The inconceivable beauty. Epistemology of an apple tree

Abstract

This essay is devoted entirely to the interpretation of Wisława Szymborska's little known poem, jabłonka [An Apple Tree] (1976) discussed in the context of the well-known Rozmowa z kamieniem [Conversation with a Stone] (1956). Interpretation of this work is based on detailed analyses the basis of which is the theory of artistic text, established in contextual semantics, showing how traditional and typical anthropomorphising figures are transformed in statu nascendi in extremely disanthropomorphising figures. And at the same time "the descriptive presentation" of the object marked in culture with a deep anthropomorphic stamp - undergoes a peculiar "eidetic phenomenological reduction", which on the level of poetic outlook leads to the radical deprecation of anthropocentrism meanwhile on the level of constructing an artistic vision clearly presents poetics of the object epiphany and metaphysics of objects". According to the interpreter this metaphysics tends to the formulation of a question on "the truth" of "objective" reality, revealing even in the most "banal" "transcendental experience", i.e. an essential contact, devoid of any anthropocentric usurpations, with any particle of existence. In this way a seemingly "trivial" and "naive" landscape poem opens metaphysical perspectives, which are later outlined in such poems of Szymborska as Widok z ziarnkiem piasku [A view with a grain of sand] (1986) or Niebo i jawa [The sky and the reality] (1993).