The Poet on epistemology is the carnival of thought

Three Postures for a Scale That Reads Nothing

The professor doubts on Tuesdays. By Thursday the chairs are back.

A man who sets his alarm to dream is not dreaming. He is keeping the schedule the dream would have broken.

The seminar asks what if we’re wrong the way a locked door asks what if I’m open — the asking is the latch.

II.

You will know the real thought by the limp.

Not by its proof. Not by the scale’s verdict — justified, unjustified — those are the customs agent’s stamps on a body already across the border.

The woman who carried the anomaly home did not decide to carry it. She stood up and it was in her legs.

Weight is what you learn from how the floor has changed.

III.

375 million years ago something inhaled and sealed in the same gesture.

The glottis still remembers.

When the paradigm hiccups it is not thinking. It is breathing against its own throat —

the measurement that returns an address the mailroom burned centuries back,

the letter arriving anyway, singed, legible, heavy in both hands.

Aphorisms for the Unweighed

The scale is the only instrument that gets lighter the more it measures.

Standing is a posture. Carrying is a fate. Epistemology confused the map of the first for the territory of the second.

Descartes doubted everything except the room he was doubting in.

The carnival thought: a parade float returned to the warehouse by dawn, its sequins catalogued, its route already printed in next year’s program.

The hiccup thought: a hand on your shoulder in an empty room.

To weigh a thought you must first set it down. But the thoughts that matter are the ones you set down and they don’t stay set.

The barometer broke years ago. The discipline reads the needle’s last position and publishes the weather.

Epistanai: to stand upon. But the ground is walking. The ground has always been walking. The ones who stand are standing on something that is leaving.

The genuine epistemological event: you were carrying something before you knew you’d picked it up.

You will describe it later. The description will be called knowledge. The carrying will be called nothing. The carrying is everything.

Coda

The thought that wakes you at three has no footnotes.

It has no warrant, no justificatory apparatus, no position on the axis between belief and doubt.

It has your spine.

It has the specific curve your spine makes when something will not be set down,

and the morning finds you shaped around it, and the discipline arrives with its clipboard and says: what is this,

and you say: I don’t know, I’ve been carrying it, it is heavy, it is heavy,

and the clipboard weighs nothing at all.