Some of my most boring and infuriatingly frustrating arguments over the yearshave been over what poetry is, mainly with those who refuse to accept any definition of it. The worst are the Philistines who find it impossible to accept anything as a poem that they don’t like. Having gotten into another such argument this week with a Shakespeare Authorship Wack who won’t let me define poems objectively as little lineated verbal constructions intended to give aesthetic pleasure (to give the quickest, simplest definition) because then I would be able to call myself a maker of poems and thus more likely to know what went on in Shakespeare’s head when he made a poem than the wack, who is not a poet. For him a poem is something indefinably wonderful made out of words that only a few persons are capable of making–Shakespeare and perhaps one or two others (He mentions Donne and Milton, but really believes only one poet ever existed, Oxford, the author of Shakespeares Sonnets and other works), but no one later than Milton, and most certainly not I.
What can I say? Nothing.
Stewing about it after vacating the argument, I came up with my solution for any difficult intellectual problem: a coinage. This one was, “verosofact.” I do agree with the subjectivists that nothing is 100% objectively true, but don’t care. That’s because, for me, there exist what I’ve just dubbed, “verosofacts,” which are close enough to being 100% objectively true to be taken as 100% objectively true. True beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, there are degrees of verosofactuality–as I believe I discussed in this blog of mine recently: scientific verosofactuality is closer to absolute certainty that historical verosofactuality, but the latter is still close enough to absolute certainty to be considered true beyond reasonable doubt. Like the verosofact that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.
My coinage comes from my earlier coinage, “verosophy,” of the search for significant truths that science, history, philosophy and like endeavors are. A verosofact is a verosophical absolute truth.
I don’t see how one can make any effort to find any even semi-consequential truth about existence without granting the eixstence of verosofacts. I think almost everyone, for instance, accepts cause and effect as an absolute, although many do so only unconsciously. Ditto the laws of logic. And that there is a difference between material reality (for me, a verosofact) and other kinds of hypothesized realities, none of them capable of being verosofacts though not necessarily non-facts.
Sciences is not uncertain, only not absolutely certain, only verosofactual. Well, a mixture of verosofactuality and uncertainty not yet classified as either verosofactual or contrafactual.
The ultimate verosofacts, the existence of material reality, and the validity of logic and cause and effect, are givens–the axioms that make verosophy possible.
Am I a child writing for infants? Maybe. I do believe everything I’ve said extremely simple and obvious. It’s difficult to achieve such final simplicity, though.
I’d come across a poem or poems by Ezra using the horizontally-split word technique and at once wanted to try it myself. I don’t find the result satisfactory–but it has potential, I think.
