] Poem: There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
The poem is from someone whose online pseudonym is atiguhya padma. I’ll quote the first verse, the refrain, and the beginning of the second verse to give you enough flavor to decide if you want to follow the link. There are about 9 verses total.
Someone looked out of their window
And said to me: the world looks
So beautiful, that I praise God
Each day for this wonderful life,
This landscape of happy creatures
And rolling fields of growth and form.
He obviously had not read Tennyson
And he wasn’t an ecologist,
For he had no firm idea of how
Ecosystems sustain themselves.
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth.
You said you loved me.
And I wondered what that could mean...
Reductionist thinking can connect emotions triggered by the surfaces encountered in daily life to a larger set of concepts and predictions, and this seems to have consequences for both the thinking and the emotions that isn’t often discussed and is even less often discussed well. I liked the poem because it addressed the issues pretty well and in an emotional mode, which is doubly rare.
The “no beautiful surfaces” refrain is a quote from Nietzsche which has little easily accessed online scholarship. Nothing in the first few pages of google results mentions a source for the quote so I was suspicious at first that it was even a quote by him, but references available via google books indicate that it comes from one of his notebooks. I haven’t tracked down the notebook (it doesn’t seem to be in gutenberg), so I’m not sure if the original source carries the specific connotations the poem attributes to the phrase, or if it is just a cool line put to good use in a new context.
I think a book of poems like these would be enough to fend off a whole load of existential angst.
I really liked this, it was very thoughtfully posted (i.e. most vaguely reductionist/scientific poetry is unbearable), and would like to see other polite conversations between intellect and emotion such as this. It’s nice to see them getting along for once.
Uhm, maybe I actually don’t understand the poem. I’ll read it over again.
EDIT: I still get the same message from the repeated lines, that the complex systems behind the surface can’t be beautiful, and are somehow innately terrible.
To clarify why I liked it, I find comfort in the fact that someone else has thought about the same existentially terrifying things as me. (I read the beauty-terrible complaint as one of the nature of nature, rather than of something we can change.) So when I think about such things, I’m less likely to feel quite as alone if I recall this poetry. Somehow reading other people’s prose on the subject doesn’t strike the same effect as poetry.
It [the poem] might not relate to consequentialist thinking that easily, but I found it a good antidote to the negative emotional effects consequentialist thinking has. I expect other people’s mileage to vary; I have a specific personal set of philosophical neuroses, roughly identified as this sort of nihilism.
I’ve now upvoted your link to “Explaining vs. Explaining Away”, by the way, because I think it serves, for me, the same function as the poem. I’m guessing you didn’t have this reaction though?
In context, the poet’s meditation on death sounds like an eastern philosophy thing, in which case the surface/depth discussion is about dualities. To say that one thing is beautiful implies that something else is not. The poet is asking his beloved whether he is accepted completely, or only his surface parts.
To put it another way, given the context, I interpret it as saying that the division between surface and depth is what makes one terrible and the other beautiful. Together, the whole is neither ugly nor beautiful. (Note the poet’s meditation on his own depth and death does not indicate that he thinks they are bad things.)
But of course, that’s just, like, my opinion, man. ;-)
What I think Nietzche thought about this was that one must aspire to “superhuman” thoughts and actions to move in that apparent void and draw sustenance from it; what we are now is not enough at all, and, like in a desperate last stand, heroism one never knew one had is the only way to survive.
And, terrifyingly enough, we might at some need to sacrifice or deny some part of ourselves to reach across that abyss. (Curiously, this does not feel incompartible with my faith)
I think this link explains my thoughts on the poem. http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/
Yes, it is intolerable. All the depths should be improved, too. Beyond where the surfaces currently are.