Lacking A Conclusion Poem by gershon hepner

To find the conclusion it is necessary first
to see there’s something that you miss,
then when you feel the lack of it to have a thirst
for ends that tell you to dismiss.
Without conclusions there are possibilities,
reality inventing fictions,
and only sour realists are ill at ease
because they stick to their convictions.



Gabriel Jospiovici (“Fail again, Fail better: The crisis called Modernism may have passed, but it remains a challenge—and an embarrassment”) writes in the TLS, November 30,2007:

As for philosophers, Kierkegaard’s remark that “to find the conclusion it is necessary first of all to observe that it is lacking, and then to feel quite vividly the lack of it” is surely an apt description of all Wittgenstein’s work. But Kierkegaard’s remarks also help to explain why so many Modernist writers have been at pains to stress that their fictions are only fictions, not reality….What is, as Kierkegaard understood, cannot be imagined, only lived. “Actuality cannot be conceived, ” he writes in his notebook.

To conceive something is to dissolve actuality into possibility—but then it is impossible to conceive it, because conceiving something is transforming it into possibility and so not holding onto it as actuality.

12/7/07