KEY OPENS DOOR BY ITSELF?

KEY OPENS DOOR BY ITSELF?

Erle Frayne Argonza / Ra

A key

Inserted on a doorknob

Cannot turn itself

Someone has to be

It’s turning’s progenitor

What

If indeed a key

Turns a doorknob

By itself?

‘Tis like asking

If a cockroach can

Push an elephant

Or if a gentle breeze can

Knockout a sturdy house

It coheres with the circumstance

When a ball rests and bounces

At the same time

When the slightly probable

Fills the observer’s eyes

As an inescapable vista of verdant forests

Green and lucidly green

[Writ. 29 May 91, Cubao, Quezon City, M.Manila]

REFLECTION

A poetic piece meant to disturb readers a bit, to make them reflect, and enable them to examine the presuppositions behind their thoughts. If one is able to do so all the time, then one is just a step away from the meditative state whence presuppositions fly away like dusts in the wind. In a presuppositionless state, visual apperception of higher levels of reality is possible.

At any rate, people live the lifeworld taking reality for granted, unmindful of what goes around, mindful only of the next activity or work they need to do. Someone has to consciously stop and conduct reflective work in order to break the monotony of the lifeworld. It is during a reflective moment that one can think about puzzles in the lifeworld and the universe, take stock of paradoxes, and challenge the psyche to solve lingering puzzles in the mind.  

Let’s take the interesting case of the electron and ask: is the electron a body that can rest a bit? Or is it moving all the time? Can it be modeled like a ball that bounces on the ground? Schroedinger and Heisenberg reflected seriously on the matter, and to their own amazement they found at that the electron actually rests and yet is in motion at the same time. That modeling of electron led to the ‘duality theory’ in quantum mechanics.

Ra

April 2011