The Poet and The Philosopher (El poeta y el filósofo) - León Felipe

I am not the philosopher.

The philosopher says: I think…therefore I am.

I say: I cry, I shout, I howl, I blaspheme...therefore I am.

I believe Philosophy begins with the first judgement, Poetry with the first lament. I don’t know what the first word said by the first philosopher on earth was. But that of the first poet was: Oh!

Oh!

This is the oldest verse that we know. The pilgrimage of this Oh!, for all the vicissitudes of history, has been Poetry up to now. One day this Oh! is organised and sanctified. Then the psalm is born. From the psalm the temple is born. And the shadow of the psalm has been housing man for centuries.

Now everything on earth has broken. Everything. Even the tools of philosophy. And the psalm has become mad: it’s been crying, shouting, howling, blaspheming...and thrown headfirst into hell. The poets are here now. Well, I am here at least.

This is the route of Poetry across all paths on Earth. I believe it’s different to Philosophy. Therefore one can never say: this is philosophical poetry.

This is because the fundamental difference between the poet and the philosopher isn’t, as believed till now, that the poet speaks in rhythmic, crystalline and musical verse, and the philosopher with obscure, dull and doctoral words. Instead, it is that the philosopher believes in reason and the poet in insanity.

The philosopher says:

To find the truth one must organise the brain.

But the poet says:

To find the truth one must burst the brain, make it explode. The truth is beyond the music box and the great philosophical file.

When we feel the brain rupture and the psalm break into a cry in the throat, we begin to understand. One day we discover that there are no windows in our house. Then we open a large hole in the wall and escape in search of light: naked, crazy and dumb, without speech or song.

It can be added that as poets we know very little. We’re very bad students, we’re not intelligent, we’re lazy, we like to sleep and believe that there is a shortcut to knowledge.

And instead of meditating like a philosopher, or investigating like the wise, we place our greatest problems on the altar of the oracles and decide how to solve them by tossing a dime.

And we say things like: Because I do not know who I am...that decides fate.

Heads or tails? 

From Ganarás la luz