Sonnet
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out of the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one
but horiticulturalists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.
—Robert Hass (1941- )
from The Apple Trees at Olema:
New and Selected Poems
Ecco Press (2010)
COMMENTARY
The multiple meanings of reality are not caused by loose usage of the term, but reflect the structure of reality itself. To be conscious of something is an experiential process polarized by the cognitive tension between the knower and the known.
The several meanings of reality can be made intelligible by going through the successive acts of reflection on the process of consciousness: If, in a first act of reflection on the process, we turn toward the pole of the known, the object of cognition will be something we acknowledge as real.
If, in the second act, we turn toward the pole of the knower, the human carrier of cognition as well as his images and language symbols referring to the known, will move into the position of the something to be acknowledged as real. And if, in a third act, we turn toward the experiential process and the cognitive tension as a whole, the process will become the something we acknowledge as real.
Following the acts of reflection, the meaning of reality moves from the known to the knower and ultimately to the process that is structured by the participation of, and by the cognitive tension between, the knower and the known in the experience. The consciousness of reality becomes a process within reality. Eric Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings. CW Vol 28, 113.