The Word

In the beginning
There was the Word
And the Word was with God
And God was the Word
So then what?
Well, write it down
Then we won't have to worry about some clown
Of great renown
Reciting the bloody thing all over town
For fear of forgetting its sound.

It's really no coincidence
That civilization started with writing things
It's much easier to make sense
When we can really look at things
The written word's tangible
It's questionable
It's analyzable
Which makes it remarkable.

Now once we’ve got these words down
What’s next to be done
What’s the most basic question
For which we can use them
And even a bit of reflection
Upon this new innovation
Shows what must be done
Let’s distinguish right from wrong.

In this most general sense
We now have a major advance
We write down what we need to know
In order to forward our goals
We may not always be right
But then we can always rewrite
With Law, Morality, Religion
Humanity truly has vision.

Then we have natural development
Science, mathematics come naturally
As a kind of attachment
To the application of moral philosophy
But what we need, really
Is some new understanding of reality
How to proceed philosophically
To represent actual processes
That is to take what we see
As it proceeds piece by piece
To understand empirically
And to represent such processes
In terms of underlying mechanisms
The concept of experiment
All written down on parchment.

And then with written experiments
All kinds of new developments
Mathematics, electricity
Develop exponentially
And with this new technology
We find a new methodology
For representing ideas.
Movies, computers, television
Enable us to expand our vision
With new forms of representation
To assist with progress and innovation.
Perhaps, the Word’s a limitation
Too abstract a representation
Mathematics is a fine invention
But not reality’s substitution
Take images of things themselves
Compare the versions on history’s shelves
Patterns which reveal themselves
Then progress can proceed apace
As the future shows its rosy face.


© Copyright Jerome Raymond Kraus 2005