Poetic

The meanings of some words are quite straightforward, table for example, most English speakers, in spite of all having pictures of different tables in their heads, will understand the meaning if the word is put in context. 'I eat at the table' or 'the table will give you the results.' Different types of table, but put in context...

Some words change their meanings according to the culture as I have found since being in Canada, for example, to us English, a pillow is what we sleep on, to Canadians it is also what we would call a cushion on the sofa.

Then there are words that describe an abstract concept such as Humanity, Justice, Art. One such word that our Renaissance French lecturer spent some time trying to put over to us, was the idea of 'La Poétique'. It doesn't mean poetry itself, nor does it mean poetic, the adjective. La Poétique is the essence of poetry, that which underlies it and makes it poetry and which can be found in other things, but only if you have grasped what it is.

One small strand of Sartre's Existentialism is concerned with the way we define our world with words, and in this way we change the way we perceive the world. We use words to impose boundaries on what we see, Sartre gives us the example of looking at the root of a tree. We give it the name 'root' and thus we see it as something separate from but connected to the tree. We could have not chosen to name it and we would have then simply perceived the tree as a whole.

The naming of things cause all kinds of problems because of the way it influences perception. Do we call our god God, or Allah or Jehovah ...? Do we see what we want to see because the name itself comes with a whole definition? Perhaps.

But it's that little word poetic that I wanted to come back to. Not the French one, the English adjective. Interesting how a word can come to mean something so far removed from its original meaning. When something is poetic, it might actually be just that - poetic, or we might mean it in the sense of poetic justice. Depends on the context.

In general, I'm not feeling full-on sympathy for those bleating at their respective governments for not rescuing them quickly enough from Lebanon. The governments of Britain, Canada, the US are all there, evacuating them, just apparently not quickly enough. I felt full-on sympathy for people trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, because it seemed like a perfectly good place to go on holiday. But Beirut, well, for the past thirty years, the name has been synonymous with destruction and conflict. I do of course acknowledge that some people are there working, but some - are just there.

But when you are a muslim cleric, I shall not type his name because to name him is to give him some kind of credibility, who publicly praises the atrocities of 11/09/01 and organises violence against Danish embassies because of a bit of humour, and then when you hot foot it out of Britain before you are put away and you decide to go to Lebanon, to then whinge at the British government that they won't rescue you from said new country and take you on a Naval ship back to dear old blighty, well, there isn't even a word for that amount of cheek.
But the British Navy's refusal to allow him on the evacuation ship, that, THAT is poetic.