Sense, Nonsense, No-Sense-at-All: these 3

Assess this:

the

...................................... non-sense
............... sense
......................................................no-sense-at-all

ratios

That damned moral sense, exclaimed Mark Twain.

Beyond Good & Evil, suggested Nietzsche.

Think out of the Box says everybody these days
at one time or another.

Damning our moral sense and moving beyond good & evil
sounds diabolically threatening to traditions, family values,
civic responsibility, decent community relationships.

Call it The Liberal Art, then: out of the cave, culture,
convention, closet—“liberation,” to grow beyond.
Yonder.

Thinking out of the Box sounds benign unless I consider
the box: my morals—local, & regional boxing me in, my
good & evil cultural relativities regulating my belief systems:
good guys and weasels? My intuition and counter-intuition?

Build thee more stately mansions , O my soul, says Oliver
W. Holmes: shut thee from heaven with a box more vast.
He said dome, not box. Same deal. Enclosure.

.................C

Every word is a prison, says Emerson. Every idea. Man is
clapped into jail by his consciousness, his moral sense,
his good & evil addiction. .

Think out of the C.

It would take something like an immaculate conception,
some stork flapping into my chimney with a bundle of
unpostponed joy for me to think out of the C.

Where would the thought come from? Me boxed in by
bias & belief systems, by my prejudices and convictions—
by my DNA (directional navigational algorithms) protected
like family jewels or risk re-configuration, reformatting,
reformation. .

Give me my Moral Sense, or give me death, my Good & Evil,
my Coherence , my Consistency, my Predict-Ability some what
Certain Sustain Ability Determination & the Principle of the Thing:
all told my Big Box I would rather not think out of.

(terminal pre positions not with standing).

Non Sense:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins